Desert Wives (9781615952267) Read online

  Of course. In Scottsdale, just about one in every four passers-by had Mormon relatives. Those who didn’t knew enough not to offend those who did, because Mormons counted among the state’s major power brokers and held controlling interest in several industries and banks.

  I stood up and held out my hand. Deputy Yantis stepped forward and shook it in friendly enough fashion, but when I held it toward Sheriff Benson, he let my hand hang in the air until I finally lowered it.

  Kryzinski gave him a dirty look but his voice remained neutral. “Sheriff Benson here says he wants to ask you and Jimmy some questions. How about we go into the conference room, Lena? We got lots to talk about.”

  I liked Kryzinski but I didn’t feel like making nice, so I motioned to the hard wooden chairs scattered around the office. “Sit, stand, whatever.”

  Jimmy frowned. Like most Pima Indians, he was very polite. Left to his own devices, he would not only have ushered Sheriff Benson and his deputy into the conference room, but would also have offered them cold drinks of his own private stock of organic prickly pear cactus juice.

  As Kyrzinski and Deputy Yantis sat down and started mopping the sweat off their faces with wrinkled handkerchiefs, I stole a glance through the window. They must have driven up together because I could only see Kryzinski’s blue-and-white parked at the curb. The rest of Main Street’s gallery row appeared deserted, a not unusual situation for early afternoon, when heatstroke could fell the unwary art lover within minutes. Most Scottsdale folk wouldn’t troll the galleries until sunset. The tourists, well, for them Scottsdale employed a state-of-the-art Medi-Vac system. I figured that to brave this heat, the lawmen from Utah had to be in one all-fired rush.

  When I returned my attention to the room, I saw that Benson remained standing. He towered over my desk in the old I’m-Bigger-Than-You-Are game that certain men seem to love so much.

  “Ms. Jones, we have reason to believe you have some knowledge about the murder of Mr. Solomon Royal, of Purity, Utah.”

  But Benson wasn’t the only person who liked to play games. Smiling, I put my jeans-clad legs up on my desk and leaned back, nice and slow and lazy. I folded my hands behind my head and smiled. “Solomon who?”

  “Oh, I think you’ve heard of him, Ms. Jones. Solomon Royal, Prophet Royal, as he was known in the area. Before his death, Mr. Royal was the leader of a religious group just north of the Arizona border.”

  I was enjoying this. “Oh, that Solomon Royal. I think I remember reading something about him in the Scottsdale Journal. When you say he was the leader of a ‘religious group,’ don’t you really mean those Mormon polygamists?”

  Benson’s face tightened, as I knew it would. Members in good standing of the Church of Latter Day Saints don’t like it when someone describes modern-day polygamists as Mormons. I knew full well that the official church had renounced polygamy more than one hundred years earlier, but after the hand-shaking incident, I wanted to yank Benson’s chain. I had never liked smug men, and with his prim, ferret face and ramrod back, Benson looked way too full of himself for me.

  “Mormons? You know better than that, Ms. Jones!” Benson snapped. “Solomon Royal’s group, the Church of the Prophet Fundamental, is not part of the Church of Latter Day Saints and never has been. The people at Purity belong to a heretic sect which has absolutely nothing to do with our modern church. By taking plural wives, they are breaking the law.”

  I wasn’t impressed. “So why don’t you arrest them? I mean, you are the sheriff.”

  Jimmy stared at me steadily from across the table, as if warning me to be careful. He had been adopted by a Mormon family and raised in Utah, and although he had returned to his Pima Indian relatives on the reservation that abutted Scottsdale, he still retained strong ties to his adoptive parents and the Mormon community.

  Captain Kryzinski’s voice intruded upon my game. “Lena, I told you I’ve guaranteed the Scottsdale P.D.’s cooperation.”

  “Good thing I’m not Scottsdale P.D. anymore, then, isn’t it?”

  After receiving a bullet in the hip from a drug dealer, I had left the force almost a year earlier. I was my own boss now at Desert Investigations and no longer had to take orders from anybody, especially not from some badly dressed man. But Kryzinski couldn’t seem to get our changed relationship through his thick skull. He kept trying to order me around like he had done since I’d been a rookie. The fact that we frequently worked opposite ends of the same case did not help.

