Concrete Desert

Chapter Thirty-two

Julie walked back inside the cabin, and I followed her. It was a foolhardy thing to do. But I was feeling foolhardy. Homer tells of how the Greek soldiers before Troy lost their senses and became drunk for war. I suppose it was that way for me, only I was drunk with a kind of flinty curiosity-I had to know; I had to know.

“I keep wondering what you said to Phaedra the night before she died,” I said. “When you met her at the coffee shop on Mill Avenue. What you said that upset her so much.”

Julie twirled a strand of hair and looked out the window.

“You ask too many questions, David.”

“I suspect she didn’t really realize what she was into even at the end,” I went on. “She was gentle and trusting and too eccentric.”

“You were always such a sentimental sap,” Julie said. “Phaedra was a little moralizing bitch sometimes, but she knew the color of money.”

“Even if it was money that belonged to Bobby Hamid?”

“I don’t know who it really belonged to, but it’s mine now,” she said. “I earned it. More money than you can imagine.”

“So that’s what you meant about us being in grave danger?”

Julie was silent.

“What about Phaedra? Did she realize she was in danger?”

“You don’t want to go there, David.”

“Oh, but I do. I am there.”

She sighed and looked at me like some pathetic being. “No money, no life. It’s that simple.”

“So Greg decided to rip off his employer?”

“Not Greg,” Julie said. “Give me more credit than that.”

I arched an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life working, watching the beautiful life go on all around me.” Her voice rose. “Jesus! All I had to do was walk around to see everything I couldn’t have. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be broke in Phoenix?”

“So a million dollars in cocaine money was the ticket? You just thought you’d stay in town and everything would be fine?”

“That was the plan,” she said.

“The plan where Greg Townsend and Phaedra took the fall? And Julie is left with the money?” I felt an overpowering revulsion.

“Nobody’s innocent. Everybody got what they wanted.”

“Really?” I said. “Everyone I talked to said Phaedra hated drugs. So what did she get?”

“She got stupid. She got in the way.”

“She was your sister.”

Julie clenched and unclenched her hands, but she was silent.

“So Phaedra didn’t know about the drugs or the money?”

“Not at first,” Julie said.

“But she overheard.”

Julie said, “All she had to do was be her weird, ethereal self. Always missing half the world right in front of her nose. That’s all she had to do. And nothing would have happened.”

“But it didn’t work out that way. Phaedra heard about ripping off Bobby Hamid, taking his money and failing to deliver the product. She got scared and she ran. She stayed on the run for over a month. Were you really afraid she’d narc on you?”

“There’s more to it than that,” Julie said.

“So eventually, you found her. You found her, and you told her something that persuaded her to meet you, and then to follow you away from a public place. The next thing you know, she’s dead in the desert.”

“I didn’t hurt her,” Julie said, her left eye twitching. “I couldn’t.”

“But you found her. And she couldn’t be allowed to live, knowing what she knew.”

There was an odd brightness in her eyes. “I had to have the money. I didn’t have any chances left. You don’t understand. With the money, I could have a life; I could get Mindy back.”

“And buy more cocaine.”

She let out some breath.

“So where did I come in?”

“You?” She sounded disoriented.

“You came to me, remember? You asked me to look into Phaedra’s disappearance? Then you cried when I told you I’d done all I could do. So I jumped into it, up to my eyeballs.”

“You always had a ‘white knight’ fantasy,” she said. “I knew you couldn’t resist.”

“So you had it planned from the start. When Phaedra ran, you hoped I could help you find her. And that I could also be your cover. Your old boyfriend, who worked with the Sheriff’s Office, could muck around and draw attention away from the person who really killed Phaedra. And then I was the perfect alibi: I was the one who saw you cry at the Phoenician when I told you about Phaedra. I was the one who defended you in front of Peralta and the detectives.”

She lit a cigarette. “You give me too much credit, David. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

“I imagine your sister was scared, too.”

She was silent for a long moment. Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. “I never meant for her to get hurt.”

“Oh, cut the shit, Julie,” I said sharply. “Turn it off. I’ve wised up about you, finally. I know about your cocaine habit. I know you had Phaedra’s car. I know you were with her the night before she was found murdered. It was all a lie: that you hadn’t seen her for weeks, that you didn’t know why she’d disappeared. And everything about us was a lie, too.”

“You never knew me,” she said, crying now. “You never knew how awful it was growing up. How my mother never gave me-”

I cut her off. “This isn’t about you anymore, Julie. This is about Phaedra’s murder.”

She looked at me oddly. “What are you talking about?”

I grabbed her and shook her hard. “I’m talking about your little sister, Phaedra. She had red hair and played the cello and was afraid to fall in love. Somebody raped her and strangled her and left her in the desert, trying to make it look like a copycat killing, a link to a 1950s murder. Why, Julie? Why?”

Julie dropped the cigarette, grabbed my arms, and dug her nails into them. She looked at me with something wild in her eyes and crumpled slowly to the floor, shaking, hyperventilating. She wailed, “Nooooooooooo. Noooooooooooooooo. Nooooooooooo.”

I pulled her up off the floor, a limp doll. “Stop the acting, Julie. We’re going to Phoenix.”

The voice behind me said, “She’s not acting.”

I turned and was looking at Greg Townsend.

“And of course nobody’s going to Phoenix.”

He had a pistol in his right hand, pointed at my chest.