by Betty Webb
I’d already warned Jimmy that I had some hard questions for Ted, so conscious of the time constraints, I kept the greetings to a minimum and started right in. Keeping my voice low enough that the kiddies wouldn’t hear, I said, “Ted, did you have an affair with Mia Tosches?”
Behind the Plexiglas barrier that separated us, his eyes flickered from me to Jimmy, who kept his eyes down. I could tell from my partner’s posture he was unhappy with my directness, but the fact that he kept his mouth shut meant that he knew more frankness was called for.
Ignoring my question, Ted asked Jimmy, “Been to see Dad lately? He seemed stressed when he visited this morning.”
“Oh, he’s…”
I cut in. “Ted, look at the clock. We don’t have time for idle chit chat.”
He ignored me again, asking Jimmy how well the head wrangler, in this case, Dusty, was handling the tourists in his absence. Jimmy neither reframed my question or changed the subject. No expert in interrogation, he simply reminded Ted that he hadn’t yet visited the ranch, but planned to do so tomorrow.
All this deflection was to be expected. Indians, even those raised in non-Indian families, weren’t big on discussing their sex lives; they felt it was the height of vulgarity. Squirming with impatience—the clock in the visitor’s room was ticking down—I asked my question again. Again Ted ignored me. Keeping his eyes on Jimmy, he said his attorney had told him there was a possibility that this “material witness stuff” might be made to go away.
“Ted, please,” I pleaded. “We’ve only got ten minutes left.”
For all the good that did me, I could have been turning somersaults on the moon. Ted continued pretending I wasn’t there, kept yakking at his brother about the ranch, the horses, the dudes, the weather.
Until I’d had enough. “Hey! Look at me and tell me the truth. Did you screw, fuck, or whatever, Mia Tosches?” This time I didn’t bother lowering my voice.
Ted, who like most Indians, never used vulgarities, finally looked at me. “Lena, please!”
“Cut the crap. I’m going to sit here and recite every synonym for ‘fuck’ I can think of until you tell me the truth. Bone, hump, schtup…”
Jimmy, another clean-mouther, lowered his head and moaned softly.
“Did you play hide the kielbasa, respond to her booty call, screw…”
Ted raised his hands, as if to ward off demons. “Lena! Watch your…Oh, heavens, your language. There are children present!”
“Knock boots, do the wild thing, the mattress mambo, get lucky, grab some ass…”
“We only did it once!” Ted yelled so loudly that most people in the visitor’s room turned to see what was going on. The older kids looked thrilled.
When I smiled and waved, everyone except for the teenagers went back to minding their own sad business, and I returned to mine: questioning a reluctant client. Lowering my voice, I said, “Good thing you fessed up before your brother here fainted. Now that we’ve got the schtupping out in the open, tell me, why just once?”
“Because she was married!” Ted hissed.
“She was married the first time you screwed her.”
“You don’t understand. She…she…”
I could see where this was headed, so I cut him off at the pass. “If I hear one more man whine about some woman whose evil wiles overcame his own innate purity I’m going to puke. As soon as I’ve finished puking, I’ll resume my list of synonyms. Look, Ted, I’m not asking for a detailed account of who did what to whom, however entertaining that might be, but I want to know how the situation started and how it ended. I especially want to know why after your romantic interlude, Mia Tosches now hates you enough to lie to the cops about that altercation at the Gas-N-Go, which is what got you locked up in the first place.”
Admission finally made, Ted explained what led to their encounter, but the tale he told wasn’t much different than those I’ve heard before. After several weeks of group riding lessons at the ranch, Mia requested a private tutorial. Since giving private lessons to the folks living in Sunset Canyon Lakes was nothing new, Ted hadn’t given this a second thought.
“I should have been more alert when she said she wanted to work on her trail riding skills,” he admitted. “Most private lessons are given in the ring.”
“So you took her out on the trail. Then what?”
He tensed again, then lowered his head and mumbled, “Well, you know that bend by the river, where the trail veers away from the road and there’s a bunch of cottonwoods that…?”
