Desert Rage

by Betty Webb

  I waited. Sometimes, if you wait long enough, the other person will say more to fill in the silence. That’s what he did.

  Pale gray eyes finally met mine. “Look, Arthur could be personable enough, but he was, oh, I don’t know, he never felt like he was with you when he was with you, if you know what I mean. Removed, you could say. You usually don’t experience that kind of thing around here.” He paused for a moment, a thoughtful look on his fine-boned face. “Margie didn’t care for him, either. If Arthur came home while she was over there chatting with Alexandra, she’d say she had to get back and start dinner, which was a blatant lie.” A hint of a smile. “My wife can’t even boil water. If it wasn’t for Chinese takeaway and AJ’s ready-to-eat meals, we’d both starve to death.”

  Fleetingly, I wondered what they were eating up on their Wyoming ranch. Raw elk? “How about Ali? What do you know about her?”

  The half-smile broadened. “A lovely girl, simply lovely. Had her mother’s heart. I’d see her around every now and then, skateboarding up and down the cul-de-sac—without a helmet, I regret to say—sometimes walking home from school with friends. That the police could believe that crazy confession of hers, well, it beggars belief.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Ali is not the type to ever hurt anyone.”

  “And what ‘type’ is that?”

  “You know. Troubled. Violent. Not Alison.” Then an element of doubt entered his voice. “She appeared to be a typical teenager, but then again, Margie and I were never lucky enough to have children, so what do I know?”

  “Ever hear any fights between her and her father? Or anyone else?”

  Another head shake. “These houses are pretty much soundproof. They could set off nuclear tests over there and we wouldn’t hear a thing.”

  “Do you think…?”

  My next question was cut short by someone coming through the door. I turned around and saw a tiny brown woman with the face of an enraged shark. “The bitch didn’t show!”

  When she noticed me, she looked even more furious. “Lady, if you’re selling insurance, you sure as hell picked the wrong house on the wrong day.”

  To punctuate her comment, she lobbed her handbag across the room like a grenade. It bounced off the opposite wall, spewing shrapnel of keys, tissues, and pens across the tile floor.

  Elmont “Monty” Newberry didn’t flinch. Maybe this sort of thing happened all the time in the Newberry house. “Hi, Hon. This is Lena Jones, she’s a private investigator. She’s working for Ali’s attorney, and would like to know about Alexandra’s and Arthur’s marriage.”

  “Don’t want to know much, do you?” his wife muttered, plopping herself down on the sofa next to him. She ignored the wounded handbag and its spilled innards. “Whatever was going on between those two is none of your business.”

  Angry people not only say things they don’t mean, but they also say things they do mean but were normally too cautious to verbalize, so I braved the firestorm and said, “I’ve heard from several people that Alexandra Cameron was unhappy. Did she ever mention divorce?”

  Dark brown eyes glittered at me. Was it my imagination or did she resemble the photograph I’d seen of Geronimo at the fry bread restaurant? Margie Newberry definitely had Indian blood, and judging from the cragginess of her face, possibly Apache.

  “Hate to disappoint you, Miss Jones,” she said, “but regardless of what my husband might have told you, I wasn’t Alexandra’s Mother Confessor.” She glared at her husband, then, surprisingly, gave him a peck on the cheek. “Monty here has a vivid imagination, should have been a writer, not a banker. That marriage was fine. Not perfect, no marriage is, but acceptable.”

  “Acceptable?” I allowed my skepticism to show.

  Nonplussed, her husband smiled at her, a man besotted with his wife. “Just tell the woman, Margie. It might help Ali.”

  “Hmm.” She left the sofa, walked over to her handbag, and began gathering up the spilled items. It seemed to take longer than necessary, but when she returned to the sofa, she had a determined expression on her face. “Poor Alexandra. All that beauty and look what it got her. Amazing, isn’t it, how one mistake can ruin your life?”

  “And that mistake was?” I asked.

