Desert Noir (9781615952236)

by Webb, Betty

  “Goddamn Californians are ruining this town.”

  I said the most optimistic thing I could think of. “But the statistics show that for every three Californians who move out here, two go back.”

  “Leaving one more son of a bitch every half block to make us miserable.”

  For the past decade, Scottsdale—founded after the Civil War by Winfield Scott, a U.S. Army chaplain, and which had once called itself “The West’s most Western town”—had been overrun by Californians fleeing earthquakes, New Yorkers fleeing crime, and Chicagoans fleeing snow. The city had grown from 130,000 to 180,000 residents in just six years, and while the influx was good for the tax base, Scottsdale now suffered from streets too narrow for the increased traffic. Not a day went by that some rancher didn’t sideswipe some underdressed immigrant on rollerblades.

  Nobody liked it, but there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. In twenty years, I figured, the Valley of the Sun would look just like Los Angeles.

  And smell like it, too.

  That night the pain in my shoulder kept me awake so I lay staring at the ceiling, thinking about Clarice and all the other battered women I’d come in contact with in my years with the Violent Crimes Unit. Each year, an estimated one-and-a-half million women were severely beaten by their husbands, and everyone in VCU believed that Scottsdale had more than its share of these dysfunctional couples. We’d arrest the batterers and refer the women to shelters, but nine times out of ten the next day the scarred and beaten women would be down at the jail bailing out their men. The psychologists told us it was because the women could see no way out of their situation, but while that theory might explain some victims, it didn’t explain Clarice. She was a childless, educated beauty with money of her own. She didn’t need to be dependent upon anybody else’s paycheck, she owned a house worth a half million, and she could get any man she wanted.

  Why had she wound up with Jay?

  A sudden rumbling pulled me from my reverie. I rolled over and nudged Dusty, to whom insomnia was a stranger. “You’re snoring, babe.”

  “Mmph.” He gave me a few minutes’ reprieve, then started up again.

  Careful not to wake him, I pressed my hand against his cheek and caressed it slowly, surprised as always by how soft his weathered skin actually felt. He turned his face into my hand and, eyes still closed, kissed my palm. I moved my hand away.

  I didn’t love him. I didn’t.

  I was still safe.

  Chapter 7

  Dusty was gone by the time I crawled out of bed, but he’d filled a vase with water and arranged Cliffie’s yellow roses in it.

  My head still hurt, but not as fiercely. I showered carefully, keeping my bandaged shoulder out of the spray, dressed in jeans and a loose T-shirt, then limped downstairs to the office.

  Jimmy greeted me with a disapproving glare. “You should stay in bed. There’s nothing going on down here I can’t handle.”

  I ignored him. “The Violent Crimes Unit ran an AFIS check on Jay Kobe and came up with a few things I want you to follow up. See if he owes money, stuff like that.”

  “Great minds think alike. The print-out’s already on your desk.”

  “Remind me to give you a raise.”

  The glare vanished as he laughed. “You can’t give me a raise. We’re equal partners, remember?”

  I smiled, even though my shoulder was screaming at me. “You talk to the Golden Apple yet about that light-fingered manager?”

  “They’re very pleased, didn’t even ask about the bill.”

  Which I knew would be considerable. “They might make a few comments when they receive it. How about our little insurance claimant?”

  He was silent for a moment then said in an oddly even voice, “I think one of us ought to run some surveillance on her with a video camera. Those credit charges don’t prove a thing on their own.”

  “You looking to get out of the office?”

  Another long silence. Then, “If I do, will you promise to take it easy?”

  “Sure,” I lied, anxious for him to leave so I could do some work without him nagging at me. “Just remember what I told you the last time we discussed surveillance. Don’t ever, ever let her get a look at you or it’s all over. With your size, long hair, and tribal tatts, you don’t exactly blend in with the scenery.”

