by Webb, Betty
The flat land of the Pima rez was better suited for growing crops than was the San Carlos, which is why early Indian wanderers had settled just outside the area that came to be known as Phoenix. Although today the Salt River Valley was frequently too dry and hot for comfort, it had at one time been quite lush. Up until relatively recently, the Salt was an active, flowing river, so the Hohokam had designed a two-hundred-mile network of canals with which to irrigate their crops during the long, hot summer months. It made all the difference to their descendants, the Pimas.
For staples, the early settlers grew corn, beans, gourds, grain amaranth, and squash. Antelope, land tortoises and other animals provided an occasional feast. For clothing, the Hohokam and Pima both cultivated and wove cotton. Everything they needed, they gleaned from the land. They lived in such close harmony with nature that more than two thousand years later, the area the Hohokam originally settled bore few scars.
But when the White Man moved to the Salt River Valley in the early 1800’s, he rerouted some of the old Hohokam canals to water his own gardens. Not content with this minor water rights theft, in the early part of the twentieth century the Anglos built the Roosevelt and the Laguna dams, which deflected the river’s entire flow onto Anglo land. The Pima’s crops withered and died. Within a generation the tribe was reduced to poverty.
But now they had begun to fight back.
Like their more warlike cousins, the Apache, the Pimas were building casinos as quickly as they could get them up. For those Pimas who still preferred a rural way of life, mechanical irrigation systems now replaced the old canals, although at a much higher cost. And a few Pimas, like Jimmy’s uncle, had gone into business for themselves.
PIMA PAINT AND COLLISION—MICHAEL SISIWAN, PROPRI-ETOR sat just outside the Scottsdale border, on the western edge of a large Pima cotton field. This being August, most of the cotton had already been harvested, leaving only a few white tufts blowing around the field, driven by a hot wind. Across the road, where a tractor was preparing the ground for the next planting, a dust devil whirled along a gully. I wondered again how anyone could work in 100-plus temperatures, especially when the monsoon season had spiked the humidity.
As I drove up, Mr. Sisiwan and his crew came out to meet me. “I’ve heard plenty about this Jeep,” Jimmy’s uncle said, patting the steer horns, his vowel sounds stretched out in the melodious Piman accent.
Other than his considerable height and breadth, he looked little like his brother’s son. Where Jimmy’s face was cantaloupe round, his uncle’s harkened back to some ancient ancester. Recent theories say the Pimas may be descended from South Sea islanders, not Asiatics. It was angular, liberally creased with weather lines and worry. Well, owning a business will do that to you. And then there was the lack of facial tattoos. Mr. Sisiwan’s face, as well as the faces of his entire staff, remained unmarked. Jimmy was the only Pima I’d ever known who had resurrected the custom.
“Jimmy tell you what I want?”
Mr. Sisiwan looked worried. “Well, yes, but I’m not sure I understood him correctly. He said you, ah, wanted to be surprised?”
“That’s right. This is your chance to get creative. I’m sick of the pink, but I still don’t want a Jeep that looks like every other Yuppie-mobile in town.”
The crew, all of them Pimas, looked around at each other. Here was living proof, their body language seemed to say, that Anglos should stay out of the summer sun.
“Any color?”
I nodded. “I don’t care if you paint stripes on it. Just make sure it looks different.”
Mr. Sisiwan, still hesitant, took me inside the office and filled out a service ticket, writing “Customer says be creative” inside the color selection box. “You’d better sign off here,” he said.
I signed with a flourish, also initialing “Customer says be creative.” “Great. When can I pick it up?”
He checked a work list. “How does day after tomorrow sound?”
“That sounds fine. Ah, Jimmy told me you’d have a loaner for me?”
After being warned by Jimmy, I didn’t expect much, so I was pleased at being led to the almost-new Toyota pickup truck in the back lot. “If you don’t like this, we’ve got a Taurus around here somewhere.”
I shuddered. The last time I’d seen a Taurus up close, its occupant had shot me. “No, thanks. The truck’ll do just fine.”