  “C’mon, Lena.” He wiggled around on the hard chair, his corpulent body stuffed into one of his many too-small Western suits. Today’s howler was pale blue with chocolate piping on the lapels and pockets, the ensemble completed by a black bola tie and purple ostrich-hide cowboy boots. Kryzinski’s clothes had caused mirth around the station house for years, giving rise to many hummed choruses of “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Originally from Brooklyn, Kryzinski, like many other imports to Arizona, had taken to the Western lifestyle with a vengeance.

  Jimmy took pity on him and fetched some bottles of prickly pear from the office refrigerator. Kryzinski and Yantis gulped them gratefully. I noticed that he did not offer any to Benson.

  Oblivious to the slight, Benson leaned over my desk and continued his attempt at intimidation. “Mr. Royal was shot to death a week ago and we know there’s an Arizona connection. A Scottsdale connection, to be exact. That’s where you come in. Our sources tell us that an attractive blond woman with a scar above her right eyebrow was seen hiking in the area three days before he died. That certainly describes you, doesn’t it? And we were also told that a woman who used to live in Mr. Royal’s religious community hired you to pull her daughter out of there. Now, you can continue to play cute if you want, but in the meantime, somebody’s getting away with murder.”

  Well, there’s murder and there’s murder.

  “Tell me why I should care anything about one of those Purity men getting murdered,” I said to Benson. “And while you’re at it, answer my question. Why don’t you and the rest of you Utah law enforcement types round up the whole bunch of them and throw their asses into prison where they belong? After all, as you so succinctly pointed out, polygamy is against both church law and state law. So what does that make you, Sheriff Benson? A double scofflaw for knowing about it and not doing anything?”

  The healthy tan on Benson’s face darkened in an angry flush. “It’s not rape if there is consent.”

  I laughed. “Come on, Sheriff. In Arizona, when a sixty-eight-year old man has sex with a thirteen-year-old girl it’s called statutory rape. We don’t believe that children are mature enough to give informed consent.”

  The red intensified. “Polygamists don’t marry girls under sixteen anymore. Not since the law was changed in 2001.”

  “That’s just Utah Tourist Commission bullshit and you know it. They’re still doing it.”

  A tic got busy at the edge of Benson’s right eye but the rest of him didn’t move. “That’s another conversation for another time. We’re trying to solve a murder here.”

  “I’d like to give the murderer a medal.”

  “Aren’t you interested in justice, Ms. Jones?”

  “I certainly am interested in justice, Sheriff. That’s why I’m not crying any crocodile tears over baby-rapers.”

  Benson’s right eye jerked so much it almost closed. “That’s a pretty harsh term.”

  “Old men forcing themselves on little girls, then covering up their crimes by calling it marriage, is pretty harsh, if you ask me.”

  The tic eased off and the smug look returned. “What makes you so certain the marriage, was being forced? Or do you have some information we don’t?”

  Benson was no fool. In my anger, I had come close to admitting that I’d been the one who rescued Rebecca from Prophet Solomon Royal. Before I could make another mistake I went back on the offensive.

  “Maybe I’d cooperate if you’d tell me, since you’re so interested in ju
stice, why these polygamy compounds are allowed to continue? Or is the rape of young girls just Utah’s version of safe sex?”

  Benson’s face tightened. “Not that it’s any of your business, but there have been prosecutions. Tom Green is doing time for child rape and a member of the Kingston clan is doing six years for incest.”

  “You know as well as I do that the only reason Green and Kingston were prosecuted at all was because they were high profile cases that made it to the national media just before the Salt Lake Olympics. Now the Olympics are over, and you’ve still got polygamists spread out all over the map.”

  I could swear I heard his teeth grinding before he took a deep breath and finally answered. “My job is to investigate the murder of Solomon Royal, Ms. Jones. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, if you have information about the night he died, you need to share it with us. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise what?”

