High Country Nocturne (20 page)

A Phoenix Police SUV slipped past me as we crossed Thomas Road and for a moment I thought he would pull her over for the darkened taillight, the suspiciously missing rear glass. Then I could back him up and this nightmare would be over. But he turned onto a side street. Going to a call.

When I was a little boy, much of this area had still been citrus groves with creeping subdivisions and good new schools attracting the middle class. You could still buy oranges and grapefruits at roadside stands. Now much of it had turned shabby, lawns gone weedy or left to become dirt, another linear slum in the making.

The toffs who made it a point of pride never to go south of Camelback, or even Bell Road many miles to the north, called this area “the Sonoran Biltmore,” a slur for the changing demographics.

The real Biltmore was getting closer. We hit green at Indian School, Campbell and Highland, then the fancy midrise condos, offices, and Ritz-Carlton at Twenty-fourth and Camelback Road loomed up.

Camelback turned red and I slipped onto a residential side street behind the glassy Esplanade office tower. The low-slung houses here once had views of the mountains. Then a future governor, developer Fife Symington, built towers terribly out of scale with their surroundings and this street began a slow decline. Symington later got in trouble with the law but he'd made his money and wrecked a neighborhood. So very Phoenix.

For me, the street provided a sanctuary as I turned off the lights and did a one-eighty, then slid slowly back toward Twenty-fourth.

The light was green now and the Chevy was a block ahead, passing Biltmore Fashion Park. Where the hell was she going?

Less than half a mile on, I got the answer: She turned right into the entrance to the Arizona Biltmore. I saw that the guardhouse was unmanned and flipped off the headlights again. The Chevy drove on. We were enveloped in shadowy trees, perfectly manicured lawns, and very expensive real estate.

The hotel was some distance from the street. Many people thought it was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, but the architect was actually his former student Albert Chase McArthur. Either way, the resort was a jewel. Fancy houses surrounded it, too. The Chevy took a right on Biltmore Estates Drive, a parkway that wound a lazy half-circle around the golf course and was lined by expansive older mansions. Plenty of diamonds here. Historic diamonds. Conflict diamonds. Legitimate diamonds.

What the hell was Strawberry Death doing here?

A few years ago, some of the local leaders had convened a series of salons to discuss big ideas for Phoenix's future. They had been held at a developer's house on this street and I had been invited as the token historian. Not much had been accomplished other than good booze and company. This particular house had hosted Ronald and Nancy Reagan as guests in the 1950s.

We drove past that place and the Chevy slid into a circular drive of another property. I coasted to a halt, car lights still off. I was unable to see through the landscaping but soon lights started coming on in the house. Making note of the address, I turned around and left, amazed that this fifteen-year-old Honda Prelude hadn't attracted attention.

A mile south, back in the Sonoran Biltmore, I pulled into the parking lot of a tumbledown shopping strip and tried to figure out my next move. The answer came with a tap on the driver's window. It was a skinny young man in a hoodie, an Anglo. I almost shot him.

“Do you have any cash to spare?”

“No.”

“Is there anything I could do to earn it?”

I looked him over. He couldn't have been more than twenty years old but he was getting by hustling on the streets.

“Get in the car,” I said. As he walked around, I stowed the carbine in the back seat.

He sat in the passenger side and used his hands to slick back his onion head of dark hair.

“Are you a cop?” He zeroed in on the Python in its holster on my belt.

I shook my head. “Do I look like a cop?”

He studied me. “I don't know.”

“Maybe
you're
a cop.”

He pulled up his hoodie and shirt. “I ain't wearing no wire. I'm not the police. I used to be a student.”

“Why did you quit?”

“The money ran out,” he said. “I got to like the meth way too much. Let's drive somewhere private.”

“We can do this here. How much?”

“Twenty-five bucks to suck your cock, forty if you want me to swallow. It's better than you'll get from your wife.”

I doubted that. As I wrote on a notepad, he shivered in the seat. I peeled off four twenties and held them out.

I said, “You have a phone?”

“Yeah.”

“You can have the money if you call this number and read these words, only these words, and then hang up.” I flipped on the dome light.

