Kiss of the Bees w-2

by J. A. Jance

  Once when she was ten or so, she had sat at the kitchen table after dinner, poring through the exotic pages of one of the several Sears and Roebuck catalogs that came to the house each year with her mother’s name on them.

  “Look at these,” Diana had said, pointing to a set of sheer, frilly pink curtains. The curtains could be purchased as part of a set along with a matching bedspread. “Wouldn’t those look nice in my bedroom?”

  Diana’s question had been intended for her mother’s ears, but at that precise moment, Iona had stepped across the kitchen to the pantry where she was just taking off her apron. Before she could finish hanging up her apron and return to the table, Max Cooper had banged down his beer bottle and then leaned toward Diana. He peered over her shoulder, glowering at the page in the catalog.

  “Won’t matter none,” he announced morosely. With a quick jab, he grabbed the catalog out of Diana’s hand and dropped it into Iona’s box of kitchen firewood. “Curtains or no, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And all those hoity-toity girls from school still won’t have nothin’ to do with you. You know what they say,” he added with a leer. “Once a garbageman’s daughter, always a garbageman’s daughter.”

  He had leaned back on his chair then, watching to see if she would try to rescue the catalog from the trash heap which, of course, she did not. Even at that age, she already knew better than to give Max Cooper’s meanness the kind of satisfaction he wanted.

  In the books Diana had devoured every day—fictional stories peopled by the likes of Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton and the Dana girls—the heroines had slick rooms, speedy little roadsters, loving parents, and enough money to do whatever they liked. If they wanted something, they bought it themselves or some nice relative gave it to them. Diana Cooper’s life wasn’t like that. She never had a matching set of curtains, sheets, and pillowcases until after she had been married and widowed and was living alone in the little rock house in Gates Pass.

  She had left the catalog where her father threw it, but she had never forgotten what he had done. And she had never forgiven him either.

  Now, driving toward her interview with Monty Lazarus, Diana Ladd Walker was struck once more by how far she had come from those bad old days. It was a long way from the garbageman’s house in Joseph, Oregon, to the lobby of the La Paloma in Tucson, Arizona. A damned long way.

  When she pulled into the covered driveway in front of the hotel, a valet-parking attendant stepped forward to open the door and claim her car. “Are you checking in?” he asked, helping her out of the seat.

  “No,” she said. “I’m here for a meeting.”

  “Very good,” he said, handing her a claim ticket.

  She stood for a moment watching as he took the Suburban and drove it out of sight. The miracle was that she didn’t feel as though she were out of her league or that she had somehow overreached herself. No, she was here at a first-class hotel, and she felt totally at ease.

  Smiling, Diana smoothed her dress and started inside, nodding a thank-you to the attendant who opened the door.

  Not only was it a long way from Joseph to here, she thought, but every single step had been worth it.

  As she entered the room a tall, gaunt-looking man with a headful of bushy red hair, slightly stooped shoulders, and an engaging grin rose and came toward her. “Mrs. Walker?” he asked.

  Diana nodded and held out her hand. “Mr. Lazarus?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” he said with a courtly bow. “Monty Lazarus at your service.” He led her toward a low, comfortable-looking couch. “I’ve managed to corral this little seating area for just the two of us. I thought it might be nicer for talking than the restaurant would be. Would you care for a drink?”

  “A glass of wine might be nice. A drink sometimes helps take the edge off.”

  “In other words, you’re not looking forward to this.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “About as much as I look forward to having a root canal,” she told him.

  For some strange reason, that answer seemed to tickle his funny bone. Monty Lazarus laughed aloud.

  “The lobby bar isn’t open yet,” he said. “You hang on right here. If you’ll excuse me for a few seconds, I’ll go get you that glass of wine, then I’ll do my best to make this as painless an interview as possible.”

  Diana sat back, closed her eyes, and waited, forcing herself to relax, to forget how nervous being on the subjective side of an interview always made her feel.

  “Have you ever been to a bullfight?” Andy had asked Mitch once.

  “A long time ago,” Mitch answered. “Down in Nogales back in the early seventies. Lori and I went together. I wasn’t especially impressed.”

  “The Nogales ring wasn’t noted for the quality of its fights,” Andy replied. “It’s like small-town sports everywhere. The bush leagues. You get the young guys who aren’t quite good enough to make it in the majors and a few major-league has-beens that aren’t tough enough to cut the mustard anymore. But bullfighting, if it’s done right, is a thing of beauty.

  “The bullfighter has to be able to kill. That goes without saying, but the art of it is all in the capework, in the bullfighter controlling the drama with his cape. The whole point is to bring the bull’s horns so close that physical injury or even death are less than a fraction of an inch away and yet, when the fight is over the bull is always dead, and usually, the bullfighter walks away unscathed. It’s fascinating to watch.”

  Mitch Johnson remembered every word of that conversation, and he had taken them all to heart. This was his capework, then. He had set up the interview and the whole Monty Lazarus fabrication just to prove to himself that he could do it, that he could take the girl, do whatever he wanted with her, and still talk to her mother with complete impunity. There was power in that.

