Arizona Heat

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“Did you check?” Jolie pressed. “Call the hotel to find out if he was really there alone and not staying with a girlfriend?”

Greer’s right hand knotted into a white-knuckled fist. “No,” she said, gazing up at me. “I paid Mojo to do that kind of dirty work.”

“I was a little busy,” I pointed out.

“I want my retainer back,” Greer said.

“Fine,” I told her.

“Stop bickering,” Jolie said. “Both of you!”

Greer and I both subsided.

“A man is dead,” Jolie informed us. “Let’s stay on the subject.”

Greer let out a wail.

A man is dead, I thought with a mental snort. Gee, maybe I ought to offer Jolie a partnership in Sheepshanks, Sheepshanks and Sheepshanks. She had such a keen eye for detail.

But then, she’d expect a paycheck.

Back to sole proprietorship.

“I think Beverly killed him in a drunken rage,” Greer said with frightening clarity. “Alex just spent a fortune to send her to some fancy rehab center, but I’ll bet she was swilling gin on the plane back. Are there any more cookies?”

The whole conversation went like that. I wondered why anybody would want to be a cop—or a private investigator, for that matter. And I seriously considered applying for a blue greeter’s vest at Walmart. The dead guy and I would probably get along fine.

* * *

AT SIX-FIFTEEN THAT evening I pulled into Helen Erland’s dirt driveway. She lived in a double-wide on one of those acre plots with “horse facilities,” meaning pipe fences, a rusted feeder and a beat-up tin roof the animals could stand under to get out of the merciless Arizona sun. When the place had been new, it was probably pretty remote; now it was surrounded by the ever-encroaching stucco houses people like Helen couldn’t afford.

There weren’t any horses.

Before I could knock, the inside door opened and Helen peered out at me through the screen. She was wearing baggy shorts and a short-sleeved plaid shirt, and her feet were bare, with blue foam cushions wedged between the toes. Not too grief stricken for a pedicure, then, I reflected, and instantly hated myself for thinking that way.

Lillian used to tell Greer, Jolie and me that you couldn’t help the thoughts that came into your head, but you didn’t have to let them stick around.

“Thanks for coming,” Helen said, stepping back so I could come inside.

Gillian was sitting in a little rocking chair over by the fake fireplace, the kind with light-up logs inside.

I didn’t acknowledge her, of course, until Helen turned away to clear some laundry off one end of the couch so I could sit down.

Gillian returned my thumbs-up signal—I guess it qualified as sign language—but she looked so sad and small sitting there.

I sized up the living room. Despite the laundry, it wasn’t messy. The carpet looked clean, and there was no dust on top of the TV, which was muted but on, or beer cans on the coffee table. An electric picture of Jesus and the apostles in a boat filled most of one wall, but the plug was pulled.

“That belonged to my mother,” Helen said fondly, having followed my gaze. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

Before, I’d just felt sorry for Helen Erland. Now I began to like her. But I wasn’t stupid enough to dis a picture of Jesus, even if it did light up.

“Mom treasured it,” Helen went on when I didn’t comment. “I keep it around because it reminds me of her.”

I nodded. I barely remembered my own mother, since she’d died when I was small, but I’d just lost Lillian, and her ratty old chenille bathrobe was hanging in my closet at the apartment. I had her tarot cards, too.

I understood about keeping things.

“You want a beer or a soda or something?” Helen asked. She was a little nervous. Putting me on the trail of Gillian’s killer had probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I figured she was having second thoughts.

“Diet cola, if you have it,” I said.

Helen got up and pigeon-toed it into the kitchen. Her toenails glowed neon-pink.

Gillian and I exchanged looks again.

I signaled for her to leave the room.

She shook her head and sat tight in the little rocker.

“Tell me about your husband,” I said when Helen came back and handed me a cold can of soda. “I understand he was arrested for solicitation of a minor.”

“That was before I met him,” Helen said. “And he said she came on to him, that girl.”

I decided I’d never get the straight story on that from Helen, and made a mental note to look elsewhere. Like straight into Vince Erland’s eyes, when and if I got to speak to him. I did say, “Men sometimes lie about things like that.”

Helen flushed. “Vince didn’t do it,” she reiterated. “He didn’t proposition a teenage girl, and he sure as hell didn’t kill Gillian.”

