by Webb, Betty
Rocks had arms?
No Mayflower family, not even the Astors, has made as many contributions to American history as the Alden-Taylors. We count among ourselves presidents, senators, governors, judges, and if I may be so bold—publishers. Yes, publishers! Those upholders of America’s first and most important Freedom, the Freedom of Speech! Truly, God has infused our Alden-Taylor blood with a rare and precious gift. We are.…
I hurried through the rest of the pages and found them filled with more of the same purple-prosed swoonings. Sadly, I saw nothing that would provide clues to her murder. Except on the last toner-challenged page.
…but that person down in Florence, not being of Alden-Taylor blood, he is incapable of grasping the concept. How could he? Superiority is not found in the color of our skins—it is found in the DNA passed down to us from our sainted forefathers and foremothers. Oh, foolish man! But thus is it ever so for men of his ilk to believe.…
Here the copier’s ink failed completely and Gloriana’s stilted words faded from the page.
I stared at the manuscript. Could the passage be alluding to Barry Fetzner, aka God’s Avenger? I leafed back a few pages, then a few more, and I didn’t see his name anywhere. But who else could Gloriana have meant by “that person down in Florence”? Outside of a few ranches and cotton farms, Florence was best known for the Arizona State Prison complex.
Then I recalled the letters Fetzner had sent to Gloriana, their increasing ferocity. And the long reach of the Aryan Brotherhood.
***
After calling the State Attorney’s office and securing access to Death Row, I locked up Desert Investigations and went back to the Jeep. One more appointment to keep before I headed up to Gloriana’s house.
An appointment I dreaded.
Heart thumping with anxiety, I drove to the new office complex on the edge of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation and parked in back where no one would see my all-too-recognizable Jeep. This created an additional problem for me, for it meant I would have to use the building’s deserted rear entrance.
I did not start up the stairs until I thoroughly checked the stairwell’s shadowed corners. Then, .38 in hand, I hurried to the second floor, listening carefully for footsteps other than my own. Once I arrived at my destination, I opened the door and looked into the small waiting room to make certain no one lurked within. Satisfied, I put my .38 back into my carry-all and headed for a chair. Before I could sit down, the door to the inner office opened and Dr. Dolores Gomez smiled her practiced smile at me.
“Hello, Lena. How have you been?”
“Fine.” Never tell a psychologist the truth.
Gomez’ smile never wavered as she ushered me into her large corner office. When I had settled on the leather couch (sitting upright, of course, I was damned if I would lie down), she started in on me.
“This is what, Lena, our fourth session together?”
I didn’t answer. We both knew which session it was.
Gomez pretended not to notice my silence. “Right. Our fourth session. Our fourth court-ordered session. And we’re making absolutely no progress, are we?”
My turn to smile. “No, we’re not.” Only six more sessions to go. I could do that standing on my head. I looked out the window. The view revealed the graceful palms of Scottsdale to the west, the barren flats of the Rez to the northeast. Overhead, hawks rode the thermals, while a V-shaped formation of Scottsdale geese flapped their way from one manmade lake to another. How I wished I flew with them.
“Defendant admits to spontaneous bursts of anger that sometimes result in physical violence.” As Gomez always did at the beginning of a session, she flipped through the court documents, stopping every now and then to read aloud.
And as I always did, I laughed out loud at this legalese version of my righteous actions. “Spontaneous! Oh, come on, Gomez. When I saw the creep beating that child, I did what any decent human being would do. I stopped it.”
“You are saying that any decent human being would knock the woman down?”
This was such a waste of time. “I didn’t really hurt her. If I had, I’d be in jail with my PI license under review, wouldn’t I? Not sitting here talking to you.”
“You bloodied the woman’s nose, Lena.”
“But I didn’t break it. Besides, she asked for it.”
Gomez sighed. “When the police arrived, you were sitting on her chest, threatening to.…Let’s see.” She looked down at the court papers again. “Threatening to, it says here, ‘Rip off your head, bitch, and shit on the stump.’”
