Desert Wind (2 page)

Come to think of it, some of those Paiutes suffered from the same blisters. Maybe that was because they ate the rabbits and ground squirrels that had been eating the bad grass. Used to hunt the antelope, the Indians did, brought down deer and elk. But lately, the larger animals had been dying off, covered with sores all over their bodies. Sometimes their coats and muzzles looked so scary the Paiutes wouldn’t touch them, made do with smaller game and whatever else they could forage. Desert plants, pine nuts, spindly stuff that would hardly keep a chicken alive.

This canyon country was a hard country. Men and horses had to be hard to endure it.

When Curly’s coughs died away, Gabe turned his eyes to the film set, where the Duke was swaggering toward Susan Hayward, his hand on the huge knife at his waist. The cameras—one of them mounted on a small metal track—moved back as he approached her.

The scalding wind, blowing down from the canyon and toward the small hillock where Gabe and Curly waited, lifted the actor’s words to them. “What Temujin wants, he takes, Bortai!”

The beautiful redhead clutched her skimpy costume close to her breasts. Defiance lit her eyes. “No dog of a Mongol…”

She began to cough.

Chapter Two

Present day: Scottsdale, Arizona

Monday, 9 a.m.

It had been a rough weekend, but the new week wasn’t looking much better. When I unlocked the door to Desert Investigations, Jimmy wasn’t there.

The very fact that I’d had to unlock my office should have been warning enough. Even though I lived in the apartment upstairs and Jimmy lived three miles away on the Salt River Pima/Maricopa Indian Reservation, my partner always beat me to the office by at least an hour. Nothing pleased him more in the early mornings than to raise the blinds, turn on the computer, and while it was warming up, grind some Starbucks while he sang a Pima prayer. By the time I made it downstairs, the hour-old coffee would be thickened to perfection.

Not today. Shut blinds. Cold computer. No coffee.

Jimmy’s desk being closest to the door, I grabbed his phone and punched in his cell number. After four rings, it switched over to voice mail. “Ya-ta-hey, hola, and hello! I’ll be out of reach for a week or two, but if you leave the standard message, you’ll receive the standard reciprocal phone call as soon as I get back.” Beep.

Out of reach for a week or two? “Hey, Jimmy. Lena here. Call me. I’m at the office, it’s Monday morning and, well, I expected you to be in. Why aren’t you?”

Then I tried his landline.

Same message.

Deciding that coffee would help me think, I went over to the fancy Krups he’d bought for the office last Christmas, dumped in a handful of Guatemalan Antigua beans, hit EXPRESS BREW, and waited while the machine made grinding, then gurgling, noises. Sixty seconds later I poured the steaming cup and sipped at it as fast as my scalded taste buds would let me. Once the caffeine hit, I opened the office blinds, hoping that more light would chase away my growing sense of unease. It didn’t.

At nine on Mondays, there is little pedestrian traffic in Old Town Scottsdale. Most art galleries don’t open until ten, and given the August heat, few tourists braved the ninety-five-degrees-and-rapidly-climbing temperature. As I watched, one perspiring couple shuffled along the pavement, wiping sweat in unison from their brows. Not far behind, a lone woman wearing a dangerously bare sundress—melanoma, anyone?—peered into the window of an Indian jewelry store, then moved past my sightline, leaving the sidewalk empty and me alone in a growing silence.

By now I should be listening to the tap-tap of Jimmy’s fingers on his keyboard, his soft chuckles whenever he uncovered the old crimes prospective employees of Southwest MicroSystems believed were long-erased. We should be discussing how the past eventually caught up to everyone, trailing after them like the stink of dog shit on new shoes. Instead, all I could hear was the discreet hiss of our new air conditioner. Unnerved, I walked over to my own desk and turned on my computer. Seconds later I called up my favorite blues station, and the haunting wail of Blind Willie McTell on “Statesboro Blues” killed the silence.

Now I could think.

