Kissing Arizona (5 page)

‘Your mother kept hers in her bedroom?'

‘Last I knew. Daddy wanted her to carry it in her purse, but she wouldn't – she was afraid of guns. Was she really shot?'

‘It looks that way.'

‘That's so . . . obscene. Who could have . . . somebody got in the house? How?'

‘We don't know yet. Was your father a good shot, did he practice?'

‘Yes, routinely. He got sort of fanatical about self-defense as he got older, joined the NRA and got all passionate about the Second Amendment. That's the other thing that's so hideously ironic about this. All those hours of practice, big talk about being prepared to protect yourself – why would he let them both be killed?'

‘You never know how you're going to react till you have to do it,' Sarah said.

‘I suppose. He belonged to a gun club, competed in shoots. Practiced at a range south of town. There's a whole shelf full of trophies in the house there – in the den. My mother always wanted to call that room the library, but they never got around to buying any books, so Daddy called it the den and kept his shooting trophies and his biggest TV in there.' Nicole closed her eyes for a few seconds, opened them, and said, ‘Families are the hardest thing to figure out, aren't they?'

‘Yes. When did you last see your parents?'

‘We all had lunch together Friday at the Machiavelli's near the North Oracle store. We were contemplating another expansion, a third store in Phoenix. It's a risky year for it, but by the same token bargains are available that you don't see every year so . . . my father and I agreed it was worth the risk, to get ourselves positioned in the market before the turnaround gets started. We went over some of the numbers.' She licked her dry lips. Sarah pulled a bottle of water out of the cooler in the back and handed it to her. She drank it thirstily.

‘My mother was dubious. She thought it was too soon to make this move. The discussion got . . . pretty heated.' She drank some more. ‘That's too bad, isn't it? Big noisy fight at our last lunch? And now the whole subject is moot.'

‘I suppose. How did your mother seem to you? Anything unusual about her behavior?'

Her pale face showed a quick flash of irony. ‘No, Mom was pretty much her usual self.'

‘Which was?'

‘Loud, argumentative, occasionally abusive toward my father.'

‘Oh?' Sarah thought it was the most unsuitable comment she'd ever heard from a newly-bereaved daughter. The Cooper family wasn't getting any easier to understand – every time you moved, you sank into a new swamp. She was trying to wade carefully. People said things in emotional moments they didn't quite mean. Reminded of the statement later, they often turned their anger on the detective. ‘So . . . she didn't have a quiet voice like yours?'

‘No, I guess everybody within two blocks of Machiavelli's that day knows she thought her husband was getting ready to launch a folly. Risking everything they'd worked so hard for, she said, in this terrible year for the building industry. She kept saying, “What are you thinking?” She wanted the whole idea put on the back burner till she agreed it was time to go ahead.'

‘So would you say your mother was extremely unhappy?'

‘Not exactly. She liked to get her own way and in the end she would certainly have got her way about the new store, if she really wanted to. My father couldn't get any of the loans he was talking about until she was ready to sign for them.'

‘You said, “if she really wanted to”, but you make it sound as if there wasn't any doubt what she wanted. Was there?'

‘Maybe. Sometimes she liked to play devil's advocate – make him really fight for an idea, see if he could convince her. It wasn't pretty but she was shrewd about spotting the holes in his reasoning. Daddy often said, if he could get it past Mama, he could be pretty sure he had a winner.'

‘How did your father behave at that lunch?'

‘He wasn't exactly in top form. He'd been out talking to bankers, and the news wasn't good.'

‘They didn't want to lend him the money?'

‘No. He was pressing them hard, talking about his track record. He said, “Those bastards have made a lot of money off me, now when I need them they go soft.” But the market is pretty spooky right now. And they kept telling him, “With your cash flow, you should have a bigger bottom line.” That made him angry – he hated being criticized.'

‘Ah. Was your brother at that lunch?'

‘No.'

‘I thought raising money was his job.'

