by Betty Webb
“The Lakes!” the bus driver suddenly announced.
Relieved to be pulled out of my philosophical funk, I clambered off the trolley and onto a wide pathway that meandered through a spindly forest of palm trees. As I trod the path to the Donohue’s concrete and glass condo, I saw the lake glimmering in the distance. Behind it, red and purple mesas reached up to the sky. Chez Donohue had a killer view.
At my knock, the big oak door opened immediately, but instead of being confronted by a grieving widow, I saw a strong-jawed woman holding a martini in her hand. I’m five foot-eight, yet she topped me by almost four inches.
“Mrs. Donohue?”
She waved the martini at me. “That’s me, kiddo. You must be Cassie, Arnie Brinkman’s new wife. Welcome to the Book Bitches. Food and drinks are on the sideboard, courtesy of the other Bitches.”
“Actually, I’m…”
But she was already headed into the living room, where six carefully groomed women had gathered. None of those hothouse roses held anything resembling a book, and judging from the slurred bits of conversation that drifted toward me, they were well on their way to getting soused.
Grief takes people different ways. In my days as a police officer, I’d often delivered bad news, standing close to the next-of-kin in case they began to crumple to the floor. Some erupted into hysterics. Others stood there blank-eyed, unable to take in the fact that their lives had changed forever. A few even laughed. Experience had taught me that none of those early reactions meant a thing. One of the laughers slit his jugular within minutes of my leaving his house. Two criers turned out to be wife-killers. So I didn’t judge this widow. For all I knew, Nancy Donohue deeply loved her husband and had organized this drink-a-thon to keep from throwing herself into Sunset Canyon Lake with a cinder block tied around her neck.
However, I couldn’t forget that newspaper photograph of her holding a rifle, her foot triumphantly placed on the neck of a dead elk.
Before trailing after Mrs. Donohue, I took a moment to study the sunken living room ahead. The decor was Southwest Standard: pale earth tones relieved here and there by Indian-print toss pillows. A collection of dusty woven baskets and Kachina dolls were spread along the half-wall that divided the living and dining areas. The double doors off the entry hall stood open to reveal a den with a more idiosyncratic personality. In this very male room I saw a bookcase stuffed with what appeared to be manuals, a plain wooden desk, and an ancient recliner held together by duct tape. Arranged in a haphazard pattern on the walls were a series of black and white photographs of various men shaking hands, but I was too far away to make out their faces. The only spot of color among the photographs was one depicting something red and gold and blurry.
“Don’t stand there gawking, Cassie! Come join us!” Mrs. Donohue called.
Deciding to let the mistaken identity situation play itself out, I followed her orders. Stepping away from the den and down into the living room, I noticed that one of the overstuffed chairs had begun to fray along the seams. The wooden coffee table sported a deep gouge, as if something sharp had fallen across it. No attempt had been made to repair the flaw, which made me suspect a lack of domesticity on Nancy Donohue’s part, as well as the absence of household help. Maybe she was difficult to get along with?
As I sank into an elderly chair, I spotted a possible thorn in Donohue’s collection of hothouse roses, a thin woman in her late thirties whose Goth appearance separated her from the others. Black tee shirt, baggy cargo pants, Doc Marten boots, spiky black hair, nose ring, Celtic tattoos marching up her spindly arm, black-polished fingernails bitten to the quick. No trophy wife, she.
“Tell us more about your exciting life in New York, Olivia, and don’t leave out a thing,” a face-lifted redhead somewhere between fifty and seventy, demanded of the Goth. “Especially the newspaper part. Is it true you once interviewed Osama bin Ladin?”
“His cousin,” Olivia answered, her voice as spiky as her hair.
“Was he as crazy as Osama?” another woman asked.
“There’s a difference between crazy and evil,” Olivia said. “From all accounts, Osama was perfectly sane. His cousin, however…”
“Oh, God, let’s not start in on that again,” Mrs. Donohue interrupted. “I’ve heard all about 9/11 I care to. It’s water under the bridge, anyway.”
At that casual dismissal of so much suffering, I stiffened. So did black-clad Olivia, although her face didn’t change.
