Desert Rage: A Lena Jones Mystery (20 page)

Chapter Seventeen

By noon I was standing on Felix Phelps’ front porch in an old Peoria subdivision imaginatively named Happy Acres, wondering if the man would ever answer the door. In case the doorbell was broken—everything else around the house seemed to be in disrepair—I knocked. Still no answer. The disintegrating Toyota Corolla in the driveway bore testament that he was home, but maybe he was out walking the dog. If he had a dog.

Thirty-four-year-old Felix was the son of Beulah Phelps. A few months earlier, Dr. Arthur Cameron had ushered Beulah out of this vale of tears for poisoning four elderly men, burying them in her backyard, and collecting their Social Security checks. Due to strange odors emanating from the yard, her neighbors eventually became suspicious and called the police. The appeals process had taken two decades, but in March, Felix had been granted the privilege of attending his mother’s execution. According to the
Arizona Republic
story Jimmy pulled up for me this morning, the second Beulah had gasped her last, her son fainted, thus ensuring that neither mother nor son left the execution wing of the Arizona State Prison under their own volition.

The next month he moved back into the house he once shared with his mother, a renter this time. Why?

“Felix’s home, he just don’t answer the door,” called a woman’s voice. Somewhere in her sixties, she stood on her front porch, looking as wrecked as her house. Frowsy gray-and-white hair that eerily matched the peeling paint, an ill-fitting brown dress the exact color of the dead grass on her lawn.

“I need to talk to him,” I called back.

“Then you might as well go on in. Asshole never locks his door. Probably gonna get his head bashed in by some hop-head burglar someday, not that Felix’s got anything worth stealing.” With that, she went back inside her own crumbling house, and a second later, I heard the sound of three locks sliding into place.

Peoria is a northwestern suburb of Phoenix, and its neighborhoods range from new, upscale planned communities settled alongside artificial lakes, to down-at-the-heels neighborhoods like this one. Although built with great optimism after WWII, over the years the area’s lack of a strong economic base and the erosion of time laid bare the houses’ hurry-up construction. Their shambling appearance wasn’t helped by the tiny lots they sat on. Huddled as close together as they were, their unkempt yards and crumbling sidewalks announced the neighborhood’s illness as terminal. One day the bulldozers would come along and that would be the end of Happy Acres.

The thought of bulldozers made me wonder if the backyard still retained the open maws of four graves. Or had the city filled them in?

I gave the door a final knock, then, taking the old woman’s advice, opened it to the stench of cigarette smoke, mildew, and urine. “Hey, Mr. Phelps, you in there?”

A mumble from a far corner of the room. “What?”

The curtains, nothing more than none-too-clean sheets, had been drawn, so the living room was dark after the morning’s white-hot glare. But I could hear him trying to breathe, emphasis on the
trying
part.

“My name is Lena Jones, and I’m a private investigator. I’d like to talk to you about your mother.”

“She’s…dead.” His halting voice was a high tenor, similar to that of a child asthmatic’s.

As I stepped into the room, I reached my hand into my carryall and switched on my digital recorder. “I know, Mr. Phelps. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“The bastards…killed her.”

“I know that, too.”

“They…shouldn’t a…done that.”

“She was convicted of murdering four innocent men.”

“She was just trying…to take care of me after…Daddy left. What’d they…expect her to do when she couldn’t…get a job? Beg on the…street?” He was parroting the same defense his mother had used at her trial.

My eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom and I focused in on him. Felix Phelps was morbidly obese, little more than a blue-lipped, glutinous mass. His rolls of fat spilled over a patched-together recliner surrounded by empty beer bottles, cigarette packs, fly-specked TV dinner containers, and empty Hershey wrappers. Urine stained the front of his giant-sized sweatpants. Diabetic, probably, but I saw no syringe, and no oxygen apparatus to ease his labored breathing.

There being no way this man could have committed the three torture-killings described in the Cameron case file, I removed him from my mental list of suspects. In his condition, swinging a baseball bat even once was beyond him. He needed medical attention as soon as possible.

“You look unwell, Mr. Phelps. Want me to call someone, get you some help?”

“Call who? Never…had no one…but my…mama, now don’t even got her. She was just…an old lady. Who was she…gonna hurt anymore, huh?”

