by Betty Webb
A sigh. “No, I did not check out Kay Starr.”
“Most women change their names when they marry.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
“It shouldn’t be too hard for you to find out her maiden name.”
Another sigh.
“As soon as you find out, run the same kind of check on her that you ran on everyone else. When’s the earliest you can get to it?”
“Tomorrow. At the office.”
“Not tonight?”
“Lena, this may come as a surprise to you, but I do have a life.”
Before he could cover the mouthpiece, a woman’s voice in the background complained that he was taking too long.
“You have company!” I don’t know why it bothered me to find out that Jimmy was entertaining a woman at his trailer, but it did.
“See you tomorrow, Lena.”
He hung up.
Jimmy was right about two things. One, office hours were over. Two, he had a right to a personal life, and with whomever he chose. Judging from past history, the woman at his trailer would be crazy as a coot, but that wasn’t my problem.
Something else was, if I could just put my finger on it.
Still bothered, I returned to the sofa to cuddle Snowball, but found no help there. The kitten was fast asleep. Disappointed, I set him/her down and stared at the wall.
I tried the deep breathing exercises that a long-ago yoga teacher had suggested. After several minutes—or an hour, I could no longer tell time—my breaths turned to gasps when I thought I felt spiders tiptoeing across my skin. The sensation became so intense I jumped up and ran to the full-length mirror hanging on my bathroom door only to discover that the spiders, metaphorically speaking, anyway, were all in my head.
I went back to the sofa. Could the Kardashians be any worse than this?
When I turned on the TV, I got my answer, so I turned it back off.
What? For God’s sake, what?
It wasn’t what someone had said, I finally realized, it was the look on someone’s face when they’d said it.
Whose face had changed?
Well, there was no point in obsessing about the case notes again. Only rarely did I record someone’s body language or facial expressions, only their statements. I glanced at my watch and was astounded to find that it was almost eleven. If I had any sense, I would forget the whole thing and go to bed, but given my insomnia, I knew I’d simply lie there staring at the ceiling until morning. The idea of another sleepless night didn’t thrill me, but it was better than nightmares.
I looked over at my cat. “Snowball, purr or something.”
When kittens sleep, they sleep deeply. No purrs were forthcoming.
A writer friend once told me she got her best ideas in the shower, so I left Snowball to his dreams and headed toward the bathroom again, this time at a slower pace.
Forty minutes later, my skin was as wrinkled as a prune’s but I still hadn’t figured anything out. Disgusted, I donned my usual nighttime apparel of pajamas bottoms and tee shirt and went to bed.
***
It took several moments for my still-asleep brain to realize someone was banging on my apartment door. I grabbed my .38 and ran to answer it.
“Would you please not stick that thing in my face?” Dusty said, when I opened the door.
I lowered my gun. “What the hell are you doing here in the middle of the night?”
“It’s not the middle of the night. It’s five in the morning. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“If this is a booty call, cowboy, try elsewhere.”
“Ah, Hon, still so cynical.” That heart-breaking smile. “I come bearing gifts.”
“Such as?”
“Such as coupons for a complementary two-hour trail ride up at Slim’s.”
Two-hour trail ride?
Slim Papadopolus, Dusty’s ex-boss, owned the Happy Trails Dude Ranch in Carefree. Every now and then, especially when a case turned problematical, I rented a horse from him and took to the trails. I returned refreshed, often with the case sorted out. But it had been almost a year since I’d been up there, way too long.
“Dusty, I already told you no, remember?”
“I’m giving you another chance. If we leave now, you’ll be back by the time Desert Investigations opens up.”
Oh, what the hell. I stepped back and let him in.
***
An hour later we were riding through Tonto National Forest, me on a roan gelding named Storm, Dusty on a pinto mare named Esther. A horse’s back being better than a psychiatrist’s couch, I felt myself relaxing as we wound up the trail toward the ruins of an old Hohokam Indian village.
Despite many tourists’ beliefs, most Indians hadn’t lived in teepees. The Navajos used hogans; the Senecas lived in longhouses; the Hohokams, now extinct as a homogenous tribe, built centuries-standing pueblos. The pueblo above Carefree had been built more than eight hundred years ago, yet some rock walls remained upright, bearing witness to their skills. The residents also farmed, digging canals to irrigate the harsh desert climate, and today those canals could still be seen in satellite photos. The trail we were on had been used by the Hohokam people as they cared for their crops.
A couple of times I had ridden up here with Jimmy, whose Pima tribe was believed to be the direct descendants of the Hohokam. Part of me wished Jimmy was beside me today instead of my disloyal ex-boyfriend, but as they say, beggars can’t be choosers, and I considered those coupons a gift from the Hohokam gods.
Thank you, Earth Doctor.
“What are you smiling about, Hon?”
“Just thinking about how beautiful this all is. The saguaros, the sage, the birds. Did you see the cardinal back there?”
“Saw two of them. Mr. Cardinal and his girlfriend.”
I couldn’t resist saying, “Sure hope she has better luck with him than I ever did with you.”