“The most interesting interview I ever conducted was with the actor Leif Noble,” she said. “He chugged Chivas all the way through and when I asked him if the rumors about him and that thirteen-year-old girl were true, he threw his drink in my face and called me a whore.”
“Well, are you?”
The other women gasped at Mrs. Donohue’s ghastly question, but Olivia merely smiled. “Unfortunately, no. Whores make more money than reporters.”
Mrs. Donohue bared her big horsy teeth. “Too bad you’re merely a time-sharer, dear. At least you’re honest, which is more than I can say about the rest of my friends.” With that dig, she turned to me. “Now it’s your turn to tell us all about yourself, Cassie. We’re all dying to know how you managed to lure Arnie away from Roberta. She clung like a cocklebur, that one.”
Time to break up the party. “Actually, Mrs. Donohue, I’m…”
“Nancy, dear. I hold no truck with formality.”
“Well, Nancy, I’m not Cassie Brinkman. My name’s Lena Jones and I’m a private investigator. I was hoping to talk to you about your husband’s murder.”
Glasses stopped clinking. Women stopped talking.
The great killer of elk, however, didn’t bat an eye. “What do you want to know?”
Most of the other women leaned forward in anticipation, but Olivia remained unnaturally still.
“Perhaps we should speak in private?”
Nancy Donohue waved her martini glass. “There are no secrets here.”
In my years as an investigator, I’ve heard that statement many times, and each time it had preceded a lie. But a good investigator can learn as much from lies as from the truth. Once again grateful for Arizona’s liberal taping laws, I reached into my carry-all and switched on my digital recorder.
“Where were you the night your husband was shot?” I asked, determined to shock the arrogance out of her.
She wasn’t fazed. “Irrelevant, since that Indian ranch hand has already been arrested for his murder.”
“If you mean Theodore Olmstead, the assistant manager of Sunset Trails Guest Ranch, he’s merely being held as a material witness, not charged with anything.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Quite a big one, actually, because it means he hasn’t been accused of any crime. Now that he has a good attorney, there could even be a chance he can get released. Unless, of course, the authorities gather enough evidence to bind him over for trial.”
“My, my, how complicated,” piped up one of the other women, a tipsy dowager with lavender hair.
Ignoring her, Mrs. Donohue said, “If there’s a chance he might get released, which quite frankly comes as a surprise to me, then perhaps some privacy is called for.” Addressing the Book Bitches as a whole, she added, “If you ladies will excuse us for a few minutes, I need to step into the den with this investigator creature. In the meantime, besides gossiping about me behind my back, perhaps you can come up with some ideas for this fall’s book list. Remember, anything having to do with politics and religion is out.”
“That just leaves mysteries, cookbooks, and romance novels,” one Book Bitch grumbled before Mrs. Donohue shut the den’s thick double doors behind us. For the first time, I became aware of a faint smell of cigarettes.
My nose must have twitched, because Nancy Donohue said, “Ike smoked, the awful man, but I made certain he did it only outside the house. The stench clung to his clothes, though, and settled in here. I’ll have to fumigate everything he ever touched.”
Much closer now to the photograph wall, I saw that Ike Donohue was the common denominator in all the black and white photos. Tall, lean, and clean-featured, only a slight stoop to his shoulders kept him from being movie-star handsome. In each photograph, he was smiling his phony smile as he shook hands with an assortment of military and business types. In three of the pictures, a benevolent-looking man who looked like everyone’s favorite uncle, stood next to him. The sole color photograph, which had been too blurry from out in the hall for me to discern its subject matter, was of a mushroom cloud exploding over the desert.
Mrs. Donohue had said to make it snappy, so I did. “From what I’ve been able to find out, the last time your husband was seen alive was at the Walapai Gas-N-Go early Thursday morning. Where were you that day?” As an afterthought, I added, “And that night.”
“Home.”
“Was anyone with you during any part of that time?” One of those good-looking pool boys, for instance?
Oblivious to my thoughts, she answered, “Elizabeth Waide dropped by around dinner time. She’s the old bat with the purple hair.”
