High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

“Not many of you,” she said. “That must be lonely.”

  I thought about that and decided she was right.

  “I’ve lived here long enough that I should appreciate the rain,” she said. “But I don’t. What do you think about that?”

  That had nothing to do with the weather. It was signaled by a pedigreed toss of her head. Like mother, like daughter. She indicated a glass display case holding a very old piece of pottery, geometric design, with a shard broken out near the middle.

  Or it was a very good fake. Yet considering Elliott Whitehouse’s wealth and the abundance of various styles of large, ornate native pottery, Hopi Katsinas, and Mexican Day of the Dead figurines on the shelves, I knew it must be authentic.

  “Beautiful,” I said. “Mimbres, with a kill hole.”

  The Mimbres were part of the Mogollon culture, one of the prehistoric peoples of the Southwest. The “kill hole” was part of the burial tradition, placed with the deceased so his spirit could escape through it to the next world.

  “Very good,” she said. “I asked Chris to send me his best detective. He told me he had a professional historian on his staff. I’m impressed but not surprised.”

  I was not an archaeologist and the three thousand years of human habitation of Arizona was not my specialty. I had dated an archaeologist once, or at least that’s what she claimed to be. Instead, I was pretty sure she was a murderer and I very nearly fell in love with her. Talk about a footnote. No, I knew only enough in this field to be dangerous and yet impress Diane Whitehouse. But her comment made me wonder if she ever read the local newspaper when it reported on my successes working for Peralta?

  “Chris is going places, you know,” she said. “You stick with him. Governor is next and beyond that, who knows?”

  So she was a campaign donor. That was why Melton had roped me in.

  “He’s such an improvement over Mike Peralta.” Diane recrossed her legs, idly stroking an ankle with her fingers. “I can’t believe Elliott contributed to his campaigns all those years.”

  Every muscle in my face remained relaxed. Her expression grew intense. “I had intended to go to that jewelry show, you know? And Mike Peralta, our former sheriff, shoots a man, steals the jewels. This is such a dangerous place. One doesn’t want to be called a racist, but…”

  She sighed and smiled.

  Of course one didn’t even need to finish the sentence.

  “Elliott took me to Antwerp once. I visited the old diamond district. Amazing place. The deals were done with a handshake. And generations of craftsmen did the cutting and polishing. Much of that has moved offshore now, where it can be done much cheaper.”

  Like Jerry McGuizzo and Bogdan, she knew a good deal about diamonds.

  “You don’t strike me as someone who would be interested in bling,” I said.

  She laughed. “No. I thought Zephyr might like something. Maybe Tupac’s rings on a chain to take back to Stanford. Her birthday is coming up and it’s only been a year since Elliott died. She’s terribly spoiled but what can you do?”

  Stop spoiling her, I wanted to say. Instead, “Is she your only child?”

  Diane hesitated and pushed back her hair. “She was my child with Elliott. We were twenty-five years apart in age but it never felt that way. He had two sons by his first wife.”

  “Do they live here?”

  She shook her head. “It took some getting used to, for all of us. When Elliott and I started dating, I was seen as the home-wrecker. The boys resented me. How could they not? They couldn’t see into the reality of that marriage, how dead and passionless it was. Anyway…now they have their own families. There’s respect between us.…”

  In another setting, I might have said something to show I understood or sympathized. But I was here on police business. Not only that, in the eyes of Diane and Chris, I was here as the hired help in his political aspirations, tending to a wealthy patron. It made me feel dirty.

  I said, “The sheriff told me you found the wallet.”

  Her forehead furrowed. “The wallet. Yes.”

  She sat straight and stared into the white ceiling and her face relaxed. “You know, when the real-estate bubble collapsed in 1990, Elliott was one of the few local homebuilders who wasn’t wiped out. He was a survivor.”

  “He was the last of his kind,” I said. “Now it’s all national builders.”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “He had amazing business acumen. When I met him, I was only twenty-five and I thought he walked on water. The sophisticated older man and the malleable young woman.” She paused and watched over the big glasses to see my reaction. I was a model of empathy.

  “That’s what it looked like on the surface,” she said. “He was weaker than the world knew and I was stronger. But we had a good marriage. A complicated marriage, but isn’t that redundant? I know this must sound terribly boring. An aging woman who’s lost her looks and can’t stop talking.”

  “Not at all,” I said. The reality was that I didn’t want to be here and didn’t care about this case compared with Lindsey’s survival, finding her killer, and getting Peralta out of this jam. Less than a mile from here, I hoped, a SWAT team was taking down Strawberry Death at this moment.

  But I had to play along for now, couldn’t let my agitation show. I gallantly added, “You are very attractive.” And she knew it.

  “You’re so kind,” she said. “Do you have a Ph.D.?”

  I nodded.

  “So I suppose I should call you doctor…”

  “No. I’m not a physician or a dentist. And you’re not one of my students.”

  She smiled. “I imagine you were a fine professor. Where did you graduate?”

  “Miami of Ohio.”

