Phoenix Noir

“He was better in bed than you’d think from his looks,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him since the night this was taken, though, until he turned up in my pool.”

“Right. And you don’t think the cops would like to know about this?” I tapped a finger on the photo, and the server, who was setting down my glass of Riesling, glanced at it.

“Wow,” he said. “Nice butt.”

“Thanks, sweetie,” she drawled, leaning back in her chair and giving him a laser eyeball. He glanced from the picture to her, and did a double-take.

“Is that you? Er … ma’am?”

“Meet me in the parking lot after work and find out.” The cougar stretched voluptuously, flexing her shiny pink claws. The server, who might have been nineteen, turned purple and fled.

She laughed, but was dead serious when she looked back at me.

“The cops know. I was rattled when he turned up in the pool, but once I had a minute to think, I realized that as soon as they identified him, they’d head for the DBG and find out I knew him. So I called them and fessed up. I didn’t know about that—” She cast a displeased glance at the photo. “And if I get my hands on the little shithead who took it—but never mind …” She waved a hand. “It’s Chloe.”

“Chloe took the picture?” It hadn’t looked as though Chloe were in any shape to hold a camera.

“No.” Pamela gave me a sharp look. “Chloe is why I want you to find John Jaramillo.”

Noticing that Chloe’s glazed eyeballs coincided with Chloe’s clubbing, Pamela had figured logically that she was getting drugs at one or another of the clubs, and thus had put on her cougar costume and gone prowling with her daughter.

“What did Chloe think of that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “If I didn’t go, she didn’t go. Besides, I took dates along—” She glanced at the photo of herself and ap Gruffydd. “I wasn’t following her around all night. Or at least I didn’t let it look that way.”

I’d already figured that Pamela was much shrewder and more observant than I’d originally thought. She was shrewder than Chloe too, and it didn’t take long for her to tumble to the fact that Chloe wasn’t getting drugs at the clubs—she was taking drugs to the clubs.

“I caught her dealing in the restroom one night.” Pam was rolling her empty wine glass slowly between her palms, looking down into the dregs. “Dragged her out into the parking lot and … made her tell me where she was getting it.”

“From the gardener.”

“Yep.” She looked up, fixing me with a hard gaze. “You have a reputation for digging things up, Kolodzi. And you’re a little less sleazy than the average private detective.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“And you want to know who killed Griff.”

“Griff?”

She sighed impatiently.

“It’s spelled Gruffydd, but it’s pronounced Griffith. He didn’t like Howarth.” For the first time, her voice betrayed a little emotion over the Welshman’s death. I was a long way from trusting her, but I was beginning to like her a little.

She shrugged. She was wearing a sleeveless pink top, and the hairs on her forearms were standing up in the chilled air.

“So. You find John Jaramillo, the cops convict him of murdering Griff, he goes down, Chloe’s source dries up, and you get a story—a story that doesn’t include Chloe.”

I considered that—but the other picture, of Chloe by the ladies’ room, bleary and undressed, with her sweet young breast adrift and vulnerable, was still resting in my pocket.

“Okay,” I said. Reminded of photos, though, I pulled out the third one I’d brought—the shot of Cooney Pratt glaring at ap Gruffydd. “You seem pretty convinced that Jaramillo’s responsible. And I could see it happening by accident, maybe—the Welsh guy comes by to see you, and stumbles into the middle of a drug deal, maybe. But your husband would seem to have an actual motive.”

Pamela stared down at the wildflower in the photo, then flicked the shot back at me and stood up.

“Forget Cooney,” she said, and putting a hand on my shoulder, leaned down and whispered confidentially in my ear, “He really is a prat, you know.”

Not much happened for two days. The police released driblets of information, nothing helpful. A crane fell into a hole on a light-rail construction site. The D-Backs lost two games in a row. And Cooney Pratt’s alibi developed holes big enough to swallow a backhoe.

Pamela’s alibi was solid; she’d been at a killer bridge tournament at the Hyatt Regency Gainey Ranch, in sight of eighty other people. But Cooney had been with the noncombatants, who’d spent the night in the lobby bar, the spa, the giant heated pool … or one of the bedrooms. People had seen him, all right—but there were gaps. And it was a five-minute drive from the hotel to his house.

Meanwhile, John Jaramillo had dropped off the face of the earth. His wife refused to be interviewed, though gossip in his neighborhood said she wasn’t that broken up over his absence.

I was debating whether to try some of Jaramillo’s other gardening clients, or invite Cooney Pratt out for a drink and show him pictures, when the phone rang.

“I’ve found him!” Pamela’s voice was high, and nervous, for her.

“Who, Jar—”

“The gardener, yes.” She swallowed, audibly. “Do you want a story? Come right away—meet me at my house. Come now.”

“It was the damn squirrels,” she explained, leading me down her front drive. “I kept trapping more and more of the little buggers, and finally realized they were coming from the house next door, crawling through the breeze blocks in my wall.”

“Yeah?”

“So I looked at the house next door.” I looked too. The next-door house was vacant, with a realtor’s sign.

“And?”

“The morning it happened? The murder? I had a hangover, and I was drowning those fucking squirrels in the garage, and I was so irritated by the racket from the air conditioner next door. Then, of course, there was lots more racket from the pool deck, and I forgot all about it.”

I looked up at the roof. The AC unit now was off. The yard of the empty house was spiked with fried weeds sprouting through pink gravel. There wasn’t a soul in sight, bar a garbage truck cruising slowly, picking up the big round turquoise dumpsters, tossing the trash, then slamming them back on the pavement. Half the dumpsters had fallen over from the impact and lay on their sides, wheels spinning.

“Class warfare,” Pamela said, seeing me look. “The garbage guy hates rich people. Wait till he’s gone.”

We did, and she filled me in rapidly on her deductions. The house wasn’t being shown; nobody would show a house with the yard in that condition. But if the house was empty—why run the air conditioner?

“Jaramillo,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the empty house. “It’s got to be him. That’s where he keeps the drugs.”

It was possible. Obviously nobody was there now; not with the AC turned off. On the other hand, the cops took a dim view of breaking and entering. I mentioned this, and Pam pulled out a key, flourishing it under my nose.

“We traded keys with the people who used to live here—you know, in case of emergencies.”

The key was for the kitchen door. The house was unfurnished and silent, but I stopped dead, the back of my neck prickling. I’d thought she was imagining things, but she wasn’t. The air was thick and stifling and probably at least 115°, but it didn’t have that dead feel that abandoned houses have.

What it did have was one very bad smell. I thought it was time to call the cops right then, but Pam had gone ahead of me, through a door, and she gave a strangled scream.

I went after her and found myself in a narrow room furnished with a washer, a dryer, and a corpse.

There were flies and he’d been dead long enough that the flesh was sagging off his bones and had a greenish tinge. Pam was standing behind the body, holding a gun.

“Told you I found him,” she said.