I shifted in my seat. The sofa seemed lumpier than usual. “Something to that effect.”
A month earlier, I’d been shopping for ramen noodles at my neighborhood Safeway. On my way back to the Jeep, I saw a woman built like a Sumo wrestler standing beside an elephant-sized SUV, pounding away with closed fists on a sobbing child. As I explained to the judge, I’d simply brought an end to it. Why the judge saw fit to sentence me to a series of anger management sessions remained a mystery. After all, I wasn’t the problem; the child-beater was.
“Lena, just before you arrived, I read the witnesses’ account again and noticed something interesting. The victim of the initial assault was a little girl four years of age.”
I shifted around again but couldn’t seem to get comfortable. In my opinion, leather is much too hot a fabric for the desert. Backsides tend to stick to it. “So?”
“Weren’t you four years old when you were, ah, found unconscious by the side of the road?”
“Hardly a news bulletin, Gomez. The story made all the papers at the time, and every now and then, some sensation-mongering reporter resurrects it.”
“That’s right. Someone shot you.”
“Call it like it was, doc. My mother shot me.”
I saw my mother’s face every night in my nightmares. It was the same face that stared from the mirror at me every morning. You would think that a woman who looked so much like her daughter would cherish her child, not shoot her.
“When you regained consciousness, you couldn’t remember your name or who your parents were, and they never stepped forward. You were raised in foster homes.”
I yawned. “You’re sharp, Gomez, no doubt about it.”
She stretched a brown hand toward me. “Tell me why you were never adopted, Lena. Blond-haired, green-eyed Caucasian children are always at a premium in America.”
I looked out the window again. Something big was gaining on the geese. An eagle? They drifted down from the mountains every now and then, when pickings were lean. But when I squinted, Big Bird revealed itself to be a blue heron. He caught up to the geese and stationed himself near the rear of the formation. I chuckled. Herons in the desert. What next? Two-headed dragons?
“Lena, you didn’t answer me. Why weren’t you adopted?”
“Maybe because little girls with behavior problems aren’t at a premium anywhere, regardless of their coloring.”
Her voice softened, which I had learned to recognize as a danger signal. “What kind of behavior problems are we talking about, Lena?”
The flock turned sharply west, the heron still bringing up the rear. They were headed for the manmade lake at Eldorado Park. Good fishing there, I’ve heard. At least for birds.
“Lena?”
Gomez really should replace the sofa. It wasn’t fit for the Salvation Army, let alone a shrink’s office.
“Lena?”
Exasperated, I finally gave her what she wanted. Nothing else. The rest was my business, not hers. “I kept getting in fights, that’s why. And stealing. Now are you satisfied?”
She frowned. “Didn’t you receive therapy as a child?”
“In Arizona? You must be kidding. The state legislature slashed funding for children’s mental health services years ago, so therapy wasn’t an option.” I took a deep breath. “Not that I needed it.”
“I’m familiar with the state’s budgetary problems,” she said, as she c
ontinued flipping through the court papers. “So. Unable to find permanent placement with an adoptive family, you were warehoused in the state’s foster care system. Hmm. Am I right in surmising that some of those foster homes were less than satisfactory?”
The monster in the closet. I shut that particular nightmare out. “Give or take a few beatings, they weren’t so bad.”
With a “gotcha” smile, she leaned toward me. “After all you’ve been through, Lena, you must be very angry with your mother for not only shooting you, but leaving you to be raised by.…” She stopped, obviously searching for the right words. “Ah, raised by uncaring people.”
Uncaring? I stood up and walked to the window, still wishing I could follow the heron. “Gomez, your insight amazes me.”
She didn’t answer right away, and when I looked back, I saw her staring at me with no visible emotion other than narrowed ebony eyes. After a few moments of mutual silence, she spoke again.
“You realize, Lena, that you can’t go on like this. Creeping into rooms as if something horrible were waiting for you.…”
I hadn’t realized she’d noticed. “Don’t be silly.”