He handed me the keys, and with a final wave, I drove off.
I didn’t want to go back to the office in my present mood—my relationship with Jimmy was already strained enough—so I decided to use the key Serena gave me and take a look inside Clarice’s house.
I knew the neighborhood. Clarice’s house was nestled among the few remaining horse properties in downtown Scottsdale. Sparkling white paddocks fronted the narrow streets, and as I drove along, dish-faced Arabs and long-nosed Thoroughbreds snorted at me from velvety muzzles. The houses themselves were huge—long, low ranch-styled homes that had been built approximately thirty years ago, before the California exodus began gobbling up the land.
Clarice’s house turned out to be one of the biggest, at least six thousand square feet, and as I steered the truck into the driveway, I couldn’t help but wonder what she and Jay had done with all that space.
Serena had been right to worry about rain damage. The dining room with its sagging beam was a mess. Its priceless rosewood paneling was streaked and buckled away from the walls. Judging from the notes I found scribbled on a yellow pad on the dining room table, somebody—probably Clarice’s brother—was already making an estimate of the needed repairs. He’d better not wait long. Already the smell of rot and mildew was overpowering. When the ceiling began to creak, I hurriedly backed out of the dining room and went into the gigantic living room.
And there I stopped, stunned, not knowing whether to weep or laugh. Instead of utilizing the ever-popular Southwestern Saltillo tile, Clarice had floored the thing with white Berber carpeting flecked in grays and blues. The blue had been picked up on the walls. Every single one of them. Given that the furniture—from the sectional sofa and occasional chairs, to the clumsy marble etagere near the sliding glass doors—was white, I felt for one dizzy-ing moment as if I were trapped inside a giant Wedgewood bowl.
As I investigated more carefully, I found that nothing in the room was as it first appeared to be.
Silk and plastic plants lined a white-painted shelf that ran the length of the living room. More silk plants rested in a long, glass-topped “planter” that served as a coffee table. A white enamel and gilt birdcage played home to a stuffed parrot, and the water in a lavishly landscaped eighty-gallon aquarium bubbled around a school of bobbing artificial fish.
It got worse.
Apparently Jay hadn’t retrieved his paintings yet, because the blue walls were cluttered with dozens of portraits of questionable Indian maidens, mostly nude with glowing tits; expensive show horses apparently set free to roam the desert; and cowboys who bore a suspicious resemblance to either John Wayne or Gabby Hayes.
Nothing in the house was real. Regardless of its true cost, everything looked cheap, artificial.
Like its owner? a little voice whispered.
I forced myself to stop thinking about Clarice’s god-awful décor and began to search the premises.
Two hours later I had found nothing, other than a closet still filled with Jay’s clothing and even more of his lousy paintings tucked away in a studio at the back of the house. Why hadn’t he cleared it all out? Could he possibly have been hoping that somehow, someday Clarice might take him back?
Anything was possible, I thought, as I shouldered my carryall. But if Clarice had let Jay come home, would she still have been murdered?
Back at the office, I made the phone call I’d been putting off all morning. “Mrs. Hyath? This is Lena Jones. I talked to you and your husband a few days ago?”
“I remember you. What do you want?” She sounded relatively sober.
“Do you t
hink it might be possible to meet for…” I started to say “lunch,” but then remembered who I was talking to. “…to meet for a drink sometime in the next couple of days?”
I could almost hear her frown. “What for?”
There was no point in lying, so I told the truth. “There’s a lot more I think you could tell me about Clarice, and I’d really like to talk to you away from your husband.”
A phlegm-filled laugh. “Why should I do that?”
The obvious answer—out of maternal love—never crossed my lips. Instead, I said, “I’m not working for Jay Kobe anymore, so look at it this way. While professional ethics prevent me from actively working against a former client, if my investigation reveals evidence that he did kill Clarice after all, he can’t inherit. Got that? He can’t inherit. That means Clarice’s money will revert back to the next of kin. Namely, you.”
