by Webb, Betty
Stuffing the brochure into my carry-all, I headed toward the exhibit hall’s rear exit and soon found myself at the top of an artificial berm that sloped gently to the Old West Encampment.
Below me, in a manmade valley, sprawled a motley panorama of faux prairie schooners, faux tepees, faux wickiups, faux hogans, and faux log cabins. A few real Indians—mainly Pima, Navajo and Apache, wearing cynical smiles on their faces—strolled along in tribal dress. When I reached them, I saw they were handing out fliers inviting everyone to their next pow-wow. Cowboys, some of them actually real, did likewise. In the cowboys’ case, however, the brochures hyped local dude ranches and city-slicker cattle drives. Near a deeply banked campfire stood a chaps-wearing cowboy poet I recognized as “Chaps” Peterson. His repertoire included poems about starlit nights, lonely trails, mean broncs, and unfaithful saloon gals. The freshening wind (rain tomorrow?) carried snatches of his current presentation.
Left my sweet lil’ Sal back home,
Been ridin’ the trail seven months and a day.
While I been gone, ol’ Lonesome John
Done honeyed my Sal and took her away.
It was all phoney as hell, but who cared? The true West was no longer available except in old men’s dreams, and the more the cities closed in, the more we needed the dream. While it might be pretty to imagine an Arizona unblemished by housing tracts and satellite dishes, that hope was no more realistic than imagining Manhattan without gridlock. Evolution happens, whether we like it or not.
An actor dressed like Wyatt Earp handed me a flier. “Shoot-out in fifteen minutes, be there or be square. We’re gathering on the other side of the Pima fry bread stand.”
“Where’s that?” I asked Wyatt, remembering that the Rev planned to meet me there. I’ve always been a sucker for fry bread, especially the way the Pimas cook it: hot, puffy, and dripping with wild honey.
I followed Wyatt’s directions to the stand, purchased a half-order, then found a seat at a vacant picnic table and began to eat. Pima honey was dripping down my chin when I heard a familiar voice behind me.
“Baby, I can explain everything.”
Dusty.
Quickly assembling my thoughts, I turned to face a man I’d once thought I loved. “Well, well, look what the bobcat dragged in.”
My insult was no exaggeration. Except for Dusty’s always immaculate dude ranch attire, he did look like something coughed up by Arizona wildlife. His trail-weathered face had taken on a yellow tinge, and his lanky form seemed crumpled in on itself. Red veins streaked the whites around now-faded blue eyes, contrasting garishly with the purple circles beneath. His hands shook, and I suspected not from nerves.
“Lena, why won’t you return my calls?” Even his voice sounded broken.
A few months earlier Dusty had discarded me for another woman, a tourist who’d made a successful play for him at the Happy Trails Dude Ranch where he worked. Still smarting from his betrayal, I wanted to hurt him as badly as he’d hurt me.
“You sure as hell didn’t return my calls when you were off in Vegas with that…that…” I thought hard but couldn’t come up with a better word, “…with that bitch.”
Without invitation, he sat down on my right, his thigh pressed against mine. It was all I could do not to press back. Not that I still cared about him or anything.
“Baby, let me tell you what really happened. She and I.…”
Thigh scalding, I shifted down the bench as far away from him as I could get. “As entertaining as your yarn might be, I’m not interested. Besides, I’m working.”
He narrowed his bloodshot eyes at my fry bread. “It doesn’t look like you’re working.”
I snorted. “There’s a liar at this picnic table, and it sure isn’t me.”
“Please, Lena.…”
To my great relief, I heard Reverend Giblin’s baritone behind me. “Told you it wouldn’t be long, didn’t I, Lena? And great news. David and Emil here have agreed to tell you everything they know.”
I looked past Dusty and saw the Rev flanked by two men I had seen earlier at the SOBOP booth. “That’s wonderful. Let’s get started.”
The Rev, no dummy, raised his eyebrows. “Ah, will Dusty…?”
“The cowboy was just leaving.”
Dusty clenched his jaw, and for a brief moment, I thought he might refuse. But then his dude ranch manners kicked in and he stood up. “I’ll talk to you later, Lena.”