  Jimmy agreed to rent a nondescript car and conduct the first day’s surveillance parked down the street, with his hair tucked under a baseball cap and his tattoos hidden by cosmetics. We both knew that the woman wouldn’t be foolish enough to sashay down the sidewalk in broad daylight but she might drop her guard at night. If so, Jimmy would be waiting. If she didn’t…

  Well, surveillance cameras weren’t exactly unknown in my profession. Nothing a little breaking and entering couldn’t take care of, although I’d have to wait until my shoulder wasn’t quite so stiff. I wasn’t about to send Jimmy in there to do my dirty work. He needed a police record like I needed another bullet wound.

  As soon as Jimmy took off for the car rental agency, I settled down to read his print-out on Jay Kobe. What I found had me boiling.

  After battering his art teacher girlfriend in Bakersfield, Kobe had split town and moved to Scottsdale, where he’d joined a private S&M club on the Scottsdale/Phoenix border. After a couple of incidents that shocked even their kinky clientele, he’d been asked to hand in his membership card. He was also deeply in debt and from the names and amounts Jimmy had managed to find, his drug problem appeared to be escalating.

  Ah, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, your hopped-up crackheads… No wonder we Arizonans owned so many guns: We were scared to death.

  More disgusted than ever, I picked up the phone and called Jay’s lawyer. “Thanks for letting me know Kobe was out of jail,” I snapped, after his harried-sounding secretary finally put me through.

  “Couldn’t,” McKinnon said.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because I drove straight from the jail yesterday into a court hearing and by the time it let out, the day was shot so I went home. I don’t make courtesy phone calls from home.”

  Courtesy phone calls. I should have paid more attention to my instincts when McKinnon first entered my office. He might wear expensive suits, but morally he was a sleaze. “Your day was shot, hum? Well, so was I.”

  For a few seconds I could almost hear the rats running through his maze-like brain, then he asked cautiously, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that somebody shot me last night, Mr. McKinnon. It might have been your client.”

  There was another lawyerly pause while he thought about this. Then he said, “I’m sorry you were shot, Miss Jones, but the wound couldn’t have been too bad or you wouldn’t be on the phone talking to me right now. Am I right in guessing that you’re calling from your office?” After I grunted in the affirmative, he continued, “I’d like to remind you that Mr. Kobe is your client, too. Why would he want to harm someone who is helping him?”

  “We didn’t exactly hit it off yesterday.”

  “Jay seldom hits it off with anyone. He’s not the most personable man in the world. Artists seldom are.”

  A memory flashed into my mind of Madeline, one of my foster mothers, wiping paint off her hands with a turpentine-stained rag. Turning towards me, she caressed my cheek with a soft hand. “Did you know that you’re such a beautiful little girl I’m having trouble painting you? Say, I’ve got an idea! If you frown a little harder, you’ll give me some nice easy frown lines to paint.”

  When my standard morose expression disappeared into giggles, she caressed my cheek again. “Thank you, dear. Laugh lines are easy to paint, too.”

  Remembering all this, I said to McKinnon, “Most artists I’ve known are perfectly decent people. Kobe’s the exception.”

  He didn’t say anything for a while, and for a moment, I thought he might have walked away from the phone. But then he surprised me. “You know, Lena, I don’t think
we’re going to have any trouble getting the charges against Mr. Kobe dropped, so why don’t you just send me your bill.”

  “Hal, that’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  Interesting. One day after begging me to take the case McKinnon was backing away. Was he trying to protect me?

  Or was he afraid of what I might find out?

  I spent the rest of the day just sitting around, more or less following my doctor’s orders. After call-forwarding the phone to my apartment, I went upstairs and read a few pages from the new Stephen King, listened to some barnstorming Chicago blues by KoKo Taylor, then put together a scratch salad from the browning lettuce in the refrigerator.

  By 2 p.m. I was bored enough to ignore my shoulder’s complaints, and hobbled down the stairs and through the ghastly heat to the Damon and Pythias Gallery. The last time I’d seen Cliff Barbianzi—at least to remember—was at Clarice’s funeral. Although I was certain he’d been close to her, his face had betrayed nothing.