“And my husband,” she muttered. Then I heard her brighten. “But fifty percent of a couple of million is better than zero percent, isn’t it?”
I agreed with her, disliking the woman more and more.
“Tell you what, Miss Jones. I’m all booked up for the rest of the week and through the weekend…”
With what, I wondered. A case of gin?
“…but next Monday looks pretty good for me. Would you like to meet at the Hacienda Palms? Say around lunch time?”
Ouch. The Hacienda Palms was one of the most expensive resorts in the Valley. I hated to think what lunch and drinks would cost. Still, I owed it to Clarice.
“Next Monday. Noon. See you there.”
“And Miss Jones? Please make sure you’re dressed appropriately. We’re judged by the company we keep.”
Fuming, I hung up the phone.
I made two more calls, both less aggravating than the last one.
Yes, Evan Hyath would be happy to see me, the sooner the better. Tomorrow, even, if I wished. Since the police weren’t getting anywhere with his sister’s murder, maybe I could. He gave me directions to the company trailer on the Tudor Hills construction site, a mixed-use development going up just west of the Boulders. The location surprised me, because it was just down the road from Serena’s house, making me wonder how Serena felt about sharing her neck of the woods with comparable riff-raff. Then again, since these homes would go from four hundred thousand dollars upwards, they weren’t for the true riff-raff, just riff-raff compared to the Hyaths. But then I remembered the long ridge that separated the Boulders neighborhood from the rest of the Valley, and realized she wouldn’t mind. She’d be making a small fortune off the project, but her million-dollar view would still be unobstructed. It was just too bad for her neighbors across the ridge, who had been promised “undisturbed, scenic desert vistas” when purchasing their homes.
The next call was easier still. It had occurred to me on my drive back from Pima Paint and Collision that I needed to take another look at the murder scene. The last time I’d been there, I’d been crawling around on all fours, which wasn’t the recom-mended way to investigate a crime scene. Perhaps if I didn’t have to worry about a murderer jumping out at me from behind one of her clunky pieces of sculpture, I might be able to spot something the police had missed. Not that the Violent Crimes Unit missed much, but you never know.
Kryzinski grumbled, but in the end, he agreed to send one of his officers over with the key to the Western Heart Gallery.
“You’re not going to find anything in there,” he said, echoing my fears. “As soon as we finished, Serena Hyath hired one of those crime scene cleaning companies and they scoured the place from top to bottom. There’s not a piece of brain tissue or blood spatter left.”
Frankly, I was relieved. Determining the direction of blood spatter, an all-too-frequent duty while still with the VCU, had never been one of my favorite jobs. But I had learned that there was a lot that a careful investigator could surmise just from a room itself.
Temporarily finished with my chores, I settled back in my chair and watched Jimmy type.
I didn’t get to watch him long. Within a few minutes, a blue-and-white pulled up to the curb and disgorged Vic Falcone. He came into the office wiping his brow, his uniform damp around the armpits.
“Shit, Lena, it’s hotter than the Devil’s left testicle out there. Hi, Jimmy.” He gave me a Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle, then headed straight for the refrigerator. After rooting around for a while, he finally emerged with a Coke. Full strength, sugar and all. That Falcone, what a wild man.
Falcone slumped down in a chair, chugged some Coke, then took some keys out of his pocket and jingled them at me. “These are the victim’s, found them on her desk. They’re supposed to be returned to her family, but we ain’t got around to it ’cause of the rush.”
“What rush?”
“Ain’t you been reading the paper? Christ on a crutch, Lena, the whole city’s gone nuts. We had us a couple of home invasion robberies up on McCormick Ranch, a suspicious carpet store fire near Papago Plaza, that damned bar over on Stetson had another big fight—the usual, you know, cowboys versus tourists with the tourists getting their asses whipped—a whole shit load of bur-glaries, and that damned kid-biting coyote is still running through town. Must be the heat, making everybody crazy, even the wildlife. Is it my imagination or is it hotter than last summer?”
“It’s not one bit hotter this year than last.”
