Desert Noir (9781615952236) (17 page)

Back at the office, I made the phone call I'd been putting off all morning. “Mrs. Hyath? This is Lena Jones. I talked to you and your husband a few days ago?” 

“I remember you. What do you want?” She sounded relatively sober.

“Do you think it might be possible to meet for…” I started to say “lunch,” but then remembered who I was talking to. “…to meet for a drink sometime in the next couple of days?” 

I could almost hear her frown. “What for?” 

There was no point in lying, so I told the truth. “There's a lot more I think you could tell me about Clarice, and I'd really like to talk to you away from your husband.” 

A phlegm-filled laugh. “Why should I do that?”

The obvious answer—out of maternal love—never crossed my lips. Instead, I said, “I'm not working for Jay Kobe anymore, so look at it this way. While professional ethics prevent me from actively working against a former client, if my investigation reveals evidence that he did kill Clarice after all, he can't inherit. Got that? He can't inherit. That means Clarice's money will revert back to the next of kin. Namely, you.” 

“And my husband,” she muttered. Then I heard her brighten. “But fifty percent of a couple of million is better than zero percent, isn't it?” 

I agreed with her, disliking the woman more and more.

“Tell you what, Miss Jones. I'm all booked up for the rest of the week and through the weekend…” 

With what, I wondered. A case of gin?

“…but next Monday looks pretty good for me. Would you like to meet at the Hacienda Palms? Say around lunch time?” 

Ouch. The Hacienda Palms was one of the most expensive resorts in the Valley. I hated to think what lunch and drinks would cost. Still, I owed it to Clarice.

“Next Monday. Noon. See you there.”

“And Miss Jones? Please make sure you're dressed appropriately. We're judged by the company we keep.”

Fuming, I hung up the phone.

I made two more calls, both less aggravating than the last one.

Yes, Evan Hyath would be happy to see me, the sooner the better. Tomorrow, even, if I wished. Since the police weren't getting anywhere with his sister's murder, maybe I could. He gave me directions to the company trailer on the Tudor Hills construction site, a mixed-use development going up just west of the Boulders. The location surprised me, because it was just down the road from Serena's house, making me wonder how Serena felt about sharing her neck of the woods with comparable riff-raff. Then again, since these homes would go from four hundred thousand dollars upwards, they weren't for the true riff-raff, just riff-raff compared to the Hyaths. But then I remembered the long ridge that separated the Boulders neighborhood from the rest of the Valley, and realized she wouldn't mind. She'd be making a small fortune off the project, but
her
million-dollar view would still be unobstructed. It was just too bad for her neighbors across the ridge, who had been promised “undisturbed, scenic desert vistas” when purchasing their homes.

The next call was easier still. It had occurred to me on my drive back from Pima Paint and Collision that I needed to take another look at the murder scene. The last time I'd been there, I'd been crawling around on all fours, which wasn't the recom-mended way to investigate a crime scene. Perhaps if I didn't have to worry about a murderer jumping out at me from behind one of her clunky pieces of sculpture, I might be able to spot something the police had missed. Not that the Violent Crimes Unit missed much, but you never know.

Kryzinski grumbled, but in the end, he agreed to send one of his officers over with the key to the Western Heart Gallery.

“You're not going to find anything in there,” he said, echoing my fears. “As soon as we finished, Serena Hyath hired one of those crime scene cleaning companies and they scoured the place from top to bottom. There's not a piece of brain tissue or blood spatter left.” 

Frankly, I was relieved. Determining the direction of blood spatter, an all-too-frequent duty while still with the VCU, had never been one of my favorite jobs. But I had learned that there was a lot that a careful investigator could surmise just from a room itself.

Temporarily finished with my chores, I settled back in my chair and watched Jimmy type.

I didn't get to watch him long. Within a few minutes, a blue-and-white pulled up to the curb and disgorged Vic Falcone. He came into the office wiping his brow, his uniform damp around the armpits.

“Shit, Lena, it's hotter than the Devil's left testicle out there. Hi, Jimmy.” He gave me a Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle, then headed straight for the refrigerator. After rooting around for a while, he finally emerged with a Coke. Full strength, sugar and all. That Falcone, what a wild man.

Falcone slumped down in a chair, chugged some Coke, then took some keys out of his pocket and jingled them at me. “These are the victim's, found them on her desk. They're supposed to be returned to her family, but we ain't got around to it 'cause of the rush.” 

“What rush?”

“Ain't you been reading the paper? Christ on a crutch, Lena, the whole city's gone nuts. We had us a couple of home invasion robberies up on McCormick Ranch, a suspicious carpet store fire near Papago Plaza, that damned bar over on Stetson had another big fight—the usual, you know, cowboys versus tourists with the tourists getting their asses whipped—a whole shit load of bur-glaries,
and
that damned kid-biting coyote is still running through town. Must be the heat, making everybody crazy, even the wildlife. Is it my imagination or is it hotter than last summer?” 

“It's not one bit hotter this year than last.”

Falcone shrugged. “I was thinking it might be that greenhouse effect. Or maybe the hole in the ozone layer.” 

It was obvious that Falcone wanted to stay in my air-conditioned office and chat all day, but there was work to be done. I stood up. “Let's go see what we can see.” 

