Desert Noir (9781615952236)

by Webb, Betty

  “I keep intending to repaint it,” I said, climbing into the Jeep. “I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. So you think the steer horns should stay?”

  “Most definitely.” He grinned, and I was once again struck by how a mere smile could transform such fierce faces.

  “Then I’ll keep them.” If the steer horns were cool enough for the Apaches, they were cool enough for me. I put the Jeep in gear and pulled slowly out of the parking lot, careful not to throw more dust onto the kids than had already been blown onto them by the unrelenting wind.

  George wasn’t home, his wife said as she peered out the door of their double-wide trailer. She was a pleasant-looking woman, a little too plump, maybe, but she carried an air of alert friendliness about her. Unlike many artists wives I had known, she appeared neither downtrodden nor arrogant with reflected glory. Behind her, three glossy-haired children constructed a medieval castle out of Legos while a fat white kitten batted stray Legos back and forth.

  “It’s important,” I told her. “I drove all the way up from Scottsdale to talk to him.”

  She smiled kindly. “You should have called first. Anyway, George is over at the studio and he doesn’t like to see anybody when he’s painting. Why don’t you just make an appointment with me and I’ll see that he keeps it. He’s got to drive down to Phoenix some time next week.”

  I wasn’t about to let the two-hour drive go for nothing, so I asked her where his studio was located. She gave me a wry, you’ll-be-sorry look and pointed across the road at what appeared to be a small barn. “But I’m warning you, nobody with any sense interrupts that man while he’s painting. I did once, about five years ago, and it was the first and the last time.”

  Still, she grinned when she said it so I took comfort in the thought that Haozous’s ill temper might be more rumor than reality. Thanking her for the warning, I turned around and raised my hand to shield my eyes from the blowing dust, then angled across the road to the barn. As I neared it, the barn revealed an entire wall of glass, the north side, probably, where the light, although less intense, was steadier. Steeling myself against whatever invective might be hurled my way, I knocked politely at the door.

  No response. I knocked again. And again.

  Finally, a male voice screamed at me in Apache. You didn’t have to speak the language to know he was cursing.

  Another knock brought more curses, then heavy-booted footsteps. Finally the door flew open and I stood face to face with George Haozous.

  When not enraged and splattered with paint, Haozous was probably a very handsome man, even in a tribe known for its physical beauty. Black hair flowed well past his shoulders, providing a dramatic frame for a sienna face gifted with extraordi-narily high cheekbones. His sharp, even features appeared to have been sculpted by an artist even more talented than himself and his chocolate-colored eyes were simply magnificent. Da Vinci must have had eyes like those.

  “What the hell you staring at, Blondie?”

  I blinked, realizing that Haozous had switched from Apache to English and that yes, I was being very rude. Lowering my eyes for a minute, I took my ID out of my carryall and flashed it at him.

  “Lena Jones. Private Investigator.”

  Silence for a moment, then the anger left his face. If I hadn’t known better, I’d swear he was about to laugh. “You mean like Kojak and Rockford?”

  “Like the woman who ID’ed the Unabomber.”

  Haozous’ eyes found the scar above my eyebrow and rested there for a moment. Then he said, “You might as well come in, then, Miss Jones, before you annoy the neighbors.”

  I looked around, not seeing any neighbors, just a few dying mesquite trees. But I accepted his invitation and stepped into the studio.

  Artists’ studios were nothing new to me. Madeline, my foster mother, had taken me with her when visiting other artist friends, so I was prepared for the chaos, the clutter, the acrid assault of turps and linseed oil. What I hadn’t been prepared for was the astonishing beauty of Haozous’s paintings. As I had been warned, their subject matter was grim in the extreme, and Haozous, who had obviously taken a page or two from El Greco’s sketchbook, had perfected a manner of elongating his subject’s extremities which only added to the horror. Elderly Indians’ bones snapped under trampling cavalry horses. The bodies of disemboweled warriors sprawled across the corpses of their comrades. Shining-haired women lay spread-eagled in the classic rape position, while above them, leering U.S. Army soldiers prepared for an assault of another kind. The babies… No. I couldn’t look at the babies.

