Desert Redemption

by Betty Webb

  “Did he have good reason?”

  He scratched his dreads. “We-ell, Mother Eve can be a bit bossy. And judging from the way that poor wife of Ford’s was always cringing around, he liked his women submissive.”

  “Are you saying he beat Alene?”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth. Beat isn’t the word I’d use, but one time I saw him slap her, and that was bad enough. I told him if I ever saw him hitting her again I’d whup his ass. So he stopped. But what he did to her in private, I can’t testify to. Anyway, after that, it was more of a verbal bullying. Always with the ‘you didn’t make the bed right,’ or ‘you look fat in that stupid dress you made,’ that kind of thing all the time. Frankly, I was glad when I heard Mother Eve was going to give him the heave-ho.”

  “I heard she offered to let Alene stay.”

  Hearing a series of loud squawks, Jeremiah looked out the window. “Stop that!” he yelled. The squawks duly stopped. When I looked out the window all I could see was a flock of chickens minding their own chicken business.

  “Where were we?”

  “With Mother Eve telling Alene she could stay.”

  “Oh, yeah. Fat lot of good that did. The woman was totally under his thumb. Wouldn’t say ‘boo’ unless he told her to.”

  “Not a happy marriage, then.”

  He shook his head, sending those dreads flying. “Not my idea of one, that’s for sure. And from what I could tell in the short time they were here, Ford was the restless kind. He’d dragged the poor woman from communes in Georgia, Kentucky, and New Mexico, always looking for a place that would appreciate his wonderful self.”

  “Sounds like a narcissist.”

  “Idiots frequently are. The guy was so full of his own imagined superiority he never bothered to check out the territory before making a move, so he kept getting disappointed. I’m betting that whoever told him about EarthWay, for instance, didn’t bother to inform him it was run by a woman. Feeling the way he did about women, he’d never have moved here if he’d known.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about him, like where he and Alene might have headed when they left here?”

  Another head shake. “He didn’t say. There’s places like this all over the country, you know, for some of us die-hards from the Seventies, and new back-to-the-landers who want to get the hell off the grid. Wherever the Laumenthals wound up, it would be whatever place rang Ford’s chimes on that particular day.”

  “How do you feel about Mother Eve?”

  “Remember when I sold you those vegetables? I told you to scrub them well before eating them, didn’t I?”

  “You didn’t trust the water.”

  “Nope. Mother Eve was smart in some ways, ass-dumb in others. I’ve been hanging out here long enough to figure out that in some ways, women—especially women as hard-headed as that old woman—can be as rock-dumb as any man.”

  Despite the grim photographs lying on the table, I managed a smile. “So where are you headed next?”

  Jeremiah Blue Sky sighed and leaned back in the spindly chair. “Dunno. Maybe that place he told me was so awful in New Mexico. If Ford hated it, it’s probably great. Or maybe Twin Oaks, in Virginia. I read about that one in The Atlantic.”

  I studied his dreads, his bib overalls. “You read The Atlantic?”

  “Judge not lest ye be judged. I read that in The Atlantic, too.” He winked. “Wherever I wind up, it all depends on whichever way Elaine wants to go when we leave here.”

  “Your wife?”

  “My van. I trust her more than I trust myself.”

  “She’s named for?”

  A snaggle-toothed grin. “My mother.”

  On the way back to Scottsdale I did some thinking; flat desert highway is good for that. First, oddly enough, I thought about chickens and their pecking orders. Although the birds were dim-witted animals, they were able to maintain their pecking order with little bloodshed, just a beak-jab every now and then. The chickens’ pecking orders led me to the things humans do to maintain their own clan structures. Sometimes the method was as subtle and silly as Kanati’s beaded headband hierarchy, but other times it was more malignant. From there my thoughts skewed back to a case when I’d been hired to free a thirteen-year-old girl from a forced marriage in a polygamy compound. She’d been pretty, and although the prophet already had numerous wives, constantly adding pretty girls to his flock was his own particular sign of status. Woe be to any pretty girl who resisted; she’d wind up dead in a canyon someplace.

