Partner In Crime (15 page)

When I reached my row, I discovered I was in the back of the plane in the middle seat, squashed between two very large men. I’m not exactly a lightweight, but these two guys dwarfed me. One was a twenty-something weight lifter with massive shoulders. The other was in his mid-to-late seventies and had probably never been in a gym in his life. His shoulder muscles had come about the old-fashioned way—by doing hard physical labor. He was an old codger with several missing teeth and amazingly bad breath. He read every word of his in-flight magazine, moving his lips constantly and showing off those missing teeth as he did so.

Resigned to two and a half hours of misery, I settled into my seat as best I could, closing my eyes and hoping to nap my way to Arizona. I willed myself into unconsciousness and thought about the previous evening’s night on the town with Naomi Pepper.

We’d had a nice-enough dinner. The food at Bis on Main was wonderful and the service impeccable. Even so, the evening hadn’t turned out to be the complete success either Naomi or I had envisioned. I could tell when I stopped by the mall to pick her up after work that Naomi wasn’t a happy camper.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s my mother,” she said.

In the month or so that Naomi Pepper and I had been hanging out together, I had gleaned bits and pieces of information about her mother, Katherine Foley. Putting those pieces together, I had determined Katherine was something of a handful. Twice widowed and once divorced, she had now been abandoned by her most recent boy toy.

Some of Katherine’s wilder antics—like insisting on doing her weekly shopping at midnight in her local Albertson’s in full evening-wear regalia—verged on Auntie Mame behavior. It’s easier to deal with Auntie Mame when the person in question is some distant relative, preferably a second cousin. When the kook turns out to be your very own mother, all bets are off. That evening I realized that being Katherine Foley’s daughter had turned into tough duty for Naomi Pepper.

“What about her?” I asked.

To my surprise, Naomi’s eyes filled with tears. “Let’s not talk about it right now,” she said. “We’re having a fun birthday celebration. I don’t want anything to spoil it.”

“Tell me about your mother,” I insisted.

“She wants to move in with me,” Naomi said finally, after taking a deep breath. “She’s just this week been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She’s worried about continuing to live on her own now that Geoff has taken off for parts unknown. I don’t know much about Parkinson’s disease, but I suppose she has a point. But she’s so incredibly bossy, Beau. She’s forever trying to run my life by remote control. If I let her move in . . .”

Naomi’s voice trailed off, and I could guess at what
wasn’t
being said. Naomi Pepper is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Nice as in kind. Nice as in loving. Nice as in giving you the shirt off her back and caring about everyone else first and herself last, often to her own detriment. The problem is, the world is full of not-nice people who prey on the ones who are, people who have zero compunction about taking advantage of their victims. Naomi Pepper’s husband, Gary, is a prime case in point.

Gary hadn’t quite finished divorcing her when he was diagnosed with liver cancer. His girlfriend wouldn’t look after him, so he had dragged his dying butt back home to Naomi. And, because she’s a nice person, she had taken him in and cared for him until his death several months later.

Then there’s Naomi’s daughter, Melissa. She may not be Gary’s biological daughter, but she’s still a chip off the old block. The hair-raising stories I’d heard about Missy’s formative years put her in a class with the rotten little kid in that old movie
The Bad Seed
. From seventh grade on, Missy Pepper had been a mess—in and out of juvie and rehab and on and off the streets. Despite Melissa’s propensity for getting into trouble, Naomi loves the girl to distraction and has stuck with her through some very rough times. Naomi may have been introduced to the concept of tough love, but I’m sure she’ll be there to bail Melissa out of trouble the next time the girl needs bailing.

What I thought Naomi Pepper herself needed right then was a vacation from troublesome relatives. Here, though, was her mother, prepared to waltz into Naomi’s life as yet another patient in need of nursing and attention.

Let me be clear: I wasn’t being totally altruistic. I know the younger set is under the impression that adult sex drives disappear completely somewhere around age thirty-seven. But that’s not true. At least mine hasn’t. Still, the idea of having a sexual interlude in a bedroom where someone’s aging mother might possibly burst in on the scene at any moment encourages a degree of sexual malfunction that no amount of Viagra can fix.

