by Betty Webb
She paused with her hand in the air, a mug dangling from her finger. “Why, yes, we did. But I’m astonished he brought that up.”
“Really?”
She set the cup on the drainer. “Our breakup was pretty ugly.”
“That’s what he said.”
A frown creased her forehead. “He admitted it?”
An odd choice of words, admitted. “Yes. He said you took it pretty hard.”
“I took it hard?” She picked up the mug again, flicked it with a dishtowel, then put it in the cupboard.
I began to get it. “Selma, who broke up with who?”
“Whom,” she said absently, frowning at the mug. It was now cracked, but hadn’t been when I drank from it earlier.
“Whatever. Mind answering the question?”
She took the mug back out of the cupboard and tossed it in the wastebasket. “So much for that. Anyway, I broke up with Lee, but I get the impression he told you the opposite.”
“He’s lied?”
She nodded. And waited.
“May I ask what broke you two up?”
Selma stared at me for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but she did. “I broke up with Lee Casey because I suspected he murdered his wife.”
With that, she disappeared down the hall, leaving me standing there open-mouthed.
***
At the guest cottage, I sat down at the desk and called Jimmy on his cell. When he answered, he sounded like he was suffering from a cold.
“Did you ever find that accident report on Lee Casey’s wife?” I asked.
A thick-voiced, “Nope.”
“Hey, you getting enough vitamin C? You sound awful.”
He cleared his throat. “Thanks for caring. About that car wreck. I was able to get in touch with one of those insurance types who worked on the case, and he told me that the accident investigator felt uncomfortable about the whole thing, especially since Mrs. Casey had no known record of drug use.”
“Drug use? I don’t understand.”
“The autopsy revealed that when her car went off the mountain, she was stoned on Quaaludes,” he rasped.
I took a deep breath. “Mountain?”
“Yeah. For some reason, Mrs. Casey popped a few pills, then took a sunset drive in the Dragoons. When her car went off the road, she broke her neck.”
The whole thing smelled fishier than an anchovy cannery. “Was Mrs. Casey under treatment for stress, or any other type of emotional problem?”
“At the time, her friends said no. Anyway, because of the Quaalude factor, the insurance company refused to pay up. The investigation was brief, but you know how these things can go. Since no one found anything overtly suspicious, the case eventually faded away.”
“Were you able to find out who prescribed the drug for her?”
“Nope. There was a half-empty vial of the stuff in her purse, but no label. It was assumed she bought the stuff in Mexico. Or from a local dealer.”
Selma had told me she’d broken up with Lee Casey because she suspected he’d killed his wife. Now I wondered, too. The site of the accident wasn’t all that far from Los Perdidos, so it was within the realm of possibility that Casey drugged his wife, staged the accident, then hiked back to town. I saw another scenario. He could have paid an accomplice to make the kill for him. “Okay, so no insurance payoff. How much did he lose?”
“One point five mill.”
“Casey inherited his wife’s estate, didn’t he?”
“A flat twenty.”
I whistled. “Twenty million?”
“What else?” He cleared his throat again. “She was an only child, and her father, who predeceased her, owned timberland outside Flagstaff. He logged, then he developed. We’re talking hundreds of acres of housing tracts and strip malls.”
Yep, that could accumulate twenty mill pretty fast. “Any rumors of trouble between Casey and his wife?”
“Early in the marriage there was one report of a domestic, but the wife refused to press charges. Other than that, the guy’s clean, except for a few traffic tickets. Talk about a need for speed.”
I was silent for so long that Jimmy asked, “Lena? You there?”
“Yeah, yeah. So in the beginning, the marriage wasn’t perfect, but things quieted down. Maybe Casey learned to control himself. Or maybe she learned not to call the cops. Then a few years later she dies in a suspicious accident and he inherits everything. You thinking the same thing I’m thinking?”
“I’m way ahead of you, kemo sabe.”
“Of course, accidents sometimes happen.”
“Sometimes.” His voice sounded even huskier than at the beginning of our conversation.
“Try some throat spray, Jimmy. You’re throat’s so rough I can hardly hear you. And do me another favor. First thing in the morning, run a check on one Selma Mann. She owns the guest ranch I’m staying at outside Los Perdidos.”
“Sorry, I’m gonna be in late tomorrow.”
Even though I lived in an apartment above Desert Investigations, Jimmy usually beat me to work. “Doctor’s appointment?”
His turn for silence. He finally broke it by saying, “No, because Enterprise says they can’t pick me up until ten.”
“The car rental place? You having trouble with your truck?” Jimmy’s Toyota pickup was almost new, and like most Toyotas, its problems were few and far between.
After a short silence, he said, “Truck’s gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
His mumbled answer was so low he needed to repeat it. “Lydianna took it.”
Lydianna. The woman Jimmy had been dating. “Took? As in borrowed?”
“Stole!” he said, his voice breaking. “Stole! She told me she had to move some stuff, so I loaned it to her and she never came back. I called and called but she never answered her phone, so my cousin drove me over there, and her landlord said she cleared out in the middle of the night. She’d stripped the place bare, even stole his furniture right down to the lamps! Satisfied now, Miss I-Told-You-So?”