The number went to Silent Witness, which was less likely to have advanced tracing equipment than calling 911 directly. His time on the phone would be short, but long enough to say that he had spotted the woman who shot the deputy's wife Saturday night, the one on television, and she's at this address right now.

He read the note, moving his lips. “Seriously?”

I ran my fingers over the twenties. “Easy money. Then you get lost and forget you ever saw me.”

He reached for the bills but I pulled them away. “After you make the call.”

The boy pulled out a cell phone and started to dial.

Chapter Twenty-eight

I returned to the hospital and settled into an empty ICU waiting room, dozing intermittently. Lindsey's doctors woke me a little before seven to say that the fever had broken.

My face felt strange. I was smiling.

After being allowed ten minutes beside my sleeping beauty, I found Sharon waiting outside and told her the news. She gave me a hug and sent me home for rest. That was one thing I was not allowed at the moment.

Outside, clouds had come in and it smelled like rain. People were smiling. Rain had that effect in Phoenix.

Home. The first thing I did was to make sure any evidence from early this morning was gone. I picked up Strawberry Death's shell casings. They went with a .32 caliber pistol. The neighbor's shrubbery appeared in decent shape.

Inside, I scanned the
Arizona Republic
. It had a story about how the Sheriff's Office was missing a number of weapons issued by the federal government through a surplus military gear program. As a result, the feds were cutting off MSCO from future deliveries. There was also a follow-up story on a federal probe of the Sheriff's Office for racial profiling. My new boss.

By now, a Phoenix Police SWAT team would be interrupting the morning walks of the people along Biltmore Estates Drive. Maybe they would already have the woman in custody or dead. I showered and waited for a call from Vare.

In another suit, starched white shirt, and Salvatore Ferragamo tie from Lindsey, I returned to the Prelude and drove to the address Melton had given me. Exhaustion weighed on my limbs but I couldn't stop.

It was deep in Arcadia, a district in Phoenix that ran against Scottsdale and contained some of the most beautiful properties in the city. It still benefited from the flood irrigation that remained after the groves were bulldozed. The older houses were long rambling ranches surrounded by mature trees. Camelback Mountain presided over the oasis of orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees, cottonwoods, willows, and sycamores, towering oleander hedges.

You can still drive north on Arcadia Drive at night, turn onto Valle Vista Road clinging to the edge of the mountain and see the vast carpet of city lights below you. Lindsey and I would go up there and make out like high-school kids. Not far away is the Camelback Falls mansion, where I once worked a case after Peralta had been shot and was in a coma.

But Arcadia was changing. New owners were tearing down the older houses and putting up tall McMansions, tearing out trees and foliage that had thrived for decades and throwing down haphazard desert landscaping and concrete for more cars. It added to the heat island. It wasn't authentic. If you asked me, it was a crappy investment of water to throw down gravel here so developers could add artificial lakes and golf courses out on the fringes. But nobody asked me. Why was everything lovely and historic in my city at risk, all the time?

The only comfort from this vandalism was that the ongoing real-estate bust was keeping the destruction at a slow-mo pace.

I turned north, with the head of Camelback directly before me. It was formed a few million years before the rest of the mountain but wasn't showing its age. Another turn put me on a street with a long row of ficus trees, two stories tall and meticulously trimmed to make a privacy hedge. Amid them was a gate. I pressed the button on the call box, gave my name, and watched it slowly swing open. The car passed through the copse of trees and oleanders before opening up on a three-story French chalet surrounded by at least two acres of grounds. From the street, you would never know it was here. Which was, of course, the idea.

The house was white—of course, it would be white—with gabled windows on the top floor and three tall chimneys. It was built to look old. A turret completed the facade on one end. With the overcast, I could see lights on in every room, warm, welcoming, giving money to Arizona Public Service.

It was sprinkling when I walked up three low steps to a double front door. I would have preferred to remain outside and feel the rain, smell it, and smell the reaction of the land. But I pressed the doorbell. A Latina housekeeper led me inside and said she would fetch “Miss Diane.”

