Desert Wind

by Betty Webb

  Sunset Canyon Lakes was the biggest lie of all. A so-called “oasis” in the middle of the desert, it catered to the middle-aged and elderly, yet all the resort’s employees were young and good-looking, from the pool boys to the trolley drivers and golf cart chauffeurs. I wondered how much they made on “tips.”

  By the time I jogged into the long shadow of the mesa, I understood what had been happening in Walapai Flats, and why. I only needed to check in with Jimmy before I took my findings to the authorities.

  ***

  Since I’d called ahead, Jimmy was fully dressed by the time I made it to the Desert View, thus sparing me my blushes. Once we were seated at the card table, he proceeded with his show-and-tell, our earlier dust-up at the park apparently forgotten.

  “Let’s start with Sheriff Wiley Alcott.” He tapped a few keys and a legal document popped up.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The will of Wiley George Alcott I, filed in Walapai County Circuit Court, August 24, 1995, leaving all his worldly goods to grandson Wiley George Alcott III, which included a six-hundred-fifty acre tract the centerpiece of which was the Two Devils Silver Mine in Silver Ridge, plus a twenty-five room house; no, make that a mansion. The sheriff’s rolling in it.”

  Piles of money might explain the sheriff’s Rolex and Armani, but it raised a different question. “Why didn’t Grandpa Alcott leave his fortune to his son, the sheriff’s father?”

  “Couldn’t. Wiley George Alcott II died of thyroid cancer in 1981, the same disease that eventually killed Grandpa Alcott, and Grandpa’s sister Alice. The radiation from the Nevada Test Site wiped out the sheriff’s entire family.”

  Which might explain something else. “Alcott’s been pretty friendly, considering the fact that I was encroaching on his turf.”

  “He was hoping you’d dig up dirt in areas where his own hands were tied. People tend to forget that sheriffs are elected officials. Politicians, as it were, and as I’m sure you realize, most politicians don’t want to irritate the electorate. Looks to me like Alcott has big plans, possibly some day running for state attorney general. And before you ask, yes, he has a law degree.”

  It was all coming together. “Does he still own the Two Devils?”

  “Sure does. The silver’s pretty much gone, but he’s leased out the acreage for rangeland. He’s made very good investments, too, enough to send his oldest daughter to study art at the Sorbonne. That’s in…”

  “Paris,” I interrupted. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

  “A la-di-da way of saying times change, but not really.” He tapped a few more keys. “Moving on. Regarding Gerald Heber, one-time liar for the Atomic Energy Commission, I came up with something intriguing. Take a look at this old police report.”

  On May 30, 1960, Heber accused Gabriel Boone of assault during a community meeting in Silver Ridge designed to dispel fears about the dangers of continued nuclear fallout. Heber had been assuring the residents of Walapai County that the spike in cancer cases was in no way connected to the nearby testing when Boone, who’d been in the audience, shouted, “Liar! You government people killed Edna and now you’re killing Abby!” When Heber scoffed at the accusation, Boone leapt from his chair and knocked him to the ground. Boone was taken into custody, but released the next day on his own recognizance. Heber was treated for minor injuries at the Walapai County Hospital.

  “Wow,” was all I could say.

  “Ditto on the wow, and check out this next item.”

  Another screen popped up, its format similar to the last, but this time it was a report from the Clark County, Nevada, sheriff’s office. On November 21, 1979, hikers in the desert a few miles outside Las Vegas found the body of an elderly white male. He’d been shot in the head at close range. When deputies arrived on the scene, they identified the man as Gerald Heber. His wallet contained approximately three hundred dollars in twenties and fifties, and a full deck of credit cards. That wasn’t all. Detectives found four hundred dollars in chips from the Desert Inn Casino in another pocket, so robbery was not considered a motive.

  I took a deep breath. “When did Boone’s wife die?”

  “November 12, 1979.”

  Nine days after her death, Heber was murdered. “Was the killer ever caught?”

  “The case remains open.”

  Maybe Gabe Boone wasn’t the innocent I’d believed he was. Therapists tell us that the first stage of grief is denial, and the second stage is anger. Just how deep had his anger run?