“Not if I see you coming first,” I muttered into the last piece of my fry bread. I wished my heart would quit hurting.
As Dusty stalked off, the Rev gave me a sad look. I knew what he was thinking, that I always managed to screw up my relationships. He was right, too. I didn’t bother to tell him that this time, Dusty rejected me first.
After I was certain my voice wouldn’t tremble, I patted the bench and said, “C’mon, Rev, take a load off.”
Once the Rev introduced me to the Hispanic man, I realized where I’d seen him before. Emil Ramos, the owner of Verdad Press, made the local news broadcasts recently when he got into a spat at the Arizona Capitol with Representative Lynn Tinsley, the sponsor of the English-only bill. During the shouting match, Ramos screamed at Tinsley in five languages; besides the usual English and Spanish, Ramos was also fluent in German, Vietnamese, and Navajo. Responding in the fractured Spanglish she probably used with her maid, Tinsley called Ramos a “wetback.” Ramos, whose family had lived in Arizona several generations longer than Tinsley’s, reminded the congresswoman that if she wanted to return America to its native language, she’d have to learn approximately three hundred Native American dialects. Beside herself with rage, Tinsley then uttered the words that, although they were bleeped out on the local news, ran in their full glory on MTV. “Fuck you, beaner.”
David Zhang, owner of Arizona Trails Publishing, kept a much lower profile. A fourth-generation Arizonan, he, like many other local Asians, descended from the Chinese laborers who built the railroad across the West in the nineteenth century. As Zhang proudly told me, he began his publishing house on the strength of one book, The Iron Highway, which contained selections from his track-laying ancestors’ memoirs.
“My original publishing mission has expanded to include books on scenic areas all over the Southwest,” Zhang finished. “Most of them are the big glossy, coffee-table extravaganzas you see in gift shops, but I also produce smaller, less expensive guides for campers and hikers.”
I told Zhang that besides the book I’d bought a few minutes earlier, I also owned his beautifully photographed seasonal guide to the Grand Canyon. “My boyfriend bought it for me,” I said. Then I remembered. “I mean my ex-boyfriend.”
To forestall any questions, I quickly asked, “Randall Ott couldn’t make it?”
Zhang grimaced. “Captain America’s still signing books for his admirers. Besides, he only mixes with white people. But since you’ve got the prerequisite coloring, he might condescend to talk to you once we’ve left. Just don’t be surprised if he forces you to buy that nasty screed of his in order to get an interview.”
Losing America wasn’t my kind of nightstand reading, but if that’s what it took.… “As long as it’s cheap.”
“Doesn’t get much cheaper,” Zhang said. His tone made me suspect he didn’t mean the book’s price.
To my surprise, the stories the three told dovetailed with Owen Sisiwan’s. The day before the murder, Gloriana had suddenly asked everyone at their dinner table if they’d like to go on a hike at Oak Creek, and—impressed by her good will—the group said yes. They had arrived at Oak Creek around ten in the morning and hiked for a couple of hours. At various points, several people had lagged behind to pick flowers and herbs, only to have Owen confiscate their haul.
“Owen had no patience with that kind of behavior,” the Rev finished up. “He said that as long as they were on state land, they needed to keep their hands to themselves.”
Ramos smiled. “As I remember, he told them if they wante
d greenery, to buy it at the resort’s flower shop.”
“How well did you know the other people on the hike?”
He smoothed his silvered hair. “I know of Randall Ott, and his inamorata, Representative Lynn Tinsley. Perhaps the honorable Ms. Tinsley believed that the hemlock she picked would ward off those black helicopters she is so worried about.”
I frowned, not certain that I’d heard right. “Black helicopters?”
Zhang winked at Ramos and grinned at me, flashing the kind of perfect orthodontia you only find in Scottsdale or Beverly Hills. That and his Armani sports coat hinted that Arizona Trails’ books sold well. Or maybe he’d inherited money.