“Let’s go back even further,” I said moderately, popping the top on the diet cola. Gillian’s last name was Pellway, not Erland, so there must have been an ex-husband or a boyfriend in the picture. “You were married before, right?”

Helen tested her toenails for dryness and pulled the blue foam cushions out. Set them carefully on the end table beside the old leather recliner and sat down. A dull flush rose under her ears. “Yes,” she said. “To Benny Pellway. He’s doing twenty to life in the state pen for armed robbery.”

I didn’t need to take notes. The Damn Fool’s Guide to a Photographic Memory. “He’s Gillian’s biological father?” I asked.

Helen lifted her ponytail off her neck and fixed it to the top of her head with a pink squeeze-clip. “Yes,” she said.

“Are there any other children in the family?”

Helen shook her head, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “No,” she replied. “Vince and I were talking about having a baby, though.”

“Where does Vince work?” I was miles behind the police, I knew, but I could still ask his fellow employees what kind of man he was. And it was always possible that Tucker and the others might have missed something.

“He was between jobs,” Helen said. Her chin jutted out a little way, as though she expected me to denounce Vince Erland as a bum, and she was prepared to defend him.

“How far between?” I asked.

“He worked for a furniture company, delivering couches and stuff, until about six months ago,” she said. “Then he got downsized.”

“Do you have any family pictures or albums or anything?” Except for Jesus and the disciples, the paneled walls were bare.

Helen sniffled, got up out of the chair and opened the cabinet under the TV. Brought out several framed school photos of Gillian, along with a couple of thick albums.

“I had to put them away,” she said, referring to the shots of a smiling Gillian, posing against a plain blue background.

“I understand,” I told her.

Gillian began to rock slowly in her little chair.

“It’s the oddest thing, the way that chair moves on its own sometimes,” Helen said.

“Probably a draft,” I answered, unable to look at her.

“Probably,” Helen agreed with a sigh.

I turned to the albums. There weren’t a lot of pictures, and most of them were old. In one, a couple in sixties garb stood beaming in front of what looked like the same double-wide we were sitting in.

“My mom and dad,” Helen explained, her face softening. “This was their place. It was new back then.”

I swallowed, thinking of my own dead parents. “They’re both gone?”

“Both gone,” Helen confirmed.

I flipped more pages. Helen, growing up. Helen, on horseback, then dressed for a dance, then graduating from high school. Helen, standing with a smarmy-looking guy in a wife-beater shirt and cutoff jeans, holding a baby in her arms.

Benny Pellway looked like the kind of guy who ought to be doing twenty to life in the state pen. I decided to make sure he hadn’t escaped. Shortcut: ask Tucker. The police would have checked that first thing.

After that, the snapshots were mostly of Gillian, usually sitting alone on a blanket, clutching a ragged stuffed dog.

“She always wanted a pet,” Helen said with painful regret. She’d been leaning in her recliner so she could see the pictures, too.

Gillian signed a word, and I was pretty sure it was dog.

My throat squeezed shut again. “She’s here,” I said. I hadn’t planned on saying that—it just came out of my mouth.

“What?” Helen asked, blinking.

I figured she was about to throw me out, but it was too late to backtrack. “I can see Gillian,” I said. “She’s sitting in the little rocking chair by the fireplace.”

Helen turned in that direction. Signed something.

Gillian duplicated the sign eagerly.

I love you.

I hadn’t gotten very far in my studies, but I knew that one.

My heart sort of caved in on itself.

Helen got up, walked toward the chair.

Gillian instantly vanished.

What did that mean? I wondered.

I knew Gillian wasn’t afraid of Helen Erland. She obviously liked to be with her, wanted very much to get her attention somehow. Maybe just to say goodbye.

“Is she still here?” Helen wondered softly.

“No,” I said.

Helen, standing in the middle of the living room now, turned to study me narrowly. “Are you some kind of psychic or something?”

“No.”

“But you saw my Gillian?”

I nodded. Looked up at the electric Jesus picture and had a sudden, strange urge to plug it in. “Yes.”

“Can you talk to her?”

“She doesn’t speak, but she reads my lips sometimes. And she wrote ‘Mom’ in the dust on the dashboard of my car yesterday. That’s why I came into the store. Because she wanted to see you.”

Helen’s legs buckled, and she dropped heavily to the floor, landing on her knees.

I knew she hadn’t fainted, so I stayed where I was. Waited.