Falcone shrugged. “I was thinking it might be that greenhouse effect. Or maybe the hole in the ozone layer.”
It was obvious that Falcone wanted to stay in my air-conditioned office and chat all day, but there was work to be done. I stood up. “Let’s go see what we can see.”
He gave me a mournful look. “Hell, Lena. I’m supposed to stand outside and guard the place while you’re messing around in there. It must be 120 degrees outside!”
“One-fifteen. Why don’t you just stay here and have another Coke? You can see the Western Heart Gallery right through this window.”
“You got all them big letters on the windows blocking my view!” Seeing my expression, he backtracked. “You’re right, you’re right. I’ll move my chair over to the window, look through the center of the ‘O’, have some more Coke.”
When I left, he was trying to hustle Jimmy into a hand of poker.
The Western Heart was almost as musty as Clarice’s house had been, but a faint odor of antiseptic overlaid the odor of mildew. Clarice had been dead for almost three weeks now, and since the exit of the corpse cleaners—as the cops call the cleaning services specializing in crime scenes—no one had been in there. The corpse cleaners had done a good job, I noticed. No blood remained to be seen, not even on Jay Kobe’s crappy horse portrait. But no trace of Clarice remained, either, no stray wisps of perfume, no echoes of edgy laughter. The Western Heart Gallery was as impersonal as a morgue.
I bit my lip and reminded myself that I was a professional. Letting the place get to me wouldn’t help Clarice. Pushing aside my depression, I stood on what I believed to be the exact spot where she died—the cleaning crew had even removed all trace of the police chalk mark—and looked around.
At first I was surprised to see that all the paintings remained on the walls, the sculpture on their pedestals, but then I remembered how many legal steps needed to be completed before any artifact could be removed from a crime scene. This protected the heirs and also the artists who’d consigned their work to the gallery. Otherwise, anybody could come in, identify himself as the artist, and grab a painting. Not that anybody would bother in the Western Heart. We weren’t exactly talking Rembrandts here.
The room itself appeared more or less as I had last seen it, discounting Clarice’s body and all that blood, of course. The dolphin fountain had been turned off, but it stood in the same spot, as did Clarice’s antique desk, chair, and the overly ornate credenza which served as her invoice cabinet. The gallery’s walls were as crowded with bad art as ever. But something…
Something was missing.
Another look
at Clarice’s desk showed me that its formerly cluttered surface was now pristine. The corpse cleaners had removed the jumbled stacks of papers, a few knickknacks, and all the rest of the desktop clutter we’re prone to collect. And hadn’t there been a small piece of sculpture or two decorating the desk’s surface? I wondered what Clarice had been working on at the time of her death, because as any homicide investigator knows, paper trails solve more mysteries than smoking guns ever do. Fortunately, finding the papers turned out not to be a problem. The desk drawers were unlocked and inside them, I found unfiled consignment agreements, bills of sale, artists’ bios, a Rolodex, a milleflora paperweight, and several loose pieces of paper with phone numbers written on them.
All well and good, but something was niggling at the back of my mind. That desk…
As I stepped back and took a good look at it, I realized the desk was a near twin to the one in Cliffie’s gallery. And hadn’t Cliffie once shown me that his desk contained a cleverly disguised secret drawer, at the time all the rage among the courts of France?
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I opened the bottom right drawer halfway out, then felt around on the drawer’s surface until my forefinger felt a looseness in the center of a carved rosebud. Smiling with satisfaction, I pressed the flower hard.
The false bottom of the drawer slid back, revealing a Dayrunner lying calmly on the drawer’s true bottom.
Gloating over my find, I tucked the Dayrunner in my carryall, then slid the false bottom back and closed the desk drawer. I’d turn over my find to Kryzinski.
Eventually.
I looked around some more, taking careful note of the back door through which Kryzinski believed the killer had escaped. I studied the door facing and the lock closely but could find no pry marks. This was interesting, because most gallery owners I knew kept their back doors locked during Art Walk.
Which meant Clarice must have let her killer in.