  “Boone couldn’t have known Heber was in Las Vegas,” I said, with relief.

  Without saying a word, Jimmy brought up another screen to reveal a small article that had appeared in the November 19, 1979, edition of the Las Vegas Sun. It announced the winners of the Senior Division of the Ezra Stroughmeyer Cerebral Palsy Charity Golf Tournament on Sunday, November 18. The caption on the photo accompanying the article read, “Pictured is Gerald Heber, 79, receiving the first place prize, a gold-plated golf ball. Heber, who is staying at the Desert Inn through the end of the week, said, “This old man beat out kids as young as 66! I’ve still got it, world!”

  Given Walapai Flats’ proximity to Vegas, it was possible that Gabe Boone had somehow seen the article. While I’d taken my stroll along John Wayne Boulevard, I’d seen two news racks selling the Sun—one right in front of Ma’s Kitchen. For a moment I was tempted to go over to the jail and grill Gabe. Then I remembered the suffering aided and abetted by Heber’s lies and decided that whatever the truth was, I really didn’t want to know.

  “Ready to see what else I found out about Mia Tosches?” Jimmy asked, interrupting my dark thoughts.

  “Don’t tell me Mia murdered someone, too.”

  “If she did, no one’s found the body. But our little wild child’s full of surprises. County records list her as the founder and chief financial supporter of Haven, the local safe house for battered women. Not only that, but she’s also a major contributor to an emergency shelter for abused children. What do you think of that?”

  “I think somewhere down in Phoenix there’s a psychiatrist who needs to brush up on his diagnostic skills.”

  Jimmy looked puzzled, but I didn’t bother to enlighten him. “What about Tosches himself? Did you find anything else on him?”

  “Only that he was in talks to buy out Laveen’s share in the Black Basin.”

  “I have it on good authority that he got turned down.” That is, if the Laveens had told me the truth.

  The rest of Jimmy’s research, deeper than anything I’d been able to carry out, revealed more surprises, many of them monetary. Earl Two Horses didn’t own the Walapai Gas-N-Go; his Paiute mother did. She’d bought the gas station with the settlement she received after the cancer deaths at the Moccasin Peak Mine became public; her Navajo husband’s name appeared on the list of the mine’s victims.

  Before relocating with Katherine to Sunset Canyon Lakes, Trent Dysart had been fired from a Boston area video store when the till kept coming up short after his late-night shift. Farrier Monty Carson had been in several barroom fights, once having had to fork over six thousand dollars in damages to the Dew Drop Inn, from which he was permanently barred. Pretty little Tara Sabbatini, Jimmy’s favorite waitress, had been arrested three years earlier for shoplifting a purple thong at the Silver Ridge Wal-Mart, but she hadn’t re-offended since she’d begun waitressing for her father Marcello—better known as “Ma.” Ma had his own criminal history. He’d once served three days in the Walapai Flats lockup after pushing a diner’s head into a plate of spaghetti marinara after the diner complained his pasta wasn’t al dente enough.

  The most intriguing information was the dirt Jimmy dug up on Ronald Stark. At the time of his death, the deputy—who pulled down a whopping thirty-four thousand dollars per annum—had been under investigation by the Walapai County Sheriff’s Office for expenditure-versus-income irregularities. The investigation began when Sheriff Alcott discovered that Deputy Smile
y Face owned four Mohave County rental properties; a 2011 Bayliner 195 Discovery power boat he’d bought outright three days after Kimama Olmstead’s murder, and which he kept docked at Lake Mead; a brand new Harley-Davidson Ultra, also bought outright; and a 1964 Corvette Pro Street he garaged at the rental home he leased to Georgette Hansen, a pole dancer at the Lake Mead Triple X Gentleman’s Club. The lease for the three-bedroom-four-bath-plus pool home was for one hundred a month; I guessed the rest was made up in services rendered.

  Stark had been on the take from Roger Tosches for years. The fact that the two men had been shot to death within one day of each other was intriguing, and I was willing to bet the same handgun had killed both. Coincidences may exist, but no good investigator believes in them.