In other words, I wanted Katherine Foley to live somewhere else, but I was hoping for subtlety. I tried to avoid saying it in so many words. What I said instead was, “Are you sure you want to do that—take her in, I mean?”

“I don’t have a choice,” Naomi said. “I’m an only child.”

“Does your mother have money?”

Harry I. Ball isn’t alone in asking nothing but questions for which he already knows the answers. It’s one of the oldest ploys in an experienced interrogator’s bag of tricks, one I myself utilized to good effect during the years I worked as a homicide detective at Seattle PD. In this case I happened to know that the answer to my money question was an unequivocal yes. Naomi had mentioned on several occasions—occasions when the mother-daughter guilt card wasn’t faceup on the table—that Katherine Foley’s various ventures into the world of holy matrimony had left her fairly well off, much better off financially than her daughter, who still had to go to work at The Bon every day to earn her keep.

“Some,” Naomi allowed now.

“Couldn’t she move into an assisted-living place? Beverly and Lars live in one of those, you know. They’re in Queen Anne Gardens, up at the top of the Counterbalance. It’s very nice. At least it seems nice to me.”

Beverly Piedmont, my widowed, eighty-six-year-old grandmother, had recently married Lars Jenssen, my AA sponsor, who’s a spry eighty-seven. After their wedding, they moved into a retirement center on top of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, where they seem to be enjoying themselves immensely. The common areas of what they call “the home” resemble the lobby of a posh hotel. The rooms and corridors are brightly painted and well-lit. The floors are covered with bluish-green carpets that look new and smell clean.

At Queen Anne Gardens, Lars and Beverly had signed up for a plan that comes complete with linen service as well as three hot meals a day. The food is plentiful and palatable, with no need to shop or cook beforehand or to wash up and put away dishes afterward. Beverly Piedmont Jenssen had spent more than five decades cooking and serving three meals a day, with little or no help from my now deceased grandfather. As far as she’s concerned, being relieved of KP duty qualifies as nothing short of heaven on earth. And, since Beverly is happy, Lars is happy, too.

“Does your mother have any pets?” I asked.

Naomi nodded. “A cocker named Spade,” she said. “He’s eleven.”

“According to Lars, some of the residents have pets,” I hinted. “There may be a size restriction. You probably couldn’t get away with bringing along an Irish wolfhound, but I’m sure a cocker spaniel would qualify.”

“Mother won’t go,” Naomi said flatly.

“How do you know that?” I said. “Have you asked her?”

“No, but I know my mother,” Naomi replied. “She’d rather die than have to go live in a place like that.”

Watch out,
I wanted to warn Naomi.
You’re about to be suckered
. But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut because I’ve learned over the years that when it comes to minding other people’s business, I always wind up getting myself in trouble.

Alaska Air Lines Flight 790 had reached what the pilot called a “comfortable cruising altitude.” That was easy for him to say. He wasn’t jammed into the middle of a three-seat row. About that time the guy in front of me leaned his seat back all the way, crushing both my kneecaps. Is it any wonder I’m not much of a fan of air travel? I don’t know many people over six feet tall who are.

The weight lifter next to the window—the guy whose humongous shoulders overlapped my seat by a good three inches—suddenly needed to get up. Climbing over both me and Mr. Moving Lips, he removed a laptop computer from the overhead compartment and turned it on. I thought he was going to work on something interesting. Instead, he began playing solitaire. The only time he paused was during the couple of minutes it took him to plow his way through his English muffin/scrambled egg sandwich. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he had been any good at solitaire, but he wasn’t. He’d sit there not making moves that I could see and he couldn’t.

I would have gone back to thinking about Naomi, but between the lip-moving reader on one side and the solitaire player on the other, it wasn’t possible. Finally, with my seatmates seemingly preoccupied with their own activities, I opened my own briefcase, took out the Latisha Wall file, and commenced to reread the reports I found there. As soon as I started working, the weight lifter abandoned his solitaire game in favor of engaging me in polite conversation. Rather than let him read over my shoulder, I put the file away.

