Kissing Arizona (24 page)

He came in, squinted, measured the same way she had, saying, ‘Hmmm' and ‘Ahh.' It took him a couple of minutes to figure out how to cheat the catch so they could lift out the drawer. From the back, they could see there was a slot, but the false bottom was so cleverly fitted Leo couldn't slide it out.

‘Not enough space here for a computer.' Sarah had never noticed before how Leo poked his tongue out of the corner of his mouth when he concentrated. ‘But maybe a LadySmith?' He found a tiny button at one end of the slot, pressed, and the bottom popped out half an inch. ‘There we go,' he said, and then looked down, puzzled, at a silvery surface. ‘What is it?'

‘A netbook.' Sarah pulled it out, popped it open. ‘Neat little PC.'

‘So small . . . what's it good for?'

‘Email. Facebook, Twitter. And web surfing to your heart's content.'

‘Ah. So let's see what made his heart content.' He carried it into the den, set it on the desk. ‘Jeez, hard to work this little keyboard with gloves on. But oh, yeah, here we go.'

‘Just what Tracy said we'd find.'

‘Yeah. Wow, he liked it kind of rough, didn't he?'

‘Sure did. Ewww.' She'd had enough of Frank's dirty secrets in about a minute. ‘Let's look at the emails. Maybe we'll find out who's got the LadySmith.' The count at the top of the list said 3685. ‘Most of them are from the same person. [email protected]? Open a couple, let's see what Cheeks had to say.'

Leo opened the last message, dated the day of Frank Cooper's death, just before noon. He read it aloud, ‘“C U @ 5.” Hmmm. Cryptic. Let's try the one before. “No must C U today – MAKE TIME!” Argument about a meeting – no fun there. Let's go back a few, see if we find anything livelier. Yeah, here we go.' He read, ‘“Told U it could be like old times, now do you luv your Cheeks?” Looks like there's been a little trouble in the luv nest, huh?'

‘Look back a couple of pages. Still mostly from Cheeks. Let's see how they were doing in January.'

Leo opened one and read, ‘“Too much fun last nite Big One – Cheeks has bruises! (LOL) More soon?”' Leo made a face. ‘She called him Big One?'

‘Worth a LadySmith any day,' Sarah said.

‘I suppose. What about this other messenger? LJH20.'

‘Look at the “sent” list, see if he was sending . . . yeah, there's one.'

Leo opened it and read, ‘“How's my Tasty Toes this morning? I'm thinking about you and wishing we were . . .” Hoo-ah.' Leo read on in silence. His glasses steamed up and he polished them on his tie.

‘Still staying in touch with Cheeks though,' Sarah said. ‘I wonder how long the second one's been in the picture.'

Leo flipped back through a couple of pages. ‘Look, here's one near the end of November, to Laura Hughes, LJH20. “Laura, As I told you, I was very impressed yesterday by your beauty and charm. All I ask is a little of your time, a chance to tell you how I can make your life better. I promise you will not be sorry. Yours, Francis.” Wow, formal.'

‘Yeah. Let's see how long the formality lasted.' Sarah watched as he scrolled through the December messages, and opened one from a few days before Christmas. “My crazy crazy lover, I absolutely love mink! But you know, you don't ever have to give me any more than the thrill I get when I feel your big thing in my . . .”'

‘Let's find out which vitamins Frankie was taking,' Leo said. ‘I'll order a case.'

‘You can do that,' Sarah said. ‘But first let's take this pretty little toy back to Genius Geek and see if he can find out if either one of these ladies has the LadySmith.'

‘You want me to turn all these red-hot messages over to a teenage boy? Sarah, isn't that reckless endangerment? I could get arrested.'

‘Not to mention how noisy it's going to get on the second floor. But a guy's gotta do what he's gotta do. We need to find that gun.'

‘For sure.'

‘And I think we better ask him to figure out a timeline for when the second romance heated up and the first one began to go sour.'

‘Yeah. You know, Frank and Lois had a lot more than a new store to fight about. Think about this guy's life.'

‘I am thinking about it. And the more I think the more interesting it gets. Cheeks may have just figured out why things weren't going so well with her Big One.'

‘Yeah, we need a timeline for everybody, don't we?'