  Benson said nothing, just stared at me through icy eyes.

  Captain Kryzinski, looking worried, broke into the silence. “Lena, please cooperate.”

  “Cooperate?” If I had been any more furious I would have imploded. I snuck a sideways glance at Jimmy, who along with the deputy had listened carefully to this exchange.

  I uncrossed my hands from the back of my head and made a big show of looking at my watch. “Gentlemen, you arrived without an appointment, and while our little talk has been educational, I need to get back to work.”

  “Lena…” Kryzinski leaned forward in his chair, his round face sagging in disappointed folds.

  Benson cut him off. “Ms. Jones is right, Captain. Our work here is done. We might as well return to the station and start the process.”

  Start the process? I didn’t like the sound of that, but since I didn’t want the Utah boys to know they worried me, I kept fussing with my watch.

  Deputy Yantis threw a look of dread outside at the waves of heat rising from the pavement, but Kryzinski just sighed and struggled out of his chair. Benson strode to the door, giving me one more baleful look before he opened the door and let the asphalt-scented breeze in.

  “We’ll speak again, Ms. Jones.”

  “Only if you subpoena me, Sheriff.”

  He managed a smile. “Oh, don’t worry, Ms. Jones. We folks up in Utah are pretty good with paperwork.” Then he braced himself against the blast furnace that passes for September in Scottsdale and exited the office, his sweating deputy in tow.

  I watched until Captain Kryzinski’s blue-and-white disappeared down the street, then went back to my desk and called Esther Corbett. After filling her in on what had just happened, I told her that if she had any vacation time coming from her job behind the cosmetics counter at Neiman-Marcus, this might be the time to take it. With Rebecca.

  And preferably in some country that did not have an extradition agreement with the United States.

  For the rest of the morning Jimmy continued his personnel investigations at a nearby semiconductor plant, where someone had been walking off with shopping bags full of computer chips. I, having no computer skills at all, drove to South Phoenix in order to get the owner of a discarded tire dump in South Phoenix to admit that, yes, he knew burning tires leaked pollutants into the atmosphere, and yes, hiring his son, who had racked up two juvenile arson convictions by the age of sixteen, had been a lapse in judgment. The South Mountain Citizens for Clean Air had hired me, pro bono, of course, in hopes that I could do something about the continued fires, but so far, the dump’s owner refused to admit that his son was the source of the problem.

  I could almost hear the vinyl upholstery in my 1945 Jeep sizzle in the triple-digit heat as I cruised west on the 202, happy to put Esther Corbett’s problems aside for awhile. The glass-fronted high rises of downtown Phoenix provided no shade worth speaking of; they only succeeded in blocking the view of the White Tank Mountains. Not that the White Tanks looked particularly scenic at this time of year. Like everything else in the Sonoran Desert, they’d been burned almost black by the unrelenting sun. Only hardy creosote bushes and saguaro cactus survived on their slopes.

  I exited the freeway at Nineteenth Avenue and headed south into the Barrio, where a motley collection of mesquite trees and palms did what they could to relieve the desert’s omnipresent browns and umbers. Unlike most Scottsdale residents, I maintained a fondness for the Barrio, and not only because the family which had once saved my life lived close by. The small adobe homes, some of them a century old, were a welcome respite from Scottsdale’s pseudo-Mediterranean mansions, as were the Barrio’s pink flamingos, the garden gnomes, and the occasional live chicken scratching for its buggy dinner.

  Despite its charm, the Barrio could be a risky place for a leisurely drive. I kept a lead foot on the Jeep’s accelerator as I drove past the graffiti-covered walls which proclaimed that the turf belonged to the Crips, the Bloods, and the West Side Chicanos. This hard-core gang territory seldom failed to lead off the ten o’clock news broadcasts.

  Even more insidious, South Phoenix remained the site of too many commercial waste dumps and industrial parks. The people who lived there suffered from respiratory ailments rarely found in the rest of the valley.