  But, my god, the colors!

  Under Haozous’s brush, that hard, unforgiving sky which had haunted me since I entered the reservation became a soft, shim-mering azure, and the barren desert had been transformed into a kaleidoscope of umbers, golds, crimsons, and greens. The Indians’ skin, lit by a chiaroscuro sun, glowed with the genius of the Renaissance. It was all so gloriously unreal, scenes of the utmost horror transformed into beauty by the palette of a true master.

  “How much?”

  Now it was Haozous’ turn to blink. “What do you mean, how much?”

  I pointed to the most horrible, the most exquisite. The painting I craved portrayed the U.S. Cavalry galloping through a village of unprotected wickiups from which women and children ran in panic. One little girl of about four already lay dead on the ground, a bullet through her forehead. Or maybe she wasn’t really dead. Maybe after the cavalry left, she would awaken and creep off into the underbrush, to be eventually found by an old shaman who would nurse her back to health. And maybe then she would grow up strong and fierce and…

  I realized I was projecting my own childhood horrors onto the painting, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. “How much for that one?” I asked.

  He laughed. “That one? Miss Jones, you must be crazy.”

  “How much?” I wasn’t going to leave there without that painting, not even if it had been painted by a murderer.

  Haozous looked at the painting, then back at me, once more noting my scar. He threw out a figure. I threw one back. We haggled for a while, finally settling on an amount which irritated us both. That accomplished, I made arrangements for him to deliver the painting to my apartment when he made his next trip to Phoenix, because the immense thing sure as hell wouldn’t fit into the Jeep. As I dipped into my carryall for my checkbook, I asked, “What’s the title?”

  “Apache Sunset. It’s based on an actual historical event.”

  Hopefully, none of my ancestors had been along for that merciless attack on women and children, but I had no way of knowing, did I? I might have been descended from the very Army colonel who had planned the attack on a peaceful village. Hell, for all I knew, I could have been descended from General George Armstrong Custer himself.

  Now that our business was out of the way, I finally got down to the reason for my visit. “Mr. Haozous, I need to ask you about Clarice Kobe.”

  He gave me a dazzling smile. “Now that you’re one of my collectors you can call me George.”

  “Did you kill her, George?”

  The smile faded as he narrowed his eyes. “You do know that you have no authority up here, don’t you?”

  “So Pete and Ronald took care to remind me.”

  His narrow expression didn’t waver, but he gestured at the floor. “As long as that’s understood, why don’t you have a seat. We’ll talk.” He squatted down on his haunches, looking for all the world like Geronimo at a peace parley.

  With my bad hip, I couldn’t squat, and my shoulder was still too sore to provide me any kind of balance, so I simply sat down on the cement floor. For all the heat outside, it remained cool, and for a brief moment, I wondered if George and his family slept in here at night. Then I remembered the electric lines leading to his trailer and the gust of cool air that had rushed at me when George’s wife opened the trailer door.

  Without the least appearance of nervousness, George said, “Cliff probably told
you about my fight with Clarice.”

  I nodded and scrooched around on the floor, trying to find a more comfortable position. For the first time I wished that I had more padding back there. “He told me that you threatened to kill her.”

  He didn’t even blink. “I meant it at the time. Clarice Kobe and her ilk are everything that’s wrong with the art world today, the reason gifted artists starve while phonies like her no-talent husband rake in the big bucks. It’s disgusting and I told her so. She said I didn’t know what I was talking about and I said the same thing back to her, told her I was the one with the art school degree and she was nothing but a rich man’s dilettante, college-dropout daughter. Pissed her off, that did.”

  I’ll bet. “How did the death threat come into it?”

  He shrugged with shoulders that must have been a yard wide. “It was when she told me that we Indians don’t understand our own history and therefore have no business painting it, that true art requires the more universal perspective of the White Man. That was when I threatened to bop her on the head with my oh so un-universal tomahawk. Scared the shit out of her.” He smiled at the memory.

  “Do you own a tomahawk?”

  “Get real.” He was still smiling.