I looked around for something to sit on, saw nothing. The recliner and a cooler next to the recliner appeared to be the only pieces of furniture in the room. I didn’t even see a television set. So I kept standing.

My vision finally back to normal, I finally spotted a rickety table placed catty-corner from him so he could look directly at it. The table held a yellowing photograph of Felix as a handsome young teenager, embraced by a smiling serial killer.

“You don’t have any aunts, uncles, or cousins to help you? No friends?”

“Mama was all…I had.”

Felix had been just shy of fourteen when his mother had been arrested. With no kin, he was turned over to Child Protective Services, where—like Kyle—he made the rounds of foster care and at least two group homes. Like other children in his situation, at the age of eighteen he’d been released from CPS protection to fend for himself. These damaged kids, first damaged by their parents, then by the state, were expected to get by with whatever skills and/or education they had already acquired, which wasn’t much. If they had health problems, whether physical or mental, that was also too bad. Once they aged out of the system they were no longer insured, and their well-being was no longer the state’s concern. The good news was that the kids’ health problems seldom lasted all that long, the bad news was the reason why: there was a high suicide rate among eighteen-year-old foster care graduates.

I remembered some of the children I had met during my own long, orphaned slog through the CPS system. Johnny Frasier, dead of an overdose at eighteen. Harmony McMillan, seventeen, who overdosed with Johnny. After a year of hooking on Van Buren Avenue, D’Anne Otumbo, nineteen, drove a stolen car into a freeway abutment, leaving no sign she’d attempted to brake. Those were just a few of my fellow fosters who were no longer in this life.

Now Felix.

Maybe a visit from Adult Protective Services could help him. Then again, maybe not. The fates of so many of my friends had taught me that no matter how incapacitated, when a person wants to die, he can always find a way to accomplish that sad task. Felix had found his.

Under the circumstances this interview would be pointless, but I began anyway. Once he answered two questions, I would leave this house of past and present horror.

“Felix, what were you doing between noon and 2:45 p.m. on July 8?”

“Huh?”

“July 8. It was a Monday.”

“Then I was…here. Prob’ly. Don’t get…out much.”

“Did you hire someone to kill Dr. Arthur Cameron?”

He squinted up at me through eyes that were little more than slits in an almost basketball-sized head. “Who’s that?”

“He’s an ER doc at Good Sam. Or to put it more correctly, he was.”

Felix’s fleshy mouth twisted in puzzlement as he struggled to speak. “Last doctor…I seen was Washrowski or…Kryzoski or something like that…over at Peoria General, couple years ago…but Good Sam’s too far to drive…last time I drove more than…a mile, the engine light…came on. So sorry…never met any…Doctor Cammy.” He drank the rest of his beer, tossed the empty bottle on the floor, and in the same smooth motion, retrieved a new beer from the ice chest. “Want one?”

I declined. “His name was Cameron, not Cammy.”

“What I…said, isn’t it? So this doctor…he got himself killed?”

“Yep. Plus his wife and his son.”

“Geez…A kid?”

“Ten years old.”

“Just as well…then.”

It was my turn to be puzzled. “What do you mean, Felix?”

“No point in hangin’ out after…your mama’s gone…since she’s the only one…ever loved you.”

***

As soon as I returned to my Jeep I called Adult Protective Services and explained Felix’ condition. The woman on the other end of the line sounded efficient enough, but promised little. Maricopa County was heavily populated, she said, and there were hundreds, possibly thousands, of adults in worse shape than Felix, adults who for one reason or another, were being victimized by their caregivers. Those cases were given priority status by Adult Protective Service. Compared to grannies being beaten by daughters and grandsons, a person killing himself slowly with food, cigarettes, and alcohol didn’t even rate an in-home visit. She didn’t come right out and say that last part, of course, but by the time I ended the call, the between-the-lines hung in the air.

No point in hangin’ out after your mama’s gone since she’s the only one loves you.

I placed another call, this one to Curtis Racine, Kyle Gibbs’ attorney. He wasn’t pleased because I’d apparently interrupted him in the middle of something.

“This better be important,” he grumbled, sounding out of breath. In the background I could hear a woman’s voice, soft, yet irritated. I could also hear clothes rustling. Or was it sheets?