  “Ah, one of the ‘public Ivies.’ I took Zephyr there. Such a lovely campus. She had the grades for it, but she wanted to be on the West Coast. She doesn’t read books, you know, other than Harry Potter, even though she’s smart as hell. Don’t let her beauty fool you. I was very different. I loved books and history. Did you have a specialty?”

  “The Progressive era in America through the New Deal.” All my academic insecurities were bubbling up, so I felt the need to justify myself. “My doctoral adviser had studied under Arthur S. Link, so the apostolic succession was continued.”

  It was unclear if my name-dropping mattered. Her smile turned impish. “Was there a laying on of hands?”

  “A Ph.D. dissertation defense isn’t so spiritual. Anyway, he died a few years ago.”

  “Somebody said that every time a professor dies, an entire library burns. So why aren’t you teaching? Why become a cop?”

  I told her it was a long story. The short version was that academia didn’t like me as well as I liked it, and now there was such a surplus of history instructors that I’d be lucky to get a job at a community college in Lawton, Oklahoma. Then I tried to steer us back to the business at hand. I had more important things than chatting with a rich woman.

  “It took me a long time after his death to start to go through his things. But I finally did, and I found the wallet.”

  “Can you show me?”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  We climbed the circular stairway that Zephyr had descended and Diane Whitehouse led me down a hallway and into an expansive bedroom. It held more pottery. More kill holes. French doors led to a balcony and a view of Camelback. The rain had stopped.

  “This was Elliott’s bedroom.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “As we got older, we slept in separate rooms. He snored. I wanted my privacy.” Her eyes assayed me. “Don’t judge, Deputy.”

  “Just taking in facts.”

  She turned quickly and led me into a walk-in closet that looked as big as our guest bedroom, all dark wood and smelling of cedar. Golf shirts and slacks on stainless-steel hangers lined one side. Opposite
these were floor-to-ceiling drawers and cabinets. Our reflections showed in a huge mirror at the back.

  “I found it here.” She pulled out a drawer. “Under socks.”

  The drawer was empty now. Or it appeared that way. She reached across me and pressed on the bottom, which popped up a panel. She pulled it out revealing a hidden space beneath. A file folder was the only object there now, secured by a black band. I asked what it was.

  She shrugged. “Have a look.”

  I put on a pair of latex gloves and pulled it out, slipping off the band. The folder held what must have been a hundred photos in color and black-and-white. Most were eight-and-a-half by eleven. Each showed a man posed naked, all of them young, all very fit with well-endowed erections. Their hairstyles ranged from perms of the 1970s to contemporary looks.

  It wasn’t mass-market gay porn and none showed a sex act. One or two men covered their faces. Most smiled. Each photo looked as if a lover had taken it as a keepsake. None had dates on them, but the photographic paper on the permed guys was brittle.

  “I am not a homophobe,” she said. “But this isn’t what I expected to find in my husband’s closet. I was hoping for girlie magazines or something like that. Even billets-doux from women would have been better.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “They were his. That’s what I assume. It was his drawer. Only he came in this closet. He was an amateur photographer.” She shook her head. “Trophies.”

  “This is where you found the wallet?”

  She nodded. “Underneath them, wrapped in paper.”

  One photo fell to the floor. It was the size of a snapshot. I picked it up and studied it. Tom Frazier smiled at the photographer in an outdoor setting, palm trees in the distance. Unlike the others, he was fully clothed.

  I held it up. “Did you see this?”

  She shook her head. “After I saw the first photo, I couldn’t bear to go further. I’m not a bigot, Deputy. It’s tragic if Elliott had to stay in the closet all these years.” She looked at our surroundings and giggled. “Sorry. ‘Highly inappropriate laughter,’ as Zephyr would say.”

  “This is the man whose wallet you found.”

  The little crow’s feet around her eyes deepened. “My God.”

  “Do you have something I can put this in? I need to take the file with me.”

  “I understand.” She opened another drawer and handed me a battered tan leather portfolio with Elliott Whitehouse’s name embossed on the cover. “Please don’t bring it back.”

  I slid the file inside and pulled off the gloves. Then I asked if she knew the name Tom Frazier, if her husband had ever mentioned him? Both answers were no and we were dancing around an important question. She bit her lip and fell silent.

  “Tell me about you?” I tried to move things along.

  “Me? My family moved here from Chicago when I was ten. We lived in Maryvale. It was very different then, of course.”

  “What kind of work did you do?”

  “I was pretty aimless when I was young. Nobody paid for me to go to Stanford.” She laughed without humor. “I went to ASU, working my way through college. Had plenty of friends. I guess I was about as wild as anyone my age. Didn’t you go through that kind of period?”

  “Sure.” In my twenties, I had been driven and focused, missing out on the young lives of my friends, but what was that to her?

  “I was working at Diamond’s when I met Elliott. You know, Diamond’s Department Store at Park Central? I haven’t been down there in years.”

  “It’s closed,” I said.

  Her shoulders rose and fell. “Anyway, Elliott was a self-made man and pushed me. So I went to graduate school. Started my own interior design company. Then when Zephyr was born, I enjoyed being a stay-at-home mom. Elliott let me collect pottery. I suppose he thought I needed an outlet of some kind.”

  “Ever married before?”