I didn’t know what to say, other than I was sorry.
After another bout of throat-clearing, he said, “Thanks for the sympathy.”
“Did you file a police report?” My betting was that he hadn’t.
“No. And I’m not going to, either.”
I sighed. “We sure have our troubles, don’t we, partner?”
“Does that ‘we’ mean you lied about things going great with Warren?”
I told him the truth, that my love life was as screwed up as his.
***
After showering off the grime I’d collected while searching for bullet casings, I slipped into fresh jeans and tee shirt, then picked up Precious Doe’s picture from the night stand. I looked at it for a long while, thinking about her suffering, remembering my own.
The foster homes. The beatings. The rapes.
But I had survived.
Why me, and not her?
I studied her face again. Her eyes were forever shut against the world, but I knew they would have been a warm mahogany, gentle and trusting.
Superimposed on them, the Cutter’s malicious eyes glinted like a freshly-sharpened knife.
***
Because of civil rights laws, Sheriff Avery couldn’t go house to house interviewing every African immigrant in town, but I could. Before we’d hung up, Jimmy had given me a list of every African tribe that practiced female genital amputation. I flipped through the phone book, but quickly gave up on that form of inquiry, since I had no idea what surname belonged to what African tribe. On the off-chance that a reporter might be hanging around the Cochise County Observer on a Sunday, I called the newsroom, where Bernice Broussard answered.
She listened while I made my request, then with obvious disapproval, said, “You want a list of just the African families and their tribal associations? You’re treading on delicate ground here, aren’t you, Ms. Jones? The very white, very American Revere
nd Hall has apparently been perpetrating the same tribal practice, so why pick on the Africans?”
“Because Nicole Hall said the Cutter had an African accent, that’s why.” I reminded her of Precious Doe’s injuries and the very real possibility they might soon be inflicted on another child. “Bernice, we have to get that woman off the streets.”
She grunted. “Point taken. The best person to give you that info would be the president of the Good Neighbor Society, who could tell you everything you need to know, but I doubt she’ll talk to you. She’s pretty protective of them.” I heard a rustling of papers. “Give me an hour. I’ll go through our files and see what feature stories we’ve written in the past few years which identified the tribal groupings of some of our newer citizens. That’ll at least give you a place to start.”
I remembered our earlier conversation, when she had sent me over to the Los Perdidos Library to look up the story on Tujin Rafik. “I thought your morgue files only went back a year?”
“We keep our computer backups forever.” With that, she hung up.
She was as good as her word. Fifty minutes later, while I lay stretched out on the bed reading the Dean Koontz paperback I’d picked up at the Tucson airport, my cell rang. It was Bernice, with a long list of names and tribal associations.
“You find her, I get an exclusive, right?”
“Right.” If it were possible. Given the swarm of media in town, she could easily get scooped.
On that note, we rang off and I headed to my Jeep. Selma was in the corral again, working another horse. When she saw me, she waved gaily, as if no hostility had passed between us. I waved back.
The first name on my list of African immigrants was Abdul Jokabi, who had moved to Los Perdidos with his family ten years earlier. The newspaper had written a feature on him when he became the town’s first African immigrant to buy a house. It was located in a small tract not far from the main drag, and as I parked on the pleasant, well-manicured street, I spotted a new Dodge minivan and an almost-as-new Honda Civic in the driveway. Happy children’s voices greeted me as Jokabi himself opened the door. A handsome man clad in the standard Arizona uniform of artfully-torn jeans and Arizona Diamondbacks tee shirt, he seemed friendly enough until I told him who I was looking for.
“You crazy?” he yelled, his accent faint. “We do not associate with animals like that! Why you think we move here in the first place?”
He slammed the door in my face.
Chapter Twenty-five
Giving up on the hostile Jokabi, I next tried the Maranji family. They lived in a peeled-paint duplex where the front yard was littered with broken children’s toys, and the only vehicle in evidence was a rusty Chevy Cutlass that had once been blue. In the neighboring yard, a pit bull growled from a chain attached to a laundry pole.
A young woman wearing a bright dashiki and carrying a pink-wrapped baby answered the Maranji’s door. “Yes?”
Keeping my nose out of door-slam reach, I started my spiel.
Halfway through, she interrupted me. “These are things we do not talk about. We are Americans now.”
“I understand, but the girl they call Precious Doe died because of this procedure. Perhaps other girls in town have, too. If you’ve heard anything at all, please tell me.”
She studied my face, then nodded. “I saw you on the television this morning when you told that reporter woman about Dr. Wahab. When you walked away, that woman went over to his house and asked ugly things. Other television people did, too. I watched it all, right here from my living room.”
For the first time, a smile touched her lips. “It made me laugh. You wonder why I am so happy at that? My husband works for Dr. Wahab. He is a bad man, that one.” She glanced up and down the street, taking in the boys shooting hoops next door, the girls riding their bicycles along the sidewalk. She shifted the baby on her shoulder and stood aside. “You come in. We talk.”
Encouraged, I entered the house. In a small but tidy living room decorated with African carvings and masks, twin boys wearing matching jeans and shirts played with a Game Boy.