  Had Alene Chambers Laumenthal’s submission boosted her husband’s status, at least in his own eyes? And what would have happened if one day she’d defied him? Yet according to Jeremiah Blue Sky, Ford Laumenthal had never physically harmed her. She had died without a mark on her body, the same as her lout of a husband.

  And as had artist Megan Unruh. Other than being a regular at the studio she shared with other artists, Megan had lived an isolated life. No enemies, no loutish husband. Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a connection between Megan and the Laumenthals. Well, other than the fact that all three had been overweight at some point in their lives, but at the time of their deaths, were starvation thin.

  Health farms.

  At this realization, I hit the brakes, thus sparing the life of the ground squirrel who had picked that moment to cross the highway.

  There were several health farms in Arizona, their methods ranging all the way from the classic calorie-and-exercise programs led by board-certified physicians, to surgery performed by board-certified surgeons. But every PI knows that Arizona and its friendly neighbor, Mexico, teemed with unlicensed fat farms that promised, but seldom delivered, miracle cures for obesity. Then there were the private practitioners. One group I’d read about was accused of dosing its clients with large pills containing tapeworm larvae. According to the newspaper accounts, its clients had lost weight, all right, but some of them became deathly ill.

  If only I could remember that particular “clinic’s” name…

  Using the Jeep’s hands-free setup, I called Jimmy.

  “You want to know what?” he asked.

  “Crazy as it sounds, I want the name of that fat farm rumored to be feeding its clients tapeworms. It was all over the newspapers several years back, but I can’t remember the place’s name or where it was located.”

  A grunt. “Good thing I haven’t had lunch yet.”

  “Oh, grumble, grumble,” I teased.

  “Okay, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we talk research over lunch? We can try that new Vietnamese restaurant down the street, order a couple of noodle dishes, which look like…?” A dramatic pause.

  “Noodles,” I finished for him.

  Jimmy is fast, at least with computer work. When I walked through the door of Desert Investigations, he was sitting at his desk with a look of triumph on his face.

  “Pray for a Miracle.”

  I frowned. “Jehovah’s Witnesses stop by while I was gone?”

  “Pray for a Miracle was the name of the fat farm that was supposedly dosing its clients with tapeworm eggs to help them lose weight. They were doing business in Apache County before the state shut them down.”

  “This was how long ago?”

  Jimmy was nothing but thorough. “Twelve years. But I’ve got bad news for you, if you were thinking about dieting, and you better not, because you’re already perfect. Anyway, there never were any tapeworms or tapeworm larvae, just big fat sugar pills. The whole thing was a scam. Read this.”

  He handed me an article he’d found on Snopes.com, the website that addressed fraudulent news stories and urban legends. Reading, I saw that tapeworm infestation was definitely a reality, but was caused by eating uncooked beef or pork. As for tapeworm eggs or larvae, they wouldn’t survive long enough to be put into pills and stored for even a short amount of tim
e before being ingested.

  Feeling faintly nauseous, I asked Jimmy, “But if there were no tapeworms, why’d the state shut them down?”

  “For fraud. Pray for a Miracle promised tapeworms and didn’t deliver. Now let’s go eat some noodles.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  As soon as we returned from lunch I called Nils Quaid, the artist who had helped me with the sketch of Megan Unruh. “Got another picture for you, and this time I want you to add a double chin,” I said. “Make it look like the woman in the picture weighs at least a hundred pounds more than she does here.”

  At his agreement, I emailed him the photograph I’d taken of Reservation Woman, and less than an hour later, I had a retouched photograph of her in my hands. After studying her face for a few seconds, and allowing a fresh wave of grief to sweep over me, I forwarded the new version to Sergeant Dewayne Kaplan of the Casper Police Department. When I followed up with a phone call, the detective who picked up the phone told me Sergeant Kaplan had just left for Alene Laumenthal’s mother’s house.

  “He told me to thank you,” the detective added.