‘What, Tom find capital? No, no.'

‘But he said—'

‘That he deals with the money. I know. But Tom just deals with the
leftover
money.' A small, secret smile curled her pale mouth.

‘OK.' Giving up on understanding this family circus for now, Sarah decided on the direct approach to the crime. ‘Was this fight serious enough to make your father want to kill your mother?'

‘To kill . . .' She stared at Sarah, swallowed a couple of times. ‘Is that what . . . ?' She finally managed, just above a whisper, ‘Is that what you think happened?'

‘Some evidence points that way.' Sarah watched Nicole's thin, pale face as she closed her eyes again and swallowed several times. Was she going to vomit? Sarah got ready to grab a plastic bag. But Nicole drew a few careful breaths, took a small, cautious sip of water and fitted the bottle carefully into the cup holder. Sarah gave her a few seconds to collect herself before she said, ‘Do you think it's possible? Were they just arguing, or were they really fighting?'

‘Were they . . . ?' Nicole uttered a laugh that ended in a choking sound and mimicked, ‘Were they really fighting?' Color came up in her face. Sarah watched her warily. ‘Of
course
they were really fighting! Fighting was who they were, it was what they did!'

‘Oh?' She thought about the industrious couple she'd known at the store. ‘Funny, I've known them a long time, and I never saw that.'

‘Probably not. They saved it for the planning sessions, out of sight of customers. In twenty-five years, they grew from one tiny store to two huge ones with a contracting division on the side. All those years, they expanded or rebuilt something every couple of months, and disagreed about damn near every item on the shelves. Whether they should carry it, how it should be displayed, which colors – and after everything else was decided, there was a constant struggle over how much to charge. She wanted margin, he favored undercutting the competition and going for volume. So yes, indeed, if this is still Tucson, Arizona, on the planet Earth, you can be pretty certain they were really, really fighting.'

The memory of Nicole's bitter laughter was still in Sarah's mind as she raised her seat-back at midday Tuesday, and pushed her review of the Cooper case to the back of her mind. The medical examiner's van had just parked beside her, facing the weedy alley where an unknown body waited in its cement cocoon.

TWO

V
ictoria Nuñez came to Arizona the first time riding on her father's back across the Tohono O'odham Nation. She was two years old. Her family had not been invited to that section of the Sonoran Desert, but luck favored them for a change, so they were not escorted out either. Their footsore little band took four more days to find Tucson than their coyote had predicted. They would have died of thirst in the desert had they not found a water station put there by an organization of Christians called No More Deaths. When they found the water by a wonderful accident, the devout of the party wanted to say a rosary of thanks. The man who was being paid to lead them said, ‘Drink now and pray later,' and hurried them away. Water stations, he said, were a favorite place for the Border Patrol to find crossers.

The coyote scuttled unceremoniously away from them in a grocery parking lot near the south edge of Tucson. Pablo Nuñez found the public phone and called the number he had carried all the way from Ajijic. Soon they were picked up by Tío Rafi, who was not really an uncle but close enough – a friend of an old family friend. He gave them food and sleeping space on his floor for three days till they found a cousin of a cousin.

Victoria couldn't really remember the trip, but felt she knew all about it because her parents told her the story several times, embellishing the details as she got older. It was the biggest adventure of their lives, and they were proud of it. Her mother remembered especially how thirsty she got after the water ran out – she was already pregnant with Victoria's sister and was afraid the baby would die before they found water. But Luz was born, healthy and squalling, a few weeks after the trip ended, and gained the lifelong advantage with which she always taunted Victoria: Luz was an American citizen.

Her father's version of the story was the one Victoria liked best. He told her she was so heavy that the canvas backpack she rode in wore big holes in his shoulders.

‘You grew heavier as the trip went along,' he said, ‘and you were without pity even then. You beat on me like a demon child and demanded I go faster even when I told you I was exhausted.'

