by Louise Ure
Only ten o’clock, but the Strouts’ apartment was already in those cholesterol-matching triple digits. The furnishings weren’t helping. Someone had selected the heaviest, darkest plaid available for the boxy couch and matching armchairs. A dark brown coffee table, scarred by wet glass rings and nicks, graced the center of the room, and a feeble window air conditioner farted a semicool stream of air, flapping three finger-shaped plastic banners in front of the vents in celebration. The television, old enough to have rabbit ear antennas, was tuned to a morning talk show, but the volume was low.
“I call her every day. Well, almost every day,” Priscilla Strout said. She stubbed out the cigarette that lay smoldering in the ashtray and ignited the second one.
Dupree jotted a note, letting her know he was paying attention. At this point he had nothing important to write down, but he always started with a sketch, just to jog his memory. He’d perfected the technique over years of drawing caricatures of both friends and enemies alike. A half dozen lines and he could capture the essence of a person. He rarely had to even look at the page while he worked.
He drew in the arcing lines of her bottle-blond hair. How could he show all the cosmetics? There was more makeup here than you’d find at a liars’ convention. He added raccoon eyes.
“Maybe you can give me some background on your grandmother, Mrs. Strout.”
“Call me Priss, please. But you gotta’ leave a little gap between the words, you know what I mean?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I mean my first name and my last. If you run ’em together, PrissStrout, real fast like that? I sound like some kind of fish.”
“Mrs. Strout, I’m sure—”
“And it’s just as bad if you use ‘Missus’ instead of Priss. I mean, what’s a girl to do? I started out as a Prentice. Priscilla Prentice, that’s not too bad. I mean, you don’t get to pick your last name and I got lucky. Well, I guess you can pick your last name, cause Strout was Arlen’s name and all, and I married him, but I sure didn’t think about sounding like a fish when I did it.”
Dupree added to the bubble hairdo in his drawing. “I’ll remember to—”
“Just a little gap. Not a whole breath or anything.” Priscilla demonstrated the proper technique.
Dupree glanced back at Nellis, who squinted and patted his shirt pocket again.
“Please, Mrs. Strout.”
She took a quick hit off the cigarette and waved in the direction of the kitchen doorway where her husband, Arlen, leaned against the wall. He was short and wiry, a baseball player’s physique. His hair was greasy and stuck out in a cowlick in the back.
“When did you last see your grandmother?” Dupree said.
“Did she leave us anything in the will?” Arlen asked.
Dupree and Nellis exchanged glances.
“Priss got nothing from the old bag but a lousy card on her birthday, but I hear she was loaded,” the husband continued.
“Where’d you hear that?” Dupree asked.
Arlen searched the ceiling for an answer. “Dunno. Just around. Must have been something Priss’s mom said once.”
“We don’t have the details about a will yet,” Dupree said, then turned back to Priscilla. “Do you know who your grandmother’s lawyer was, Mrs. Strout? Or if there are any other family members we should contact?”
“I don’t know if she even had a lawyer. And there may be some second cousins around someplace, but nobody else. My father was Grandma’s son, and he died almost ten years ago. My mom passed just last year. Cancer.” She waved her cigarette in a half circle, a recognition of the author of her mother’s illness.
“Were you close to your grandmother?”
She seemed stunned by the question. “Sure. I mean, naturally. But I grew up in Tacoma—we only moved down here when my mom found out about the cancer—so I’ve only been around her the last couple of years.”
“When did you last see her?”
“When was it, Arlen? Last week? Two weeks ago?” She twirled a lock of blond hair around her finger.
Arlen’s face grew red. Was that concentration or guilt? “I dunno. One or the other.”
Dupree rose to leave and handed the young woman his business card. “I’m sorry about your grandmother. Call me at this number tomorrow and I’ll be able to tell you when you can claim the body.”
“Claim the body! What am I going to do with it?”
“The city can take care of burial—”
“We’re not spending our money to bury her, that’s for damn sure,” Arlen said. He took the business card from his wife and tossed it on the coffee table.
When they were outside, Dupree took off his jacket, folded it, and placed it in the backseat of the unmarked car. “You see that ring she was wearing? That look to you like something a twenty-two-year-old would pick out?”
“More like something a grandmother might have given her. I wonder if she’s told her husband the whole truth. Maybe she’s been getting more from her grandmother than she’s telling Arlen.”
“First, let’s find out if Mrs. Prentice really had any money to give. And where those two were last night. That Barbie doll in there might have just gotten tired of waiting for her grandmother to die.”
“Like they say: cherchez the family,” Nellis said.
“That’s not what they say.”
“Well, cherchez that white trash Barbie, anyway.”
Chapter 8
He’d dropped Lolly off at her place last night, his hands still shaking and breath coming in ragged pants. They’d sat in the van—forehead to forehead, fingers entwined in each other’s hair—until the risk of being seen together became too great.
He almost lost it again when she got out of the car. He wanted to call her back. Tell her that they could leave tonight, with nothing but nineteen dollars in their pockets. They’d find a way.
“Lolly!” he’d whispered as she approached her house, but she didn’t hear him. The door clicked shut behind her.
