Desert Noir (9781615952236) (33 page)

Eleanor Hyath was a modern-day Medea.

And what had the mythical Medea done?
To get even with the lover who had jilted her, she murdered her own children.

Anybody who reads the papers knows that mothers killed their children all the time. We read about the slaughters, shake our heads and murmur, “How shocking!” then turn to Dear Abby. Each week, battered babies turned up in Dumpsters, suspected SIDS deaths turned out to be homicides, mothers torched their children, poisoned them, hacked at them with machetes, and hanged them from shower curtain rods. Arizona even had a woman on Death Row who had paid two men to shoot her four-year-old son in the head so that she could collect $5,000 in insurance money.

Maybe another child-killer was about to end up there.

Her soul rotted by a life-long jealousy, Clarice's mother had certainly wanted to kill her daughter, just as my mother had wanted to kill me. The question was: Did Eleanor possess the same follow-through?

I couldn't ask her outright. She was too wily for that. I asked another question instead, even though I thought I already knew the answer. “Was Clarice planning to move back in here? Or was she…?” The expression on Eleanor's face told me I'd already drawn blood.

Her eyes glittered. “I told her I'd kill her if she tried to move back in.” 

Stephen put a restraining hand towards her, as if afraid his wife would spring off the sofa and fly at my face. “That was never a consideration. Clarice and I were…” He paused, thought about the way he should phrase it, then began again. “Clarice and I were going to build a house of our own, a place in another country, where we could live our lives without censure.” 

Without censure.

I thought I'd been able to keep the disgust from my face, but Stephen's next words showed me I'd failed.

“You don't have to look like that, Miss Jones. Clarice was free, white, and twenty-one.” 

Eleanor had to make her contribution. “And perverted as hell.” 

I stared at her. During our luncheon, she'd told me that she was bound to her husband by a pre-nupt. When I brought that up, she smiled. It wasn't a pleasant smile.

“Why should I divorce him? Just because he was moving in with his little whore? I wouldn't give them the satisfaction—
or
the money.” 

I had all I could take. I stood up and walked to the door without looking back.

I didn't know if it was the triple-digit heat or the incredible conversation I'd just been a part of, but halfway back to the office, I had to pull off the road and sit there for a minute. My hands were shaking and the noise of the traffic around me sounded like an
arpeggio
in a discordant modern symphony. I reached over to the passenger's seat and picked up the bottle of water I always kept there. After taking a few swigs, I felt better. But I still needed a bath, if only to wash the memory of the Hyaths off me.

At what point does a victim stop being a victim? As Stephen Hyath so
un
-politically correctly stated, Clarice was free, white, and twenty-one. Theoretically she knew what she was doing and could have been held legally accountable for her actions, as could her father. Then again, she had been molested by him since childhood, suffering—besides innumerable physical indignities—the slow erosion of her moral values. This was the hidden side of incest, the side people rarely talked about because it made them more uncomfortable than the physical act itself.

Before Daddy gets into your pants, he convinces you it's all right. After a while, you even start believing that it is. You tell yourself that what Daddy's doing is all right and with that initial lie, that first ravage against your soul, other lies follow. From an early age, you learn to convince yourself that black is white, that self-interest is love, that pain is pleasure. Your ability to discern truth disintegrates. You may look the same to others on the outside, but inside, in your
heart,
you are rotting away.

I took a final swig from my water bottle and pulled back into traffic.

I needed to run.

I needed to sing the Corn Song.

I needed the world to be sane again.

 

But I'm no fool.

The shooter, the person who had killed Clarice, was still out there, so I skipped my usual Papago Park run and turned the Jeep around. I drove north to Cave Creek, then turned off on the road that led to the old Hohokam ruins. The heat pressed against me as I chugged up the narrow path to the time-crumbled village, but I had worse demons to worry about.

Memories of harsh hands, of whispered excuses. Of lies, and lies, and lies.

Some of them my own.

The Baptists' bible had said we must not suffer a witch to live. Why didn't it say the same thing about warlocks? About the dark spells of those men whose passions corrupted young girls' souls and caused their hearts to shrivel? Why didn't it cry out against mothers who hated their daughters enough to kill them?

I wondered for a moment where my own mother was, if she was living her life somewhere content in the belief that I was dead.

Then I closed my mind against her. I would not walk that trail again.

The climb to the ruins took me longer than it should have, because every footstep was weighted by memory. More than a dozen times, I slipped on the shale and brushed my hands against the thorny spines of barrel cactus. By the time I reached the crest of the hill, my hands were drenched with blood and sweat but I welcomed the pain. It chased the memories away.

When I reached the courtyards where the Hohokam had walked and loved and slept before First World was destroyed by water, the air felt pure. With a red-tailed hawk sailing high above me, I stood on the stones of the past and looked out over the present.

And sang.

On Tecalote field, the corn was growing green.

Growing green.

I came down to the land and I saw.

I saw the tassels waving in the wind.

And I sang for joy
.

No tassels waved here. The Hohokam were gone, their forgotten fields reclaimed by sage, cactus, and coyote. They dreamed in the Underworld now with Earth Doctor.

The Pimas had taken their place.

As the white man had taken the Pimas' place.

When do sins stop?

I walked over to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the fallen bighorn, its picked-clean bones now gleaming in the sun. In the way of the desert, a few beetles—the tail end of the food chain—still scurried there dining on what tasty morsels still remained. It occurred to me that at the same time the bighorn had fed a small army of scavengers, Clarice's body lay decomposing in a lead-lined casket, protected from predators and benefiting no one, not even the grass growing on her grave.