‘Why do you tease her like that?' Marisol would say, shaking her head. But she could see that the grotesque joke worked in some way for both of them. Pablo liked playing the martyred father, more and more as he became a mostly absent one in reality. And Victoria enjoyed the feeling of power it gave her to imagine she had once dominated her father, forcing him to carry her quickly across a desert.

‘Did I yell at you?' she would ask him. ‘Was I fierce?' And when he answered, Yes, yes, you were the very devil, she would cackle with glee.

She was six by then, walking to school every day with the children who lived in the other half of their small house in South Tucson. Pablo had a job with a gardening service that managed the grounds at big resorts – a distant cousin on the crew helped him get the job and the fake work permit. Marisol stayed home and cared for the children of all the maids and housekeepers who lived nearby, until Victoria and her sister Luz were both old enough for school. Then Marisol too got a green card and a job on a house-cleaning crew.

The crew was run by Tía Luisa, Marisol's mother's sister. She had left home long ago and was presumed lost because the family never heard from her. Luisa was illiterate in both Spanish and English, and too ashamed to admit it. She would never ask for help with letters, as many others did. She worried about this a great deal for the first year she was in Tucson, but as she saw how much trouble and expense many immigrants went to for later-arriving relatives, she began to think it was not such a bad thing to be out of touch. When Marisol found her by accident in a market, Tía Luisa was rather cool at first. But when Marisol told her all the news from home she began to cry, embraced her niece and invited her for a meal. Soon they were close.

The girls learned English fast in school, and when she heard them beginning to speak English to each other at home, Marisol said, ‘Teach me,' and tried to keep up. But with work and her own housework she was usually too tired to study. She quickly learned the names for most vegetables and several bus stops, and took Vicky along when she needed something more complicated than groceries or a ride to the store.

The family had a couple of golden years, then. With two paychecks they got a TV set and a futon that made into a bed at night so the girls no longer slept on the floor. They got good clothes, too, and some toys, and learned to behave like American kids, critical and demanding.

Pablo made new friends among the groundskeepers, who were mostly single and hung out in the bars. It felt good to sit in the sun with them after work, trading jokes and drinking. He came home later and later to an angry wife and two bickering kids. Soon he began to say, of the situation he had himself created, ‘Who needs this?'

After a big noisy fight in which he threatened her with his fist and she hit him with the pan she was washing, he stayed away a week. Finally he came in the afternoon with two friends in a pickup, put his clothes in one plastic trash-bag and his tools in another. Marisol followed him around the house, yelling at him, asking him what he expected her to do. Luz followed him too, crying, ‘Daddy, I love you!' He never answered either one of them, just kept his head down and gathered his gear.

Victoria would not cry. She stood by the door, furious, watching him pick out his skivvies and socks from the drawer where the parents' underwear was mixed together. The final coldness of the way he separated his clothing from his wife's was somehow more insulting than his staying away had been – that was neglect; this was indifference. When he walked toward her dragging his two bags she stuck her tongue out and gave him the finger. This so shocked both parents that for one galvanized moment they cried out in unison, ‘Victoria,
que verguenza
!'

Her father raised his hand to strike her but she dodged away, screaming, ‘I hate you both!' That shattered the last moment when the couple might have said anything to one another. Pablo threw his bags in the back of the pickup and took off with his friends.

Marisol was devastated. She cried non-stop for two days, collapsing onto beds and even, once, into the recliner. She quickly sprang up from there, tearing her hair, shrieking that it was Pablo's chair. They had picked it out together, she wailed, and all the saints could see that now he had broken her heart. When she threw herself on the bed instead, Victoria climbed into the chair, adjusted the backrest and made herself at home. She took possession of it entirely, refusing to share it with Luz.

The girls watched TV the entire weekend, snacking on cookies and chips. Their mother, who had never before spent a day in bed, lay weeping and indifferent to them. They had no idea what she might do next. Growing crankier as their sugar-and-salt-loaded diet clogged their digestive systems, they wallowed in game shows and cartoons, and waited.