by Louise Ure
I turned up the radio and sang along. “Keep your motor runnin’. Head out on the highway!” I planned my own gifts to go with Nicole’s new play table. I’d give her those little Hot Wheels models of cars. A Classic Cobra. A ’55 Thunderbird with round side windows. Maybe make a mobile of them over the table. And a soft leather tool belt to sling across a three-year-old’s overalls.
Whether it was my voice or the radio that caused it, when we were east of Houghton Road and heading into the open desert, Nicole woke with a start to find herself in an unfamiliar car without her parents. She began to cry. Her fists hammered at the car seat and she kicked and flailed in her fury.
The seat belt sprang open and the car seat slid sideways. I reached with one hand to recapture the loose belt but couldn’t find the receiving end of the buckle.
I glanced down in my attempt to secure the seat, so I didn’t see the car hurtling toward us in the wrong lane until it was too late.
It was nobody’s fault. Just one of those cosmic coincidences where everything that could go wrong, does. And this was one I couldn’t fix with penance at the Fault Tree.
Chapter 21
Dupree replaced the phone in the cradle and heaved a sigh.
“Bad news?” Nellis asked.
Dupree shook his head. He wasn’t sure he wanted to get into all the ugly details with his new partner. “Just family stuff.”
Nellis nodded and turned back to his computer screen.
Dupree’s eldest daughter, Bitsy, was eighteen now, but it seemed like yesterday that he’d watched her take her first steps across the creaky front porch of his mother’s house in Baton Rouge. To the new father, the world had seemed fraught with peril, but it was the peril of a sharp-edged coffee table or a gravelly spill from a trike. He hadn’t known enough back then to worry about the kind of pain he was feeling now.
Bitsy had phoned to say she was leaving home and never wanted to hear from him again. He’d tried to be patient—even reasonable—when she first brought that boy home with her. But the kid had BAD written all over him. What kind of eighteen-year-old has a spider tattoo with the words “Widow Maker” etched into his chest? Dupree put his foot down. Bitsy couldn’t see Spider again.
“I’ve got the background on the manager from the Guardian Motel,” Nellis said, snapping Dupree from his thoughts. “He was picked up for check kiting twelve years ago, but he’s been clean since then. We haven’t found anything new on the motel guests since yesterday. John Samson in Unit One is a snowbird here from Detroit. Sixty-eight. No record. Lorraine Clark is visiting family in the neighborhood. We haven’t been able to track down the other three names; they’re probably fake.” He flipped the small spiral notebook closed.
“Can the manager ID any of them?” Dupree asked.
“Maybe one. Says the guy has checked in a couple of times before and his face looked familiar. Early fifties, six foot, two-twenty or two-thirty, receding hairline. Hell, except for the age, that could be me.”
“Have him look at mug shots and start with anybody with a home invasion or burglary charge.”
“Will. do. And I checked on the disinherited friend, Marjorie Lamar. Her husband left her with a pile of money. He was the descendant of the guy who started Prince Steamship Line. She’s got a multimillion-dollar house in Skyline Estates and just does the museum thing as charity work.”
“Then she doesn’t need the money. Ask some of the others from the Desert Museum. See if they were having a fight about something. They’re both widows; maybe they were going after the same guy.” Nellis jotted a note.
“What about the pharmacist?”
Nellis flipped his notebook back two pages and read from the straight-line, squared-off printing—a love letter to an accountant. “John Stephanos,” he said. “Born in 1971, graduated from Mesa High School in ’89, got his bachelor’s degree in health administration from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix in ’93. No wants, no warrants. Married to Josie Dryer in ’94. Divorced one year later. No kids.”
“Did you ask Forensics to take a look at Mrs. Prentice’s medical bills?” The forensic accounting team had gotten busier in the last few years, unearthing money-laundering schemes and frauds as well as motives for murder.
“It looks like she was significantly overcharged for the prescriptions she got at Best Aid. I guess she didn’t realize it until she refilled this prescription last week. But we won’t know whether that was a fluke or a systematic fraud until we get into the pharmacy books.”
“Let’s get a court order.”
Dupree nodded and made another note.
“Did you find out anything else about Cadence Moran?” Dupree added. She had touched off a pang of unexpected sympathy in him, with her bruises and wide, sightless eyes.
“Yeah, I ran her name through the system too. No trouble with the law, but there was a record of a car accident eight years ago. The other car had a bunch of soccer players from Australia. I guess they were jet-lagged, maybe confused. They forgot which side of the road to drive on. Three people dead, two of the Australians and the three-year-old girl riding with Moran.”
Chapter 22
I groaned when I woke on Sunday morning, my muscles as tight and bunched as a head of cauliflower. I needed physical activity, not only to ease the soreness but also to stretch my mind away from the ways people could hurt each other. Maybe housecleaning was the answer. Something to make me feel renewed but not make me think.
When I clean, I plan all my movements like the face of a clock. I moved the vacuum cleaner forward and back from twelve to six clockwise, then the same twelve to six counterclockwise.