Modern life made no sense.

Suddenly a wave of sorrow engulfed me for the woman I'd once considered a friend. I thought about the wounds she'd inflicted on others—on Magadalena Espinoza, Dulya Albundo, Cliffie, George Haozous, what she was about to do to her own mother, about to do to me. I thought about all these things, the actions of a soul-twisted woman who would ravage anyone's dreams for her own self-centered desires.

I thought about it as the beetles ran through the bighorn's ribcage, until the sun disappeared behind the mountain and darkness engulfed the valley. I thought about it until I finally figured out who'd killed Clarice.

 

When I got home, I showered off the dust and nightmares. Then I poured myself a giant glass of iced tea and sat in front of Haozous's painting for hours, listening to Big Bill Broonzy wail the “I Got Up One Morning Blues,” Elmore James crying out “Blues Before Sunrise,” Jimmy Reed sliding through the incomparable “Bright Lights Big City.” 

Unlike so many people I knew, their pain was not self-inflicted. Instead, it arrived as clean, sharp, and clear as their stories. Their babies done left them, their jobs went bust, their lives weren't nuthin' but bowls of shit. Yet they sang on, creating a legacy of beauty that remained long after their own lives had ended.

Around midnight I finally staggered off to bed. To my surprise, I slept well.

I got up at four a.m., climbed into the Jeep and headed north. Before I called Kryzinski, I needed to make sure that what I suspected—no, what I
knew
—could be proven in a court of law. For that, I had to hand Kryzinski an illegal entry. I'd do the deed in the darkness, tell him what I'd found, then he could get his own squeaky-clean search warrant. All it would take would be a “belated” memory from me, a little lie in service of a greater truth.

The construction trailer was dark, the parking lot empty. Dawn was at least an hour off. After driving the Jeep around to the back (just in case), I pulled my lock pick from my carryall, jimmied the lock, and went inside. The only light was from the soft glow of the button on cell phone, which was being charged again at the electrical outlet. The sculpture was where I'd seen it last, on the rosewood table in front of the sofa. I picked it up—
damn,
it was heavy!—snapped on my flashlight, and looked more carefully at the ground underneath the horse and rider.

There was the carved signature
: Frederick Remington, 1888. 
As I continued to study it, I saw the crispness of the lines, the lack of the usual seam ridge left behind on cheap copies.

Because this
was
no cheap copy. The sculpture was an original casting made by the artist himself, a piece of priceless art the Remington-loving but alimony-paying Evan had told Gus to bring back when he'd sent him out to kill Clarice wearing a pair of Jay Kobe's old Nikes.

“I couldn't let him leave it there,” Evan's voice said behind me. “What if one of those sticky-fingered cops took it home?” 

I spun around, at the same time reaching for the gun in my bag.

But I wasn't fast enough. Something hard slammed into my head, light exploded all around me, and I began to fall.

Just before I lost consciousness, I heard Evan sob, “Why couldn't you just leave it alone? She wasn't worth it. She wasn't worth anybody's tears.” 

I came to in total darkness, my knees tucked under my chin. The air around me smelled like gasoline and burned rubber. Where was I? What was happening? Was I stuffed in a storage room somewhere about to be burned to death?

Frantically, I lifted my hands—mercifully untied—and began to feel around my small prison. I encountered a hard, metallic object and fumbled along it like a blind woman reading Braille. I found another object, this one larger and more rectangular, that appeared to be a tackle box or a tool kit. The soft, round mass in back of me felt like a pillow.

Then I noticed that the floor was moving, that I was being jostled back and forth. A soft purring, the hushed
urrrrrr-urrrrrr-urrrrrr
of a finely tuned engine, issued through the walls of my prison. When I raised my hands straight above me, I could touch the ceiling.

I was in the trunk of a car.

Being taken somewhere.

Then I understood that the thick metal object shoved up against my face was probably a jack, the rectangular thing the car's tool kit. The pillow was no doubt a car cover.

My fingers scrabbled through the trunk again, hoping to find my carryall with its fully loaded .38 still inside, but it wasn't there. Evan had probably dumped it someplace else, hoping it wouldn't be discovered with my body, hoping to put off identification as long as possible. I fingered the throbbing lump at the back of my head and felt something sticky. I was bleeding, but considering the thickness of the blood's texture, I estimated that the wound had already begun to coagulate. So far, so good. I cocked my head and listened carefully, but I couldn't hear other traffic sounds over the motor's murmur. The jouncing I was enduring was getting worse, sometimes flinging me all the way up against the trunk lid.

Evan was taking me off-road somewhere, probably to dump me in the desert. Just as he had done to Gus.

How stupid I had been! When I thought back, the signs had all been there. Evan was living in the trailer and just because he wasn't there when I arrived didn't mean he wouldn't come back. It was the tail end of Saturday night, for Pete's sake, and he'd probably been out yowling with all the other tomcats.

But it was too late for “I shouldda's.” I needed to be thinking about the future—such as what I'd do the minute that car came to a stop and Evan unlocked the trunk to finish the job.

How hard did he think he'd hit me? Strong enough to kill? He probably thought he'd killed me, but I'd been turning, in motion, and the blow had been a glancing one. I could see a faint glimmer of hope in my situation. If Evan thought I was already dead, I would at least gain the element of surprise when he opened the car's trunk to dispose of my body.

My body.

I didn't like the way that sounded. Not at all. Then, for some reason, an odd question occurred to me…