“How long did she stay?”
“Until all the Beefeaters was gone. The bottle was almost full when she got here, and considering the speed with which she was knocking back martinis, it might have been a couple of hours. She could still walk when she left, I’ll give her that.”
A drunk witness makes a bad witness, but I asked the next question anyway. “This would have been at what time?”
Her eyes tracked up and to the left, something that often happens when people are about to tell a lie. “About an hour before dinner. I was roasting a chicken. By the time the blabbermouth shut up and hit the road, it’d burned. Ike, who had absolutely no taste buds thanks to all those cigarettes, would have eaten it anyway. If he’d lived. Since he didn’t, I threw it out. What a waste.”
Her comment was so outrageous that Olivia’s observation about the difference between crazy and evil flashed into my mind. Then I reminded myself about the danger of passing judgment so early in an investigation, and forced myself to focus. Nancy Donohue had rolled out an alibi that would be easy enough to check. Neighbors snoop, and someone might have been watching as the purple-haired Elizabeth Waide visited. Come to think of it, the woman might not have been as drunk as Nancy wanted me to believe. Whatever the case, Ted’s attorney would have access to the police report giving the estimated time of Donohue’s death. The autopsy would zero in on it.
“You said Mrs. Waide visited before dinner,’” I asked. “What time do you usually eat?”
“There’s no ‘usually’ to it. We kept to a strict schedule. Ike is, was, diabetic and he had to eat his dinner promptly at six every day or his blood sugar went wild. You have no idea how much trouble that caused me.”
If the chicken had burned, then Mrs. Waide left somewhere between six-thirty and seven. “What did you do when he didn’t show up for dinner?”
“I finished reading White Hunter, Black Heart and went to bed.”
“You never noticed that your husband didn’t come home?”
She shrugged. “It wouldn’t have been the first time. I wasn’t aware somebody had stopped his clock until two deputies showed up at the door. I had to cancel my tennis date. Very annoying.”
Oh, what a happy marriage those two must have had. “You and Mr. Donohue were married for how many years?”
“Fifteen.”
Recalling the newspaper article, I said, “I was under the impression you have grandchildren.”
“They’re not mine, thank God. I’m Ike’s second wife.”
“What happened to the first Mrs. Donohue?”
A quick bark of laughter. “You mean, did I murder her to get him? Hardly. That dullard is still alive and kicking. She was one of those ‘stay-at-home-moms,’ as housewives like to call themselves these days. Always cooking and cleaning, absolutely no interest in anything outside the home. Ike was bored stiff. Unlike her, I do things. I’m not the domestic type and never have been. Or at least I wasn’t until Ike had to go and develop diabetes.”
As self-involved and pathologically insensitive as Nancy Donohue was, living with a diabetic must have been frustrating, so my next question was a given. “Did Mr. Donohue carry life insurance?”
“Not enough to kill for.” With that, she stood up. “Interview’s over, Jones.”
“One more question.”
She made a big show of looking at her watch, which like mine, was a cheap Timex. The solitaire nestled next to her wedding band didn’t have a diamond’s usual brilliance, either. Were the Donohues having financial problems? If so, a nice insurance payoff would come in handy. I’d ask Jimmy to check.
Oblivious to the way my mind was tracking, she said, “One more question then I go back to the Bitches. Just because Ike was stupid enough to get himself killed doesn’t mean I have to stop living my own life.”
“Who do you think killed your husband?”
“If neither I nor that Indian did it, you mean? Offhand, I’d say Roger Tosches. The man’s a complete scoundrel.”
With that, she escorted me to the front door and shut it behind me so quickly it slammed me in the ass.
Chapter Nine
Tuesday noon
In some ways, Nancy Donohue reminded me of one of my least favorite foster mothers. Brisk. Unfeeling. Oblivious to the needs of others. When the social worker had turned me over to Mrs. and Mr. Putney, I was only nine years old and already in serious emotional trouble. But for some reason, no one seemed aware of that, especially not Mrs. Putney.