Gomez ignored me. “…taking the law into your own hands whenever you see a child being threatened.…”
I returned to my seat on the lumpy sofa. “Look, Gomez, the child wasn’t being threatened, she was being beaten. There’s a difference. And what’s with this whenever business? I’ve only done it a couple of times before.” That I could remember, anyway.
She nodded. “Perhaps you could get these outbursts of violence under control if you quit running away from your fears and began to face them.”
What an idiot. “Run away from my fears? If anyone is crazy in here, Gomez, it’s you. I’ve never run away from anything in my life.”
As a cop, I had been shot, stabbed, beaten, and even spit upon by HIV-positive perps. As a private detective, I have faced down murderers in both city and wilderness, yet I had never once backed down. So where was the running away?
“I never said you were crazy, Lena.”
I was shaking now, but not with rage. Gomez’ precious hide was safe from me. “You implied it.”
“No, I didn’t. All I did was point out the obvious fact that it’s time you quit running away from your memories. You need to heal your broken life.”
After I could speak again, I said, “You sound like some cheap pop psychology book. I thought shrinks were supposed to sit there and take notes, not give advice.”
She smiled faintly. “I’m a cognitive therapist, not a Freudian. But I’d be glad to jot down a few notes if that would make you feel more comfortable.”
I glared at her.
When the session ended thirty minutes later, I was still glaring.
Chapter 11
Leaving Gomez and her prying behind me, I steered the Jeep toward Gloriana’s Paradise Valley estate.
Most out-of-staters don’t realize it, but for all Scottsdale’s tony reputation, the real high-rollers live in PV, the hilly little burg which separates Scottsdale from Phoenix. There are probably more millionaires living in the shadow of Mummy Mountain than rats in Manhattan. Not that I’m drawing any comparisons.
I turned east off Tatum Boulevard, PV’s main drag, onto Hogan Drive, then wound my way through a frou-frou series of imitation Territorials and Frank Lloyd Wright rip-offs until the street forked at Warpaint and Teepee. I followed Teepee halfway around the mountain until I ran out of asphalt. Glad of the Jeep’s four-wheel drive, I crawled forward on gravel along the top of a steep-sided canyon teeming with chirping, hissing wildlife until I came to a massive iron gate. Behind it rose a Spanish hacienda that took my breath away.
Built of true stucco, rock, and wood—much of it in disrepair—the Hacienda appeared to be centuries old. Knowing the history of the area as I did, I guessed it had been built in the early 1900s as some business magnate’s desert retreat. Gloriana’s grandfather?
Although the Hacienda was partially hidden by lacy jacaranda trees and purple bougainvillea, not to mention the six-foot-high adobe wall that fronted the three-acre estate, the rambling wreck was gorgeous. Tall arched windows welcomed the light, while the balcony that wrapped all the way around the house offered spectacular views of Mummy Canyon. Through the gate, I spied a burbling fountain, its surround studded with handpainted ceramic tiles.
“Must be nice,” I muttered. Then I remembered that its owner had died a hideous death. No, not so nice after all.
I honked three times.
The gate rolled slowly back, and I pulled forward, circling around the saltillo courtyard and onto a fine gravel parking area in front of what appeared to be stables. But I could smell no horses. Then I remembered that they’d been altered to provide servants’ quarters, and that Poor Sandra and her children now lived there.
As the Jeep clanked to a stop, a middle-aged Hispanic woman dressed in black opened the Hacienda’s massive double doors and motioned me inside.
“Good lord,” I exclaimed, gawking at the house’s interior.
The woman ignored my shock. “I am Rosa. Little Mr. Zach, he said to show the pretty blond lady everything she wants.” Her stiff face displaying no emotion, she led me along the two-story-high foyer, but not before I took a moment to study the exquisite stained-glass skylight that cast jewel-colored light onto the tiled floor.
“It is pretty, yes?”
I nodded, holding out my arms so that reds and blues danced along the tanned skin. “Not pretty. Beautiful.”