Guess what he wanted to talk about? Working out. It seems his father was a championship weight lifter in the age fifty-five-to-sixty-five category. Father and son worked out at the same gym, where all the other weight lifters thought the father-and-son act was cool. Since they had bonded so well this way, the weight lifter felt free to tell me that he thought everybody else should do the same thing. And so on and so on. At tedious length. I was tempted to tell him this would be difficult for me since I never knew my father, but even that probably wouldn’t have shut him up.

I was trapped with no means of escape. It reached a point where I would have welcomed a comment from the guy on the other side, but he continued to read his magazine in total, lip-moving concentration.

Eventually—and not nearly soon enough—the pilot announced that we were beginning our gradual descent into Tucson International, which—as far as I could see from my limited middle-seat view—seemed to consist of a vast sea of brown. Brown or not, I was looking forward to landing. That would mean the guy who was crushing my knees would have to put his seat back in the full upright and locked position. I thought my troubles would soon be over. They weren’t. Once I managed to escape from the plane, my life immediately got worse.

Compared to Sea-Tac, Tucson International Airport is small potatoes. I collected my luggage and walked down the car-rental aisle, looking for a counter called Saguaro Discount Rental, the car-rental agency listed on my itinerary. I finally stopped at the Alamo desk and asked one of the women working there.

“That’s pronounced ‘sa-waro,’ “ she told me, rolling her eyes. “It’s Spanish, so the
g
is pronounced like a
w
. They’re off-site. You have to call on their courtesy phone. It’s over there on the wall. They’ll send a shuttle to pick you up.”

No matter how you pronounce it, the office and lot for Saguaro Discount Rental was more than a mile from the airport. As soon as I saw their fleet of brightly colored KIAs—all of them last year’s model—I knew that the Washington State Attorney’s penny-pinching travel agent had struck again. My car was a four-cylinder automatic KIA Sportage SUV, a name that sounds a whole lot more sporting and exotic than it is.

I admit to being spoiled. At Seattle PD I often drove vehicles equipped with police pursuit engines. Meanwhile, parked on the P-3 level of the Belltown Terrace garage is my slick guard’s red 928. Even so, I do have some experience at driving four-cylinder vehicles. I spent eight years—the whole time I was in college and four years afterward—driving an old-time VW Beetle, but that was a standard four-speed, not an automatic. My rental Sportage did fine as long as I was driving on flat ground. It was only when I started up an incline, even a gradual one, that it lugged down so far that it seemed I was barely moving. Compared to the rest of the seventy-five-mile-an-hour traffic on the freeway, I wasn’t.

My printed MapQuest directions said it would take me two hours and twelve minutes to get from Tucson to Bisbee. It actually took forty-five minutes longer than that because the road was uphill most of the way. By the time I came chugging up over the mountain pass just north of Bisbee, I was beginning to think I’d never get there. The good news is, moving that slowly I had plenty of time to survey the scenery. I found myself regretting not having brought along a pair of sunglasses, but in the dark and wet of pre-dawn Seattle, sunglasses hadn’t seemed like a pressing necessity.

The mountainous terrain on either side of the highway leading to Bisbee was either reddish brown or gray. The hillsides were dotted with green specks I assumed to be bushes of some kind. Then, as I started up the north side of the Mule Mountains, I realized those bushes were really full-fledged trees after all. They’re not the kind of towering, stately evergreens we have in Washington. No, these starved and stunted trees did have leaves on them, but there was no hint that they were about to change colors or drop off.

Every once in a while, winding along what looked like a dry creek bed, I’d see a stand of much bigger trees that had leaves that were beginning to change, but just barely. I’ve never been much of a botanist, but I found this astonishing. Back home in Seattle, many of the trees that line the avenues were already mostly bare.

I drove through a tunnel—the Mule Mountain Tunnel, I believe it’s called—near the top of that range of mountains. When I emerged from the tunnel, the town of Bisbee lay nestled in a red-hued canyon that twisted down the other side. Seeing the town for the first time gave me an odd sensation. It seemed so isolated, as though the entire rest of the world were on the far side of those mountains. The Bisbee side—with a brilliant-blue sky above it—was a world unto itself, like a self-sufficient castle with a wide moat of desert all around it.