“You haven’t heard about Tinsley’s black helicopters?” Zhang asked. “The only things that worry her more than a child speaking Spanish are the black helicopters she believes are jamming the television signals at her house. Perhaps you haven’t read her magnum opus, The Area 51 Project the Government Doesn’t Want You to Know About. She had ten thousand copies published at her own expense and now she can’t even give them away. So much for her dreams of matching her boyfriend’s publishing success.”
“Not enough hate in her book,” Ramos murmured. “Just fear.”
Frightened people frequently kill, though, so I filed the knowledge away for further consideration. “Who else spent their time picking plants?”
Ramos looked abashed. “I must admit that I was foolish enough to do so. My eye was captured by a purple aster, though, not hemlock. Owen made me give my treasure to him, which served me right for being so thoughtless. Another sinner was Gloriana’s niece, Sandra Alden-Taylor. The woman is a lovely person, of that I am quite sure, but several times, Mr. Sisiwan had to caution her, also, to leave the plant life alone.”
Zhang flashed his teeth again. “Yeah, Sandra seemed determined to shovel half the creek’s flowers into her fanny pack.”
That made several people who couldn’t keep their hands off the plants, even those who should have known better. But I sympathized. The glories of Arizona’s deserts, canyons, and forests could do strange things to people.
I noticed the Rev watching me closely, a worried expression on his face. Was it because of my questioning, or was it something else?
“What?”
“Lena, Owen made everyone hand over what they’d picked. Everyone. He did everything short of frisk us to make sure we didn’t carry even a leaf away.”
Going over everyone’s stories, I began to run the numbers in my mind. “Ott, Tinsley, Gloriana’s niece, you three…that’s only six, plus Owen. Who have I missed?”
The Rev smiled. “Myra Gordon, an acquisitions librarian from Wyatt’s Landing, down near Casa Grande. She was the only one on the hike who is actually staying at the resort. The rest of us here just drive up to the Expo every morning. Anyway, from what she told me, she’s attending SOBOP to find locally published books for the Wyatt’s Landing Public Library. And Zach, Gloriana’s grandson, came along, too. But I can assure you that he didn’t pick a thing. He was right in front of me, and I would have noticed.”
I’d heard such assurances before. They seldom amounted to much. “Zach would have seen the water hemlock and heard Owen’s warning, right?”
The Rev shrugged. “I guess. But he’s a good man, Lena. One of the best.”
Most of the men on Death Row had once been described by someone as “a good man.” Especially by their mothers.
“One final question, Rev. Did any of you see exactly what Owen did after he confiscated the plants?”
“He replanted most of the herbs and flowers, and disposed of the too badly damaged plants in the brush. But he put the hemlock in his jacket pocket.” The Rev’s face looked glum.
Not good. Owen had probably collected enough lethal flora to wipe out the entire Arizona Diamondbacks team, and half the Cardinals to boot.
Then something else occurred to me, something that might help ease the pressure on Owen. “When you all got back to the resort, did you hear anyone talking about the water hemlock?”
Zhang nodded. “Yeah, Randall Ott was pretty ticked that some Indian had dared tell him what to do. I think most people ignored him, though.”
Maybe, and maybe not. For the first time that day I began to feel optimistic about Owen’s prospects. Not only did the hiking party know about the poisonous plant, but so did anyone else who had been on the receiving end of Ott’s complaints. As for the others at SOBOP, I had already noticed that the book I bought from Zhang’s display contained a full-color picture of the plant. The page even carried a bold type warning, in red, which detailed its poisonous parts: namely, all of them. I did a quick mental calculation. Anyone intent on killing Gloriana could drive back up to Oak Creek in under two hours, pick more hemlock, and return to the resort before the salad course was set out in the banquet hall. With the various seminars continuing throughout the day, one person’s absence wouldn’t be noticed. Unless.…
“Did anyone not turn up where he was supposed to? Like on a panel?” I asked the Rev.
The Rev thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not that I’ve heard.”
Means and opportunity enough for everyone then, not just Owen. But what about motive? My early years with the police had taught me that barring the odd serial killer, gang banger action, or sloppier-than-usual robberies, the solution to a murder usually lay in the victim’s own life. All I had to do was find out enough about Gloriana Alden-Taylor to determine who hated the woman enough to kill her.