Maybe my obvious physical disabilities just kept people from noticing the rest. The bullet that had entered my brain left me with a dragging left leg and a weak left arm. To give credit where due, Mrs. Putney saw to it that I continued my rehabilitation program until the left side of my body was as strong as my right. For that, I’ll always be grateful. But she didn’t handle my fragile emotional state nearly as well. When I cried, she told me to shut up. When I couldn’t eat, she forced me to until I threw up. When I begged for my bedroom light to be left on at night, she called me a baby.
Had the social workers told her what had happened to me? That I’d been shot in the face by my mother, then left for dead on a Phoenix street? That when I regained consciousness in the hospital two months later, I could tell the social workers little—just that I remembered my mother screaming, “I’ll shoot her, I’ll shoot her now!” That my father was already gone, shot to death in the forest that haunted my nightmares? Whether Mrs. Putney knew or not, she wouldn’t leave a light on.
I had no way of knowing that the next foster home would be much, much worse.
Pushing the memory of Mrs. Putney out of my mind—and hating Nancy Donohue for resurrecting her in the first place—I called Katherine Dysart to get black-clad Olivia’s last name. Eames, Katherine told me. Olivia Eames. Mission accomplished, I sat in my rental car outside the gate of Sunset Canyon Lakes for a few minutes, digesting what I’d learned.
The fact that Nancy Donohue hadn’t bothered to act the grieving widow was actually a point in her favor, since I’d never met a homicidal wife who didn’t wail like a banshee over her husband’s murder. Still, her almost pathological coldness unsettled me enough to want Jimmy to delve into her background. Olivia Eames’ and Katherine Dysart’s past, too, and not merely out of curiosity. Both women were fish out of water in Sunset Canyon Lakes, and I wanted to know what they were doing there. One of the first things I’d learned when conducting murder investigations was to look for any object that seemed out of place, especially when that object was human.
I checked my watch again. Although not yet noon, it felt as if hours had passed since I arrived at the resort’s gate. It was time to leave the Emerald City
and return to the real world, so I pulled out of the parking lot and headed for Sunset Point, where Donohue’s body had been found. If I arrived a few minutes late for my lunch with Jimmy, he’d understand.
After all that unnatural green, it was a relief to drive through a more subtle landscape, the desert’s stark beauty softened by the enormous blue sky. Above, red-tailed hawks soared along the updrafts. I even spotted a condor, one of the few that had been released into the Arizona wilderness in hopes of bringing the birds back from near-extinction. Condors are scavengers. They eat anything dead, including road kill. I wondered if one had been among the birds found snacking on what was left of Donohue’s body.
As it turned out, Sunset Point was easy to find but difficult to reach. Situated at the top of Walapai Mountain, the highest point in the mountain range that created the Virgin River Gorge, the scenic viewpoint was only available to people with four-wheel-drive vehicles or hikers who had the stamina for the steep climb. It was all up and around, switchback after dizzying switchback, as my SUV hugged the inside of a poorly maintained gravel road. Heaven help any sight-seer who suffered from vertigo.
Just as I thought the winding road would continue forever, it dead-ended at a metal barrier that kept me from driving straight into the canyon. After setting my emergency brake I stepped out and looked into the distance. Grand Canyon National Park lay twenty miles to the south. A million or so years ago the Virgin River Gorge had been formed by the seasonal runoff that fed into the Colorado, but while the gorge itself was no Grand Canyon, it was no mere arroyo, either. The sides presented a sheer drop of more than twelve hundred feet. At the bottom, the river surged along the rock walls like a silver snake, carving the canyon ever larger and deeper.
What a great place to dispose of a body.
However, as the fluttering remains of yellow police tape proved, Donohue had become snagged on a cactus-studded outcrop ten feet below the ledge I stood on. Easy pickings for scavengers, not so easy for law enforcement. The bad news was that the sheriff had been forced to call for an expert rock-climbing team to retrieve the body. The good news was that whoever dumped Donohue hadn’t been able to climb down to tumble him off the outcropping into the river below. Otherwise, the victim might have floated all the way to the Gulf of California and then onto the shoreline of Mexico.
