The Fault Tree

by Louise Ure

  “Can I see that?” Dupree asked, pointing to the sharp corners that stuck through the child’s shirt. The boy’s face reddened, but he pulled the box from its hiding place. Dupree fingered the tiny samples of turquoise, fool’s gold, mica, and agate that were neatly glued into place and labeled as though they were as valuable as pieces of shooting star. He glanced up at the boy’s mother, whose aggressive approach suggested that she thought her son was being mauled by a predator. Dupree showed her his badge.

  “Maybe your mom will buy it for you.” The mother pulled the box from Dupree in a huff. Dupree wondered if he could talk Nellis into a walk around to the other side of the museum where the prairie dogs were.

  A strident voice interrupted his thoughts. “Detective? I’m Marjorie Lamar.” She was a stocky woman, with no discernible waistline and thick ankles that filled her lace-up shoes to overflowing. Her iron-gray hair was cut Galahad straight and ended where it met her collar.

  Dupree motioned Nellis to join them. “Is there somewhere we could talk?”

  Lamar led them to the coffee bar next to the gift shop. “Wanda and I have been friends for more than ten years. Most of the women who volunteer here—Wanda called them the Gray Brigade—only want to work with children’s groups, or in the orientation room. Wanda said she’d already spent a dozen years with children’s groups and was ready for something else. She was tiny but she was strong. Strong enough to work with the hawks and the vultures, even though they don’t really let us docents handle the birds. Animals didn’t have to be cute for Wanda to love them.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill her?” Nellis asked.

  “Nobody. But what does it take these days? You read about somebody getting killed because he honked at another driver or because she’s wearing the wrong color.” She curled her lip, then washed the taste of the words out of her mouth with a long drink of iced tea.

  “Did she ever talk about her personal life?” Dupree asked. He made her eyes look sadder in the sketch he had started in his notebook.

  “We both did. Since our husbands died, neither one of us really had anybody to talk to. And we were together here at least four days a week.”

  “What was her relationship like with her granddaughter?”

  “Priscilla? She never did trust her much. She hadn’t spent much time with her until a couple of years ago when Priscilla and her mom moved here from someplace in the Northwest. And Priscilla didn’t come by often, but when she did, things seemed to go missing.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, twenty dollars here and there. A silver teaspoon. I think Wanda was still trying to find a ring that might have been misplaced, but it could have been stolen too.”

  “What kind of ring?” Dupree asked.

  “A big yellowish stone—topaz or something. I only saw it a couple of times. It had lots of curlicues around the side.”

  It sounded like the ring on Priscilla Strout’s finger.

  “What did she think of Priscilla’s husband?”

  “I don’t remember her saying anything about him. Just about being disappointed in the girl. She’s bright but never tried to make anything of herself.”

  Dupree wasn’t sure he agreed with that bright assessment but thought there was merit to the rest of the statement. “And you can’t think of any enemies, anyone who would have profited by her death?”

  “No one except her granddaughter. I don’t mean she was an enemy, just that Wanda wasn’t close to her. But Wanda changed her will a couple of months ago and named Priscilla and the museum as the only beneficiaries. So I guess she was close enough that she wanted to leave the girl something.”

  They hadn’t found a will in the Prentice house. “Do you know where she kept it?”

  “We got them done together at the Senior Center and gave each other a copy. I’ve got it in my locker. I’ll get it for you.” She rose to retrieve the document.

  “Oh, and I just remembered. She had a hell of a fight with a pharmacist last week. Real blood pressure-raising stuff. She said she had proof he was bilking Medicare.”

  “You said she changed her will,” Dupree said when Marjorie Lamar returned. “Who was to be the beneficiary before Priscilla was named?”

  “The Desert Museum, of course. And me.”

  Chapter 18

  Juanita returned the house key to the waiting patrolman. She planned a whole celebration menu on the ride home, claiming that Detective Dupree would owe us a steak dinner for this new evidence.

