Desert Noir (9781615952236) (26 page)

He looked confused. “Does Madam mean she wishes the crepes?” 

She would have looked more fondly at a bug. “What do you think I mean, José?” 

The waiter, whose name tag announced his name as Gilberto, gave her a deep bow—to cover the fury on his face, I think—then rushed away. I wanted to rush away, too, sticking the evil old bitch with the bill, but she still hadn't answered my last question.

“What did you mean, Mrs. Hyath, when you said your children should have followed your example? What example are you talking about?” 

Another genuine smile. “Why, my pre-nupt with their father, of course. It was one of the first pre-nupts my attorney ever put together. For a woman, that is.”

This was news. “You mean, you and your husband have a pre-nupt?” 

“Like I said, everyone around here must be deaf. Of
course
I have a pre-nupt. Why do you think I'm still living with him?” 

In response to my urging, Eleanor revealed the realities of love among the Upper Classes. When she and Stephen Hyath had first married, he'd already been a rising developer and she was little more than an impressionable teenager from an old Arizona copper mining family. The deal for her fair hand, much like any business deal, had been this: Hyath would provide an interest-free loan to Eleanor's father for some obscure business venture he'd embarked upon, and in return, the father would rewrite his will to give Eleanor a larger inheritance that had been originally planned.

As Eleanor related this, I thought I saw a brief flash of pain in her eyes. But it disappeared so quickly that it might have been just my imagination.

But Eleanor, although young, had already learned a thing or two from her money-grubbing father. Before agreeing to the marriage contract, she demanded a pre-nupt that would make her an equal partner in Hyath Enterprises, which included, of course, Hyath Development. And in a coup de grace that took my breath away, the attorney, a Phoenician who'd been around the track a few times himself, had added a startling codicil: Whoever filed for divorce first would forfeit three-quarters of the corporation's profits for a ten-year period following the date of the final decree.

Talk about until death do you part.

“It's a man's world and a woman has to protect herself,” Eleanor said. “If it hadn't been for that eleventh-hour codicil, Stephen would have traded me in for some dumb blond long before now. Maybe even one like you.”

The expression on her face was bleak beyond words. As Gilberto, whose face appeared set in concrete, delivered the prickly pear crepes, I couldn't help but wonder if Eleanor's financial security had been worth all the pain.

When she called for another margarita, I had my answer.

I arrived back at Desert Investigations a little after two o'clock, still shaken from the size of the luncheon bill. And just what had I learned? Very damned little. That confession Jay supposedly gave Eleanor sounded like a figment of her malicious imagination. And as for the rest of her ramblings, she hadn't told me anything I didn't already know.

Except for the sordid details of the Hyaths' pre-nupt. No wonder the Hyath siblings hadn't had their own drawn up. With their parents' marriage as an example, they were probably trying to achieve the exact opposite, no matter how risky the attempt.

The lunch had given me a raging headache, so I told Jimmy I was quitting early. He nodded sympathetically, and I dragged myself up the stairs, swallowed a couple of Excedrin, and jumped into a cold shower. I stayed in there long enough to turn into an icicle, then wrapped myself in a white terry bath sheet and fell across the bed.

After lying there for a while staring at the ceiling, I suddenly felt my eyes begin to burn. Then a tear slid down my cheeks.

I was crying.

But I didn't know why.

When I woke up, the shadows in the room had lengthened. I checked the clock and discovered it was almost six o'clock. I'd been asleep for four hours.

At least my headache was gone.

I got dressed and readied my fanny pack for my evening run. The hip was fine and the shoulder hardly twinged at all. It was time to stop babying myself.

So I ran. And ran. And ran. I ran so swiftly that even my friend the blond-faced coyote looked amazed. She followed me for a short while up the slanting side of the Buttes, veering away into the underbrush only after she spotted another runner.

A yellow cloud of pollution hung over the Phoenix end of the Valley, making the Buttes glow with a sick fire. Nonetheless, I sang the Pima Corn Song as if the desert was as pristine as a century earlier, when Pima songs were in the ascendancy, not the twilight.

Then I limped home.

A shadowy figure was waiting for me on the stairs. As I drew my .38 from my fanny pack, a familiar voice floated to me on the magnolia-scented air.

“Shoot me, Lena, and I'll haunt you for the rest of your miserable life.” It was Dusty.

I don't love him, I don't love him…

Ah, who the hell did I think I was kidding? I holstered the gun and walked towards him.

He stood up, his face soft. “I love you, you silly bitch. I'd do almost anything for you.” 

Almost? Where was all this unconditional love I kept reading about?

But I opened my arms anyway.

 

“On the whole, I prefer CNN,” Dusty said, frowning at
Apache Sunset.
“The wars are a lot more cheerful.” 

“Philistine.”