“Oh, Hon, you wound me.” That heart-breaking smile again. “Haven’t I told you a hundred times that I’ve changed? Been to rehab, made my amends, cleaned up my act?”
The wind, as it wafted through the saguaros, seemed to whisper Liar! Due to the beauty of the day, I chose to ignore the warning, and concentrated instead on the sound of the horses’ hooves against the fresh-smelling soil. Maybe Dusty was right, that life that turned me cynical. For certain, I had let myself become blind to life’s frequent beauty. This soul-stirring day, for instance.
***
Two hours later we’d just finished putting our horses away when Slim, the ranch’s owner, pulled me aside. “Got a horse I want you to meet, Lena.”
I’d known Slim as long as I’d known Dusty, and if he wanted me to meet a horse, it would be a horse worth meeting. Dusty’s temperamental opposite, Slim had honest gray eyes peering out of his dark Grecian face. An ex-jockey, he was little over five feet tall, which made me feel like a giant as I followed him to a corral behind the barn. Dusty remained behind in the tack room, explaining that one of the wranglers wanted to show him a hand-tooled saddle he might be interested in buying. Dusty liked flashy, thus his penchant for redheads.
However flashy that saddle was, it couldn’t possibly compare to the mare romping and bucking her way around the corral. A half-Arab “leopard” Appaloosa, black spots the size of a silver dollar dotted her white body. Her dish-shaped face and narrow black nose authenticated her Arabian heritage. Her eyes, dark and wild, stared straight at me as I climbed the wooden rail fence and watched her caper.
I had never seen anything more magnificent.
“I let her out in the paddock an hour ago,” Slim said, climbing up beside me. “It takes that long to get the kinks out of her system. Lots of fire in that girl.”
“She’s extraordinary.”
“No lie there. Trouble is, she was owned by an idiot
.”
“Oh?”
The story Slim told me wasn’t all that unusual. A newly arrived transplant from the East, having fallen in love with the West, decided to buy a green-broke horse. The problem was, the dude had never ridden before, and the first time up on the Appaloosa, she bucked him off and broke his leg.
“Probably had something to do with the fact that the ninny kept her in a stall for a month without letting her get any exercise.”
I stared at him. “You allowed that?”
“Nah. I let her out myself every day, except for that last week. My sister, the one back in Hoboken, had a heart attack I flew back to see her. I was so shook up I forgot to tell one of the hands to see to her. When I got back, little Spot there had already done a number on him.”
“He named her Spot?” I couldn’t keep the outrage from my voice.
“Sure did. But that’s not the worst. He was about to have her hauled off to the slaughterhouse, but I intervened. Paid him five hundred for her, a lot more than he’d get from those killers.”
“You’re an angel, Slim.”
“Saint Slim, that’s me. Here’s the thing, Lena. I don’t have time to mess around with a green-broke four-year-old, not even one that pretty, so I’m going to have to sell her on. I’ve got a couple more horses coming in next week on a long-term board so I don’t have the room to keep her for long, either. There’s a guy over in Cave Creek that’s maybe interested in taking her on, but seeing as how you’re here…” He let it trail off, knowing I would finish the sentence myself.
“You figured I might be interested.”
The mare, as if sensing she was being talked about, stopped her antics and took a step toward us. Three of the leopard spots on her face ran so close together they formed a black blaze. As I admired her configuration, she moved even closer, flicking her ears back and forth.
“She seems to like people.” I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
“Some people, anyway. That girl has good judgment.”
“Also known as horse sense.”
Slim gave me a sidelong glance. “I’m not looking for a big profit here.”
“And I’m not looking for a horse.”
“Figured as much or you’d have already been up here, asking around.”
“I don’t have any place to keep her.”
“You could keep her here until you make other arrangements.”
“Thought you didn’t have room?”
“A week in the paddock isn’t going to kill her. I fact, it’ll help her calm down some. I’ll even put up a shelter to keep the sun off.”
I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just watched her ears twitch back and forth. They were mirror-image crescent moons. As I sat there thinking, she reached the fence. Stuck out her narrow muzzle and smelled my riding boot. Looked up again. Met my eyes.
I surrendered.
“Jimmy’s got a cousin over on the Rez who boards horses.”
“What’s that, a ten-minute drive from your office, fifteen? Hell, you could ride every morning before you started work. I can trailer her down for you.”
“Figure she’ll break my leg, too?”
“Nah, you two wild things were made for each other.”
With that, we left the formerly named Spot to entertain herself in the paddock and headed to the office to take care of the paperwork.
First a cat, now a horse. What next?
I was still laughing at myself when I entered the tack room to tell Dusty what I’d just done.
Instead, I backed out of the tack room quietly enough that he never knew I was there.
After all, it’s bad manners to interrupt a man in the middle of humping a big-breasted redhead.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Luckily we had taken my Jeep up to the stable, so I was able to make it back to Scottsdale, leaving Dusty to his own devices. Maybe the redhead had a car. Or a buckboard. Whatever. I didn’t care.
Or at least I pretended not to care.
Walking into Desert Investigations, I announced, “I bought a horse!”
