The Quiet Streets of Winslow (2 page)

NATE ASPENALL

I
USED TO FOLLOW
Ernest Sterling around, back when he and my mother, Sandra, were together and I was in middle school. Ernest was a handyman, basically, a hippie handyman who smoked pot on his way to this or that job, and I'd go with him, Saturdays, to watch him unclog a drain or replace a washer, insulate a ceiling or install a swamp cooler.

“Watch how I do this, Nate,” he would say, and I'd be there at his elbow, handing him a wrench or a Phillips. He was muscular and tattooed, with hair to his shoulders and a moustache dripping down either side of his mouth. Being stoned never seemed to get in his way. In his truck, those mornings, I would say, “Let me have a toke. It's not like I haven't gotten high before,” and finally he would let me, and it was like I was watching myself in a movie, all morning, watching myself act the role of a thirteen-year-old kid following this father figure around. At home, for lunch, Sandra put a frozen, family-size Mexican dinner in the microwave, and I ate almost all of it myself, and Sandra said to Ernest, “I can't fucking believe you would do this,” and she got his clothes out of her bedroom closet and threw them on the front porch.

I tell this story to show that nobody knows what's best for another person.

Y
EARS LATER
, I used the skills I had learned from Ernest to get my job at the Chino Valley RV Park, earning a small salary and bartering a place to live in exchange for keeping the narrow gravel roads smooth and the RVs in running order, and some years after that was when I met Jody Farnell. She was waitressing at the Denny's on Mirage Highway, where I ate breakfast, and from the moment I saw her, before I had heard her voice, even, I felt a physical shock, as if I had just taken off in a rocket or woken up from a coma. I'm not sure I ever stopped feeling that. In that flesh-pink uniform with her pale skin and brown eyes she looked so young you wouldn't have guessed that she had a child or that she had lived the complicated life I was to find out about.

I was thirty-two to her twenty-three, and five mornings a week with her bringing me coffee and pancakes I learned that she had come to Chino Valley with a boyfriend she wasn't with anymore, and that she was renting a motel room by the month. I also learned that her daughter, Hannah, lived with Hannah's father, only nobody knew where, and that Jody wanted to get Hannah back from him. With some people you could see where the darkness was, and you knew better than to shine a light there, but she volunteered details: she and the father had hardly known each other; she had been struggling with drugs, back then, which was why Hannah's father had taken Hannah from her. He had been raised by a Navajo family near Winslow, Jody said, which was where Jody was from, too. The Navajo family hadn't wanted Jody to have Hannah either, even after Jody got clean. It seemed as if everybody had been against her.

I told Jody she could count on me if she ever needed anything—seriously count on me, I said—and on a rainy October morning after her motel room had been broken into she asked if she could stay with me a few nights. She knew from Mike Early, who had the RV behind mine, that the RV park was safe. She knew Mike Early from Denny's, which he frequented quite a lot.

“You can stay with me as long as you need to,” I told her, and she brought over her belongings and slept in the built-in bed in my RV, while I slept on the futon couch in what was essentially the living room. She talked about looking for a place of her own, but I said, “You don't have to,” and after a week she dropped the subject and I was relieved.

Jody was tiny. Five feet one with bones so thin it made you ache to look at her wrists. She fit into the RV alongside me, because I'm not a big person either. I'm small, for a man, five seven and 138 pounds no matter how much I eat or how many weights I lift. I take after Lee, my father, more than I take after Sandra. I have dark hair and eyes, like Lee and my half brother, Travis, whereas Sandra is blonde and blue-eyed. The Honda dealership she worked for used her face on billboards, but up close she was tenser and older looking than you would have expected. She and Lee had been seventeen when they had me, and I used to try and guess how many times they had thought
no way
before they gave in and let me come.

I never introduced Sandra and Jody to each other. I didn't like the thought of them forming ideas about each other, or ideas about me based on what they thought of each other. I didn't want all that imagining going on. Moreover, I didn't want to jinx my situation with Jody. I felt lucky to have found her, and luck was something you had to protect, I had learned. It wasn't as if it came often or easily, at least not to me.

chapter three

SAM RUSH

I
SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN
working the case, given how long I had known Nate Aspenall and how close I was to the family, but there was just Kurt Hargrove and myself deputy-sheriffing the more than eight thousand square miles that made up Yavapai County, and Kurt would have had to take the time to get to know the family and the situation. Moreover, I thought it likely that Kurt, or anyone in Kurt's position, might not have looked as carefully elsewhere once he had Nate as a suspect. Nate did not have a criminal history, but he was a solitary, underemployed, thirty-two-year-old male who had known the victim, and the victim's body had been found near his father's house, 150 miles from where the victim was living. I knew what I would have thought; I knew how it looked even to me. For my part, I had to be conscious of my bias. I wasn't convinced I had one, which made me fairly certain I did, and I knew it was crucial that I keep aware of it.

The details of the case were as follows: Jody Farnell had left Chino Valley at the beginning of February, close to three months before she was killed, and moved back to Winslow, where she had grown up. She moved into a small rental on the corner of Hicks and Maple, across
town from where her mother was located, and when she wasn't able to find a job locally she looked for work in Flagstaff and was hired as a maid at a Hilton Inn.