“Don’t know it, don’t want to. Hurry this along. I still have a few synonyms left.”
A deep inhale. “When we reached the cottonwoods, Mia said she was feeling dizzy and needed to dismount and could I help her. So I…” He swallowed.
“You jumped down, helped her dismount, I get it. And you stayed real close, so you could catch her if she fainted, right?” I wasn’t being sarcastic. When I’d first met him at that pow wow, Ted carried an air of gallantry that I’d found refreshing in this jaded age.
“Something like that. She kinda slumped against me so I put my arms around her, you know, to hold her up, but…”
“But things progressed from there. Because she’s really hot.”
“Yes.” He stared at the floor as if something fascinating was going on down there.
“Okay, so after the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ what happened?”
“We, uh, we got back on the horses and rode back to the ranch.”
I could imagine the conversation they’d had along the way, but I had him repeat it as well as he could remember. It was always possible that she could have been so het up by his wonderfulness that she’d confessed all her sins.
Still staring at the floor, he said, “She told me she wanted another, uh, private lesson next week, well, that would be this week, wouldn’t it, but I said I was busy. She didn’t want to hear that, kept pushing and pushing, so I finally had to tell her that, um, what happened had been a mistake, that she was a wonderful person and under other different circumstances I’d want to see her again, take her someplace nice like she deserved, but since she was married that our, uh, that this had better be the end of the, um, private lessons.”
“Her response was?”
“She said I’d be sorry.”
Mia told the truth there. Ted was sorry. Sorry for his moral lapse, sorry for the clumsy way he’d handled the aftermath, and especially sorry he’d wound up in jail separated from his family and his job. Regardless of all that sorry, he still sat on the other side of a thick Plexiglas partition, waiting to be hustled back to his cell. Not that I was being judgmental. I’d done plenty of stupid things in my own life. Everyone has, and most of us get by with it—at least on this wicked Earth—but Ted’s fall from grace had resulted in consequences that hardly fit his crime.
“This happened on what day, Ted?”
He finally looked up at me, but it took an effort. “Last Wednesday. I was so worried about what she might do to get back at me that I drove around all night, thinking. The next night, too. That’s the real reason I don’t have an alibi.”
“Did you drive up to Sunset Point, by any chance?”
“No. Basically, I just drove around in the desert. There are some roads out there you can handle if you’re in a big truck or a four-wheel drive vehicle. I remember being out by Mitten Mesa for a while.”
“Anything else?”
“Sorry. That’s about it.”
Jimmy, tired of letting me do all the talking, said, “Didn’t you say Dad visited you this morning?”
Ted nodded. “And every morning, regardless of what’s going on at the ranch.”
An expression of sorrow briefly crossed Jimmy’s face. Ted was the favored son; Jimmy only tolerated. Their conversation returned to small talk and remained that way until an announcement came over the loudspeaker that visiting hours were over. With relief I headed out the door, leaving Jimmy behind to say an extended farewell. While the other visi
tors surged through the lobby, I sat down on a bench and waited.
People with the rare good fortune to never have had a loved one or friend incarcerated tend to type those families as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals or, during their more compassionate moments, victims of downward genetic drift. But that’s hardly the case. Besides committing murder, thievery, and mayhem, everyday men and women could wind up in jail for sundry non-violent crimes—failure to pay parking tickets, lewd language in public places (here’s looking at you, kid), even mouthing off to a police officer who was having a bad day. None of these encroachments against the public good said anything about the quality of the offenders’ families, all of whom were swept along with them for the bumpy ride through the justice system. This included spouses, children, parents, extended families, friends, and employers. Passing by me were red-eyed women; elderly folk in wheelchairs, their hands shaking with palsy; children asking why Daddy couldn’t come home with them; and morose parents wondering where they’d gone wrong.