  “Well, somebody bopped her on the head with something. She’s dead now, so I guess you have your revenge.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to feel sorry about it because I don’t.” I hate it when people minimize violence, so as a matter of principle I gave Haozous a detailed description of the state of Clarice’s body when I found it. To my considerable gratification, he started looking sick.

  “That’s not right,” he said, shaking his head. “To do something like that to such a pretty woman. That’s not right at all. I thought she just got shot or something.”

  “Just got shot or something? A gun shot would make it right?” I waved back at his paintings, at the gory craters gouged out of human flesh by Winchesters. “Was that right, then, the ones who just got shot?”

  Now Haozous looked distinctly uncomfortable. “It’s just an expression.” “So’s ‘The only good Indian’s a dead Indian.’”

  He sighed. “You can climb down off your soapbox now, Lena. I get the point. Want the truth? I would never have harmed Clarice, even though she was everything I accused her of being. She was just a dilettante. She didn’t have a creative bone in her body nor the eye to recognize real creativity when she saw it. Maybe you liked her, but I’m telling you there was something lacking in that woman, a lack of substance, a lack of heart.”

  This last observation startled me because it meshed with something I had once found myself thinking about Clarice. I’d been at one of her artists’ receptions when I’d overheard her discussing the new Museum of Western Art being built over the rubble of the last remaining Hispanic neighborhood in Scottsdale. Centuries-old adobes had been replaced by a sprawling monstrosity of steel, glass, and snot-green fiberglass panels. Every time I drove by it I wanted to puke.

  “Those Mexes weren’t doing anything with the property anyway,” I’d heard Clarice say. “So why are they whining now?” A lack of heart.

  Still, Clarice had been murdered in a particularly ugly fashion, and her casual racism didn’t excuse it. “If you didn’t kill her, George, who did?”

  He got up gracefully and walked over to the painting he’d been working on before my arrival. “I have no idea who killed her. Why should I? I was up here on the rez when she died. My wife will vouch for that.”

  “Anybody other than your wife?”

  Face expressionless, he looked over his shoulder at me. “Look, I haven’t set foot in either Phoenix or Scottsdale in about three weeks. I’ve been too busy painting.” Then he returned to work on his canvas.

  I didn’t believe him. He was holding something back.

  I looked around again at the paintings in the room, at the depictions of hacked limbs, crushed skulls, flayed hides. Just how deep did George Haozous’s fascination with violence actually run? He was an intelligent man, an educated man, yet he lived on this bleak reservation as if he was hiding out from something—or someone. I made a mental note to have Jimmy check him out.

  I struggled off the floor, nowhere as gracefully as Haozous. The dampness of the concrete had settled into my hip, making me limp after him like some elderly woman with osteoporosis. The top part of my body wasn’t doing any too well, either, because ever since I’d hit the floor, my bullet wound had been nibbling at me with tiny, sharp teeth.

  “George, do you know anybody else Clarice might have pissed off?” There was no point in letting him know his story had more than a few holes in it—including his so-called alibi.

  He looked at me again, his face composed, his eyes guarded. “Why don’t you try that family of hers? Those are some pretty weird people.”

  “I’ve already talked to her mother and father.”

  He picked up his palette and studied the painting, where an Apache woman was bent over the decapitated body of a child. Her mouth opened in a bottomless well of grief.

  His continued silence told me that the interview was over, so I shouldered my carryall and limped towards the door. Just before I stepped out into the glaring sunlight, Haozous called after me, “Try talking to her brother. Or her sister. That one’s even crazier than Clarice, if such a thing is possible.”

  When I looked back, he was painting furiously, his brush almost digging into the canvas.

  Chapter 11

  By the time I had completed the journey back down 60 and turned off Loop 202 at the Scottsdale city limits, the fat black clouds I’d noticed earlier in the day had completed their voyage from the Mexican border. Lightning blazed across the darkening indigo sky. Like a fool, I’d forgotten to put up the Bikini top on my Jeep and raindrops the size of dimes slapped me on the head. Easing off 202 at Thomas Road, I drove carefully along the drenched side streets, using my left hand as an umbrella, trying to both steer and shift gears with my right. How I ever reached the parking lot behind Desert Investigations without getting into an accident, I’ll never know.

