Desert Noir (9781615952236)

by Webb, Betty

  Evan caught me staring at it and threw me a rueful smile. “Goddamn thieves, they…”

  Not wanting to hear the car phone thief story again, I interrupted, “Yeah, Malik told me.”

  In front of the sofa, another rosewood table served as a display area for several pieces of Western sculpture, including a copy of Remington’s Pony Express. I only gave it a cursory glance because I’d seen knock-offs of it in every cheap souvenir store in Scottsdale—even Clarice’s gallery.

  “Just a copy,” Evan said, stating the obvious. “Of course, it’d be crazy to keep a real Remington in here—but copy or not, all the lines are there. The man knew horses, didn’t he?”

  “And human anatomy.” Then I remembered the horrible pieces in Western Heart Gallery and for a moment, I actually missed them. There were worse sins in the world than bad art. Murder, for instance.

  The corner of Evan’s mouth turned up in a sad smile. “I loved my sister, Miss Jones, but she called in sick the day God passed out good taste. I tried to get her to take an art appreciation class down at the Phoenix Art Museum, but you know Clarice. You couldn’t tell her anything.”

  That was true. Once I’d realized she was in an abusive marriage, I’d told her to get counseling. She’d laughed in my face.

  Evan settled himself onto the sofa and gestured me towards the chair. “Now, what can I do for you?” Then he immediately stood up again. “Sorry. Where are my manners? You want Coke? 7-Up? Tea? Fucking overpriced designer water? Or how about an Anchor Steam? That’s what I’m going to have.”

  I asked for tea, then settled back into the deep chair, enjoying the feel of cool leather on my backside. Evan’s clumsy but genuine courtesy reminded me of Serena’s, making me smile. As troubled as the woman had proven to be, I’d found myself admiring her attempt to bring some tenderness into a violent world. And now her brother appeared to be following in Serena’s footsteps. His appointment of the very black Malik Toshumbe as construction foreman hinted that he didn’t share Clarice’s racism. Families are funny.

  Evan interrupted my thoughts by returning with a tall glass of ice tea and a frosty bottle of Anchor Steam. Collapsing onto the sofa, he took a long swig of beer, then said, “Okay. Now that neither of us is going to dry up and blow away, tell me what I can do for you.”

  At closer quarters, Evan bore a startling resemblance to his father. His face shared his father’s lean angles, and his hair was beginning to gray in the same distinguished manner. His blue eyes, however, held considerably more warmth than had the elder Hyath’s.

  I chugged some tea, then set it down on the table next to the faux Remington. “Look, Mr. Hyath…”

  “Evan, Evan. I’m not into formality.”

  “Look, Evan, you might as well accept the fact that the police consider Jay Kobe, bastard though he may be, not a particularly viable suspect right now. I’m sure Captain Kryzinski has already given you the bad news on that.”

  Evan clenched his jaw. “Yeah, Captain Kryzinski gave me some shit about Jay’s having an alibi, but for God’s sake, Lena, you’re not buying into that crap, are you? I mean, the police have to follow certain procedures, we all know that, but you’re a private investigator. You must have other methods.”

  “Like what? Cattle prods and baseball bats?”

  He set the bottle of Anchor Steam down so abruptly that beer sloshed out of the opening. “This is some fucking country, isn’t it? When men like Jay Kobe can run around beating and killing women while the rest of us have to play nice.”

  Which made me wonder again about his own divorce. Or, as he had mentioned, divorce plural. “Look, Evan, I’m continuing to check out Jay’s alibi, but I want to make sure we’ve got every other angle covered. As you know, I was Clarice’s friend so I’ve got my own motivation here. So let’s lay off Jay for a minute. Instead, why don’t you tell me where you were the night she was killed.”

  For a moment I thought he might pick up the faux Remington and throw it at me, but the anger on his face faded quickly. He gave a heavy sigh which seemed to make his shoulders collapse inward. “You’re just doing your job, I know. But…” Another weary sigh. “All right. I was having dinner with Malik that night, down at the Pacific Seafood Company, I think. We were having some labor troubles and I wanted to get away from the site while we discussed them.”