We'd made love through the evening and half the night. Now it was morning and we were still damp from the shower, sitting wrapped in bath sheets on the sofa, where Dusty was—unasked—playing art critic. “That artist must be nuts.”

“He might be,” I agreed. “That's the guy Clarice kicked out of her gallery.” 

“Gee, I wonder why.”

“He's pretty good, actually.”

Dusty got up and walked over to the painting, the bath sheet slipping down around his hips. I smiled. He had the best buns I'd ever seen.

He leaned down and peered at the signature.
“George,
huh?” 

“Yeah. George.”

“The guy who was here when I called.”

“The very same.”

Dusty didn't ask me if I'd slept with George, just as I didn't ask him if he'd slept with the redhead. As we had many times before, we just continued in the present, not bothering to discuss what had gone wrong and how we could prevent it in the future. Who knew if we had a future, anyway?

“I've got to get back to the ranch,” he said, his voice trailing after him as he headed for the clothes he'd left in a pile by the bed. “I've already missed morning feed time, but I left word with a couple of the other guys to help out in case I didn't make it back. The horses won't starve.” 

I followed him into the bedroom. It was understood that I would never try to talk him into staying once he'd announced he had to leave. “I was kind of starved.” 

He turned, his Jockey shorts dangling from his hand. “Yeah, I noticed that. But you're not now, are you?” 

How could I tell him that when it came to sex, too much was never enough? When you can't allow yourself to love, you still have to reach out, to stroke, to caress, to kiss. “I'm fine now,” I lied.

He smiled. “You look fine. Real fine.”

I smiled back. “You do, too, Cowboy. Y'all come again, y'hear?” 

For a brief moment, the sound of his laughter chased my loneliness away.

My morning copy of the
Scottsdale Journal
informed me that Animal Control officers had finally located the biting coyote's den and had staked it out. In accordance with the locals' wishes, they were armed only with tranquilizer guns. They promised to merely stun the coyote, haul it off for rabies quarantine, then release it into the wild a long, long way from Scottsdale.

Not a perfect solution, I thought, but probably the best solution for everyone concerned. If left to its own devices, that coyote would probably wind up getting flattened by a Mercedes someday.

I spent the morning on the phone, putting out fires and rustling up new business. The most rewarding phone call came when I told Brian Meeks that I'd found his runaway girlfriend shacked up with his wife. His hypocritical outrage was something to hear, but I finally calmed him when I said that as far as the divorce courts were concerned, adultery was adultery, no matter with which sex or species.

Of course, that held true for
him,
too.

He was still thinking about the implications of that when I hung up.

Around lunchtime, when my stomach began to growl, I remembered being at the Hacienda Palms with Eleanor Hyath. Something she said was still bothering me, but every time I tried to remember it, it eluded me. Disgusted with my Swiss cheese memory, I wandered over to a deli and picked up a hot pastrami for Jimmy and a corned beef for myself. As I walked back through the noontime heat, the memory still eluded me, like an itch at the back of my brain that I couldn't scratch.

The rest of the day was slow, except for the now-routine phone call from Jay Kobe's attorney, crowing that he had bailed his client out again.

“Isn't this getting just a little bit boring?” I asked Hal McKinnon. “The cops arrest him, you bail him out? The cops arrest him, you bail him…” 

“You wouldn't think it was boring if it was you sitting in Sheriff Joe's jail eating green bologna,” he snapped. “Now are you going to help us again or not? My client did
not
do this murder.” 

“If he didn't, it's only because he's the luckiest man alive and someone else murdered Clarice before he got around to beating her to death.”

McKinnon begged some more, then finally began to threaten. “Albert Grabel is going to be very unhappy with you.” 

He obviously didn't know that Grabel had called me that very morning and told me that my duties to Jay Kobe had been well and truly performed, and that he wouldn't hold it against me if I refused to do any more work on the case.

“If I'd known everything about Jay I know now, I'd never have asked you to do this, Lena,” he'd said, his voice heavy with regret. “I'm sorry about the whole thing.”

I was off the hook.

So when McKinnon finished his threats, I smiled into the receiver. “Tell Jay he can stick it, Mr. McKinnon. And you can, too.” 

I hung up, vowing never again to do any work for wife beaters. No matter who they were related to.

The rest of the day proceeded calmly, and by the time the little hand hit five and the big hand hit twelve, I was ready to close up shop. I told Jimmy to go home.

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “I think I'll drive over to Uncle Sisiwan's, learn a few more Ant Songs, talk to him about painting my truck.”

“Your truck?” I looked out the window at Jimmy's almost-new Chevy pickup truck. It was a gleaming burgundy, with a metallic gold racing stripe streaking along the side. “I think your truck looks pretty good.” 

“Not half as good as your Jeep.”