  Just as I’d hoped, Cliffie sat enthroned behind his Louis Quatorze desk, as elegantly attired as the Sun King himself. The hand-tailored dark suit might not be very “Arizona” but it whispered money and good breeding, as did the diamond and platinum tie tack which kept his rep tie from running off. The Sun King, however, would probably have disapproved of an art gallery devoted to male nudes; Louis XIV preferred women. Cliffie looked up when I entered and a look of horror spread across his crinkled baby’s face.

  “Lena! You’re supposed to be in the hospital!” Although in his sixties, Cliffie was one of the handsomest men I knew. With his cherubic face and silvery hair, he looked like an impish elderly angel just one good deed away from getting his wings.

  I eased myself carefully into an exquisite needlepoint chair. “Don’t nag, Cliffie. It makes my head hurt. Why don’t you offer me a drink instead?” I looked hopefully towards the small back room where I knew he kept a small refrigerator stocked with strawberry smoothies and Beck’s. “I need the vitamin C.”

  He gave me a bemused look but without another word, got up and walked to the back room, returning shortly with a Beck’s for himself and a smoothie for me. He knew that I never touched alcohol, although he didn’t know the reason—that not knowing my genetic background, I was afraid to indulge in anything that might be even remotely habit-forming. For all I knew, my parents were both alcoholics. Or drug addicts. Or maybe even a nasty combination of both.

  “L’chaim, dear heart,” he said, as he tilted his Beck’s towards me.

  “L’chaim to you, too.” The smoothie was delicious. We sipped in quiet communion for a moment, then I cleared my throat and said, “Cliffie, I want to thank you for everything you did last night. Not everybody would have come running like that when the shooter was still around.” Cliffie wiped a thin line of froth from his delicate upper lip.

  “You’re not ‘somebody.’ You’re my friend.”

  Refusing to get emotional, I took a deep breath and continued. “And thanks for the flowers, and thanks especially for cleaning up the, uh, mess. That really went above and beyond.”

  He smiled so sweetly I could almost hear angel’s voices. “Dear heart, as tough as you might like to act, I know you would have done the same.”

  Emotion threatened me again but I managed to fight it off. “Naw, I wouldn’t. I’m not a cop anymore.”

  His smile returned. “Being or not being a cop has nothing to do with it. You’re just a very nice person, Lena, no matter how you try to disguise it underneath that prickly exterior of yours. You care when other people feel pain, probably because you’ve felt so much in your own life.” Damn the man. If he kept on like this, I’d be a slobbering wreck. It was time to get the subject off me. “Uh, if you’re through playing psychiatrist now, Cliffie, I want to ask you a few questions about Clarice.”

  He frowned. “You’re working on the case?”

  “Yep. Jay Kobe hired me.” I didn’t tell him McKinnon had issued my marching orders earlier that day, orders I had no intention of obeying.

  “What do you want to know?” Was it my imagination, or did his voice sound wary?

  “I was wondering how she spent her last day in the gallery, who you saw going in, going out, what time she locked up to get the gallery ready for Art Walk. That kind of stuff.”

  “That kind of stuff is what I’ve already told the police, as you should certainly know if you’re still as close as I think you are to that strange little man, what’s his name, Kryzoutski?”

  “Kryzinski. I’ll tell him you said that.”

  “Those clothes, my dear! What in the world could he possibly think he’s doing?”

  “I imagine he thinks he looks like Bat Masterson, Cliffie, and please quit changing the subject. Just tell me how Clarice spent her last day in the gallery.”

  He sighed theatrically. “Well, as I told Kryzinski’s minions, I have my own gallery to run so I don’t exactly keep an eye on the Western Heart all day long. But from what I did notice, not much seemed to be going on over there that day. Just the usual. The only strange thing I can think of was that Clarice told Gabriella, her assistant, to leave around four o’clock. That she’d get the gallery ready for Art Walk all by herself.”