Jimmy Sisiwan had been a full partner ever since Desert Investigations had opened several years back, and we had so much in common that I sometimes called him “Almost Brother.” Like me, he was an orphan, his Pima parents having died not long after his birth from the diabetes that ravaged the tribe. Unlike me, he’d been adopted by people who loved him, whereas I—deemed unadoptable because of certain behavioral issues resulting from a gunshot wound to the head—had made the rough rounds of Arizona’s foster care system. Jimmy was even-tempered, but as for me, let’s just say that ongoing anger management therapy kept me out of jail. The point is, Jimmy calms my chaos. No matter what kind of crazy messed with my mind, he always has my back. Without that big Indian, I feel naked.

“Jimmy, where the hell are you?”

I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud, and the sound of my voice echoing around the sharp corners of the room startled me. Furnished in mauve and bleached pine, the office had all the personality of a furniture showroom, but it worked for our high-roller clientele. By the time they came to see us, life—in the form of predatory gold-diggers, missing teenagers, and various and sundry con artists—had kicked them around so much they needed soothing, not stimulation. But now all that Yuppie Bland unnerved me. Something was wrong.

As Blind Willie finished the last few bars of “Statesboro” and started on “Broke Down Engine Blues,” I finished the last of the Guatemalan Antigua. That’s when I noticed the message light blinking on my phone. I entered my PIN number and hit the speaker button.

Jimmy’s voice floated out.

“Hi, Lena. Sorry about the short notice, but something’s come up and I have to leave town. At least it’s August and not much is going on. In the unlikely event that Southwest MicroSystems sends over a new batch of background checks for us to run, which is doubtful because as you’ll remember, they’re in the middle of a hiring freeze, call Jean Begay. I checked with her before I left town, and she said she’d be happy to help with backgrounders or anything else computer-wise. See you in a week.” Pause. “Or two.”

Click.

When the relief that he hadn’t been mangled in a car accident faded away, I replayed his message and listened all the way to the end. A week or two? If he’d had time to contact Jean Begay, why hadn’t he bothered to phone me? Swallowing my annoyance, I muted Blind Willie in mid-yowl and called Jean. She answered immediately, but our conversation proved something I already knew: Navajos aren’t chatty.

“Good morning, Jean. Lena Jones here.”

“Hi.”

“Um, I just called to ask, well, do you know where Jimmy is?”

“Nope.”

“But…”

“Other phone’s ringing. Have a nice day.”

Jean rang off, leaving me staring at the receiver as the silence closed in again. When I turned the radio station back up, Blind Willie had finished and Big Joe Williams was carrying on about his “Little Leg Woman.” I listened to that for a while and pretended I wasn’t worried. Jimmy was a grownup. If he’d wanted me to know where he was, he would have told me.

Big Joe Williams gave way to Mississippi John Hurt, who morphed into Elmore James, who later stepped aside for John Lee Hooker—who reminded me of my murdered father…

I cut the Internet radio off and tried to find something to do.

Not easy, today.

The television series that had hired me as a consultant remained on hiatus while industry gossip hinted that it might not be renewed for the next season. Fortunately, Desert Investigations had thrived for years before Hollywood came a-knocking and would continue to thrive after the program was cancelled. But as Jimmy had been careful to point out, it was August, and our clients had fled for cooler climes. Nonetheless, I called up our case files on the computer and started going through those that remained open.

DI-CASE:4109/Stallworth. Elizabeth and Douglas Stallworth had hired us to track down their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Jennifer. When last seen, Jennifer was part of the inner circle surrounding a New Age minister who fleeced his flock out of millions. Upon his release from prison, his shorn flock welcomed him back with open arms.

Forgiveness is a wonderful thing, but stupidity isn’t quite as wonderful, especially when the combination of the two made it possible for victims to be re-victimized. Although aware that her parents had lost more than two hundred thousand dollars to Father Felon, Jennifer signed over to him the deed to the Paradise Valley condo her parents had given her, along with the title to her new BMW 335i convertible. When I pointed out to the Stallworths that Jennifer was an adult and thus enjoyed the legal right to ruin her life, they had not been happy. After much discussion, I’d given in to their pleas to keep an eye out for her, but so far, she and Father Felon remained off the grid.

I scrolled down to DI-CASE:3867/Bryce. For the past two years, Richard Bryce IV had been searching for his third wife, Chrissie, who had run off with her stepson—fifteen-year-old Richard Bryce V. The trail had grown stale, but the cops and I were still looking.