Another reason I hated jails was because by their very pre-trial nature, the innocent bunked with the guilty, addicts were incarcerated instead of treated, and the scum of the earth mingled with folks who’d merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As the glum horde passed by, I noted a sheriff’s deputy in the hallway ushering them into the night. Tall, sandy-haired, big smile. Friendly and outgoing, he nodded to the elderly and chucked the children under their chins. He looked familiar, but at first I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen him. He wasn’t one of the officers I’d dealt with on my earlier trips to the jail. Then, when he grasped a wobbly senior by the arm to steady him, it clicked. Officer Smiley Face was the bully in the park.
While I was still assimilating this, Jimmy appeared beside me. “Did anyone ever tell you you’ve got a dirty mouth?”
“Look at that cop,” I whispered. “The one by the door.”
Jimmy’s back stiffened. “Oh, no.”
“Let’s get out of here, but don’t catch his eye. In case his wife does wind up asking for help, we don’t want him to know we’re connected to Ted.”
We separated before approaching the door. Solitary blonde, solitary Indian, nothing but the old same old. Blonde with Indian, memorable. Our caution paid off, because at the door, the deputy winked and said to me, “Pretty night, isn’t it, ma’am? Almost as pretty as you.”
I nodded and said to a well-dressed woman beside me, “Hope it cools off soon, don’t you?” I hoped he’d think I was with her.
“Damned desert never lets up.” The woman blotted her face with a lace-bordered hanky. “I miss Oregon.”
I continued our casual comments as we walked down the steps. At the curb, too late for the bully cop to notice our separation, she headed for the parking lot while I found a place in the shadows and waited for Jimmy.
“That poor woman,” he said, after arriving at my side.
Yes. That poor woman. Few cops are batterers, but those that are can find themselves protected by fellow officers who in other instances are admirably quick to enforce antibattering laws. In the first place, cops are good at covering up their own violence because they’ve learned from the pros. But even when cop buddies can’t help but notice, other factors can come into play. As a former cop myself, I know how much we have to rely on our partners, because we so often battle life-and-death situations together. It’s the us-against-them mentality, and when you’re that close, you can ignore an instance or two of bruised knuckles. The person riding with you in the squad car is the same person watching your back when you enter a drug den where shots are being fired.
My own partner had saved my life in just such an instance. Regardless of the danger to himself, he’d stayed beside me the day I was shot, using his own body to shield me from continuing gunfire. If I’d found out later that he beat his wife, would I have reported it to the higher-ups? I might first have urged him to get anger management counseling. If he’d shown up at work one more time with bruised knuckles, then, yeah, I’d have reported him.
Even if one officer filed a report against another, sometimes nothing came of it other than a ruined partnership. In all domestic abuse situations, there was an inequity of power, but in cop-against-spouse matters, that inequity strutted on steroids. A wife complaining of abuse was complaining about a man who not only carried a gun and knew how to use it, but someone who also knew how to sanitize a crime scene. Let’s say she looked past the possibility that the next crime scene might be her cooling body, and lodged a complaint, anyway. Not only would she have to testify against her husband in court, she would also have to go up against his cop friends, most of whom would empathize with the stress he endured on a daily basis. Their testimony would be slanted accordingly.
In spousal abuse situations, finances needed to be factored in, too. In many cases, the cop was the major bread-winner, and if convicted of battering, he would lose his job. His spouse knew that, which was another reason so many battered wives kept their mouths shut; they needed their husband’s paycheck to buy formula for the baby.
Barring a direct complaint from his wife against Officer Smiley Face, there was little either Jimmy or I could do to help her or her daughter, other than to tip off CPS to a possible child abuse case, which I’d do the moment I got back to my motel. Not that I thought much would come of it. Smiley Face’s genial “Sure-love-ya-folks-but-it’s-closin’-time” routine at the station house proved he was adept at disguising his dark heart.
As Jimmy and I walked through the shadows toward our cars, I thought of an often-used phrase, which when once used as a book title, rocketed the author onto the best-seller list. “Speaking truth to power,” sure sounded nice, but power almost always won.