  “Marrying Arthur, of course. Talk about a cold fish. She did talk about leaving him. So there. Make of it what you will.”

  “He was cold, you say? That doesn’t sound reason enough for a divorce.”

  “Depends on what a person wants from life. You Catholic or something, Miss Jones? Think marriage is sacred and all that?”

  The question didn’t call for an answer so I gave her none. Just waited.

  She sighed. “Oh, all right. Alexandra is dead, along with poor little Alec, as well as that idiot she was married to, so nothing I say can hurt her now. However, before I begin, I want you to turn off any recording device you have in your bag or on your person and set it on the coffee table.”

  I reached into my carryall, pulled out my digital recorder, switched it off, and laid it down.

  Mr. Newberry’s mouth formed a perfect “O.” “You didn’t get my permission for that!”

  “She didn’t have to, Hon,” his wife explained. “Under Arizona law, only one person has to know about a recording device, which almost always means the person who’s making the recording.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” he muttered.

  “Since when does the law have to be fair?” To me, she said, “I don’t want you taking notes, either.”

  I raised empty hands. “No problem.”

  She took a deep breath, then proceeded to reveal that she was, after all, Alexandra Cameron’s Mother Confessor. “Once, Alexandra asked me if I could recommend a good divorce attorney.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “Didn’t have to. I already knew how unhappy she was.”

  Tolstoy’s comment about marriage came to mind. All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. “Can you explain?”

  “Among other things, she suspected he might be having an affair.”

  Which was no more than I’d suspected myself, since secret bank accounts fairly reeked of extramarital activities on at least one person’s part. Still, I pretended to be surprised. “Really! Do you know if she confronted her husband with her suspicions?”

  “No.”

  “Yet she wanted a divorce attorney?”

  “Yep. I think she just…” Margie’s eyes unfocused for a moment, then snapped back to attention. “Besides her suspicions, I think she was just tired. That can happen in a marriage. One day you wake up and you’re ready to pack it in. All you’re looking for is an excuse. That’s what happened to Alexandra, I guess.”

  Spotting the alarm that swept across her husband’s face, she gave him a swift smile and a pat on the cheek. “You silly man.”

  The besotted expression returned. Tolstoy notwithstanding, even happy marriages are unique in their own way.

  “Back to Alexandra,” I said, to forestall any cuddling between the two unlikely lovebirds. “If she suspected her husband was having an affair, did she have a particular woman in mind?”

  Husband duly reassured, she went on, “What difference does it make?”

  “Surely she had grounds for her suspicion.”

  She glanced across the room at the Comanche sculpture, as if looking for advice on how much she should say. The Comanche remained silent.

  “Her suspicions started several years ago, after he switched his hours from days—which he’d worked for years—to nights. He told her he liked fixing the gunshot wounds, the stabbings, especially on weekends, when they really started rolling into the ER. Arthur was freaky that way, when he talked shop, it sounded like he wasn’t talking about human beings at all, just organs. You know, like ‘Yesterday I worked on
the most interesting kidney’ or ‘That aorta was exciting, never saw anything like that since med school.’

  “Anyway, he switched his schedule to nights, working from around six in the evening to around two or three in the morning, but now and then he never came home at all. Not that that’s anything unusual for an ER doc. Then one night little Alec got sick. Shivering, vomiting, cramps, the whole nine yards. Alexandra tried calling him at the hospital, but kept getting his voice mail. Again, not unusual for an ER doc. But she was all shook up, called me, said she didn’t know what to do, but neither did I, so she kept calling and around midnight she finally reached a nurse over there she knew personally. The nurse told her Arthur had the night off.”

  Yes, that would have set alarm bells off in most marriages. “What happened then?”

  “She took Alec to Scottsdale Health Care Emergency, where the pediatrician on duty diagnosed the flu and wrote out a prescription for the latest wonder drug. So that was that.”

  “No, I meant when Dr. Cameron came home, did Alexandra ask him what was going on?”