  She dropped me off at the house, declining my offer to check her brakes. Since it was my day off and I was still too much on edge to be alone, I called Kevin to suggest dinner. If he did the grocery shopping, that is.

  My cousin and I had come to an uneasy truce not long after the accident: he never mentioned Nicole; I never let her slip from my mind.

  “I’ll have the girls with me,” he said when I called. “Emily’s going to a friend’s bachelorette party tonight. Do you mind cooking for all of us?”

  A tremor of anxiety ran up my spine when he mentioned his two younger daughters, Bernadette and Teresa. Kevin hardly ever brought them by.

  “I’d love to.”

  I read off the list of ingredients for an easy boiled dinner. Probably too heavy a meal in this heat, but it was simple.

  Their arrival that afternoon was punctuated by little girl squeals of delight. Teresa was seven and Bernadette five. They filled the front yard with as much noise as a flock of parrots. The girls had never known their big sister, but I felt her presence like a shadow behind them.

  Kevin took their coloring books to the living room and tuned the television to a cartoon program. His hands carried the waxy smell of crayons when he came back into the kitchen. The air was still, and I opened the kitchen window to get a cross breeze blowing.

  I quartered potatoes, cabbage, and carrots, then ran my fingers over the Braille labels on the jars. I found the bay leaves in the first row of small bottles and picked out two leaves for the pot.

  Kevin opened one of the beers he had bought along with the groceries and leaned back in the kitchen chair until it creaked. He yawned and the heels of his boots thunked on the seat of the chair next to him.

  “You sound tired, Kev. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. Work’s going okay. I got a raise last week. And we got this little Learjet in to do an engine overhaul. It’s a beauty.”

  Kevin still repaired his own car, but all the rest of his mechanical work was now done on private planes and executive jets. I remembered the first time Kevin took me flying in his boss’s old Cessna. It was better than any drug I ever tried in my sighted days. A true unleashing of the spirit. I reveled in the surge of acceleration down the runway, my back plastered to the seat, the thrum of the propeller seeking purchase on the air. Then the joyous rush of the climb. It was almost sexual.

  Kevin had taken my hands to show me the location of the dials and controls. Oil gauge. Radio. Ailerons. Fuel mixture. Stick. There was a Plexiglas overlay covering the instrument panel, but he led my finger to each of the dials and described what they looked like.

  The Cessna seemed primitive compared to the cars I worked on. Airplanes don’t even have reverse. On the other hand it was also simplistically beautiful—thin sheets of metal and Plexiglas as the only things between you and the heavens.

  Now I requested an airplane ride every year as a birthday present.

  “Everything’s okay at home?” I asked.

  “Oh, that part’s absolutely fine. Em’s pregnant again, did I tell you already?”

  My heart stuttered. “No, that’s great. Congratulations. Another girl, you think?”

  He took a long swallow of beer. “Don’t know yet. Emily would be happy with a whole tribe of girls, but me? I don’t know. I’d kind of like a son.” He sighed. “Everything’s fine. I guess I’m just tired.”

  I felt bad about asking him to add one more thing to his alread
y full day. I’d not only had him do the grocery shopping, but he’d spent the better part of the day repairing my cane in his home workshop.

  “Thanks again for repairing Lucy. I’d really miss her if I had to get another one.”

  “No problem. It’s even stronger now. I fit a new bottom piece to the head and hollowed it out to take a steel shaft down the middle. Just make sure you tell them at airports or they’ll think you’re carrying a weapon on board.”

  “Oh, yeah. A blind terrorist. That would be really effective. I’d have to ask directions to the cockpit.”

  I filled him in on my conversations with the police and heard the reflected concern in his voice. “Do you want me to come pick you up after work for a while? I don’t think you ought to be walking home if there’s some killer around.”

  “I can’t start using you as a taxi service; I’d never get comfortable out by myself again. And I don’t think I’m in any danger. Juanita said the cops think it was a robbery gone bad. I’ll make sure I keep the doors locked.” I didn’t have the luxury of being afraid of the dark.