Chapter Twelve
It’s easy to get lost in the desert at night. No lights, only a pale moon and even paler stars, no familiar landmarks, nothing to guide me other than the Trailblazer’s GPS unit. As I drove along the two-lane blacktop, wildlife dramas played themselves out in front of me. Why does the coyote cross the road? To chase the jackrabbit on the other side. I witnessed several of these chases, rooting, in turn, for the rabbit, then the coyote. One had to die in order that the other would live. My musings about Nature red in tooth and claw ended when I saw, standing in the middle of the road ahead, a particularly scrawny coyote looking down at a flattened rabbit. Road kill. As my rental approached, she turned toward me, eyes yellow-bright. Although I was quick on the brake, my car slid almost into the coyote’s side before it stopped. The coyote merely sat there. Didn’t move. Kept looking at me.
We long-time Arizonans know to beware of wildlife exhibiting atypical behavior. Coyotes are clever beasts who instinctively know humans aren’t their friends. Upon spotting us or even our vehicles, they usually make tracks into the brush, especially when carrying a kill. Another thing about coyotes: they don’t share. Except, of course, when it comes to their pups. As I stared at the coyote and she stared back, I saw her swollen teats. Another reason she shouldn’t be standing in the middle of the road watching cars drive by. She should grab that road kill and run on home.
But she didn’t. We watched each other for a few more moments before I figured out what was wrong. She was salivating, and not from hunger. Foam rimmed her mouth, dripping onto the rabbit. When I studied her eyes more carefully, I realized how dazed they were. Flat, irises dilated, glowing with pain.
Rabies.
With one hand I lowered the automatic window six inches—she still didn’t move—while I reached into my carry-all with my other hand for my .38. Better a quick death than days of suffering. As for her pups, tomorrow I would search for them and deliver the same harsh mercy. They were doomed because they’d been drinking her milk.
“Over here, Mama,” I called. I poked the .38’s short barrel out the window. I hoped my voice would make her shift her position but she remained stationary. Knowing better than to step out of the car, I turned the steering wheel hard right and rolled the S
UV to a position broadside to her thin flank. She still didn’t move, which was testament to how sick she was.
I aimed carefully, then fired.
The bullet hit her behind the left foreleg, a clean heart shot. She dropped straight down, her frothy muzzle resting on the road kill. A hind leg jerked twice, then stilled.
It would be irresponsible to leave a rabid animal on the road, lest some soul with more compassion than caution came blundering along and attempted to help, perhaps even rendering mouth-to-snout resuscitation. Such things have happened out here in the tourist-visited West, so I had to get her off the road. Trying to figure out how to keep my own hands untainted by her blood and saliva, I exited the car. A glance back at the coyote’s rapidly-filming eyes assured me she was dead, which made me feel both sad and safe, but I couldn’t see a way out of my quandary. If I’d been driving my Jeep, I would have everything I needed, from tool chest to tarp. But the rental had nothing, other than a….
…a jack.
It was an ugly business, but the jack worked. Once I’d used it to scoot the coyote’s body off the road, I performed the same task with the rabbit, then covered them both in dirt, brush and rocks. To make certain I could find the same spot the next morning—in daylight everything looked different—I stacked the rocks into a triangular cairn. The thought of going out to kill a litter of pups depressed me, but leaving them to die of rabies or slow starvation depressed me even more.
On that grim note, I climbed back into my rental and headed for the Emerald City.
***
Katherine had informed me that the mixer’s theme was One Night in the Wild West, so I wasn’t surprised when I entered the resort’s cavernous party room and saw scores of senior citizens dressed in Western drag: designer jeans, cowboy boots handmade in Italy, elaborately fringed shirts no real cowboy would be caught dead in, and an assortment of Stetsons sporting hatbands made of silver, turquoise, and feathers. At the far end of the room, ersatz cowboys and saloon girls were attempting to do the funky chicken to Old Sons of the Pioneers tunes played by a similarly dressed band.