  “Wouldn’t you? Arthur got home around four in the morning, which was pretty much his normal time, and by then the kid had stopped barfing. Alexandra didn’t exactly give him the third degree, she wasn’t like that, but from what I understood, when she asked him where he’d been, he told her that where he went and what he did was none of her concern.”

  “He didn’t even bother lying about it?”

  She shrugged. “You had to know Arthur to understand. If he wanted to do something, he did it, and if you didn’t like it, too bad. That might make you think he was a forthright person, but he wasn’t. In his own way, he could be very secretive, like he knew something no one else knew and enjoyed knowing it.”

  Such as the existence of a secret bank account. “Sounds like Dr. Cameron was a complicated man.”

  A sharp laugh. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Your neighbor, Ralph Parelli, told me Alison was ‘edgy’ around her father.”

  She looked at her husband. “Did you ever see anything like that?”

  He shook his head.

  “I didn’t either,” she continued. “Arthur irritated her sometimes, just like he irritated everybody, but edgy? Never. If anything, she seemed to understand him better than anyone else.”

  Monty nodded. “Ali wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. Especially not her father, maybe because Arthur was too remote to actually get mad at anyone, especially her, so…”

  “You’re wrong, Monty.” Margie’s fierce brown eyes narrowed. “Arthur did have a nasty temper. He had a run-in with me once.”

  I waited and watched her own anger build.

  “It was over that damned Corvette of his, oh, yes, I remember now. A couple of years ago, right after he bought the stupid thing, on his days off he would park it in front of his house and start washing it, waxing it, fussing and pawing over it like it was a show horse. You never saw such a display of obsession in your life. Once I sent Monty over there to remind him the neighborhood R&Rs forbid that sort of thing, but next thing you know, Monty was right there with him, drooling over the damned car, too.” She shot her husband a dirty look.

  “Hon, it was a 1957 convertible,” he said mildly. “Well worth the drool.”

  “Men are so useless.” But she smiled fondly at him. “Anyway, Arthur kept doing it, washing and waxing that thing in front of the house, day after day, polluting the environment with God knows what chemicals. It became so irritating that I filed a complaint with the homeowners’ board, and they sent him a cease-and-desist notice, and that was the end of that. Not too long afterwards, I was out front picking up the newspaper at the same time Arthur happened to be fetching his. When he caught sight of me, he walked over and told me to stop coming over to his house and pestering his wife. The nerve! Well, trying to bully Geronimo’s great-great-granddaughter is always a mistake, so I told him I’d visit whomever I wanted whenever I wanted, and that according to the communal property laws of the great state of Arizona, the house was as much Alexandra’s as it was his, so if she invited me over for coffee, as she often did, well, screw him and the horse he rode in on.”

  “What’d he say to that?”

  “He called me an Indian bitch, then stomped back to his house.”

  A glower replaced the placid expression on her husband’s face. “Bitch? Indian bitch? You never told me he called you that! If you had…”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’d have gone over there and punched his lights out, then he’d bring assault charges against you, and there we’d go again. As if I don’t have anything better to do with my time than play Courtroom when I’m not being paid to do it. Remember that time you…” She caught herself. “Anyway, that’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  Remember that time you…I made a mental note to have Jimmy run a background check on both Newberrys. Maybe good ol’ Monty wasn’t as mild-mannered as he appeared.

  The story about the Corvette reminded me of something I’d meant to ask earlier, but it took a moment to figure out how best to phrase the question. “From what you’ve just described, Dr. Cameron had a dark side. It’s my guess he kept a tight rein on his family. Would that be accurate?”

  “Not really,” Margie answered, the anger leaving her face. “At least not from what I observed. You have to remember, Arthur worked very long hours. Emergency room physicians don’t exactly have nine-to-five jobs, or six-to-two, whichever. They stay ’til the bleeding stops. If anything, I’d say Arthur was more, ah, emotionally removed from his family than anything else. Alexandra ran that household, not him. She did everything, from researching universities for the children, to calling out the plumber. He couldn’t have cared less. The only thing he cared about was his damned cars, and whatever ghastly, chewed-up mess came into the ER.”