  A couple of hours later I received Kaplan’s call-back. “Mrs. Chambers is pretty sure the woman in that sketch is her daughter,” he said. “Sure enough that she’s flying down to Phoenix tomorrow to do a formal ID of the body.”

  Then I called Sylvie.

  Mission accomplished, I sat there in Desert Investigations watching tourists pass by on Main Street. They looked so carefree, carrying their shopping bags and wrapped paintings, but I’d been in the detecting business long enough to be suspicious of appearances. Who knew which of them carried enough hate in his or her heart to commit murder?

  While watching a particularly happy-looking couple walking along arm-in-arm, it occurred to me that if Megan Unruh and the Laumenthals had been intentionally starved to death, then their killer, or killers, may have committed the perfect crime. No murder weapon, and no known motive. Granted, none of the three had been poor. Megan had inherited money from her deceased father, a local attorney, and her art exhibit was doing well even before she disappeared. As for the Laumenthals, Sylvie had tipped me off that Ford was a trust fund baby whose grandfather had been CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Alene Chambers Laumenthal hadn’t been poor, either. An only child, five years earlier she had inherited fifty percent of her sports team-owning father’s estate when he’d dropped dead on a golf course in the Bahamas.

  “But don’t get all hot and bothered about some unknown perp enriching himself via their inheritances,” Sylvie said, when she phoned me back with new information. “Upon proof of death, Ford Laumenthal’s money reverts to the family trust. As for Alene Laumenthal, hers goes to her mother. Megan Unruh’s goes to her mother, too.”

  Without thinking, I found myself rubbing the old bullet scar on my forehead, a reminder that mothers sometimes harmed their daughters, not always meaning to. Then again, sometimes they did. Another possibility occurred to me. It was rare, but cases have been found where multiple murders had been committed to provide camouflage for one suspicious death. Say, new bride Jane Doe wants to murder new hubby Richard in order to inherit his fortune, but Jane—clever girl that she is—knows that once Richard winds up on a coroner’s slab, she’ll be the most obvious suspect. So what does clever Jane do? Using the same method with which she kills Richard, she also kills Susan, Allan, Jennifer, Mark, and Carol. The police then suspect there’s a serial killer at work, not a greedy bride, and clever Jane drives her new Rolls-Royce off into the sunset.

  After switching the Jane Doe scenario to a Greedy Mama one, I decided that another visit to Megan Unruh’s mother was long overdue.

  The sun was setting when I arrived at Mrs. Unruh’s house, and the shadows were long. But not long enough to obscure the note taped to the front door:

  CALL THE POLICE

  A quick glance up and down the street revealed no police cars, no nosy neighbors. How long had the note been there? Considering the neighborhood’s large lots, with at least ten yards separating her house from the neighbors’, the note could have gone unnoticed until the mailman came along.

  Before following its instructions, I decided to see what I could see.

  The front drapes were drawn but the back gate was unlocked, whether from forgetfulness or design. Entering the yard, I saw nothing suspicious other than a neglected swimming pool. Courtesy of the neighbor’s acacia tree, the pool was littered with oval leaves and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in days.

  When I crossed the lawn to the patio, I noticed that the arcadia doors were slightly open.

  Taking a chance, something I would soon regret, I entered the house.

  “Why did you enter the house?” asked the first police officer to arrive, once he’d seen what I had seen. His badge informed me his name was Brian Mulrooney.

  I was still trying to explain my actions to Officer Mulrooney when an unmarked cruiser rolled up and detectives Sylvie Perrins and Bob Grossman climbed out.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she snipped. “It’s the mother?”

  I nodded.

  The “it” was the body I’d found hanging from a noose tied to one of the beams in the vaulted living room ceiling. Dorothea Unruh had climbed up there on a ladder, then kicked it over. The ladder had fallen on the glass coffee table, breaking it.

  The note pinned to her dress said…

  I AM WORTHLESS

  “Just goes to show, doesn’t it?” Sylvie.

  “Yep, you never can tell.” Bob.

  “Looks like we pegged her wrong, didn’t we?” Me.

