New River Blues

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This first world edition published 2009

in Great Britain and in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Gunn.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Gunn, Elizabeth, 1927-

New river blues. - (The Sarah Burke series)

1. Police - Arizona - Tucson - Fiction 2. Women detectives

- Arizona - Tucson - Fiction 3. Murder - Investigation -

Fiction 4. Construction industry - Arizona - Fiction

5. Detective and mystery stories

I. Title

813.5'4[F]

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-024-1   (ePub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6732-2   (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-115-7   (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have to thank Sergeant Kevin Hall, who currently heads the hard-working Homicide investigations unit of the Tucson Police Department, for a tour of his section that enabled this story to take shape. John Cheek, of Cops ‘n' Writers, patiently guided me away from many errors. Greg Shelko, director of Rio Nuevo, and Nina Trasoff, city council member for Ward Six, both gave generously of their time to help me unravel the mysteries of an urban renewal project. Matthew Lottman, of Ttolmann Construction Company, shared his hard-won insights into the plight of the home construction industry caught in the credit meltdown. And without Mike Hayes, author of the
Mad Dog and Englishman
series and passionate car buff, my antique Jaguar could never have roamed the streets.

ONE

T
he party was big and very noisy at first, two or three groups that didn't mix very well and laughed at everything so they'd know they were having fun. The neighbors huddled in one room, taking careful sips of tall drinks and comparing insurance plans, while a bigger, louder crowd of theater people milled around them, sharing inside jokes and grabbing refreshments with both hands.

A third group, young, clustered in the dining room drinking long-neck beers and wine coolers out of an ice-tub in the bay window. They all talked at once to a beautiful blonde girl who evidently lived there. When the rooms were full of laughing, swilling people the blonde, at a signal from the hostess, took her place under a chandelier hung with balloons and began to open her birthday presents. She showed each gift around, hugged the donor and declared each item to be something she'd always wanted.

Several older guests offered toasts praising her beauty and wit, and a window-rattling cheer went up from the kids when she blew out eighteen candles. Then the birthday girl and her friends ate a lot of cake very fast, kissed the hostess and went out the door in a babbling rush into a red November sunset.

Once the kids' refreshments were cleared away, the drink trays emptied faster and the party warmed up. A hint of high-grade cannabis began to drift through the elegant rooms. The groups that had clung together since they arrived began to break up and drift too, as if the laws of gravity were being gradually repealed. Intense new friendships formed around a sentence or even a glance.

The hostess kept an eye on her guests, joining the singers around the piano for a chorus, making sure the men talking politics in the study had plenty to drink. The high-energy theater people who were clustered around the crinkly smiling man on the stairway didn't need much looking after – they stayed hilarious on their own.

Pauly had only been working parties for a month but already he was a fair judge of what made one fly. This event had plenty of booze and pot, an unusual mix of people in luxurious surroundings and a voluptuous, beaming hostess in the most beautiful beaded green dress he'd ever seen. He thought it was the best party he'd worked yet, probably good for some decent tips and maybe a couple of hours' overtime.

Felicity had found the job for them. She was a waifish actress, too skinny for his taste before he went to Yuma but plenty hot for the sex-starved ex-con he was now. Not that she'd give him the time of day. She had long auburn hair and big eyes that would probably be lovely when her shiners healed up. Right now she was using a lot of makeup to cover her mysterious eye bruises, which along with her oddly swollen nose made her look like a raccoon that had tangled with a trap.

On stage, she covered up her injuries with even more make-up and cagey acting tricks. Felicity was a pro at the regional theater where many of the people at this party were sponsors and board members. Has-been Hollywood stars or TV actors whose series got cancelled would jet into Tucson to pick up some sunshine and easy applause in old Broadway shows –
Brigadoon
,
The Sound of Music
– and locals, sometimes some of the board members, got their grins taking supporting roles. Felicity and one underfed fag understudied all the parts and covered emergencies. Pauly and Nino, this season's staff, moved props and kept the theater clean.

From the theater they had followed Felicity's lead into this part-time job with the catering company that booked parties out of the Spotted Pony, the actors' favorite bar. Not a great job but it beat Dumpster diving and sleeping under bridges, which was what they'd been down to for a while after they got to town.

Pauly and Nino had drifted together in the yard at Yuma during ‘exercise,' the time when they stood in corners smoking, saying fuck this and fuck that, bunched for safety with Petey and a couple of other short-timers. Bored drop-outs from high schools in small Arizona towns, they'd all made their grab for easy money in the drug trade and been busted almost at once by lawmen who treated them like pathetic jokes. Seething with a toxic mix of resentment and fear after prison had shown them they were not as tough as they thought, they cursed ‘the system,' worked half-heartedly on GEDs, and tried to stay out of fights and love affairs while they ran out the clock on their sentences.