  She’d just given me the perfect intro to bring up finances. And maybe secret bank accounts. “Sounds like Alexandra must’ve done all the bookkeeping.”

  Margie nodded. “As if she didn’t already have too much to do. Sometimes when I went over there I’d find her half-buried in bills and financial reports, investment portfolios, the whole nine yards. Not that she ever complained. Number-crunching was her thing. Before she married Arthur, she was a CPA for Saxe, Hartnell, and Schaeffer, that big Phoenix accounting firm. She only quit because he wanted her to.”

  “Did she ever mention anything about missing money?”

  “What do you mean, ‘missing money’? Alexandra knew where every dime came from and where it went.”

  “Just wondering.” It explained why Dr. Cameron had opened a secret savings account. His wife acted as chief financial officer at their house, and whatever secret thing was going on with him, he wanted to keep his extra income a secret. “You know, Margie, so far everyone I’ve talked to has described Alexandra as a near-saint, but in my business, and probably yours, we know that very few saints walk the face of this Earth.”

  A wry smile. “I know what you mean, but if Alexandra had a fault, I never saw it. She was beautiful, but even more than that, Alexandra was good.” She didn’t look at me when she said it, though.

  “No hint of an affair?” At her narrowed eyes, I added hastily, “A beautiful woman whose husband worked long hours and sometimes vanished for an entire night, it wouldn’t surprise me if she got lonely from time to time.”

  Margie pursed her lips so tight they almost disappeared. Recognizing that further questions about Alexandra’s faithfulness wouldn’t be welcomed, I changed the subject.

  “How well did you know Alison?”

  The fierceness disappeared. “Ali? Like her mother. Bright. Independent. Certainly no killer, regardless of what the papers are hinting, although for legal reasons they aren’t outright saying.”

  “She did confess to planning the murders.”

  “Show me a teenager who isn’t
above telling a fib every now and then.”

  “A murder confession can hardly be categorized as a fib.”

  She snorted. “Semantics.”

  Further questioning gleaned no more useful information, other than the fact that Alexandra Cameron was as saintly as she was beautiful; Alison wouldn’t hurt a fly; ten-year-old Alec was a budding Einstein; and despite his profession, Dr. Arthur Cameron had the cold soul of a snake.

  As the lovebirds, holding hands, escorted me to the door, I asked one final question. “What you do you know about Ralph Parelli, the guy across the street?”

  Margie laughed. “An interior decorator with a great art collection. And inherited money.”

  “Interior decorator?” There went that stereotype.

  “Casinos,” Mr. Newberry explained. “And nightclubs, the kind movie stars go to. Mobbed up, would be my guess.”

  Margie gave her husband a warning look. “Better not let Ralph hear you say that. We’ll find a dead fish on our doorstep.”

  He gave her a pat on her skinny rump. “Don’t worry, Hon. I’m not as dumb as you think I am.”

  When the door closed behind me, Geronimo’s great-great-granddaughter was giggling like a schoolgirl.

  ***

  Outside, the day had heated up even further, and the Jeep’s upholstery felt like it would ignite any minute. I dug my phone out of my carryall and called Jimmy. He answered right away and he didn’t sound happy.

  “Why do you keep turning off your phone? I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. There’s news…”

  Before he could finish, I said, “Last time I drove around with my phone on I killed the battery. Anyway, I’d like you to run checks on an interior decorator named Ralph Parelli, and Elmont and Margaret Newberry. She’s an attorney; I don’t know for sure what he does, maybe something in banking, but I’m sure you can…”

  “We need to talk, Lena. That’s why I’ve been calling.”

  “We’re talking, but it’s hot as hell out here, so make it quick.”