  “I don’t see anything about Cole and Barbara Laveen here,” I said, after scrolling through the various rap sheets of felonies and misdemeanors accumulated by the good folk of Walapai Flats.

  “That’s because I found no dirt on them, unless you want to count the ticket Laveen was issued last September when he got caught parking crossways in a strip mall driveway while rescuing a stray dog hit by a car. He paid the fine, apologized, and went on his merry way.”

  Considering everything that had happened, all the deceit, all the deaths, I shouldn’t have asked my next question, but I couldn’t help myself. “What happened to the dog?”

  “When Laveen left the scene, the dog was with him. He took it to the vet, paid for the necessary repair work, and adopted it. The dog’s name is Bobo, kind of a Jack Russell terrier mix. Cute. It even has its own Facebook page. As do all the Laveen’s other dogs.”

  “So Laveen’s brush with the law doesn’t count.”

  He chuckled. “Strict law and order types wouldn’t agree with that assessment, but as another animal lover, I applaud his crime. Other than that one incident, I found nothing but awards and accolades from other businessmen, state senators, and the people who run the community centers and homeless shelters the Laveens are funding. All in all, they look as pure as the driven snow.”

  “Even snow gets pissed in.”

  “Invariably. But I couldn’t find the pissing place.”

  I could; the Laveens’ stairs.

  Maybe some people really were saints. Maybe pigs could fly, too. I eased back in the uncomfortable motel room chair and smiled at my partner. “You’ve done a lot of work for one morning.” Now it was time to ask him something I’d always been curious about, but hadn’t wanted to bother him with. “This case has dug up many troubling issues. For instance, look what happened to the Paiute. The nukes decimated the tribe.”

  Jimmy shifted his eyes away, something he always did when trying to hide his feelings. He probably knew what I was going to ask, and didn’t like it. “Your point being?”

  “When I realized there might be a connection between Ike Donohue’s murder and what went on sixty years ago, I began to wonder. Your people seem to always get the shaft.”

  Still not looking at me, he answered, “There’s no ‘seem’ to it, Lena.”

  I thought about the East Coast Indians being sold to Caribbean slavers, the Indian Removal Act, the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee…Four centuries of genocide, planned and unplanned, a history written in the rage on Earl Two Horses’ face at the Downwinders meeting.

  “Jimmy, don’t you or any of your biological family ever lust for revenge?”

  When he finally turned back to me, a faint smile had returned to his handsome face. “Almost Sister, if we Indians were the vengeful sort, not one white person would be safe from us. Instead, we oh so graciously invite you to visit our casinos.”

  “Vengeance enough, Almost Brother?” I smiled back.

  “Time will tell. Uh, why haven’t you asked what else I found on Olivia Eames?”

  From his tone of voice, I knew the news wasn’t going to be good. “What did she do, strangle a nun?”

  “She’s dying, Lena.”

  With my lame joke already leaving a bad taste in my mouth, I remembered Olivia’s ghost-pale face, the bleeding sore on her lip, the amount of weight she’d lost since I’d first met her. The signs had all been there, but I’d chosen not to see them.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Although I could guess the answer.

  “Stage Four breast cancer, Lena. Metastasized. She’d been undergoing chemo at Sloan Kettering in New York, but stopped last month because it was no longer working. That’s when she flew out here to write her last story, then die on her home turf. I’m sorry. I know you like her.”

  Yes, I liked Olivia. Her journalistic vision. Her courage. And—recalling her tenderness with the grieving Nancy Donohue—her compassion.

  The poet William Blake had it right when he’d written,

  Every night and every morn,

  Some to misery are born,

  Every morn and every night,

  Some are born to sweet delight.

  Some are born to sweet delight,

  Some are born to endless night.

  Olivia might have experienced moments of sweet delight, but it seemed to me that overall, her life had been one of endless night. Born into a fallout-cursed family, she’d been gang-raped in New York City mere months before losing her lover on 9/11. Now this. I wondered how the woman remained sane, or if she still was.

  Ignoring the lump in my throat, I said, “There’s no way you could hack into hospital records.”