‘Genius Geek can do that for us. Because you and I need to interview Nicole and find what's her name, Tasty Toes? Laura Hughes. We can't spend all our days slavering over Frank Cooper's secret emails.'

‘Sarah, you may be too busy to slaver,' Leo said, looking pious, ‘but I can make time for it, if I must.'

THIRTEEN

‘
G
ot a crew coming to clean your house this afternoon,' Will said, ‘because the realtor wants to show it tomorrow. She says the duplex market is kind of brisk right now.'

‘That's good,' Sarah said, not paying very close attention. Will Dietz had turned into some unlikely combination of Dudley Do-Right and The Little Engine That Could. Besides having one more day off every week than she did, he seemed to have altered his circadian rhythms somehow – on the four days when he worked all night he was getting along fine on three or four hours of sleep plus an occasional nap. He was moving three sets of household goods into the Blenman-Elm neighborhood without much assistance from her.

Denny was similarly energized. Besides helping Will figure out the odd couplings that held her old iron bed together, she had conquered the mysteries of the gas stove in the Bentley Street kitchen and was cooking up a storm. ‘A pinch, what's a pinch?' Sarah heard her ask Aggie, who was perched on a kitchen stool, talking her through a recipe in an ancient family cookbook that had surfaced in the move.

This family dwelling has lit everybody's fire, Sarah thought. And that was very lucky, because she had hardly any time to think about it at all this week. The intel gods had evidently opened a gusher somewhere. Information was pouring onto her desk from all points of the compass.

The Tucson crime lab had found one perfect thumb print that didn't match any of the Coopers, or their housekeeper, or Lois's sister.

Ollie Greenaway, following a rumor he only half-believed, had discovered a small-time dope dealer languishing in Yuma prison who claimed to know the two stash house victims well. Imprisoned before the murders, he could not be a suspect, so he felt secure enough to trade everything he knew about the drug business for a little time off his sentence. Ollie's long emails were streaming in from Yuma.

Phil Cruz called and said José Ojeda was on a plane with a US Marshall, would be landing in Tucson in a couple of hours and could take their river walk tomorrow. And now here came Tracy Scott, saying, ‘You are going to love what I have for you today.'

‘You too? I think every question I ever asked in my life is being answered this week,' Sarah said. ‘It's getting so I'm afraid to pick up the phone.'

‘Then don't,' Tracy Scott said. ‘Turn on your answering machine and listen to me. Because I've got some nice juicy stuff.'

‘Let's get Leo.'

‘He's coming. I told him.'

He took her seat without asking. She brought in an extra chair and she and Leo huddled knee-to-knee on the visitors' side of her desk, reading the printouts as they slid across from Tracy – Mr Lucky, Leo had started calling him, since he gave him the job of reading all Frank Cooper's emails.

‘Oh pooh, those emails, I made quick work of them,' Tracy said, ‘they're all that same crud, it gets boring in a hurry. The really juicy stuff is in the Accounts Payable.'

‘Isn't that just like a geek?' Leo said. ‘He thinks math is sexier than sex.'

‘Maybe not sexier, but a lot more actionable. Remember you told me, Sarah, that you were convinced Nicole was hiding something?'

‘You found it?'

‘Pretty sure.' He nodded happily, his coke-bottle glasses throwing off light beams in all directions. ‘Look here.' Rows of numbers marched down the page, under headings that read: 1st Q, 08, 2nd Q 08, four quarters to a year for the last three years.

Leo said, ‘These notes at the bottom of the page in code?'

‘Only till you know what they mean. 1st Birm means the check on the first Friday of every month was written to Birmingham Mills. 2nd Kens means the one on the second Friday goes to Kensington Paper Products. 3rd Wall is for Waller Chemical, and 4th Hed is for Hedley Paints.'

‘All electronic payments?' Sarah asked him.

‘Sure. Why?'

She shrugged. ‘Fraud is easier to track on paper. That's all.' Next to her, she felt Leo nodding vigorously.

Tracy rolled his eyes up and muttered, ‘Easier on paper, gag me with a spoon.' He sat up straight, took a deep breath and went on. ‘Anyway! The thing that started me looking was that all four of these companies get paid strikingly similar amounts. You see? A few bucks north or south of five hundred dollars, and they always get paid on the same Friday of the month. Which seems odd for a wholesale supplier of retail products, doesn't it?'