Rosa’s face relaxed into a smile. My admiration of the house had won her approval. “Miss Gloriana, she drew the picture for that skylight, then my father built it.”
That such delicate beauty could emerge from Gloriana Alden-Taylor’s hands surprised me. But I was here to learn more about her, wasn’t I?
“I take you through the first floor now,” Rosa said, leading me past a double staircase that swooped gracefully up to a gallery lined with oil paintings. More portraits. I recognized the twelfth President of the United States, Zachary Taylor, but the other faces, many of them in military uniforms, one Confederate, escaped me. The man next to Old Rough and Ready, though, looked enough like him to be his son.
Rosa followed my stare. “Miss Gloriana’s grandfather. He built the Hacienda when he come here from Louisiana. He was rich, but not so much as his father or his father’s father, the President. After the war, the family did not do so well.”
“Which war?”
“The one between the states.”
I wondered what it must have been like, growing up in the shadow of those fierce-visaged men, having them stare disapprovingly down from the wall at you, as if assessing your life and finding it wanting.
Lucky orphans, who had no one to live up to.
Lucky me?
A child’s voice broke through my thoughts. “Rosa, we’ve finished our homework. Can we play now?”
A somber blond girl of around eight stood in the doorway, holding a younger boy’s hand. Although there appeared to be at least two years between them, with their Nordic features, they looked enough alike to be twins.
Poor Sandra’s children.
“Yes, you may go to the playroom, but you must stay in there until your mother comes home,” Rosa said, her voice tender. “I will bring you some pop later.”
The little girl led her brother away, still holding his hand.
“Caroline and John,” Rosa explained. “They miss their great-grandmother.”
I wondered if little John was called John-John. Curious, I asked, “Was Gloriana close to the children?” It was hard to envision that stiff-spined martinet unbending for anyone, even a child.
“I believe that Miss Gloriana loves…loved children,” Rosa answered. “But she was not a demonstrative woman. She showed her love by giving them a beautiful home.”
Gloriana had certainly done that. While I had seen my share of gorgeous houses before, none came close to touching the perfect
lines of the Hacienda. But as Rosa led me through the house’s main floor, I began to see the skull beneath the skin. The place was falling down, the plastered walls crumbling, the wooden window lintels shot through with dry rot. The saltillo tile flooring cracked in a thousand places, and the ancient carpets were dangerously thin. Most of the furniture looked ready for the dump.
As we exited one particularly decrepit room—the library, with its myriad shelves of spine-split volumes—Rosa said, “Miss Gloriana, she put everything she had into the Hacienda. It is not so bad as it was.”
This was the after of the before?
The maid pointed toward the vaulted ceiling, with its massive dark beams. “Those are new. They are not for decoration, they hold up the roof. The old beams, they were no good, so Miss Gloriana had them replaced. You would not believe how much it cost.”
“So she was renovating.”
She nodded. “Oh, yes, always. Because of the cost, Mr. Michael, Miss Gloriana’s husband, he did not like living here. He resented the money she spent on the Hacienda, and I heard him say many times that for what she spent, they could own three new houses. I think he was right, but Miss Gloriana did not want three new houses, she wanted only her Hacienda.”
Scarlet O’Hara and her Tara, I thought, trying to picture old Gloriana dithering in crinolines. Nope. Didn’t work. Gloriana had probably never dithered in her life.
Rosa continued. “When Mr. Michael died, Miss Gloriana continued to fix up. When her business began to make money, she fixed up even more.” Here, she motioned to the beams. “A place like this, you must always be fixing. Old houses, they are like people. They get sick.”
And go on life support.
I wondered briefly about Mr. Michael’s death, but pushed the thought aside. From what I’d heard, he had keeled over in public at the Phoenix Open. Little chance for murder there. Then I remembered how Gloriana herself had died. In public. By poison. What goes around comes around?
With uncanny perception, Rosa said, “Miss Gloriana loved Mr. Michael. She would not harm him, not even for her Hacienda. When he died, she did not speak for days. But it was even worse when Big Mr. Zach was killed.”