  I wrote the information down in the notebook I’d pulled out of my carryall. “Malik will verify that?”

  Evan shrugged. “Probably. I don’t know if he wrote it down or anything, but I probably paid for the meal by credit card, and there’ll be a date and time on the receipt, I think. You want me to dig it out?”

  I shook my head. Maybe later, if it turned out to be necessary, but I doubted it would. Evan sounded like he was telling the truth. After taking Malik’s cell phone number from him, I said, “Now tell me anything you can about your sister. I already know that Jay wasn’t the only person she had trouble with.”

  The mulish look on his face told me Evan had already made up his mind Jay had killed Clarice, but my years in homicide had taught me how to deal with the most recalcitrant of witnesses. I took a deep breath, leaned across the coffee table, grasped his hand in mine, and looked deep into his eyes. “Evan, I know how much you loved your sister. Please help me help her now that she can no longer help herself.”

  To my horror, the mulish look faded and tears welled up in his eyes. I snatched my hand back and watched helplessly as he buried his face in his hands and tried to muffle his sobs. Since I am not one of those women who is all that comfortable with “sensitive” men, there was little I could do other than to fish a few tissues out of my carryall and thrust them into his wet hands. “Blow.”

  Evan blew his nose until I thought it would fall off, then groped around blindly for more tissues. I was all out, so he began mopping his dripping nose with his sleeve. Disgusted as much with myself as with him, I jumped up, ran down the narrow hall to the bathroom, grabbed a roll of toilet paper, and trailed it back to the couch.

  “There.” Hating myself, I handed him a wad of toilet paper. Feeling like I should do more but not knowing exactly what, I moved over to the sofa and put my arm around him. I felt like I was holding a child, and maybe I was. No one in the Hyath family, Clarice included, had so far impressed me with their emotional maturity.

  After a few minutes, Evan looked up, red-eyed and red-faced. “I’m so sorry,” he managed, his voice jagged as cut glass. “But you don’t…you don’t know what it’s been like. I had to make all the funeral arrangements. I’ve never done that before, and I just didn’t know what to do. The funeral… It was a mess. Hardly anyone showed up.”

  So I had noticed. “Didn’t Serena help you make the arrangements?”

  He shook his head and gave his eyes a final swipe with the toilet paper. “Serena has always had problems, as I’m sure you noticed, and Clarice’s death made her even worse. I actually thought I was going to have to check her into some rehab center somewhere before it was all over. That husband of hers is worse than useless. Calls himself an investor, but if you ask me, it’s just a cover for something else, god knows what.”

  This was interesting. I made a mental note to have Jimmy run a check on Serena’s husband. “What about your parents? Didn’t they help?”

  Anger flooded back into his face, chasing away the remaining ravages of grief. “Them! Can you see my mother doing anything for anyone? Or my father?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t see either of the senior Hyaths bothering to see that any of their children were buried properly. But this, at least, explained one thing; why Clarice’s funeral had seemed so slipshod. Judging from her brother’s condition, Clarice was probably lucky she’d actually made it underground.

  Evan looked down at the Navajo rug, as if ashamed to meet my eyes. “Hell, I’m no paragon of mental health, myself. Three wives already and I’m not even forty yet.” He sighed. “It’s different when I’m here at work, I can forget about… well
, you know. I can concentrate on getting these homes in for people and not think about…”

  I nodded. “I understand.”

  His eyes welled up again. “Clarice was so sweet.”

  Clarice had never seemed particularly sweet to me, but then again, I wasn’t her brother. I made a sympathetic noise and let him continue.

  “When we were kids, Clarice and Serena and I kind of took care of each other. We had to. We didn’t have anybody else, just the hired help, and they never stayed long because of Mom. Dad was usually gone, but when he was home it was even worse. And Mom…Well, you’ve met the Gin Queen.”

  I nodded again.

  “Maybe the three of us leaned on each other too much. I mean, look at us. Not one of us can seem to find a healthy relationship. Clarice wound up with Jay, Serena got that crook from Madrid, and me? Christ. I got Liz, Amber, and Tiffany. Money-grubbing bimbos, every last one of them.”