  Mitch stood at the bar waiting for the bartender to finish dealing with some kind of inventory issue. Even that slight suspension in the action was annoying. Now that the interview was about to begin, his whole body was alive with anticipation. The moment when Diana Ladd Walker had come across the room toward him was already one of the high points of his life. He would never forget the cordial smile on her face as he rose to meet her or the way she had held out her hand in greeting. The touch of her fingers had been absolutely electrifying because, like the poor, unfortunate bull, Diana Ladd Walker didn’t suspect a thing.

  She had no idea that her precious daughter belonged to the man whose hand she was shaking. She didn’t have a glimmer that he had spent almost the entire morning with Lani Walker spread out before him as a visual feast for his sole enjoyment. The girl was his, both physically and artistically. Lani was a prisoner of his charcoal and paper as surely as her hands and feet were secured to the trundle bed’s sturdy little corner posts. Diana Ladd Walker had no idea that her interviewer had spent several delightful morning hours being alternately tortured and exhilarated by the process of re-creating that delectably innocent body on paper; that, by controlling his aching to take Lani—because it would have been so easy to do so—he had reveled in the rational victory of denying that physical craving, that fundamental bodily urge. So far Mitch’s violation of Lani Walker had been mainly intellectual, but that wouldn’t last forever.

  “Sorry about the delay, sir,” the bartender said. “Can I help you now?”

  “A glass of chardonnay for the lady,” Mitch Johnson said. “And a glass of tonic with lime for me.”

  For the first half hour of the Monty Lazarus interview, the questions followed such a well-worn track that Diana could have given the answers in her sleep.

  “How long have you been writing?” he asked.

  “Twenty-five years, give or take.”

  “You must have studied writing in school, right?”

  Diana shook her head. “No,” she said. “I applied for the creative writing program here at the university, but I wasn’t admitted. I became a teacher instead.”

  “That’s right,�
� Monty said. “I remember something about that from the book. Your husband was admitted using material you had actually written while you weren’t allowed in, and Andrew Carlisle turned out to be the instructor.”

  Diana nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything to add.

  “Did you and he ever talk about that?” Monty asked.

  “About what?”

  “About the fact that he had admitted the wrong student, that he had given your place to someone who turned out to have far less talent.”

  “We never discussed it,” Diana said. “There wasn’t any need. After all, I won, didn’t I?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Professor Carlisle didn’t let me into his class, but I got to be a writer anyway.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “The University of Oregon,” she answered. “I got my M.Ed. from the University of Arizona.”

  Monty Lazarus continued to ask questions that reeked of numbing familiarity. Diana had answered the same questions dozens of times before, including two weeks earlier on The Today Show.

  “How did you sell your first book?”

  “I submitted it to an agent I met at a writer’s conference up in Phoenix.”

  “And how long have you been writing full-time?”

  “Until I married my husband Brandon, my second husband, I had a full-time teaching job out on the reservation and only wrote during the summers. That’s Tohono O’othham—spelled t-o-h-o-n-o new word o’-o-t-h-h-a-m, by the way. The school where I taught is in Topawa, south of Sells, about seventy or so miles from here. After Brandon and I married, I cut back to substitute teaching. I did that for about three years, and I’ve been writing full-time ever since.”

  As Diana went through the motions of answering the questions, it occurred to her that if Monty Lazarus had actually read her book, he would have known the answers to some of those questions without having to ask. She remembered dealing with many of them as part of the “back” story in Shadow of Death.

  She bit back the temptation of mentioning to her interviewer that it might have been a good idea for him to do his homework. It wasn’t at all smart to tell an interviewer how to do his job, not unless she wanted a hatchet job to appear in the periodical in question. Instead, Diana Ladd Walker answered the questions with as much poise and humor as she could muster.

  Having filled several pages with cryptic notes, Monty Lazarus finally put down his pen. “Okay,” he said. “Enough of that. Now, let’s turn to the more personal stuff.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Gates Pass, west of Tucson.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since 1969. I moved there right after my first husband died. Brandon Walker came to live there after we got married in 1976.”

  “Where were you from originally?”

  “Joseph, Oregon,” she said. “My father ran the town garbage dump. We lived in the caretaker’s house the whole time I was growing up.”

  “So yours is pretty much one of those Horatio Alger stories,” Monty Lazarus offered.

  Diana smiled. “You could say so.”

  “And do you have children?”

  “Yes.”

  For the first time in the whole interview, she felt suddenly wary and uneasy. That was stupid, because she had answered all these same questions time and again. She took a deep breath.

  “In 1975 I was a widow raising an only son, a six-year-old child. In 1976, Brandon and I married. He had two children, two sons. In 1980 we adopted a fourth child, our daughter, Lani.”

  “Four,” Monty Lazarus repeated. “And where are they all now?”

  Maybe knowing that question would automatically follow the first one was the source of some of her anxiety. She opted for putting all the cards on the table at once.

  “The two older boys were Brandon’s. My one stepson disappeared years ago while he was still in high school.”

  “He ran away from home?”