  “I came close.” She touched my left ring finger. “I see you’re married. Happily?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been unfaithful?” She let her small hand rest atop mine and the atmosphere in the big closet closed in on us.

  I gently pulled my hand away.

  “So you have.” She smiled. She had a very nice smile. “Men have secret lives.”

  “Women, too,” I said.

  She sighed. “True enough.”

  I turned with my back to the drawers and faced her. “Did you suspect your husband was gay or bisexual?”

  She smiled again, sad this time. “Elliott was a man’s man. He was of that generation. So much of him was hidden. Again, I think it’s a generational thing. Men his age didn’t talk about what was going on inside. Men your age can be different, thank God.”

  I started out of the closet but she blocked me.

  “Do you want to know what he was like in bed, David?”

  That smile again. Not the sad one. The one with chemistry and danger. The kind that had taken me many years of experience to decipher its meaning. I still felt the electricity of her hand atop mine. She took off her glasses and tilted up her chin. I felt a finger in the pleat of my slacks. Then it ran down my leg.

  I could have picked her up and fucked her against the wall right then. She was small and I was tall and as our romp continued we would knock down the dead man’s golf shirts, rolling around on them.

  I crossed my arms.

  “I was a horny young woman, David. I still like sex. I need it. Don’t you?” Her voice was husky. “Elliott liked that at first. After we’d been married for a year, we might have sex every eight months. If I was lucky. Believe me, I counted. But I liked the life he paid for. Do you think that makes me a prostitute?”

  “No.”

  “Then Zephyr came along. I didn’t want her to be raised in a broken home. I suppose that was foolish. There was no prenup. This is a community property state and I could have taken half of everything. But I stayed.”

  I nodded.

  She ran her other hand through her hair. It fell back in place perfectly. “You know what’s strange? He always had male assistants. Good-looking guys. I mean real hunks. I never gave it a second thought at the time. I was happy that he didn’t have little babes that would bring out the green-eyed monster. Women who might replace me if he grew bored. But when I saw those photos, it all made sense. I wanted to throw up.”

  “Why did you bring the wallet to Sheriff Melton?”

  She dropped her hand from my slacks. The electricity shut off.

  “I looked at the driver’s license and did a Google search. I found a little article about this young man being found dead in the desert in 1984. It was his wallet. I thought his family might want it.”

  She walked out, brushing past me, now more with impatience than flirtation.

  I followed her into the bedroom.

  “Do you suspect your husband was involved with Tom Frazier?”

  “Who the hell knows?” She sat in an armchair and crossed those slim legs. “I don’t even know Elliott, I realize now.”

  “He never mentioned the name?”

  She shook her head.

  “This is a suspicious death,” I said. “Probably a homicide.”

  Her face lost color. She stared at me, opened her mouth but no words came.

  “Was your husband violent?”

  She nearly jumped out of the chair. “What the hell are you implying, Deputy?” The “David” stuff was gone. “How dare you? Who do you think you are to say that Elliott could have murdered this young man?”

  “You said that. I asked if he was violent.”

  She whirled around and strode to one of the French doors. For a long time she stared out at the mountain. The top of the camel’s hump had disappeared in the clouds.

  Finally, a small voice: “Elliott
was a man of extremes and he could be very generous. When I told him that I hated north Scottsdale, he bought this property and built this house for us. The more I learned about Native American and Mexican art, the more he bought me pieces. Very expensive ones.”

  She turned back and her face was composed.

  “I’m terribly rude. May I get you something to drink?”

  “No. Thank you, though.”

  She fixed me with her enormous beautiful eyes. “The answer to your question is that Elliott had a bad temper. It was worse when he was drunk, which was a lot. He hit me more than once. My dad had been an alcoholic, too. He beat me with a belt when I was fifteen years old! Shit, I thought it was normal. With Elliott, he would slap me and the next morning turn sweet and give me an expensive present. He’d want to take me out to dinner even if I had a black eye. I had worse than yours, believe me.”

  “If he was involved with Tom Frazier and something went wrong, do you think he was capable of hurting him?”

  Her shoulders rose and fell. “We always want to think the best of the people close to us, don’t we? But those pictures showed me how little I really knew the man. So the honest answer is, I don’t know.”

  I handed her my card and started to leave.

  “David, about what happened back there in the closet…”

  “Don’t give it a second thought, Mrs. Whitehouse.”

  That smile again. “It’s Diane. I wasn’t going to apologize. I see something in you, David. You’re special. I feared that Chris would send some knuckle-dragger and he sent you, instead. I always fell for brains. It’s not as if I throw myself at men.”

  I tried to smile back. “I’m very honored. I also love my wife.”

  “To whom you’ve been unfaithful before. Only children confuse passion with love.”

  She handed me her card and stroked my fingers. I let her do it.

  “Call me if there’s something you want, David.”

  What I really wanted was someone who could find millions in missing rough diamonds and lead me to Peralta. Most of all, I wanted Lindsey to get better.

  She watched me closely, this compact still-lovely woman, in her expensive black jeans and huge house and ancient pottery with kill holes, who had deposited this secret on Chris Melton’s doorstep.