“You gentlemen have been a great help,” I told the three, reserving my warmest smile for the Rev. “One more question and then I’ll let you get back to your display booth. I only met Gloriana once, so I don’t know much about her. Tell me, what was she really like?”
From the frost that swept over the picnic table, you’d think a glacier had dropped from the skies. None of the men, including the Rev, seemed inclined to answer.
I waited until Emil Ramos, his eyes glittering with hatred, said, “Miss Jones, you want to know what she was like? Then I will tell you. Gloriana Alden-Taylor would disgust the Devil.”
Chapter 4
Nearby, two “Indians” from indeterminate tribes told jokes in Brooklyn accents, while their three children, dressed as cowboys, play-shot each other with plastic guns. In front of the Old West Saloon, one stuntman punched another, who then rolled dramatically across the dirt, screaming old-time epithets while tourists’ cameras snapped. Near the Overland Stage Stop, Wyatt Earp and his posse swaggered toward the Clantons, long-barreled firearms at the ready.
Glamorized killing, therefore not my problem. I specialized in the real deal.
As I looked into Zhang’s and the Rev’s eyes, I saw agreement with Ramos’ shocking statement. Gloria Alden-Taylor had no admirers here.
“Perhaps you’d care to explain, Mr. Ramos.”
“I would be happy to explain her evil if you have a free year or two in your schedule, Ms. Jones,” Ramos answered, his words like razors. “But why do you not simply look at the Patriot’s Blood catalog? The titles alone will tell you the kind of person Gloriana was.” He closed his eyes and began to recite. “Black and Brown: A History of the Degenerate Races.” Or perhaps “The Mexican Mud People.” When he opened his eyes, the depths of hatred there frightened me.
The Rev cleared his throat. “I’m sure you realize by now that Gloriana’s publishing house specializes in books that take an extreme political view. They are very, very troubling to large numbers of people, myself included.”
Zhang’s ire simmered only slightly less than Ramos’. “Randall Ott’s book is disgusting, of course, but the idiot doesn’t yet advocate killing immigrants at the border, or at least he didn’t the last time I talked to him. Some of Gloriana’s other authors actually do. As a publisher myself I have a strong commitment to the First Amendment, but as far as I’m concerned, in this political climate, Gloriana wasn’t simply yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater. She was carrying gas ca
ns toward the flames.”
I agreed. In the light of recent events, what Gloriana had been doing was unconscionable. Two days after 9/11, a Scottsdale convenience store clerk had been shot dead by a gun-toting “patriot” too ignorant to know a Sikh from an Arab. Since then, many of the city’s frightened Saudis, Pakistanis, and Egyptians had changed their phone numbers to unlisted ones and begun wearing Western dress to their mosques. Yet under the banner of patriotism, domestic terrorism continued to increase.
“Were Gloriana’s books just money-makers, or did they reflect her personal beliefs?” I asked Zhang. Not that it made any difference. Gasoline is gasoline, whether you like the smell or not.
Zhang looked baffled. “I’m not certain. She didn’t seem particularly bothered to be seated at our table. And don’t forget, she arranged that hiking trip for us. Even after she’d seen the color of our skins.”
“But she didn’t go along.”
“No, she didn’t,” he said. “Looking back on it, the whole thing was odd. But who’s going to pass up a trip to Oak Creek, with somebody else paying for the gas? Certainly not me.”
Something else seemed odd, too. “Who was in charge of the seating arrangements? Considering everything.…” I didn’t bother to state the obvious.
Ramos actually blushed. “I am sorry to tell you that my wife Beatrice was responsible for the seating. She knows few of the publishers personally, most are just names to her. After she sketched a preliminary seating chart, she did ask me to go over it, but I became so busy with other organizational details that I forgot. Later, when Beatrice realized what had happened, she blamed herself.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness, his thick gold wedding band glinting in the sun. “I am still trying to convince her that Gloriana’s death was not her fault, that if it had not happened at SOBOP, it would probably have happened elsewhere.”