The foyer was overpoweringly white—walls, tile floor with black diamonds embedded, baby grand piano, marble table topped by a vase of white lilies, multiple arched entrances and a staircase circling overhead. Color was added by tasteful antique chairs, a dark cabinet, black wrought-iron candelabra, oxidizing copper sculpture, and a light-brown fireplace with a mirror on the mantle.

It was a long way from Cypress Street. But the room felt both overcrowded and sterile.

I heard footsteps on the grand staircase, caught a flash of legs, and forced myself not to look up.

Soon a young woman appeared. She was twenty or so, athletically put together. The first thing you noticed was the long tawny hair, then the long tanned legs set off in a casual short dress. Her eyes were a rich brown. She came close enough that I could study her long lashes.

“Well, well.” Her smile was powerful enough to light the house, her teeth the color of polished porcelain. “Aren't you dressed up? You don't look familiar. Diane's had so many lawyers through here since Daddy died that I know them all.”

“I'm not a lawyer.”

“I didn't think so. You don't have that transactional look. You're very tall.”

She placed her hands on my shoulders. “You're a little old to be Diane's new distraction but I suppose you'll do. Yes, you will do. She usually likes them young, after she snagged Daddy, of course. Maybe she's turning over a new leaf. I find young men boring.”

She was inside my comfort zone. I took a step back and she stepped with me, as if we were dancing. Later, I thought how she was close enough to try to disarm me or run a blade into my stomach, but I put down my defenses because she was pretty and the surroundings moneyed.

She kept her hands on my shoulders long past appropriate and looked at me smoothly.

“Who did that to your eye? You don't look like a brawler.”

“I'm not, usually. Who are you?”

“Zephyr.” She tossed her hair, which glistened in the bright room.

“The west wind.”

Her lips curled up. “You know your mythology. I like you.”

I knew more about trains. The Denver Zephyr had been a premier passenger train before America decided it wanted to throw away its great rail patrimony. They stayed on life support with Amtrak, which operated the California Zephyr. Lindsey and I had ridden it through the Rockies.

This Zephyr started to say more when a new voice came behind us.

“Zephyr, dear, leave the gentleman alone. He and I have to talk.”

She finally removed her hands. “Of course, Mother. Have fun. He's good looking and I bet he knows it.”

Now I was being played. Women her age had rarely found me attractive, not even when I was twenty.

Zephyr sauntered through an archway and disappeared.

“She's very mischievous. Do you have kids?”

“No.” I introduced myself and showed her my badge and identification.

She gave me a firm handshake. “I'm Diane Whitehouse.”

Diane Whitehouse was petite with thick dark hair cut to her jawline and parted on the left. She wore black Prada jeans, a simple white sweater, and diamond studs in her ears. She appeared to be about my age, with big eyes behind the black plastic-framed glasses that were fashionable again.

Her forehead was defined by natural wrinkles. I respected that. Being rich in this town almost mandated a trip to one of the pricey plastic surgeons in Scottsdale, “Silicone Valley.” A large solitary diamond sat on a ring, the only other piece of jewelry she wore.

She was also the widow of Elliott Whitehouse, the last of the old generation of local residential builders, who had died last year.

I had never met the man but he made his fortune laying down suburban tract houses all over the Valley. When I was young, his corny flag-draped billboards promised, “You don't have to be president to live in a Whitehouse.”

I was surprised he had chosen to remain here after selling Whitehouse Homes and retiring. The usual playbook was to leave the city for coastal California or the San Juan Islands. Of course, this was probably only one of his homes.

Like so many of its custom-designed cousins that ran from here across to Paradise Valley and up into the slopes of the McDowell Mountains, this one managed to appear expensive and trashy at the same time.

Diane led me through one of the arches into a study lined with light-brown built-in bookshelves, interspersed with a marble fireplace, a large mirror, and French doors leading to a terrace. All of this except the mirror was colored butterscotch. A heavy black wrought-iron chandelier hung from a snowy ceiling. The room had too much furniture. She invited me to sit on a sofa and settled across from me in a chair, crossing very slender legs.

“This rain is so depressing.”

“I love it,” I said.

She nodded like a scientist whose experiment had produced something unexpected. “You must be a native.”

“Fourth generation.”

“Not many of you,” she said. “That must be lonely.”