  “It took all night and half the morning, but I got into Admissions. Even you ought to know that with everything computerized these days, nothing’s one hundred percent secure. Some sites just take longer to hack, that’s all. As soon as Olivia arrived in Walapai Flats last month, she checked in with Dr. Amos Carrollton, an oncologist at Arizona-Northwest Medical Center. I couldn’t make it into the hospital’s pharmacy records, but considering how long she’s been sick, it’s my guess the doctor gave her a prescription for Fentanyl. You know what that is?”

  “Medication for extreme pain, administered when morphine no longer works. It’s applied in patch form, usually on the upper arm.”

  He nodded. “She was probably stoned at least half the time you talked to her. You never noticed?”

  “Dilated or pinpoint pupils are the first things I check for during an interview, and I never saw anything like that with her.” However, Olivia had been oddly nervy during our drive to Silver Ridge for the Downwinders meeting, picking at her lip, rubbing her forehead. Maybe she’d backed off the Fentanyl in order to make the trip. The fact that she continued working on the Black Basin story at the same time as the Downwinders story was testament to her toughness, but Jimmy was right; there was only so much pain a human being could bear. At some point Olivia would have to apply another Fentanyl patch or shoot up or take whatever the hell else she was using.

  Then I remembered her behavior as we stood on Nancy Donohue’s patio, the headache she’d admitted to, the bitter tone in her voice when she told me Excedrin couldn’t help.

  My leaving her to care for another suffering woman had been one lousy judgment call.

  ***

  The drive to Sunset Canyon Lakes went faster this time, only partially because I was prepared for the detour. Although detectives and crime techs hadn’t yet finished working the Stark crime scene, afternoon traffic was sparse. Before I’d left Jimmy’s motel room, I’d tried to reach Olivia to tell her that I was on my way; my call went straight to voice mail. The same thing happened when I tried Nancy Donohue’s phone. Frustrated, I’d called Information, but the operator informed me that Elizabeth Waide, Nancy’s lavender-haired neighbor, had an unlisted number.

  I hoped Olivia could hold off on her meds and Nancy would continue her drugged sleep for several more hours. As soon as I arrived, I would cross the street to Elizabeth’s house and ask her to watch Nancy. Then I’d take Olivia back to her timeshare to drug away her own misery.

  As it turned out, Olivia had been realistic about her physical limitations, and when Nancy Donohue’s
door opened, Elizabeth Waide stood facing me. With finger pressed to her lips, the loyal Book Bitch whispered, “Nancy’s sleeping. If you need to talk to her, come back tomorrow.”

  I whispered back, “Where’s Olivia?”

  “Gone. She told me she needed some fresh air and was driving up to Sunset Point.”

  Sunset Point.

  The place where Olivia had killed Ike Donohue.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  If the desert between Walapai Flats and the resort was beautiful, it paled next to the severe majesty of Sunset Point.

  Red rock walls plunged toward a blue-green ribbon of water below, where the Virgin River wound its way toward the Colorado. Sixty years ago, the river had been despoiled by radioactive fallout, but now it flowed clean, delivering life-saving moisture to plants and wildlife that would otherwise be doomed. Above, a pair of red-tailed hawks floated in the hot updrafts, calling out to each other when they spied their scurrying prey below.

  As I parked my Trailblazer behind Olivia’s Explorer, I saw her sitting on the very rim of the canyon, watching the river’s zigzag progress south.

  “Thinking about jumping?” I approached, training my .38 on her back. You could never be too careful with murderers, however much you like them.

  “Not yet,” she answered, never taking her eyes off the river. “I’ve already filed the Black Basin story, and I’m several hours away from finishing the one on the Downwinders. Once I do…” she shrugged her bony shoulders. “I’d originally planned to jump, but maybe I’ll shoot myself instead. It would be poetic justice, don’t you think? Live by the gun, die by the gun?”

  Her voice held a slight slur. Once she turned around to face me, I saw the dilation of her pupils. I also saw the .38 lying next to her, the weapon with which she’d killed Ike Donohue, Roger Tosches, and Deputy Ronald Stark.