  “Yes. At this point, he’s missing and presumed dead. His older brother got himself in trouble and ended up in prison in Florence. I believe he’s out now, but I have no idea where he’s living. We don’t exactly stay in touch. The two younger ones, my son David, and our daughter, Lani, are fine. David just graduated from law school in Chicago, and Lani is a junior at University High School right here in Tucson.”

  Monty shook his head sympathetically. “It’s tough,” he said. “Raising kids is always a crapshoot. So it sounds as though you’re running about fifty-fifty in the motherhood department.”

  “I guess so,” Diana agreed. Fifty-fifty wasn’t a score she was proud of. She would have liked to do better.

  Monty Lazarus glanced down at his watch. “Yikes,” he exclaimed. “We’ve been at this for over an hour. I’ll go flag down a waitress. Can I get you anything? Another glass of wine, maybe?”

  Diana shook her head. “I’d better switch to iced tea,” she said. “No sugar, but extra lemon.”

  As Monty Lazarus sauntered away, Diana was left mulling his sardonic words about raising kids. Crapshoot. That just about covered it.

  Tommy, Brandon’s younger son, had walked out of their lives one summer afternoon between his freshman and sophomore years in high school. Over the years they had gradually come to terms with the idea that Tommy was probably dead—he had to be. The situation with Quentin wasn’t nearly as clear-cut. Diana sometimes thought they would have been better off if Quentin had died as well.

  The moment she met Quentin Walker, Diana recognized he was both smart and mean. Even as a ten-year-old, his conversation had shown intermittent flashes of intellectual brilliance. No, lack of brainpower had never been one of Quentin’s problems. Curbing his tongue was, his tongue and his temper. He was manipulative and arrogant, angry and unforgiving. Not only that, by the time he was in high school, he had already developed a severe drinking problem.

  Five years earlier, he had been driving drunk. He had crashed his four-wheel-drive pickup into a compact car, a Chevette, killing the woman driver and her two-year-old child. As if that weren’t bad enough, the woman was six months pregnant. The baby was taken alive from his dead mother’s womb, but he, too, had died three days later.

  Brandon was still sheriff at the time of the trial, and the whole ordeal had been a nightmare for him. Not that he was responsible. Quentin was an adult and had to deal with his own difficulties. Brandon Walker’s whole life had been committed to law and order, yet here was his son, a repeat drunk-driving offender, who had blithely killed three people. And when the judge had shipped Brandon Walker’s son off to Florence for five years on two counts of vehicular homicide (the dead unborn fetus didn’t count), it had almost broken Brandon’s heart. It had seemed at the time that things couldn’t get any worse. And then they did.

  Three years and a half years after he was locked up, shortly after Diana had started work on Shadow of Death, Brandon had come home from work and told her the latest bad news in the Quentin Walker department.

  The moment Diana caught a glimpse of his face as Brandon stumbled into the house, she knew something was terribly wrong. His face was so gray she initially thought he might be having a heart attack.

  “What’s happened?” she had asked, hurrying to his side. “What’s going on?”

  Shaking his head, he walked past her proffered embrace, opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a pair of beers—one for each of them. He sank down beside the kitchen table and buried his face in his hands. Concerned, Diana sat down beside him.

  “Brandon, tell me. What is it?”

  “Quentin,” he groaned. “Quentin again.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “He’s hooked up with a gang of extortionists up in Florence,” Brandon answered. “They’ve been operating out of the prison, supposedly accepting bribes on my behalf. It’s a protection racket. They’ve been telling people that if they don’t pay up, something bad is going to happen to their building or business, without
any cops being there to take care of things. In other words, if the marks don’t fork over, they don’t get any patrol coverage.”

  “But that’s outrageous!” Diana exclaimed. “They’re claiming you’re behind it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that’s the whole reason you were elected in the first place,” Diana protested. “To clean things up and put an end to that kind of crap.”

  “Right.” Brandon, staring into the depths of his beer bottle, answered without looking Diana in the eye.

  “How did you find out?”

  “Hank Maddern told me.”

  “Hank!” Diana echoed. “He’s been retired for years. How did he find out?”

  “One of the deputies—Hank wouldn’t say which one—went to him with it and asked for advice as to what he should do about it. The deputy evidently thought I was in on it.” Brandon’s voice cracked with emotion. It took a minute or so before he could continue.

  “Considering the well-known history of graft and corruption during Sheriff DuShane’s watch, you can hardly blame the guy for thinking that. Thankfully, Hank and I go back a long way. He came straight to me with it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Brandon sighed. “I already did it,” he said. “I went straight to Internal Affairs and told them to check it out on the off chance that some of my officers are involved. I told them I’ll cooperate in any way necessary, and that they should do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of it.”

  “What’ll happen to Quentin?” Diana asked.

  Brandon shook his head. “We’re talking felonious activity, Diana. If the prosecutor gets a conviction, he’ll spend a couple more years in prison. And when you’re already in the slammer, what’s another year or two? He won’t give a damn, but it’s going to be hell for us. Our lives will have to be an open book. We’ll have to turn over all our bank records. The investigators will want to know just exactly how much money came in, where it came from, and where it’s gone. I told them to have a ball. We’ve got nothing to hide.”