“As per our earlier agreement, you’re not talking on the phone to me, anyway, so this intrusion into your personal life never happened,” I said. “Here’s what I suggest you do. Visit Kyle, tell him Ali’s about to retract her confession and that she’s going to deny planning her family’s murder. She’s also going to say that the only reason she made up the story about hiring a hit man was because she thought she was protecting Kyle. Since then, she has come to believe that he doesn’t need protecting because he had nothing to do with the murders.”

No comment for a moment, just a hurried shush to the muttering woman before Curtis came back on the line. “Aren’t you forgetting something? A certain person’s fingerprints on a certain piece of sports equipment?”

“I’m sure he has an explanation for that. Especially since the crime techs found only one set of fingerprints on the bat. If Kyle killed those people, his fingerprints should have been all over it, not merely confined to the grip area. His prints should also have shown up in the master bedroom and Alec’s bedroom, at the very least. But they didn’t.”

“I planned to use that in a certain person’s defense. Dammit, stop!” This last wasn’t addressed to me, but to the woman, who from the tone of her voice, was pleading for something. Having been around that block a few times myself, I could guess what.

“Curtis, just get the kid to tell the truth, okay?”

“The truth. Now there’s a concept.”

“Another thing, and you didn’t hear it from me, remember. Desert Investigations has discovered that for the past three years, right up to his death, Dr. Arthur Cameron was moonlighting as the Arizona state executioner, during which time he put ten men and one woman to death. He was paid, in cash, a total of eighteen thousand dollars per head. So to speak.”

An unlawyerly squawk.

I ignored it. “Which means there were a lot of other people who might have wanted Dr. Cameron dead, grieving family members and such.”

“Holy. Shit.”

“You can say that again. Well, it’s been nice talking to…”

He interrupted, his voice lowered to a whisper. “You haven’t been talking to me, and I’ve certainly heard none of this information from anyone, let alone you. But just out of curiosity, I have to ask, why are you doing this?”

Because I don’t want Kyle turning into Felix Phelps
,
I could have answered. Instead, I just said, “If you can convince that dumb, deluded boy that Ali had nothing to do with the murders—and at this point I can assure you she didn’t—he’ll probably retract his confession, too.”

With that, I let him get back to whatever important task he’d been performing for womankind and called Fiona Etheridge, the dumb, deluded boy’s soon-to-be-adoptive mother and imparted much the same information. The only thing I left out was Dr. Cameron’s lucrative sideline, which she didn’t need to know.

After giving Fiona time to make happy noises, I added, “Get down to juvie today and start working on him. He needs to retract that bullshit confession.”

“But what if he thinks he’s still helping Ali?”

“It’s your job to convince him otherwise.”

I ended the call, then pressed speed dial for Jimmy.

The conversation was tense, but after first refusing, he gave me the local addresses where the families of four recently executed men lived. If nothing substantive turned up in my interviews with them, I’d range further afield.

“You okay?” Jimmy asked, before I could hang up.

“Considering what happened last night, I should probably be asking you that question. How is it, anyway?”

“How is what?”

“Your nose.”

“Sore.”

“You should have just let me scream it out. That’s what I usually do.”

“My partner starts screaming in the middle of the night and I’m supposed to ignore it?”

“You know how I am.” A partial lie, because I’d never told him about my nightmares, and certainly not about Golden Boy.

“I knew you had issues, but I thought you were getting help.”

“I did. My therapist was so good that yours was the first bloody nose I’ve caused in, oh, several months.”
Keep it light, keep it light.

When he took a deep breath, I knew a lecture was coming. He didn’t disappoint. “This is serious, Lena. You should…”

“Hmm. Let me see. The address for the Hoppers was 4891 West Corinth, right? In Maryvale? You recited those numbers so fast I wanted to make sure.”

“Yeah. 4891 West Corinth.”

“Thanks.”

I killed the call before he added anything else.

On Sundays the Black Canyon Freeway flows relatively smoothly, so as the Jeep cruised south toward the Maryvale area of west Phoenix, I erased last night’s embarrassment by worrying about someone with worse problems than mine. Felix Phelps would be dead by the end of the year, but there was nothing more I could do. If God existed and if He was as merciful as some people believe, Felix would pass away peacefully in his duct-taped recliner, staring at his mother’s photograph. Despite her horrific crimes, she had somehow managed to make her son feel loved.