  According to Cliffie, and as he had already stated in the police report, Gabriella had opened the gallery at ten that morning and Clarice had drifted in sometime around two o’clock. This much had already been confirmed by Gabriella’s own statement. Yes, Cliffie had thought it odd when he’d seen Gabriella leaving a couple of hours later, but at the time, he’d taken it for granted that she was just stepping out for a minute. He didn’t find out she hadn’t returned until the police questioned him the evening of the murder.

  “Doesn’t getting the galleries ready for Art Walk take a lot of work?” I asked.

  “Sure. There’s the cleaning, the straightening, the champagne or wine to uncork, the hors d’oeuvres to make and set out. That’s why Javier helps me out every Thursday.”

  Javier was Cliffie’s companion and sometimes-assistant, and his hors d’oeuvres were the talk of the Walk. Even people who didn’t care much for the art in Damon and Pythias gravitated to the gallery to nosh on his thinly sliced salmon crisps garnished with capers and chopped onion. Some hung around long enough to grow fond of the oil paintings of naked men, and some, finally swayed by the artistic integrity of the paintings, even bought them.

  A memory nudged at me. “When I found the body, someone had already put wine in the fountain but hadn’t set out the hors d’oeuvres yet.”

  Cliffie shrugged. “I guess she was killed before she got to it. Gabriella came by the day after the murder—she was upset, as I’m sure you realize—and while we were talking, she told me Clarice definitely said she would take care of them herself.”

  The police report hadn’t mentioned any food in the refrigerator, just white wine. Since Clarice surely hadn’t planned on making a last-minute trip to the store, the only thing I could deduce from her behavior was that she wanted Gabriella out of the gallery.

  But why? Because she had an appointment to meet her murderer?

  Since I was also curious about something else, I let the case of the missing hors d’oeuvres slide for the time being. “Cliffie, when that tourist found her body, the front door was open. But according to the medical examiner’s report, she’d been killed about two hours earlier, when the front door should have been locked. You know anything about that?”

  Cliffie shook his head. “It’s a mystery to me, too.”

  I was getting all kinds of pertinent information here. I tried again. “How about this. Do you know anything about some Apache artist that Clarice was supposed to be having trouble with?”

  His eyes lit up and he took another sip of Beck’s. “Ah, yes. The infamous George Haozous.”

  “What was the trouble between them?”

  He spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “The usual trouble between an artist and a gallery owner. Cla
rice told George that she wasn’t going to carry his work anymore. It wasn’t commercial enough and she’d decided to concentrate on the big sellers like Jay Kobe.” Here he made a small moue of distaste. “If you can call that poseur an artist.”

  “But Kobe’s stuff sells, right?”

  Cliffie nodded. “Oh, yes. It sells. Snowbirds from Minnesota just love that crap—all those noble savages, bosomy Indian maidens, true grit cowboys. Gag me with a palette knife, dear heart. Clarice couldn’t keep his paintings on her walls long enough to even raise the prices. Whatever else she might have been, she had a good head for business.”

  Whatever else?

  Before I could ask him what he meant, he continued, “George Haozous’s work doesn’t sell well. The irony is that it’s hard-edged realism, which as you know usually flies off the walls around here. And he’s very, very good, a modern master, actually. I haven’t seen colors like that since Titian. The problem is with George’s subject matter.”

  “Which is?”

  “Dead Indians.”

  I wasn’t certain I heard him right. “Did you say dead Indians?”

  A wry smile. “You heard me right. Dead Indians. Very dead Indians. Indians with their heads hacked off by U.S. Cavalry sabers, Indians with their insides splattered all over the prairie from settlers’ shotgun blasts, Indians with…”

  “Okay, okay. I get the picture.” As an ex-cop, I had no problem imagining carnage. “But you say they’re good?”

  “They’re brilliant, dear. In a just world, Jay Kobe would be picking up litter in Indian Bend Park and George Haozous and his family would be living in a mansion on top of Camelback Mountain. Even Clarice recognized how brilliant George was, but after hanging one of his more strikingly, ah, gory works in her gallery, she received so many complaints she had to take it down. That’s when the two of them had that terrible fight. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it over at your place. Half the street did. It was the talk of Scottsdale for a while.”