  South Mountain Tire Storage, with more than six hundred thousand tires destined for the state’s recycling program, had long been one of the neighborhood’s chief offenders. In the past couple of years, it had belched huge columns of smoke on an almost regular basis. The Environmental Protection Agency proclaimed itself not amused, but so far, the fines they levied against Dwayne Alder, the dump’s owner, had not solved the problem.

  As I drove into the storage yard, I could still smell burning rubber, even though the last fire had been put out three months earlier. The stench emanated from the three-story-high mound of tires known sarcastically by the locals as Black Mountain. The smelly heap did not appear all that stable, either, and looked as if it would topple over any minute. I was just thinking that I would make this visit as brief as possible when a nasty-looking Rottweiler the size of a Shetland pony trotted from behind a mound of bald Firestones to greet me with bared fangs.

  “What a good dog,” I said hopefully, remaining in my Jeep while awaiting rescue. “And what nice, sharp teeth you have.”

  Good Dog informed me in his rumbly voice that he hoped to use them on me, but his hopes were dashed when a middle-aged man sporting a belly the size and shape of a bowling ball exited the single-wide used as the dump’s office. The man’s face had been so burnt by the sun that it almost matched his red hair and scrawny beard.

  “Ringo, sit!”

  Ringo sat, although he did not look happy about it. I climbed out of the Jeep, giving him a wide berth. His eyes followed my every move.

  The man studied my Jeep with the same amount of beady fascination as Ringo studied me. Not long ago, some of Jimmy’s relatives had decorated the Jeep with a series of Pima story-telling designs, and now the entire history of the Pima Indians marched across its hood, doors, and rear. A set of steer horns mounted on the hood finished off the Jeep’s fashion statement.

  “I’m Lena Jones, the private detective,” I said, when the man finally faced me again. “If you’re Dwayne Alder, we’ve already talked on the phone.”

  His eyes gave me the usual lustful once-over, then stopped when they reached my face. I was used to it. I had been told that the one-inch-long scar from the bullet that had almost killed me was the only flaw in an otherwise perfect set of features. The scar could have been removed in one short visit to any plastic surgeon, but I’d chosen to keep it, hoping that someone might eventually recognize it and tell me my real name. You see, the name I use is not really mine. It had been given to me thirty years earlier by a particularly unimaginative social worker.

  “Are you Mr. Alder?” I tried again.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s me,” he said, finally shifting his eyes away from my forehead. “Call me Dwayne. C’mon, let’s get inside the office before we fry. Ringo, y
ou stay.”

  Ringo whined, but sat obediently in the shade of the tires.

  It was much cooler inside and the purple faux leather chairs surprisingly comfortable, but the reek of burnt rubber that blended with the smell of stale tobacco kept my breaths shallow.

  “I’m here about your son,” I said. “Your neighbors aren’t too happy with him.”

  “I don’t care about the neighbors. Miles is a good boy.”

  He shifted around on his chair as if fleas bit his butt, and plucked nervously at his scrawny red beard. “Sure, Miles got hisself into some trouble years back, but he was runnin’ with a rough crowd then.”

  If I had a dollar for every time I heard the parent of some felonious teen blame it on his friends, I would be skiing in Switzerland right now, not melting in the Arizona heat.

  “Two stints at Adobe Mountain Correctional Facility aren’t exactly a little trouble, Mr. Alder. And as for that rough crowd you say corrupted your son, my sources maintain that Miles was the ringleader. Whatever mischief they perpetrated, he initiated. It’s time to face facts and get that kid some help, because he’s not going to recover from his attraction to fire without it. Now, I know the ATF hasn’t been able to come up with enough evidence for an arrest, but don’t you think you have a moral obligation to your community? Every time that dump goes up, hundreds of little babies suck in lungs full of toxic fumes.”

  Alder hitched his pants. “Yeah, that’s too bad, but there ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

  “Couldn’t you get Miles another job? Some place where he wouldn’t be exposed to, ah, flammables?”

  More beard-plucking. “Like flipping burgers at MacDonald’s or something? The kid’s gotta learn how to run the business. My health ain’t so good. Emphysema. I’m going to have to retire pretty quick now.”

  “You don’t have any other children?”