Then there was DI-CASE:4218/Haggerty. Stephen Haggerty, owner of Haggerty and Sons Jewelers, had loaned a boatload of diamonds to adorn the spindly limbs of five socialites for their appearance at the Helping Hearts Charity Ball. The next morning, their chauffeur was found at Sky Harbor International Airport, passed out across the front seat of their rented limo, his blood filled with orange juice and Rohypnol. The phony socialites were gone, along with the diamonds. Rumor had it that they were now working Florida, but so far, I’d found nothing concrete.

After an hour spent going through other open cases and making a few phone calls, I found nothing that called for my immediate attention. None of the cases involved violence, just the usual frustration and heartbreak. I was halfway tempted to shut down the office and drive to the gym when the phone rang. The caller identified herself as Amy Flanagan, the new Human Resources Supervisor at Genesis Cable. She sounded tense.

“Ms. Jones, Beth over at Southwest MicroSystems—she’s a friend of mine —recommended Desert Investigations to me. Here’s my problem. Genesis has a new contract for the West Valley, so we have to bring some new hires aboard, and quick, too. I have thirty job applications sitting on my desk right now. Five of them are for high level positions, so you see that, uh…”

I helped her out of her discomfort. “You need them checked fast and you need them checked deep, right?”

She expelled her breath. “Exactly.”

Problem was, although I could play around with Google and Dogpile, I didn’t have Jimmy’s more advanced computer skills. With the realization that we were probably losing a new client for good, I apologized and offered Jean Begay’s phone number. Flanagan thanked me and hung up, leaving me glaring at Jimmy’s empty chair.

Irresponsible rat!

Then I caught myself.

Being a foundling, I had no known living relatives, and because intimacy had always been difficult for me, I also had few friends. The old saw counseled, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” but Jimmy’s friendship had taught me the flaw in that philosophy. Whenever I began tipping over into the shadow side of life, his steadiness always brought me back. He would say at such times:
Love your friends, forget your enemies.
Yet here I was, angry at the most decent man I’d ever known over something as insignificant as one lost client.

Another thing Jimmy had taught me: When anger blooms, search for the seed. Knowledge being prequel to understanding, I placed a call to Michael Sisiwan, Jimmy’s uncle. If anyone knew Jimmy’s whereabouts, Michael did.

“Pima Paint and Collision,” Michael Sisiwan chirped into the phone. “You wreck ’em, we fix ’em.”

I forced myself to sound casual. “It’s Lena, Michael. Jimmy wasn’t in the office when I came in but he left me a message saying something about being out of reach for a couple of weeks. At least that’s what I think the message said. You know how landlines are. Talk to somebody in China and the connection’s so clear it sounds like you’re talking to someone across the street, but try to get a message from someone who lives down the road and all you get is static. If my guess is right and he is out of town, out of curiosity, where’d he go?”

Unlike me, Pimas never lie, but they can evade. Trying to get information from one could be like navigating a minefield of politeness.

“Jimmy? Sorry, Lena, but that man does not give me every detail of his schedule.”

“Understood. I’m simply asking if you know where he is.”

“Hmmm. Do I know where the man is.” A statement, not a question. Michael knew and wasn’t going to tell me.

“Michael, I’m getting worried. Jimmy has never disappeared like this before, so stop playing games.”

Another long pause. A laid-back tribe, Pimas like the subtleties of conversation, the slow dance around the word room. But because of his collision business, Michael was used to dealing with anxiety-ridden white folks, and a little directness had rubbed off.

“Since you put it like that, if Jimmy wanted you to know where he was and what he was doing, he would have told you. I am very sorry, but…Oh, look. Here comes a messed-up Ranchero. Think I will mosey over there and check the damage. Always liked Rancheros. Prettiest thing Detroit ever produced—a car that looks like a pickup. Or a pickup that looks like a car. This one is turquoise, too, my favorite color, not that other colors are not nice. Red. Yellow. Even gray, which is under-appreciated, seeing how it is the color of rain clouds, which in the desert is always good news. You think the fellow might be interested in selling that pretty thing?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “You take care now, Lena.”