He put the van in drive and coasted to the end of the cul-de-sac to turn around. There were still no lights on in Lolly’s house when he passed by again.
When he got home, he turned on the old TV and flipped the channel knob until he got a late news program. Had they found Mrs. Prentice yet? Were they talking about a manhunt and witnesses? Nothing, so far.
He’d snugged the van up against the side of the house and covered it with an old gray tarp. It looked like a giant loaf of bread sitting out there, but at least it couldn’t easily be seen from the street.
The TV news had moved on to sports, and the reporter was predicting another losing season for the Cardinals. He tuned out the story, caught up in the echoes of the night’s violence.
What the fuck had they done? In a split second he’d gone from being a kid with an anything-is-possible future to this. A thief. A life taker. And for what? Nineteen dollars.
They should have run away when Mrs. Prentice woke up.
He cradled a pillow in his arms, then punched it until his arm ached.
He shut off the TV and the house settled into silence. He’d sublet the place from an old high school friend months ago. Nobody but his buddy and Lolly knew he was there. Thin walled and tin roofed, with acres of creosote-choked desert between him and the nearest neighbor, the house was the perfect hideaway. No tourists or fancy buildings out here. Just rusty old vehicles and worthless land. Everybody on the shitty side of town had something to hide.
But the house was a castle when Lolly was there, their special place together. They could shut out the noise and forget the slights, the disappointments, and the rest of the world that wanted to keep them apart.
He needed her here now.
Chapter 9
When they reached TPD headquarters, Dupree ignored the stairs and took the elevator up to the third floor, where he and Nellis shared two desks shoved together against the west wall.
“Any news while we were at the Strouts’?”
> “Nothing,” Nellis replied, flipping through printouts and phone messages.
Dupree shook his head, wishing that he didn’t have to wait another ten years before retirement. “I’m forty-two going on sixty-two,” he’d told Gloria last week as he eyed his chocolate skin and wiry gray sideburns in the mirror. He knew where the gray was coming from; it was too many years of bludgeoned babies and dead women in the desert.
“Any luck?” Sergeant Richardson asked, approaching their conjoined desks with a loaded clipboard in his hand. Richardson headed the seven-member Homicide detail.
“We made the next-of-kin notification,” Dupree said. “A granddaughter, out in Catalina.”
“She have anything to give you?”
“Nothing yet. I don’t think she was close to her grandmother. Or if she was, she didn’t like her very much.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She wasn’t interested in any funeral services. And the husband kept asking about a will,” Nellis said.
“Is she a suspect?”
“We haven’t ruled her out,” Dupree said. “If we find out that she was seen there yesterday, or if there’s a history of elder abuse—”
“We should be so lucky,” Nellis offered.
Dupree unbuttoned the cuffs of his striped shirt—a present from Gloria in a shade too close to lavender; he would never have picked it himself—and rolled the sleeves up two turns. “I want to get a better handle on those two. Run ’em through the system.”
Nellis scooted his chair in front of the keyboard and typed in both Priscilla and Arlen’s names.
“Nothing on the husband, but she got probation on a shoplifting charge two years ago.”
“Not much of a résumé for a killer. Okay, we do Mrs. Prentice first. Who she did business with, where she banked, who knew her, who came by the house.”
“I want to stay with this fish girl, Priss Strout,” Nellis said.
“Got something against blondes?”
“Naw. Just haven’t met a woman yet who’d tell you the truth without a fight first.”
“No wonder you’re still single.” Nellis had been dumped by a waitress named Carole Martini last month and was still bitching about it.
The phone interrupted Nellis’s reply. He sprang to answer it, then covered the mouthpiece as he relayed the information to Dupree. “It’s the lab. Aside from those footprints, they’ve got nothing. Fingerprints in the kitchen and around the door were all smudged.”
Dupree grimaced. Damn. Twelve hours gone and nothing to show for it.
Dupree was usually the more optimistic of the two, to the point where Nellis accused him of being a downright Pollyanna sometimes. Okay, so he’d been taught to see the rosy side of things. His mother had even cross-stitched her favorite saying on a big square of unbleached muslin and hung it in the dining room: Happiness is having everything you want. And you can have everything you want if you don’t want anything you can’t have. What he wanted right now was a solid lead on Wanda Prentice’s murder.
Nellis ended the call with the Crime Scene team.
“Any good witness statements? Anybody see anything?” Dupree asked.
Nellis gnawed a pencil stub and eyed the pack of cigarettes on the corner of the desk. “Just the manager of the Guardian Motel on the corner. He didn’t see anything. But he’s given us the names and addresses of the five people who had checked in. Of course, given the nature of that place, the names may not be good.”
Dupree pictured the one-story, gray cinder-block motel with the lighted sign promising “Free HBO.” Unfortunately the “B” had dropped off, leaving the message unintentionally prurient in its offer to provide “Free HO.”
“I want to get that blind lady at the garage—what’s her name—Cadence Moran, in here.” Dupree had a hunch about her. And sometimes a hunch was worth a whole bucket of fact-finding.
Nellis barked a laugh. “You know something the rest of us don’t? Unless she’s psychic, she sure didn’t see anything.”