When the scrubbing and dusting were done and I felt virtuously clean, I loaded a week’s worth of underwear, T-shirts, and jeans into a gunnysack for the laundry. I made sure I had enough quarters, cinched the top closed, slung the sack over my left shoulder, and headed out.
Lucy’s new and improved contours felt familiar, but there was a different heft and weight to the cane. The steel shaft made it stronger but also made it heavier. I wound up stepping elegantly with it, instead of using the windshield wiper motion that the mobility instructors recommend.
“Have to give you a more formidable name now, I guess. How about Lucille? Lucinda?”
The coin-op laundry was two blocks to my left.
A circus of birds played at the feeder in front of the Arnolds’ house until a dog with multiple tags on his collar scattered them with a bark. Thunder crashed in the distance, but there was no telltale odor of ozone to accompany it. No rain to cool us off today.
I stepped off the curb and into the street.
Chapter 23
He twitched involuntarily when the thunder cracked and pulled the baseball cap lower on his face. That woman probably lived or worked in the area, and he would need a good cover story if he were to keep circling the neighborhood. He had thought about loading the van with a rake, a hoe, and a bunch of garbage bags full of dead leaves. That way, if anyone asked, he would say he was going door-to-door looking for cleanup and gardening work.
No. He already had the perfect cover story. He rummaged around on the floor until he found the magnetic delivery sign under the backseat and slapped it onto the driver’s door of the van. There. Legit. Now, if anybody asked, he could say he was lost and couldn’t find the address he was looking for.
Another clap of thunder. He glanced at the towering clouds over the Tucson Mountains to the west. All bluster, just like his dad. There would be no rain in those clouds today. Just threats and noise.
He’d tried to talk to Lolly about the killing, about how it twisted his guts up, and how everything looked shadowed and darker to him now. “I did it for us,” she’d said, as if that was reason enough. And it was. But he still felt the bricks of his carefully built identity crumbling and flaking away. He’d worked so hard to build the man they thought he’d never be, but the mortar wasn’t holding.
Lolly had found her strength. Now he had to find h
is. And that rebuilding couldn’t start until he was sure there was no witness against them.
He didn’t know if the dark-haired lady would be here on a Sunday. If she worked around here she wouldn’t be back until Monday, and he’d have to try again. But if she lived here, maybe he’d see her in a yard, or through a kitchen window, or coming back from church.
He started at the Guardian Motel and made slow, methodical circles of each block.
There. Ahead. One block down on the left and coming his way. She had a white canvas bag over her shoulder and used that wooden cane like a la-di-da prop. Putting on airs? Or did she need it? Maybe she had a bad hip or knee. Maybe he’d banged up her leg the other day.
He checked the side mirrors and the empty street ahead. The only cars in sight were tucked nose first into their gravel driveways. No cops nearby, no Sunday strollers, no witnesses in the front yards.
He lined the car up on the yellow stripe and took aim.
Chapter 24
An engine roared.
I stood still in the middle of the road, sure that if I jumped in one direction, the panicked driver would pick the same one. I was safer standing still and hoping that he saw me in time.
My knees confirmed that fight or flight weren’t the only two options in a crisis. They chose freeze.
I held my breath and waited for that telltale screech of brakes or the forced rubber sound of swerving tires. It never came.
Chapter 25
“How do you want to handle the Strouts, August?” Nellis said. “Separate rooms or together?” He shrugged off his jacket like a boxer getting ready for a championship fight.
Dupree looked up from his notes and glanced first at the Strouts, who sat on separate benches in the hallway, then back to his partner. “It looks like they’re already fighting. That may work for us. Put ’em in separate rooms.”
Nellis nodded, patting left and right for his pack of smokes. “I’ll take a backseat with Priscilla Strout. Something about that woman makes my skin crawl.”
Dupree raised his eyebrows twice in a Groucho Marx leer—“She does look a lot like Carole Martini”—invoking the name from Nellis’s crash-and-burn romance.
“Don’t start, August.”
Dupree smiled. “Let’s talk to the husband first.” He turned back toward the hallway and gestured for Arlen Strout to join them.
“Is this going to take long?” Strout asked, impatience and resignation swirling together in the words. Dupree took his time sitting down and straightening his papers. Nellis turned a side chair around and rested his hands and chin on the back.
Arlen Strout was little more than five and a half feet tall, with a farmer’s tan across his biceps and a cowlick poking up like Indian feathers from the back of his head. Old acne scars dappled the hollows of his cheeks. “Tell me more about your wife’s grandmother, Mr. Strout. Had you ever met her?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. She came over when Priscilla’s mother died last year.”
“So you’ve never been to her house?”
“No…yeah…I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
If they could identify any of the prints inside the house as Strout’s, they might be on to something.
“I dropped Priss off there once. That’s all.” He turned away from the detectives, sitting sideways in the chair to avert his gaze.
Nellis flipped back a couple of pages in his notebook. “You ever been arrested, Arlen?”
Strout’s head jerked up and he met Nellis’s gaze with a steely stare. “Six years ago. Possession.”
“Possession of what?” Dupree asked. Just because Nellis hadn’t found an arrest record didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Six years ago, Arlen Strout would have been a juvenile, and those records would be sealed.
“Cocaine.”