I thought about that and decided she was right.

“I've lived here long enough that I should appreciate the rain,” she said. “But I don't. What do you think about that?”

That
had nothing to do with the weather. It was signaled by a pedigreed toss of her head. Like mother, like daughter. She indicated a glass display case holding a very old piece of pottery, geometric design, with a shard broken out near the middle.

Or it was a very good fake. Yet considering Elliott Whitehouse's wealth and the abundance of various styles of large, ornate native pottery, Hopi Katsinas, and Mexican Day of the Dead figurines on the shelves, I knew it must be authentic.

“Beautiful,” I said. “Mimbres, with a kill hole.”

The Mimbres were part of the Mogollon culture, one of the prehistoric peoples of the Southwest. The “kill hole” was part of the burial tradition, placed with the deceased so his spirit could escape through it to the next world.

“Very good,” she said. “I asked Chris to send me his best detective. He told me he had a professional historian on his staff. I'm impressed but not surprised.”

I was not an archaeologist and the three thousand years of human habitation of Arizona was not my specialty. I had dated an archaeologist once, or at least that's what she claimed to be. Instead, I was pretty sure she was a murderer and I very nearly fell in love with her. Talk about a footnote. No, I knew only enough in this field to be dangerous and yet impress Diane Whitehouse. But her comment made me wonder if she ever read the local newspaper when it reported on my successes working for Peralta?

“Chris is going places, you know,” she said. “You stick with him. Governor is next and beyond that, who knows?”

So she was a campaign donor. That was why Melton had roped me in.

“He's such an improvement over Mike Peralta.” Diane recrossed her legs, idly stroking an ankle with her fingers. “I can't believe Elliott contributed to his campaigns all those years.”

Every muscle in my face remained relaxed. Her expression grew intense. “I had intended to go to that jewelry show, you know? And Mike Peralta, our former sheriff, shoots a man, steals the jewels. This is such a dangerous place. One doesn't want to be called a racist, but…”

She sighed and smiled.

Of course
one
didn't even need to finish the sentence.

“Elliott took me to Antwerp once. I visited the old diamond district. Amazing place. The deals were done with a handshake. And generations of craftsmen did the cutting and polishing. Much of that has moved offshore now, where it can be done much cheaper.”

Like Jerry McGuizzo and Bogdan, she knew a good deal about diamonds.

“You don't strike me as someone who would be interested in bling,” I said.

She laughed. “No. I thought Zephyr might like something. Maybe Tupac's rings on a chain to take back to Stanford. Her birthday is coming up and it's only been a year since Elliott died. She's terribly spoiled but what can you do?”

Stop spoiling her
, I wanted to say. Instead, “Is she your only child?”

Diane hesitated and pushed back her hair. “She was my child with Elliott. We were twenty-five years apart in age but it never felt that way. He had two sons by his first wife.”

“Do they live here?”

She shook her head. “It took some getting used to, for all of us. When Elliott and I started dating, I was seen as the home-wrecker. The boys resented me. How could they not? They couldn't see into the reality of that marriage, how dead and passionless it was. Anyway…now they have their own families. There's respect between us.…”

In another setting, I might have said something to show I understood or sympathized. But I was here on police business. Not only that, in the eyes of Diane and Chris, I was here as the hired help in his political aspirations, tending to a wealthy patron. It made me feel dirty.

I said, “The sheriff told me you found the wallet.”

Her forehead furrowed. “The wallet. Yes.”

She sat straight and stared into the white ceiling and her face relaxed. “You know, when the real-estate bubble collapsed in 1990, Elliott was one of the few local homebuilders who wasn't wiped out. He was a survivor.”

“He was the last of his kind,” I said. “Now it's all national builders.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “He had amazing business acumen. When I met him, I was only twenty-five and I thought he walked on water. The sophisticated older man and the malleable young woman.” She paused and watched over the big glasses to see my reaction. I was a model of empathy.

“That's what it looked like on the surface,” she said. “He was weaker than the world knew and I was stronger. But we had a good marriage. A complicated marriage, but isn't that redundant? I know this must sound terribly boring. An aging woman who's lost her looks and can't stop talking.”