  In deference to his grief, I refrained from pointing out that he’d chosen the money-grubbing bimbos himself. Why not teachers? Social workers? Ex-nuns?

  Evan’s next words stole my thoughts. “But I’ve only got myself to blame, right? Nobody pointed a gun at my head and told me to marry them. The warning signs were all there. I just chose to ignore them, like Clarice chose not to pay any attention to Jay’s temper when they were dating. Or Serena not listening to anybody about her drug problem.”

  I took another long drink of tea. Was it my imagination, or had the trailer become hotter? Maybe I was simply responding to the emotional temperature of the room. I’d never been comfortable with naked expressions of emotion, a shortcoming that had made my life in the Violent Crimes Unit tougher than necessary. All that suffering. All that grief.

  “Relationships are tough for us all,” I said, falling back on the truth in a desperate attempt to change the subject. “But there’s nothing either of us can do about that right now so why don’t we just concentrate on helping Clarice? Tell me who else might have a motive to kill her. Then I’ll put the cattle prods to Jay.”

  My attempt at humor worked, and Evan managed a wobbly smile. “I’m still convinced it was Jay, but I know she was having trouble with one of her artists. Some Apache guy.”

  “I’ve already talked to him.”

  He picked up his Anchor Steam and lifted it to his lips. “Other than that, I’m afraid I don’t…” Suddenly his eyes narrowed and he slammed the bottle down. The glass resounded on the rosewood table like a gunshot. “Jesus, why didn’t I think of her earlier?”

  “Her?”

  “That damned Albundo woman. She’s been gunning for Clarice for years.”

  “Albundo?” The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “Dulya Albundo. You must remember the Museum of Western Art project. When we got those old homes condemned, Dulya’s mother refused to leave. Magadalena Espinoza, her name was, ninety if she was a day. Senile. Dulya hauled her out of there, not that she had much choice, really, what with the court order and all. But the old lady somehow managed to sneak back into that old house of hers one night and got killed when the bulldozers took it down next morning. Dulya blamed Clarice. Said she’d get even with her if it was the last thing she ever did. I thought the lawsuit she brought against Hyath Construction was what she meant.”

  I felt like slapping myself. How could I have forgotten the tragedy and the part Clarice had played in it?

  It had been four years ago, but the scandal over the building of the Museum of Western Art still hadn’t died down. The lawsuit Dulya Albundo filed was still winding its way through the courts. Every attempt at reaching a settlement had been spurned, because Albundo was determined to have her day in court and—as she had once told the newspapers—“prove to the world what a despicable woman Clarice Hyath is.” It had all started when the Scottsdale city fathers bought Clarice’s idea that the city needed a museum devoted to the “art of the American cowboy.” Working from a list of the Valley’s wealthiest families, Clarice had almost single-handedly raised the fifteen million-plus required to purchase a good-sized parcel of land and design and construct the huge building.

  But the land purchase went terribly, terribly wrong.

  Clarice had zeroed in on Scottsdale’s last remaining Hispanic enclave as the museum’s target site. She knew that the homes there, hand-built by Mexican laborers a century earlier, would be less expensive to buy than any Anglo neighborhood within Scottsdale city limits. The fact that the thirty-plus homes were genuine adobes, passed from father to son, from mother to daughter, meant nothing to her. In the end, it didn’t mean anything to the city fathers, who let themselves be persuaded that real adobes weren’t constructed of caliche mud, straw. Besides, they resented the fact that some of the families kept sheep and chickens on their property, a right that had been grandfathered in when the zoning laws changed. Bulldozing the entire area in order to get rid of some chickens and erecting a shiny new museum for the tourists sounded like an answer to the zoning commission’s prayers.