He gave me a mournful look. “Hell, Lena. I'm supposed to stand outside and guard the place while you're messing around in there. It must be 120 degrees outside!” 

“One-fifteen. Why don't you just stay here and have another Coke? You can see the Western Heart Gallery right through this window.” 

“You got all them big letters on the windows blocking my view!” Seeing my expression, he backtracked. “You're right, you're right. I'll move my chair over to the window, look through the center of the ‘O', have some more Coke.” 

When I left, he was trying to hustle Jimmy into a hand of poker.

The Western Heart was almost as musty as Clarice's house had been, but a faint odor of antiseptic overlaid the odor of mildew. Clarice had been dead for almost three weeks now, and since the exit of the corpse cleaners—as the cops call the cleaning services specializing in crime scenes—no one had been in there. The corpse cleaners had done a good job, I noticed. No blood remained to be seen, not even on Jay Kobe's crappy horse portrait. But no trace of Clarice remained, either, no stray wisps of perfume, no echoes of edgy laughter. The Western Heart Gallery was as impersonal as a morgue.

I bit my lip and reminded myself that I was a professional. Letting the place get to me wouldn't help Clarice. Pushing aside my depression, I stood on what I believed to be the exact spot where she died—the cleaning crew had even removed all trace of the police chalk mark—and looked around.

At first I was surprised to see that all the paintings remained on the walls, the sculpture on their pedestals, but then I remembered how many legal steps needed to be completed before any artifact could be removed from a crime scene. This protected the heirs and also the artists who'd consigned their work to the gallery. Otherwise, anybody could come in, identify himself as the artist, and grab a painting. Not that anybody would bother in the Western Heart. We weren't exactly talking Rembrandts here.

The room itself appeared more or less as I had last seen it, discounting Clarice's body and all that blood, of course. The dolphin fountain had been turned off, but it stood in the same spot, as did Clarice's antique desk, chair, and the overly ornate credenza which served as her invoice cabinet. The gallery's walls were as crowded with bad art as ever. But something…

Something was missing.

Another look at Clarice's desk showed me that its formerly cluttered surface was now pristine. The corpse cleaners had removed the jumbled stacks of papers, a few knickknacks, and all the rest of the desktop clutter we're prone to collect. And hadn't there been a small piece of sculpture or two decorating the desk's surface? I wondered what Clarice had been working on at the time of her death, because as any homicide investigator knows, paper trails solve more mysteries than smoking guns ever do. Fortunately, finding the papers turned out not to be a problem. The desk drawers were unlocked and inside them, I found unfiled consignment agreements, bills of sale, artists' bios, a Rolodex, a
milleflora
paperweight, and several loose pieces of paper with phone numbers written on them.

All well and good, but something was niggling at the back of my mind. That desk…

As I stepped back and took a good look at it, I realized the desk was a near twin to the one in Cliffie's gallery. And hadn't Cliffie once shown me that his desk contained a cleverly disguised secret drawer, at the time all the rage among the courts of France?

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I opened the bottom right drawer halfway out, then felt around on the drawer's surface until my forefinger felt a looseness in the center of a carved rosebud. Smiling with satisfaction, I pressed the flower hard.

The false bottom of the drawer slid back, revealing a Dayrunner lying calmly on the drawer's true bottom.

Gloating over my find, I tucked the Dayrunner in my carryall, then slid the false bottom back and closed the desk drawer. I'd turn over my find to Kryzinski.

Eventually.

I looked around some more, taking careful note of the back door through which Kryzinski believed the killer had escaped. I studied the door facing and the lock closely but could find no pry marks. This was interesting, because most gallery owners I knew kept their back doors locked during Art Walk.

Which meant Clarice must have let her killer in.

Or did he have a key?

This once again brought the investigation right back to Jay Kobe, a member of the family, or—and this was a new thought—a lover who had not yet stepped forward. Clarice had not only been a rich and beautiful woman, but she had considerable charm. There was no reason why she couldn't have already replaced Jay's rough affections with those of another man.

But who?

Still thinking about this, I opened the back door and looked out upon a parking lot empty except for the Dumpster Clarice shared with Cliffie. The smell of mesquite-broiled steak wafted from the restaurant across the alley, reminding me that it was almost dinnertime. I walked outside and took a quick look around, only to find nothing. If there had been any clues lying around outside, they were long gone. Sighing, I went back inside the gallery, locking the back door firmly.

For a moment I stood there inside the gloom, feeling the emptiness of the place.

“I won't let him get away with it, Clarice,” I said out loud, listening to my voice echo around the room. “That's a promise.” 

As I crossed the street to my office, an old pickup truck came rattling around the corner and squealed to a stop right in front of Desert Investigations. Alarmed, I reached into my carryall for my gun, but I let my fingers relax when I recognized George Haozous in the driver's seat. A tall plastic-wrapped object sat propped in the truck bed.

“Brought your painting,” Haozous said, emerging from the truck, a tool belt cinched around his waist. “Where do you want it?” 

I noted once again what a handsome man he was, especially now that he wasn't covered with paint. His long hair glistened and his features were as flawless as a Greek statue's. His long, muscular legs were encased in tight-fitting Levis, and a black shirt mirrored his eyes. If George Haozous ever went to Hollywood, he'd make a fortune. Today there was no trace of his famous temper, and in fact, the man seemed positively genial. Probably because my check had cleared the bank.