“Here in Arizona?”
“Tacoma. Priss and her mom moved here three years ago. I followed them down, and we got married a couple of months later.”
“Did you all three live together?”
“At first. But then we got our own place out in Catalina.” Strout’s face told the story of those three-to-a-house days: he hadn’t liked the enforced supervision. Maybe jail time held the same threat for him.
“Where were you and your wife on Thursday night, Mr. Strout? Say, between eight and midnight?”
Strout stiffened, but his answer came easily. “I’m a night watchman at that taser company out by the airport. My shift starts at eight.”
Dupree knew the place. They were the largest seller of tasers to police forces around the world. He wondered if they knew about their security guard’s criminal history.
“That’s quite a commute for you. All the way across town, it must be, what, thirty miles each way?”
“Priss likes to have the car, so I take the bus. It takes about an hour, hour and a quarter, with transfers.”
“Can you prove you were out there all night long?”
Strout met his gaze without blinking. “I punched the time clock every hour on my rounds. And my partner was there the whole time too. Never even went for a dinner break, we ordered pizza in.”
“Arlen, do you think your wife had anything to do with her grandmother’s death?”
“Priss? Shit, don’t be ridiculous.” He waved away the notion with one hand, but that hand shook. “I mean, we’re short on money and everything, but killing somebody? That’s not Priss’s style.”
“What is her style? Stealing from her grandmother?”
Strout’s eyes darted away.
Dupree and Nellis got up, leaving Arlen Strout in the interview room.
“Let’s see what the grieving granddaughter has to say.” Dupree led the way into the next room.
Chapter 26
Nellis leaned against the mirrored wall in the interview room, while Dupree sat at the end of the table, affording himself a view of only the woman’s profile. Priscilla Strout was on her second Diet Coke. She wore a white halter top today, tied inches above the waistband of her shorts, revealing a narrow waist but pale and flabby belly. She clicked the nails on her thumb and ring finger together like a Morse coder with an urgent message to deliver.
“Are you sure I can’t smoke in here?”
“I’m sure. We’ll take a break in a few minutes.” Dupree eased back in his chair and crossed his legs. All the time in the world.
“I really want a cigarette.”
Dupree uncapped a bottle of water and placed it in front of her. “Did your grandmother keep valuables in the house?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure she had any. I only went there a few times. Mostly we talked on the phone.”
“You know about her old TV show though, huh? Sounds like she was a real celebrity around here.”
Sergeant Richardson had confronted Dupree this morning, waving a stack of e-mail printouts in his face to punctuate the urgency. “She was the fairy godmother to every damn kid in Tucson!” he’d said. “Now they’re all over fifty and don’t want their happy memories disturbed. I’ve been fielding calls all morning!”
“I guess I sort of knew it,” Priscilla replied. “Dad had this scrap-book with a bunch of old pictures in it. We left it in Tacoma.”
The celebration of a life—arrayed on the page, pasted down, titled, remembered—cast off in the interest of traveling light. Dupree remembered watching his wife cutting out news stories about his arrests, taking time out of her busy weekends to go to scrapbooking classes so she could showcase his achievements. Would his daughter Bitsy some day jettison Gloria’s scrapbooked chronicle of his career?
He thumbed back to his notes from the last phone conversation with Juanita Greene, when she’d told him about returning to Wanda Prentice’s house. Both Arlen and Priscilla Strout would have been too short to leave that nose print on the window, but Priscilla might have gotten someone else involved. Who knew what kind of friends she’d been making while Arlen worked?
He put a tick mark next to the note that sai
d “coffee can.” “There were coffee grounds all over your grandmother’s kitchen, but we didn’t find any kind of can or bag for them. What kind of container did she keep her coffee in?”
Priscilla’s face showed alarm, as if she’d just been apprised of a pop quiz in a subject she hadn’t studied for.
“Oh, that thing. Well, she did keep some money buried in the coffee can on the counter.” She peeled the label from the bottled water in front of her.
“How much?”
“Never more than twenty or thirty dollars. It was for tips to the delivery people. The church basket. Stuff like that.”
“What’s that coffee can look like? Do you remember the brand?”
“It’s not a real can, not like you get from the store. It’s more like a decorative canister. Painted metal, with a red and green design.”
It was the most detail Priss had provided for any part of her relationship to her grandmother. Dupree bet she had raided the canister on her visits to the house. But the notion of delivery people was a good one. He’d follow up on any deliveries to the house: UPS, pharmacy, groceries, pizza.
“Did she have any good jewelry?”
Her hand jerked upward to rake her hair, successfully tipping the water bottle on its side.
“Oh, God. I’m sorry. Let me clean that up.” She dug through her purse for Kleenex.
“Her jewelry,” Dupree prompted.
“Nothing really good. A gold chain. Her wedding ring.”
Dupree let her think that he hadn’t noticed her slip off the yellow ring and drop it in her purse.
“Don’t you get lonesome—bored—with Arlen working all night?” Dupree pictured A Day in the Life of the Strout Household: soaps on TV, Arlen snoring in the late afternoon, Priscilla looking for attention, conversation, any kind of stimulation by the time the sun went down.
