Desert Noir (9781615952236) (16 page)

“Who's touchy? Listen, I've got work to do here, calls to make.

I can't be tying up the line with these personal conversations.” 

“Fine then.” He slammed the phone down.

I hoped that horse I'd heard in the background kicked him.

The day crawled like a centipede with a broken leg. I needed to interview Clarice's brother, but for now, there was billing to be done and notes to be typed. At the best of times, I'm not wild about computer work, but getting these monthly statements out was pure torture and I could only make myself do it because of the large amounts of money the bills generated.

Mid-way through the morning I had a thought.

“Jimmy, didn't you say that your uncle owned a body shop?” 

Jimmy looked up from his keyboard and nodded. “Yeah. He does major collision work, but he can handle dings and dents, too. Painting, detailing, stuff like that. The re-upholstery stuff he farms out to his brother.” 

“How much do you think he'd charge me to paint the Jeep?” 

Now he turned all the way around, a pleased expression on his face. “Well, it being a Jeep and all, there's not really a lot of surface there, so I wouldn't imagine it'd cost too much. What color you thinking of?” 

That was the question. The pink was awful, certainly, but what else was there? Red? White? Black? Puce? What looked good on a Jeep besides the standard Army-issue green? Then I had an idea. “Look, why don't I just drive it out to your uncle's, let him take a look at it, and let him decide. Any color will be fine, as long as it's not pink and doesn't clash with the steerhorns.” 

He raised an eyebrow. “That's a little trusting, don't you think?” 

“I can use the practice.”

Jimmy called his uncle and made an appointment for me to take the Jeep in that afternoon. “He said he's got a loaner he can give you, but it's not anything fancy.” 

“Neither's the Jeep.”

On the way out to Jimmy's uncle's, I stopped for lunch at Native Hands, the Pima restaurant-cum-gift shop that now sat almost directly under the new freeway overpass. After enjoying a mesquite-smoked barbecue sandwich and a small cup of lamb stew, I went into the gift shop portion and purchased a pair of turquoise and silver cuff links. Not that I had anybody to give them to, anymore. But it was always best to be prepared.

The flat land of the Pima rez was better suited for growing crops than was the San Carlos, which is why early Indian wanderers had settled just outside the area that came to be known as Phoenix. Although today the Salt River Valley was frequently too dry and hot for comfort, it had at one time been quite lush. Up until relatively recently, the Salt was an active, flowing river, so the Hohokam had designed a two-hundred-mile network of canals with which to irrigate their crops during the long, hot summer months. It made all the difference to
their
descendants, the Pimas.

For staples, the early settlers grew corn, beans, gourds, grain amaranth, and squash. Antelope, land tortoises and other animals provided an occasional feast. For clothing, the Hohokam and Pima both cultivated and wove cotton. Everything they needed, they gleaned from the land. They lived in such close harmony with nature that more than two thousand years later, the area the Hohokam originally settled bore few scars.

But when the White Man moved to the Salt River Valley in the early 1800's, he rerouted some of the old Hohokam canals to water his own gardens. Not content with this minor water rights theft, in the early part of the twentieth century the Anglos built the Roosevelt and the Laguna dams, which deflected the river's entire flow onto Anglo land. The Pima's crops withered and died. Within a generation the tribe was reduced to poverty.

But now they had begun to fight back.

Like their more warlike cousins, the Apache, the Pimas were building casinos as quickly as they could get them up. For those Pimas who still preferred a rural way of life, mechanical irrigation systems now replaced the old canals, although at a much higher cost. And a few Pimas, like Jimmy's uncle, had gone into business for themselves.

PIMA PAINT AND COLLISION—MICHAEL SISIWAN, PROPRI-ETOR sat just outside the Scottsdale border, on the western edge of a large Pima cotton field. This being August, most of the cotton had already been harvested, leaving only a few white tufts blowing around the field, driven by a hot wind. Across the road, where a tractor was preparing the ground for the next planting, a dust devil whirled along a gully. I wondered again how anyone could work in 100-plus temperatures, especially when the monsoon season had spiked the humidity.

As I drove up, Mr. Sisiwan and his crew came out to meet me. “I've heard plenty about this Jeep,” Jimmy's uncle said, patting the steer horns, his vowel sounds stretched out in the melodious Piman accent.