  Kevin called the girls in to dinner, and they talked in whispers while I located each portion on the plate with my finger. I wish I could have found my courage as easily.

  Chapter 19

  Wanda Prentice’s will was exactly as Marjorie Lamar had described it.

  “Priscilla was going to come into some money,” Dupree said, refolding the pages. “Someplace between one and two hundred thousand, depending upon the value of that house and the duplex.”

  “Sounds like a motive to me. And that means Marjorie Lamar had the same motive.”

  “Yeah, if she was the only one with a copy of this new will, she could have waited until the old one surfaced and turned her friendship with Wanda Prentice into some real money.”

  “But she’s the one who told us about the new will,” Nellis argued.

  “That’s a point in her favor. But let’s check out her finances anyway. See how much happier a couple hundred thousand dollars would have made her.”

  Dupree flipped through the stack of pharmacy receipts and medication warnings they’d taken from Wanda Prentice’s house. She’d been in pretty good shape for a seventy-six-year-old. Blood pressure medicine. A prescription-strength cream for arthritis aches and pains. “She used two separate pharmacies, but the receipt from last week comes from the Best Aid Pharmacy on Swan. If Mrs. Lamar is right about the date of the fight, this is the place. Can you make out the name of the pharmacist—right here?” He handed Nellis the receipt and pointed to the scrawled initials next to the prescription number.

  Nellis squinted at the signature. “Nope. Some of these guys need to take a handwriting course.” He started to hand back the receipt, then stopped. “Wait a minute. He’s charged her a hundred and thirty bucks for this.”

  “So?”

  “Come on. She’s a senior citizen. She at least has Medicare. Probably some supplementary insurance. There’s no way she’d be paying a hundred and thirty bucks for this.”

  “Maybe that’s what the fight was about.”

  “Let’s go ask him.”

  The waiting area at the pharmacy looked like a scene from Beetlejuice. Three cadaverlike seniors slouched on a plastic burgundy bench. Four more shuffled their feet and gazed at the floor, forming a Maginot line of stolid patience at the counter. A mechanical voice droned its message over a scratchy loudspeaker. “Number eighty-four, your prescription is ready. Number eighty-four.” No one moved forward with proof of the winning ticket. The man in front of Dupree held ticket number 112.

  Dupree excused himself to the customers in line and approached the white-smocked Asian woman behind the cash register. The pharmacy section was built two steps above the rest of the drugstore, so that Dupree had to look up to her.

  “Tucson Police Department. I’d like to speak to your manager, please.” Saturday was a big day for getting prescriptions filled; he hoped the manager was in.

  They waited almost ten minutes, watching what appeared to be a heated, whispered conversation between a short, dark-haired man and his tall, thin coworker behind the pharmacy window. The dark-haired man ended the conversation with a jabbed finger in the other man’s chest, then came out a side door to join the detectives.

  “John Stephanos,” he said, rolling his cuffs back into place but not offering a hand. “Make it snappy. I have to pick up my girlfriend and her kid.” His hair was slicked back Elvis-style, glued in place with some shine-inducing pomade. The style went well with the full-lipped sneer.

  Dupree started the sketch in his notebook with just the lips. It was all he would need to remind him of this interview.

  “Do you recognize this woman?” Nellis asked, showing Stephanos a picture of Wanda Prentice.

  “Yeah, sure. What did she say about me? She was causing a scene. We’re not going to do business with someone like that again.” He fiddled a dangling cuff link into its buttonhole.

  “What kind of scene?” Dupree asked.

  “She thought we were overcharging her, but she was wrong. And she wouldn’t let it go. She got loud. Got all the other customers involved.” He ran his hand along the side of his hair, confirming its placement. “I had to have her removed from the store.”

  It looked like they’d found their contentious pharmacist.