  Smelling like a wet dog, I climbed the stairs to my apartment, gun in hand. I unlocked the door, conducted my usual look-inall-the-closets drill, then put some Slim Harpo on the turntable. His enraged mutters on “I Need Money” followed me all the way to the bathroom, where I stripped and stepped into the shower. I didn’t even mind that the hot water heater was broken again—the cold water felt good on my skin. I soaped myself down several times, washed my hair, and was just toweling off when the phone rang.

  I told Slim to hush up and rushed to answer it, hoping that it might be Dusty. It was.

  “Hey, good-lookin’. The campfire sing-along’s been called on account of rain, so how’d you like some company?” Slim switched to “My Little Queen Bee ,” making my smile grow even wider. “Sounds fine to me, Cowboy. I just got out of the shower.”

  “I’m taking it that’s a hint?”

  “Unlike Catherine the Great, I’m not too crazy about sleeping with horses. Or men that smell like them.”

  I heard him laugh. “I’ll check if the horse trough is free. If it is, you’re in luck.”

  “And if it’s not, Cowboy, you’re out of luck.”

  An hour later, Dusty arrived, smelling like Brut and looking more handsome and weather-beaten than ever. He toted a grocery bag full of Pete’s Wicked Ale and strawberry smoothies, with which he proceeded to stuff the refrigerator. Not even waiting for him to finish, I grabbed a smoothie.

  He finished putting the drinks away, then stood there for a moment, watching me guzzle. “I figured you needed your vitamins, you being so sick and laid up and all.”

  I wiped the strawberry mustache off my upper lip. “Sick and laid up. Right. So sick I can’t even fool around.”

  He expelled a theatrical sigh. “Looks like I’ve wasted my drive.”

  “And the strawberry smoothie.”

  “Guess I’d better go, then.” He ma
de a big to-do out of putting his rain-slicked duster back on.

  “Um, before you go…”

  I put my smoothie down on the counter and started peeling off the duster. I continued to peel until he was down to his briefs. “My, my,” I whispered into his ear. “Aren’t you hard and fit.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.” With that, he slipped his arms around me, picked me up, and started for the bedroom.

  I nuzzled my face against his chest. “Hey, Cowboy, haven’t you forgotten something?”

  “You mean the condoms? Honey, I’ve got a month’s supply on me.”

  “Hell, no. I meant my smoothie.”

  Regardless of Dusty’s comforting presence—or perhaps because of it—my usual insomnia kicked in around 1:00 a.m. As I lay in my dark bedroom staring at the ceiling, I reviewed what I’d learned about Clarice.

  She had been a complicated woman, more so than I originally thought. Possibly sexually abused—no, make that probably sexually abused—as a child, Clarice had grown up to be a woman of many contradictory parts: a sophisticated (if not tasteful) art dealer, a financial opportunist, a battered wife, a bigot. Would I still have counted her among my friends if I had known as much about her when she was alive? If it came down to that, was friendship nothing more than a coalition among like-minded people?

  At some point during the night, I must have fallen asleep, because Dusty woke me at 4:30 as he was crawling out of bed. “Got to feed the horses,” he whispered, giving me a perfunctory peck on the cheek.

  I reached up and rubbed his naked chest. “Give them a kiss for me.”

  He winked. “Woman, don’t you know by now that I don’t kiss horses?”

  The rain had stopped by morning. The Scottsdale Journal told me that a lightning strike on the transformers on Hayden Road had knocked out power to about twenty-five thousand customers, but other than that, the Valley had gotten off easy. The big storms were yet to come. Turning the page, I saw that a Satanist inmate at the state prison in Florence had lost his Supreme Court fight to keep his goat’s head, black candles, and other religious artifacts in his cell. In another story, Sheriff Joe Arpaio had run into trouble with Amnesty International; seems they thought serving green bologna at the jail was cruel and unusual punishment. On the wildlife front, a javelina had wandered in off the Pima Reservation and been captured in the front of Baby Kay’s Cajun Kitchen. Fortunately for the javelina, the cook hadn’t caught it—the Scottsdale cops had, and they simply drove it back to the rez.