Dupree thought back to Miz Rogers—the “blind witch,” his brother called her—who had lived in the little clapboard house at the end of the road when he was growing up. She couldn’t see, but she sure knew a lot about what was going on around her.
Chapter 10
I don’t drink anymore, but that night I wanted one.
The shop had been buzzing with details of the murder all day.
“Pools of blood,” Turbo had relayed.
“I heard she was stabbed a hundred times,” Danny said without crediting a source.
Hyperbole aside, their comments still triggered the poisonous image of Nicole’s rag doll body hanging halfway through the windshield. That was my last vision before my world went dark.
I decided to drink by proxy, so I dialed my ride.
“Juanita? Can you give me a lift to my mom’s house?”
“Sure. Fifteen minutes.”
Juanita may have inherited her height from her African-American father, but she got her accent and verbal venom from her Mexican mother.
When she asked about the new cane and the bruises on my face, I downplayed the accident, saying only that I’d fallen and broken Lucy. Satisfied with that explanation, Juanita returned to the complaint she’d had in high gear when I got in the car, railing against the Arizona authorities about the motor vehicle registration process.
“Do you know they only have four—count ’em, four—inspection stations for this whole damn city? Over a half million people here and we’ve got to get into this conga line for three hours in the sun, waiting to have the car inspected? I had to take the whole damn day off work for this!” I could guess what a spectacle she made while waiting in line. A desert-brown Amazon with a black belt in verbal abuse.
Her full name was Duchess Juanita Greene and her brothers were Chance, Rooster, Books, and Cahill. “Thank God it was only a John Wayne obsession. Our parents could have been Charlton Heston fans.” I pictured latte-hued boys named El Cid, Moses, and Michelangelo.
We weren’t the most likely of friends in high school. Juanita was the smart kid who loved science and math; I looked forward to shop class. But the friendship was cemented one quiet, gray Friday when I pulled Johnny Deare off Juanita in a corner of the sports field where two chain-link fences met. Her blouse was ripped and his fingernails had left wet, red scratches down her chest. “What are you, deaf?” I bellowed. “You didn’t hear her say no?”
Juanita had turned her love of chemistry and physics into a job as a latent print specialist for the Tucson Police Department’s Crime Lab.
She’d been my friend before I was blinded and stayed that way afterward. Now Juanita dropped by at least once a week to run errands, drive me to appointments, and read my bills and letters out loud. I kept her Toyota gassed up and in good running condition. We both thought we were getting the better end of the deal.
“I’ve got some shopping to do at the mall,” Juanita said. “Just give me a call when you’re ready to go home.”
I took a deep breath, pulled my shoulders back, and steeled myself for a visit with my mother.
“Come in, come in,” Momma trilled. “You want something to drink, Cadence?” I smelled hair spray and the acrid juniper scent of cheap gin as it poured from the shaker. I crossed the room and bent down to kiss her cheek. Her hair was as stiff and hard shelled as a wasp nest.
“Just a little martooni to straighten out the day?” she said.
When I was growing up it was my job to refresh the pitcher when I got home from school. Gin was the perfume of motherhood.
I sat broom straight in the armchair across from the couch. By this time of night Momma was usually listing to the left, propped up on loose couch cushions, twirling the strap to a high-heeled sandal around a pinkie finger. Always sandals, of course, since she kept her toenails the same shape, length, and color as her fingernails, like little pink daggers on her feet. Doris Day with a substance abuse problem.
Only Aunt
Caroline, Kevin’s mother, still had patience with her sister. “She’s just weak willed, Cadence. You have to forgive her for that.”
Momma didn’t seem to have noticed either the gravel damage on my face or the new cane.
Something with the swallowed consonants of Portuguese played softly on the stereo: my mother’s version of urban-desert chic. I heard the hum of a dimmer switch set low. She must have needed the forgiveness of mood lighting tonight.
“You really need to start taking care of yourself, Cadence,” she said between sips. “Get the grease out from under your nails. A little makeup wouldn’t hurt. I’ll bet you could still get a guy…”
Even if you’re blind, she usually said. Even if you’re less than whole. She should have been more worried about my own lack of desire to be with a man. For years after the accident I had allowed myself no pleasure. No belly laughs, no sweetness on the tongue, no sexual release. Even now, lovemaking was a solitary pleasure for me. An aria, not a duet. An animal release of tension but never something to be shared. I couldn’t trust myself to care that much about someone again.
I got up to get a glass of water and turn down the glacial setting of the air conditioner.
The last time I had seen my image was eight years ago. At that time I was a trim twenty-three-year-old with short, wispy black hair, Arizona-burnished skin, and eyes a little too far apart for my face.
I wondered how my looks had changed. My weight was probably the same, as I was still buying the same size jeans. And I still wore my hair short. I wondered if there was any gray in it yet and if the scars alongside my mouth now looked like frown furrows instead of the result of an accident.
“Did you hear about that murder in your neighborhood?” Momma said. “You should see the pictures of that lady. Sweetest thing. Butter wouldn’t melt.” She made a sucking sound to get the last drops of gin. “But I’ll bet they used old photos. Bet she doesn’t look like that now.”