When Jimmy turned around, his smile faded into a frown. “Then why don’t you look happier?”
“I’m ecstatic.”
“Tell me another one. What’s wrong with the horse?”
“Nothing a sensible woman can’t fix.”
The smile came back. “And that’s you, I take it?”
“Yer durned tootin’, pardner.”
He laughed. “Your John Wayne impression needs a little work. Okay, so you bought a horse. Tell me all about him.”
“Her.”
I spent the next half hour showing him the pictures I’d taken on my phone, and extolling my new mare’s virtues, which at this point were mainly her beauty. But I had spent enough time around horses to recognize a kindred spirit when I saw one, so I was confident that whatever problems she had could be worked through with a lot of love and even more patience.
Jimmy agreed. “And this business of keeping her at my cousin’s, yeah, you could do that. He’d charge you a fair rate, too. But I have an even better idea.”
“What could be better than that?”
“The secret I’ve been keeping about my construction project. I’m planning on buying a horse myself. In fact, I’m already halfway through fixing up a corral and sun shelter. That’s what my cousin and I were working on when you called yesterday.”
“Your ‘cousin’ sounded like a woman to me.”
“You think women can’t build things?” he scoffed. “I’ll have you know Nita’s handier with a hammer and nail than I ever thought of being, you sexist thing, you.”
“Touché, Almost Brother. But do you think that corral will work for two? Sometimes horses can take a weird dislike to each other. Just like people.
He tried unsuccessfully to hide his smile. “Only if they’re crowded. Right now, the paddock’s already big enough for a small herd, but if you want, I’ll divide it into two sections so your little App doesn’t get her pretty hide bit. The water tank’s supposed to be delivered around six tonight, and once it’s in place, I’ll start checking out the horses-for-sale ads. So what do you say?”
I thought about that for a moment, going over the pros and cons. The pros were obvious, a large—even private—space for my horse, close enough that I could almost jog to it. The con, though…
“You’d be my landlord!”
“You got a problem with an Indian landlord, Kemosabe?”
I burst out laughing.
Looking smug, he typed up a contract which I immediately signed. After slipping the contract into his jeans pocket, he said, “Welcome to the Rez. By the way, you said you were going to rename her. Any ideas yet?”
The perfect name had occurred to me during the drive from Carefree. “Adila,” I said.
“Very pretty. What does it mean?”
“It’s Arabic for Equal.”
***
Okay, so maybe I was minus a boyfriend—not that I’d ever really had that bad boy—the trail ride had done two good things for me. One, I was now a horse owner. Two, being outdoors again had removed my memory block, so by noon I was knocking on the metal door of Richard Fairfield’s trailer. I’d waited until his children were in school and his wife was well into her morning shift at the fast-food joint.
Fairfield wasn’t happy to see me.
“What the hell do you want now?”
“Just a little chat.”
“Chat, my ass.”
“I can always come back when you’re wife’s here.”
A sneer. “And that scares me because?”
“She doesn’t know about Jacklyn Archerd.”
“Aw, shit.” He opened the door wider and stepped back enough to let me in.
Given Fairfield’s record, I migh
t have been more concerned about being alone with him in his trailer, but given his gimpy leg I figured I could handle him. If things got out of hand, there was always my favorite fallback: the .38 tucked into my pocket holster.
Without being asked, I settled myself on the sofa.
“You met Jacklyn at the Iron Cross?”
He laughed. “I’m no pussy but that place’s too rough for me. Naw, I met her at that donut shop down the street from there. I was picking up a dozen to bring home and she was having coffee and we got to talking. You know how it goes.”
An ex-con and a pretty woman. Yeah, I knew how it went. “You two still seeing each other?”
“Don’t know if ‘seeing each other’ is what I’d call it, but naw, we flamed out something like a year ago.”
I didn’t bother asking him why he would risk his marriage over a fling with a woman he didn’t seem to care about, because men are men, and that’s the way they are. Some of them, anyway. “Did Jacklyn tell you about her son?”
“Stevie? Hell of a thing.”
“She ever show you his room?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why would she do a thing like that?”
“Answer the question.”
“You’re a nosy bitch.”
“Not exactly breaking news.”
He laughed again. “Okay, I saw the room. So what?”
“So did you decide to play knight in shining armor? Go hunting for the boy’s abductor? Wreak vengeance on a different pedophile when you couldn’t find him?”
He didn’t respond right away, and when he did, no trace of laughter remained. His battered old face looked bereft. “My days as a knight in shining armor are long gone. Not that they were ever there in the first place.”
***
Still feeling unsettled from my interview with Richard Fairfield, I headed back east to Scottsdale and the lair of Sean Beltran, Nicole’s ex-husband.
His offices were in a steel-and-black-glass building abutting the Pima Reservation. The letters after his name on the door to his inner sanctum proclaimed him to be NCARB, AIA, LEED. When deciphered, the alphabet soup reinforced what I already knew, that he was an environmentally conscious hotshot architect. His corner office looked like he did: leathery and sleek. One floor-to-ceiling window faced the desert, the other the Pima end of the parking lot, naturally shaded by mature olive trees.