The elderly woman living next door to Jody didn't often see her, but she had seen a man at Jody's front door two or three times, quite late. A medium-size male in his thirties, was her impression, with light hair; had she seen the same man mowing a yard down the street? It was possible. She never saw a vehicle. She would see him at Jody's door, then she would see him leaving on foot. She assumed Jody wasn't home or didn't feel like letting him in.

Jody's landlord, Paul Bowman, had been out of state with his wife at the time of the murder; I wasn't able to interview him at first.

Jody's mother I spoke to at the trailer she rented on the eastern edge of town. She was anorexically thin, from drug use, I surmised, and described herself as disabled. She chain-smoked while we talked. She said that Jody was supposed to have taken her to the pain clinic in Winslow the following day, which was how she knew that something was wrong. But she couldn't tell me anything about Jody's recent life. “Jody didn't confide in me,” the mother said. “I don't know why we weren't close in that way.” If Jody had had a boyfriend in Winslow, the mother didn't know about it, and while the mother had heard Jody mention the name Nate, she couldn't recall the context. About her granddaughter, Hannah, she knew little to nothing. She had not seen her since she was an infant. “That Indian family,” she said, “who knows what they did to her? The baby's father stole her away.” Jody's mother didn't know where they were.

A
S FOR THE
death, itself, Jody's neck had been broken, probably by hand, by somebody who was left-handed, as Nate Aspenall was. There
were no discernible fingerprints. There was some bruising on her upper arms, as if she had been either shoved or grabbed first. She hadn't been thrown down into the wash but positioned to look as if she had; there were no signs of her body having hit the rocks. Whether she had been killed there or brought there dead was hard to know. Footprints were hard to make out in the desert. I suspected she had been killed first, then carried there. She had not been raped, nor had she had intercourse within the previous twenty-four hours, but there were traces of semen in her mouth and on her chin. She had been dead for about ten hours by the time Travis and Damien Aspenall found her. Nine
PM
, then, she was killed, or close to it.

As I said, the fact that Nate Aspenall had known Jody, and that Jody had been found not in or near Winslow, where she was living, but near the Aspenalls, in Black Canyon City, made Nate a person of interest, despite the illogicalness of his having done something that pointed the finger at himself. He claimed to have been in Chino Valley the night of her murder, working on the RV behind his, trying to locate a water leak. He had worked until midnight, he said. The occupant of that RV was a sixty-two-year-old man named Mike Early, who worked at a Sears in Paradise Valley. I left messages and waited to hear back. Meanwhile, I spoke to the manager of the RV park, who said that he had no knowledge of Early's water leak but that Mike Early and Nate Aspenall were neighbors, and they were friendly with each other. Early had probably asked Nate for help directly. That often happened, the manager said. Often he—the manager—wouldn't learn until later what work Nate had done, when, and for whom.

I hoped that Nate living in an RV park, as opposed to the kind of isolated places where so many residents of Yavapai County lived,
would make it easier for me to learn whether anyone else might have seen him at home the night of Jody's murder.

M
Y FIRST INTERVIEW
with Nate took place on the telephone the evening of the day the Aspenall boys found the body. I talked to him from home, from my duplex on Abbott Street, across town from Lee and Julie's residence. Fifteen years earlier, Lee had lived in the left side of the duplex and I in the right; since then, I had bought and renovated both sides into a house for myself, and that was where I had lived since—other than my two years of marriage, when, at her request, I had moved into my wife's house.

“Tell me again, Nate,” I said, “when you saw Jody last.” I was at my kitchen table, next to the sliding glass door, with my small notebook in front of me.

“The last week in February,” he said. “Maybe earlier. I'm not sure. I don't keep track of time. She asked me to meet her in Flagstaff, and I did and we talked. We met at a diner near the hotel where she worked, and she told me about her life in Winslow and the problems she was having.”

“With what or with whom?” I said.

“She was afraid of somebody,” Nate said. “She said a man was showing up late at her house, wanting to make a sexual arrangement with her, calling her all the time, looking in her windows. One night she was at a place called Bojo's, she said, having supper, and was almost sure she saw him hiding in the back hall, staring at her. She didn't know who he was, she said, and she didn't want to go to the police. She felt they would blame it on her, somehow. She didn't trust them.”

“Had this man threatened her?”

“It sounded like it. Or else she felt threatened. She also said that her landlord had come on to her. He would charge her less rent, she said, or no rent, if she . . . well, you can imagine.”

“She spelled out the sexual act he referred to?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Was she asking you to do something about either of these men?”

“Not that I could see.”

“So why do you think she wanted to tell you?” I said. “And why in person?”

“I've thought about that,” Nate said. “I have. I think she wanted to see me worried about her—to see that worry in my face.”

“Why?”

“She felt that nobody cared about her.” He said that reluctantly, it seemed to me, as if he were revealing a confidence.

“Before this meeting,” I said, “how often had you and Jody talked on the telephone?”

“Four or five times a week at first, then not as often. I would call her, and if she felt like it, she would call me back. She didn't always want to talk to me.”

“Why was that?”

“Honestly?” he said. “My feelings for her were stronger than she wanted them to be. We weren't . . . when she was staying with me, we were roommates. That was how she was with me.”

“So she wanted you to worry about her but she didn't want you,” I said. “Is that what you're saying? That's a tough position to be in.”