  Hence the quick and dirty nighttime condemnation hearing, attended by no one from the Hispanic community. By the time the families figured out what was happening, the homes their families had lived in for generations had been condemned. A quickly assembled protest group with a lawyer who’d just passed the Bar exam joined the fray too late and their attempt to obtain a restraining order failed. Justice had a price tag in Scottsdale and as usual, the Hispanics came up a day late and several million dollars short. Checks for “fair value” for their properties were hand-delivered to all the residents and the matter was considered closed. Soon sheriff ’s deputies were stacking the families’ belongings into U-Haul trucks and arresting any individual who refused to leave. A couple of the neighborhood’s men put up a fight. Both were serving time in Perryville Prison.

  Six months to the day after Clarice got her bright idea, bulldozers mowed down every adobe within a four-block radius.

  And one ninety-year-old woman.

  “Have you heard anything lately from Dulya Albundo?” I asked Evan.

  Evan shook his head. “I never thought…”

  “We can’t jump to conclusions here but I obviously want to talk to her. Do you have an address? Your lawyer should know how to reach her.”

  He jumped up, walked quickly over to the desk, and picked up the phone. Within seconds he was talking to his attorney. After a few minutes, he scribbled down an address, hung up, and brought it back to me. Tears had filled his eyes again and he didn’t look at me as he handed the address across. “Here’s where she’s living now. It… it looks like she’s down in South Phoenix.”

  From Scottsdale to South Phoenix? Where the deer and the gangbangers played? What a come-down.

  I stood up, eager to escape from Evan Hyath and his grief. “I’ll check it out.”

  When I left, he was sitting on the couch, his head once more in his hands.

  As soon as I walked back into the office, Jimmy announced that he had beaten the investment banker’s encryption system. “But whoever set it up was good. You want to know what it turned out to be?”

  I shook my head, convinced I wouldn’t understand it even after he’d explained it to me. For once I was wrong.

  “It was Navajo, with all the words spelled backwards!” Jimmy threw back his head and laughed. “Remember the Navajo Code Talkers in World War Two? The Japanese never broke that code, but all it was, really, was just a bunch of Navajo guys yapping all the classified information in their own language. After I recognized the sentence structure, I got Harvey Gray Hills over here and within ten minutes, we had it.”

  I laughed with him. “You’ve got to admit, though, that’s one savvy investment banker. And he’s obviously got a Navajo working for him.”

  “They’re probably both World War Two buffs.”

  “But no match for The Flash.”

  To celebrate, I went over to the fridge and poured Jimmy a tall glass of prickly pear juice. Then I poured myself a
tall glass of fucking overpriced designer water and toasted my partner.

  “To The Flash!” I said.

  Jimmy shook his head. “To the Navajo Code Talkers!”

  Chapter 16

  After replenishing my bodily fluids, I called Malik Toshumbe and verified that Evan Hyath had been having dinner with him the day Clarice had been killed.

  “I’m never that hungry at five, but Evan wanted out of that trailer real bad so we went down to that fish restaurant on Scottsdale Road and scarfed down some oysters.”

  “You get the labor problems straightened out?”

  Malik laughed. “Not much. Evan started drinking as soon as we arrived and by the time we left, he couldn’t tell a labor contract from a summons. I even had to drive him back to the trailer.”

  The trailer? “Why not home?”

  Malik made a disgusted sound. “That trailer is his home. His last wife got the house and the Rolls. You know, Evan’s a great guy, but he’s a goof. Show him a couple of big tits…” he trailed off into stuttering. “I, uh, I’m sorry. I mean he, uh…”

  It was my turn to laugh. “No offense taken, Malik. I know exactly what you mean. He gets blinded by the light.”

  Malik laughed back and we finally hung up with me in receipt of an invitation to share an Arizona Diamondbacks game with him and his wife. They had season tickets, right down on the third base line.

  Jimmy, who had been eavesdropping again, turned away from his computer with a jealous look. “Third base line? I’ve never been out of the nosebleed section.”

  I flashed my teeth at him. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

  I fooled around the office for the next hour, making a few more phone calls. So far, we’d been unsuccessful at finding out the whereabouts of the department store chain CEO’s ex-mistress, or the missing diamond necklace. I canvassed a few more pawnshops to see if anybody’d unloaded it, but came up empty-handed again. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up. The woman had to be somewhere, possibly with friends, possibly with relatives.