High Country Nocturne

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.”

“Not at all,” I said. The reality was that I didn’t want to be here and didn’t care about this case compared with Lindsey’s survival, finding her killer, and getting Peralta out of this jam. Less than a mile from here, I hoped, a SWAT team was taking down Strawberry Death at this moment.

But I had to play along for now, couldn’t let my agitation show. I gallantly added, “You are very attractive.” And she knew it.

“You’re so kind,” she said. “Do you have a Ph.D.?”

I nodded.

“So I suppose I should call you doctor…”

“No. I’m not a physician or a dentist. And you’re not one of my students.”

She smiled. “I imagine you were a fine professor. Where did you graduate?”

“Miami of Ohio.”

“Ah, one of the ‘public Ivies.’ I took Zephyr there. Such a lovely campus. She had the grades for it, but she wanted to be on the West Coast. She doesn’t read books, you know, other than Harry Potter, even though she’s smart as hell. Don’t let her beauty fool you. I was very different. I loved books and history. Did you have a specialty?”

“The Progressive era in America through the New Deal.” All my academic insecurities were bubbling up, so I felt the need to justify myself. “My doctoral adviser had studied under Arthur S. Link, so the apostolic succession was continued.”

It was unclear if my name-dropping mattered. Her smile turned impish. “Was there a laying on of hands?”

“A Ph.D. dissertation defense isn’t so spiritual. Anyway, he died a few years ago.”

“Somebody said that every time a professor dies, an entire library burns. So why aren’t you teaching? Why become a cop?”

I told her it was a long story. The short version was that academia didn’t like me as well as I liked it, and now there was such a surplus of history instructors that I’d be lucky to get a job at a community college in Lawton, Oklahoma. Then I tried to steer us back to the business at hand. I had more important things than chatting with a rich woman.

“It took me a long time after his death to start to go through his things. But I finally did, and I found the wallet.”

“Can you show me?”