  “How’d she take that?” Nellis asked.

  “Oh, she was screaming about senior citizen rights and how she was going to sic the authorities on me. I guess that’s you guys, right?”

  “So you didn’t overcharge her? Maybe charge a branded price for a generic prescription?”

  “Of course not. Look, I really don’t have time for this right now.”

  “We all have someplace else we’d like to be, Mr. Stephanos. Including these people in line.” Dupree motioned to the seniors who were following the verbal volley like tennis fans. Several nodded and smiled at Dupree’s recognition. The three pharmacists behind the shoulder-high glass barrier scurried back to work.

  “It looks like she was right to have a beef with the guy,” Nellis said when they were back in the car.

  “Let’s find out a little more about Mr. Stephanos and how he likes to do business. Overcharging? Medicare fraud? There’s a whole lot of money involved in those prescriptions.”

  And money was always a good motive for murder.

  Chapter 20

  On the day I lost my sight, I was working in the plus-size department at J. C. Penney. Even after more than ten years of tinkering with lawn mowers and car engines with Kevin, and two years of being the only girl in shop class, I couldn’t get a job as a mechanic. “You’d do very well in retail,” my high school counselor had suggested. Retail: the holding tank of dreams for girls with only a high school education.

  They didn’t even put me in automotive supplies.

  We had a family barbecue that afternoon. Momma had consumed a whole pitcher of martinis before the first hot dogs went on the grill. Aunt Caroline watched apprehensively but didn’t say anything. “Don’t rock the boat,” was always her best advice.

  Kevin had married five years earlier and his wife, Emily, showed none of the strain and fatigue I expected with the rearing of a three-year-old. She laughed easily and her eyes shone with pride as she watched Nicole’s antics at grabbing a dandelion, hugging our almost-toothless golden retriever, or investigating an abandoned anthill.

  Kevin was the first to spot the old dinette set Momma had shoved under the oleander bushes against the back fence. It was blond wood, maple maybe, with one broken leg and a top big enough for a family of four.

  “Oh, the top has gotten so scarred, and now that the leg broke, I’m just going to throw it out,” Momma said.

  Kevin glanced at Emily for confirmation. “If you don’t want it, would you mind if we take it? I could shorten the other legs and it would make a great play table for Nicole.”

  “Help yourself.” She gestured with an empty glass. “But you’ve got
to take the chairs too, and it’s got to be out of here today. I can’t bear to look at it even one more day.”

  When the sun set, Caroline and my uncle Twill were the first to leave. Kevin, Emily, and I stayed another few minutes, enjoying the ghost of a breeze that rustled through the tamarisks. When it was full dark, we started loading the dinette set into his car.

  His Toyota was hardly big enough for the table, even after we’d unscrewed the legs and moved the rear seats all the way forward. We stacked two chairs in the back and tied rope to the trunk lid so it wouldn’t bang. Two more chairs were roped to the roof of the sedan.

  “We look like the Clampetts,” Kevin said.

  “At least the Clampetts had enough room to tie Granny and the rocking chair on top.” I pointed to Nicole’s car seat, which had been taken out to make room for the table.

  Momma called from the house, “Cadence, honey, come back in here and rub my feet, will you? I’ve had such a day!”

  I turned back to Kevin. “Don’t worry. I’ll follow you home with Nicole in my car.”

  Kevin had moved into a new development on the far east side of town. Façade Estates, he called it, because the homes looked great from the street, but you could see the shoddy construction once you got up close. A drive in the cool evening air would be good for me and keep me from having to listen again to Momma’s recriminations about my lack of opportunities and how unfair life was to have left her without someone to take care of her.

  I pushed the passenger seat of my old Karmann Ghia all the way back and attached the child seat through the lap belt. Nicole was already drowsy and leaned against me as I snugged her in on my right.

  I’d only had one beer, but the darkness and the wind whistling through the cracked-open window had an almost soporific effect, and I had to blink myself awake several times.