Other than his considerable height and breadth, he looked little like his brother's son. Where Jimmy's face was cantaloupe round, his uncle's harkened back to some ancient ancester. Recent theories say the Pimas may be descended from South Sea islanders, not Asiatics. It was angular, liberally creased with weather lines and worry. Well, owning a business will do that to you. And then there was the lack of facial tattoos. Mr. Sisiwan's face, as well as the faces of his entire staff, remained unmarked. Jimmy was the only Pima I'd ever known who had resurrected the custom.

“Jimmy tell you what I want?”

Mr. Sisiwan looked worried. “Well, yes, but I'm not sure I understood him correctly. He said you, ah, wanted to be
surprised?” 

“That's right. This is your chance to get creative. I'm sick of the pink, but I still don't want a Jeep that looks like every other Yuppie-mobile in town.” 

The crew, all of them Pimas, looked around at each other. Here was living proof, their body language seemed to say, that Anglos should stay out of the summer sun.

“Any
color?”

I nodded. “I don't care if you paint stripes on it. Just make sure it looks different.” 

Mr. Sisiwan, still hesitant, took me inside the office and filled out a service ticket, writing “Customer says be creative” inside the color selection box. “You'd better sign off here,” he said.

I signed with a flourish, also initialing “Customer says be creative.” “Great. When can I pick it up?” 

He checked a work list. “How does day after tomorrow sound?” 

“That sounds fine. Ah, Jimmy told me you'd have a loaner for me?” 

After being warned by Jimmy, I didn't expect much, so I was pleased at being led to the almost-new Toyota pickup truck in the back lot. “If you don't like this, we've got a Taurus around here somewhere.” 

I shuddered. The last time I'd seen a Taurus up close, its occupant had shot me. “No, thanks. The truck'll do just fine.” 

He handed me the keys, and with a final wave, I drove off.

I didn't want to go back to the office in my present mood—my relationship with Jimmy was already strained enough—so I decided to use the key Serena gave me and take a look inside Clarice's house.

I knew the neighborhood. Clarice's house was nestled among the few remaining horse properties in downtown Scottsdale. Sparkling white paddocks fronted the narrow streets, and as I drove along, dish-faced Arabs and long-nosed Thoroughbreds snorted at me from velvety muzzles. The houses themselves were huge—long, low ranch-styled homes that had been built approximately thirty years ago, before the California exodus began gobbling up the land.

Clarice's house turned out to be one of the biggest, at least six thousand square feet, and as I steered the truck into the driveway, I couldn't help but wonder what she and Jay had done with all that space.

Serena had been right to worry about rain damage. The dining room with its sagging beam was a mess. Its priceless rosewood paneling was streaked and buckled away from the walls. Judging from the notes I found scribbled on a yellow pad on the dining room table, somebody—probably Clarice's brother—was already making an estimate of the needed repairs. He'd better not wait long. Already the smell of rot and mildew was overpowering. When the ceiling began to creak, I hurriedly backed out of the dining room and went into the gigantic living room.

And there I stopped, stunned, not knowing whether to weep or laugh. Instead of utilizing the ever-popular Southwestern Saltillo tile, Clarice had floored the thing with white Berber carpeting flecked in grays and blues. The blue had been picked up on the walls. Every single one of them. Given that the furniture—from the sectional sofa and occasional chairs, to the clumsy marble etagere near the sliding glass doors—was white, I felt for one dizzy-ing moment as if I were trapped inside a giant Wedgewood bowl.

As I investigated more carefully, I found that nothing in the room was as it first appeared to be.

Silk and plastic plants lined a white-painted shelf that ran the length of the living room. More silk plants rested in a long, glass-topped “planter” that served as a coffee table. A white enamel and gilt birdcage played home to a stuffed parrot, and the water in a lavishly landscaped eighty-gallon aquarium bubbled around a school of bobbing artificial fish.

It got worse.

Apparently Jay hadn't retrieved his paintings yet, because the blue walls were cluttered with dozens of portraits of questionable Indian maidens, mostly nude with glowing tits; expensive show horses apparently set free to roam the desert; and cowboys who bore a suspicious resemblance to either John Wayne or Gabby Hayes.

Nothing in the house was real. Regardless of its true cost, everything looked cheap, artificial.

Like its owner?
a little voice whispered.

I forced myself to stop thinking about Clarice's god-awful décor and began to search the premises.

Two hours later I had found nothing, other than a closet still filled with Jay's clothing and even more of his lousy paintings tucked away in a studio at the back of the house. Why hadn't he cleared it all out? Could he possibly have been hoping that somehow, someday Clarice might take him back?

Anything was possible, I thought, as I shouldered my carryall. But if Clarice
had
let Jay come home, would she still have been murdered?