Then Petey got jumped in the laundry one day, went in the infirmary and didn't come out. In the yard that afternoon Pauly kicked the wall. ‘Fucking guards don't do nothing but supervise the killing, what the fuck?'

Nino pushed him into a corner and stood in front of him muttering, ‘Shut
up
,' because one of the yard pigs was looking. When Pauly calmed down he admitted Nino had saved his ass, and before lights out he'd agreed that job one, from now on, was staying alive till tomorrow.

It wasn't much of a plan but it became one. They watched each other's back, thought ahead a little for the first time in their lives. And they began to talk every day about what they wanted to do when they got out.

Most of Pauly's ideas centered on food and sex. Before his arrest he had accepted his limited success with Benson girls because he had nothing to offer but himself and there were plenty of unemployed no-talent yo-yos around. But cut off from society as he was now, he began to fantasize about bedding girls of all shapes and sizes. He wanted to try sex with several girls at once, he told Nino, and then find one slavish female who would cook great meals and put out whenever he wanted it. He masturbated endlessly to one particularly vivid dream of mounting her as she bent to look in the oven.

Nino could read without moving his lips and was open to dreams of the wider world. ‘I'm ashamed,' he said one day, ‘that I settled for such stupid little crap when there's so much on the outside to choose from.' He had been studying the pictures in dog-eared copies of
Playboy
and
Hustler
the staff left around. He pointed to ads for big cars, good clothes, and glossy living rooms, saying, ‘See?
This
is what we should be aiming for.'

‘Oh, sure,' Pauly said. ‘Just snap my fingers, I can have that stuff anytime.'

‘You can if you get in with the right people,' Nino said. He tilted his head to one side and studied Pauly. ‘You know, you'd clean up pretty nice. You oughta think about that.'

‘Hell you talking about? I ain't no whore.'

‘Didn't say you was. Were. But you want to move up, you gotta consider how to get people to like you. You're a good-looking guy. Learn how to dress and talk, it could change your life.' Pauly stood with his mouth open, not knowing how to respond to the unexpected compliment, till Nino came up on his blind side with, ‘Think about it hard enough, you could probably even get yourself to quit saying ain't.'

Pauly said, ‘Aw, shee-it,' and turned his back. But he didn't stay mad, he never stayed mad at Nino because Nino was all he had in here and a better friend, come right down to it, than any he'd ever made on the outside. Pauly had seen movies where men at war formed a kind of brotherhood, and he thought that was how it was working for him and Nino in prison.

For the rest of their time in Yuma they talked about how they would ‘make it' on the outside. Pauly had always been near flunking out of school and had terrible handwriting, but he was big and strong and as Nino said he cleaned up well. Nino was a skinny little runt but he was canny. If they stuck together, they decided, they could work something out.

‘Oh, I got it now,' Nino said one day, grinning in the yard. ‘What we need to do, we need to
augment our skill sets
.'

Pauly said, ‘Say wha'?'

‘Just learned that this morning from that fat counselor with the nose ring.' He crooked his pinkie. ‘Ain't it just too, too dee-vine?' Nino was so pleased with himself he forgot about not saying ain't.

They progressed like that, two steps forward and one back, while the relentless sun rolled east to west over their sandy patch of prison yard. Nino turned into a regular suck-up with the counselors as parole time approached, trying to ensure they got everything they were entitled to when they got released. Which wasn't much – a pair of jeans and a gray T-shirt apiece, and a couple of maps Nino begged off one of the guards. Pauly reclaimed his driver's license, his social security card, and the little earring with the dangle he had been afraid to wear in there.

The last thing he put on was his grandfather's turquoise ring. It had one stone missing, but his mother had given it to him for his thirteenth birthday, saying he could get a ruby put in when his ship came in. He'd kept it because it made him feel like he had a goal.

Between the two of them they'd saved just about enough for bus tickets home – the last place, they agreed, that either one of them wanted to go. They pooled their money and bought tickets to Tucson.

The question of skill sets came up again as the bus lumbered past the saguaros on the east side of Yuma. Pauly had grudgingly done a little haying and fence-building for his stepfather, on a ranch south of Benson, before he dropped out of school and ran away. He had just enough ranching experience to know it wasn't for him, and the old man must have agreed because he never came looking for him. He'd washed dishes in a café in town for a few weeks, until he made new friends and learned how to buy and process crack cocaine. He wasn't tempted to try being a drug lord in Benson again, but he thought he might give food service another shot.