‘Damn right.' Leo looked at Tracy Scott with new interest. ‘And you haven't found any bills that back these up?'

‘None in the electronic files. They could all four be dinosaurs, still billing on paper, but to prove
that
you need to go into the downtown accounting offices of Cooper's Home Stores and ask for a look at the paper files. Then I bet you find the bills to back up these payments have mysteriously gone missing.'

‘You seem pretty sure,' Leo said.

‘I am. Because I Googled all these firm names, in Phoenix where they're supposedly located, and got no match. So I tried the Chamber of Commerce up there, and the Better Business Bureau and a couple of phone companies. I got the same result every time – zippo, nada, none such.

‘When you ask Nicole to show you some hard data to support these payments, I think the feces are going to hit the fan. I suppose you'd like to be there when that happens.' Tracy smiled benignly and slid a second sheet in front of Leo. ‘This details how she was performing the exact same maneuver for Mommy Dearest, with four different companies in Albuquerque. All equally fictional as far as I can learn.'

‘Isn't this fun?' Leo said. ‘They're all stealing from each other.'

‘Mostly from Uncle Sam, don't you think? And the two ladies must have been in it together, Nicole was doing all the bookkeeping.'

‘But did Daddy know?' Sarah said. Then: ‘Oh, wait. This all came off his computer, didn't it?'

‘Bingo.' Tracy nodded, pleased. ‘Even if he didn't know in advance he would certainly have spotted payments to dummy companies by now. And he's had plenty of time to blow the whistle if he wanted to. So – a better question might be, did they know what Papa Bear's been up to?'

‘With the two girlfriends, you mean?' Leo said.

‘In addition to. On top of, if you'll pardon the expression.' He had a spread sheet on Frank Cooper. Unfolded, it took up the whole desk top. They fastened the corners down with staple guns, a paper clip holder and a pencil mug. ‘To begin with,' Tracy said, ‘every Wednesday, this big honking draw, a thousand dollars in cash.'

‘Wednesday,' Sara said, ‘was Lois's bingo night at church. And she stayed over after with her sister.'

‘So, play night for everybody,' Leo said.

‘Looks like it,' Tracy said. ‘And to judge by the Thursday morning emails, some of the Wednesday night fun got pretty lively. Here's one from about a year and a half ago – Frank sent this to Cheeks.'

They all read silently: ‘Like new position we tried, do U want to try with dildo?'

Leo glanced at Tracy, guiltily, and told Sarah, ‘See, I told you we shouldn't use the kid for this work.'

‘Don't worry, Leo,' Tracy said, smiling tolerantly at the foibles of older folk. ‘The Internet has worked its magic for us all.'

‘I suppose.' Leo peered angrily out the door of Sarah's workspace as if searching for somebody to shoot. ‘Great world we invented here.'

‘Isn't it?' Sarah said, thinking of Denny.

‘The Wednesday afternoon draw stopped a couple of months ago,' Tracy said, watching their faces curiously as he went on. He had brought new information, his expression said, so why wasn't everybody pleased? ‘But Frank started a new, bigger one on Saturday. To pay for the new love nest he was setting up in Phoenix, I expect. Busy, busy Sundays in Phoenix. They were costing him a packet, so he really needed to get that third store going.'

Sarah said, ‘You know what strikes me in all this?'

‘No, Sarah,' Leo said, looking as if he might need his blood pressure checked, ‘please do tell me what strikes you in all this.'

‘Well . . . Lois had plenty of reasons to kill Frank. Has had, for years. Tom did, too. And who knows? Maybe Nicole just discovered this big new leak in the cash flow – if so she'd have a good reason to want to get his hand out of the till. And now it looks as if Cheeks just got a reason. Motives for murdering Frank are thick on the ground. But the only reason we've found for anybody to kill Lois is the one we started out with, Frank in a rage.'

‘And granted that guys always want to kill their wives sooner or later,' Leo said, ‘why now? He seems to have been too busy lately to even notice her.'

‘Except for the money fight.'

‘Well, yeah. That.'