Their mother reached over and turned the game off. “Go to your room.”
“Aw, Mom!”
“You heard what I said.”
“As soon as we finish this game.” A wheedling whine.
“Now!”
Grumbling, the boys stalked off.
“Good-looking kids,” I offered.
She sat down and motioned for me to do the same. “They are not respectful. In some ways, the old customs are best.”
“But not all?”
She kissed the top of her baby’s head. “This cutting of which you speak, that is a wicked custom I was happy to leave behind. To perform such evil on a little girl, it is a great sin.” She kissed the baby again. “Such a thing will never happen to my Caroline. My husband has given his word. Unlike Dr. Wahab, he is a good man.”
I studied my notes. “You came here, what, ten years ago?”
“When I was twenty, yes. I did not have my boys yet.” At my expression, she smiled. “They are only eight.”
“Big for their age.”
Her smile grew broader. “Children do not starve to death in America or die so much from AIDS. And your wars, you fight them other places.”
Goody for us.
I wasn’t here to discuss the benefits of living in America as opposed to anywhere else, so I brought her back to the subject at hand. “Mrs.Maranji, do you know anything about the woman called the Cutter?”
She caressed her daughter’s black, silken hair. “That thing, it always happened to the girls in my tribe. There is a ceremony and when the cutting is finished, the grandmothers who guarded us all night so that we would not run away, sing that we are now women.” Gazing at her child’s innocent face, she added, “My good friend, Esiankiki, she died beside me on the cutting mat. So did Chanya and Na’Zyia.”
I realized, then, what she was saying. “You lived through it.”
Before she answered, she kissed her baby again. “Yes. But many mothers cried that night.”
Then why did they have their daughters butchered in the first place, I wanted to yell, but I already knew the answer. An impure girl was a worthless girl.
“This Cutter, the one who lives in Los Perdidos. Do you know her name?”
To my disappointment, she shook her head. “Her name is never spoken. She is just called the Cutter.”
“If I wanted to contact her, how would I begin?”
The baby made a gurgling noise and spewed some foam. Her mother smiled. “My pretty,” she cooed, kissing the tiny forehead. “My so very, very pretty girl.”
“Mrs. Maranji? Where can I find this woman?”
“There is a place where some of our people meet in what they call a discussion group, but I do not know if that woman attends. Someone will know, perhaps one of those who do not care for the customs here. These people, they plan to return to Africa once they are rich.”
At my exclamation, she said, “American money goes far in Africa. On what my husband makes at the chemical plant, they will live like kings, and in Kenya, where I was born, the men can have as many wives as they want.” She scowled. “These people who meet at this place I tell you about, many of them think it shameful that an American man is allowed only one wife.”
The people she was talking about didn’t know about Arizona’s polygamists and their ten-wife families. If they ever found out, it could save them plane fare.
***
Following Mrs. Maranji’s directions, I soon found Los Perdidos Unitarian Church. After wading through a crowd of well-dressed parishioners, an elderly man directed me to the church secretary. “Barbara knows everything that goes on around here.”
Somehow I doubted that.
A few minutes later, after most of the parishioners drifted away, Barbara, a middle-aged woman with a comforting voice and just-as-comforting waistline, showed me the outbuilding where the Middle Eastern Discussion Grou
p met.
“They won’t get together again until next Friday, after prayers,” she said. “Our book club’s meeting there tonight, though, if you’re interested. Seven o’clock, drop-ins welcome. They’re discussing Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See. It’s about foot-binding in old China.”
Great. More horrors perpetrated against little girls. I thanked her anyway, explaining that my choice of reading seldom made the book club list. “Actually, I’m looking for an African group, not a Middle Eastern group.”
“One and the same, frequently. Muslims of all different colors and cultures, united by faith. It would be nice if we Christians could say the same thing about ourselves, wouldn’t it?”
This wasn’t the time for a debate on the relative merits of ecumenism, so I simply asked, “Do you know who leads the discussion group?”
“That would be Dr. Moustafa Abdou.”
Another Egyptian with a PhD. Didn’t that country have any dropouts? “Don’t tell me. He works at the chemical plant, right?”
She nodded. “Head of research. A nice man, if a bit, well, old-fashioned about women’s place in the world.” She smiled as if it didn’t matter.
After a few more moments of chat, she gave me his address, adding that if he couldn’t help me, to try his wife. “Mrs. Abdou knows what’s going on in town, more so than her husband.”
The Abdou’s house was right down the street from the Wahab’s house where a lone media truck was still camped in front, the brunette reporter who’d attempted to interview me, standing on their doorstep. At first glance, the Wahabs didn’t appear to be home.
The reporter didn’t let the silence deter her. “Dr. Wahab!” she yelled, waving her mike while the cameraman zeroed in on the house. “Is it true that CPS has taken custody of your daughter?”
A face flashed in front of the window, then disappeared.
Encouraged, the reporter moved forward with the cameraman. “Did they take custody because you were about to have your daughter circumcised?”
There was that damned inaccurate word again, circumcised. Wouldn’t the media ever get it right?