  Having depleted our collection of bereavement clichés, we stood there in silence, feeling awful about the things we’d thought, the things we’d said.

  35 years earlier

  Helen stands silently as twenty-three bodies—all but one of them children—are dragged to the mineshaft and thrown in. She can’t move, can’t speak, is unaware of the tiny hand gripping her own.

  My fault.

  My fault.

  My fault.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  That afternoon I warned Jimmy I’d be working late at the office, then spending the night in my old apartment. He didn’t like it, but understood. In my own way, I was grieving for Dorothea Unruh, a woman I hadn’t even liked.

  By nine, I’d typed up notes on a half-dozen cases, and after dumping out the remains of the coffeepot, I locked up. Outside, the night was beautiful, something I hadn’t been able to appreciate while hunched over my computer. Although the stars weren’t as dazzling as they were on the Rez—too much neon in Old Town Scottsdale—the full moon was bedecked with a bright halo, lending a silvery sheen to Main Street. To add to the evening’s dreamlike quality, the tourists had abandoned the nearby art galleries for the bars on Scottsdale Road, leaving this block in peaceful silence.

  I was halfway up the stairs to my second-story apartment above Desert Investigations when a shadow detached itself from the wall and rushed at me. Startled, I raised my left arm just in time to deflect a life-draining slash across my carotid. Instead, I sustained a less lethal cut on my forearm.

  “Bitch!” Mother Eve screamed, lunging at me again.

  With my uninjured right hand, I thrust the heel of my palm up against her nose. Blood gushed, but she ignored it. Silver moonlight danced across the knife’s sharp edge as she jabbed it toward me, but this time I was ready. Grasping her wrist, I used her own weight against her by pulling her forward, thus sending her hurtling down the stairs.

  “Bitch thinks she can ruin my life!” She babbled, hitting bottom with the knife still in her hand.

  Before she had a chance to recover, I drew my .38 from its holster and bounded down the stairs after her. “I’ll end your life if you don’t drop that thing,” I told her, the .38 aimed at the center of her forehead.

  Although flat on her b
ack and bleeding from a broken nose, she’d managed to land without stabbing herself. But the fight wasn’t out of her yet. Waving the knife around, she hissed, “Gonna gut your sorry ass, bitch!”

  “Lose the knife,” I ordered.

  “Make me!”

  Happy to oblige, I shot her in the shoulder. She dropped the knife. What was that old saying? Never bring a knife to a gunfight?

  As the knife clanged against the cement landing, Mother Eve yelped her favorite word again. Given her position—flat on her back, and oozing blood and snot—her rage was almost pathetic, but I wasn’t in a sympathetic mood. My left arm burned, yet I was still able to use my left hand to speed-dial 9-1-1 on my cell while keeping the .38 leveled on her with my right.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Twenty-four stitches in a perfectly straight line,” the ER doc said, admiring her handiwork.

  “Lovely,” I groused. Lidocaine or not, my slashed arm hurt. “Maybe you should take up embroidery. I hear it’s relaxing.”

  “Knitting.”

  “What?”

  “It’s knitting that’s supposed to be relaxing, Lena, not embroidery.”

  “Hmph.”

  On an ER-humor roll, Dr. Margaret Mannon called over to the other ER doc who was working on Mother Eve. “Hey, Jeff. Isn’t Ms. Jones here ready for her Frequent Flyer discount?”

  “She’s still got one shotgun wound to go before she qualifies,” Dr. Jeff answered.

  Unamused, I sat up and looked across the blood-spattered room toward Sergeant Sylvie Perrins, standing next to Dr. Jeff. Sylvie was gloating down at Mother Eve, whose right wrist was currently attached to the gurney via a shiny pair of handcuffs. Sylvie loved arresting people.

  “I called Jimmy and he’s on his way,” she informed me. “Figured you couldn’t drive like that, your Jeep being a stick and all.”

  “You think she’s good for it?”

  “Huh?” Sylvie looked puzzled. “Who’s good for what?”