Pious Deception (26 page)

“Kiernan,” Warren shouted as she opened her window. “Great. I didn’t dare hope you’d come up here so soon. I was afraid you might not really be interested.” He grinned. “Sometimes, you know, people don’t quite share my enthusiasm. But it is a fascinating process. Let me show you around.”

“Can you give me food first? And a beer?”

His tanned forehead creased. “Did I invite you for lunch? No matter, we’ll pretend I did. Will a sandwich do?”

“Perfect.”

Warren walked around the Jeep and climbed in. “The office is at the far side. Take the road straight through.” He looked at the shattered back window. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“Unfriendly McKinleys in Rattlesnake. I’ll tell you about it after I eat.”

“I’ll have one of the guys tape some plastic over the window. That should hold you till you get back to town.”

“Thanks.” Kiernan rolled up the side window against the dust outside and headed around the conveyors that joined the giant machines—what were they called? “Are those the lock hoppers?”

Warren laughed. “No, they’re the grizzlies.”

“Grizzlies?”

“Rock crushers. We’ve got three different sizes of grizzlies—”

“Poppas, mommas, and babies?”

Kiernan could almost see Warren changing mental gears. It was a moment before he laughed. “Right, poppa over there takes the big bites. See?” He pointed toward a huge, rumbling machine. “Then he spits them out onto the conveyor belt to momma, and she chews it better, and spits …” Warren laughed. “Maybe regurgitation similes aren’t the best way to make a good impression before lunch, huh?”

“Good save. It’ll take a lot more than rock-crushing stories to dim my appetite.”

“My kind of woman. Okay, here, veer around this building.”

“The conveyors lead in there. But there are no windows? What’s inside?”

Putting a hand on her arm, he said, “That, my dear, is the process. It’s the baghouse!”

“Eyes only?”

“You got it. I can’t afford to take a chance. Everything’s wrapped up in that process. And when it sells, Kiernan, I’ll take you to a lunch fit for a queen.”

Following Warren’s directions she drove around the baghouse to a one-story stucco building in the far corner of the site. It too was windowless, and the walls, she found on entering, were three feet thick. “Like a bomb shelter,” she said.

“Noise’ll kill you otherwise. I can’t have the workers wandering off half the day to find a little peace. This doesn’t muffle it entirely, but it’s not too bad. Here”—he pulled a chair out from one of the two red Formica tables—“sit. Ham, roast beef, or pastrami?”

“Pastrami.”

Warren’s green metal desk and file cabinets filled one end of the room. The other housed a sink, a small refrigerator, and the table, which reminded her of a 1950s kitchenette. On the wall was a poster of the Denali National Park in Alaska.

Warren plucked two bags from the fridge, plopped them on the table, and went back for cans of beer. “Carta Blanca, okay? It’s your only choice.”

“Great.” She took a bite of the sandwich. The pastrami was good, the rye bread fresh, the mustard sharp. Nodding at it she said, “Do you have a hot line to the only kosher deli in Phoenix that delivers?”

Warren laughed. “I figure the guys are out here in the middle of nowhere, at least I can provide good food.”

“I’d work for you.” She took another bite.

“I’d like you to think it’s because I’m such a nice guy, and I am, of course. But it’s good business. Things like this room, the movies, the food, it keeps the guys out here. Otherwise they’d be driving into town every night, and in no time they’d have found other jobs. It gets pretty tedious out here.”

“How do
you
handle it?”

Warren laughed. “Same as they would. I take every chance to get into town.”

Warren took a bite of his own sandwich. In the silence she was more aware of the thumping outside, like a kid across the street playing the drum. Enough to cause suburban feuds. Enough to cause rural feuds. “Bud,” she said, “all the guards and the precautions outside, it’s not just because of spies, is it? The villagers in Rattlesnake complained about you. How much of a threat are they?”

Warren held his sandwich halfway to his mouth, staring. “They told you that much? You are good at your work. They don’t let strangers down there. No one but Vanderhooven, and him not often.”

“Well, you saw the Jeep window. They didn’t exactly invite me to stay. But they did answer some questions—”

“What’d you ask them?”

“About the cemetery mostly.”

“The old man, he still alive?”

“He was then, but he didn’t sound good.”

“Didn’t you see him? I mean, you are a doctor, right? It’d be reasonable for you to see him.”

She shrugged, then asked again, “Are the villagers threatening you?”

Bud put down his sandwich. “There’s always some monkey wrench in the works with a project like this. Usually, it’s the delivery schedule; whatever you need most doesn’t get delivered. Or it’s union hassles. But this time things were racing right along. No problems setting up meetings, no hassles getting deliveries. In the beginning I assumed that the village would be a source of labor. It would be good money for them. But I’ll tell you, those guys in the village, they just don’t want to work. They farm a little and they sit on their porches, or inside the houses, to be accurate. They can’t even get it up to plant a tree to shade them.”

“They said you were destroying the area.”

Warren smacked a fist against the chair back. “Damn! I might as well have talked to the walls there. I told old man McKinley that I would take this hole here, this hole that White Bone Copper just walked away from, and I’d turn it back to what it was. I showed him my papers from Environmental Protection. You can’t get a better record with them than I have. E.P. saw the plans for this place and they applauded me. I told McKinley, this place is going to look better than it has in thirty years. Did no good.”

“Have they been vandalizing?”

“Stuff’s been missing, small stuff. Could be them, could be someone else.”

“Someone specific?”

“Well …”

“Zekk?”

Warren hesitated. “I don’t have proof. But the stuff that goes is wheelbarrows, air conditioners, things he could stick in the back of his van and fence when he sells the pottery. But”—he shook his head—“I don’t know. Zekk’s around a lot, but maybe he’s just bored.”

“Why do you still let him on the site?”

“I hate to banish him. The guards keep an eye on him. Isolated like this, you get to know everyone, and you take what company you can get. And besides he’s got a collection of porn tapes you wouldn’t believe. Like an outlet. Hundreds. Keeps the guys here at night.”

“So the occasional wheelbarrow is worth it?”

“You bet.”

“And, presumably, Zekk isn’t complaining about the noise like the villagers are. And even so, the villagers still share their water with you.”

“Have no choice, Kiernan. I get my allotment from the church land. That’s one good thing. I don’t have to deal with the McKinleys at all.”

“But the church gets its water from the McKinleys. They have an informal agreement, right? So they could turn off the tap any time if they wanted you out of here badly enough.”

Warren shrugged. “I’d say that proves my point.”

She finished her sandwich and took a long, slow drink of beer, thinking of Joe Zekk. Zekk, who had had McKinley’s will. Zekk, who called Philip Vanderhooven in Maui. Who cheated the villagers and got $200 a month from Austin Vanderhooven. She put the can down. “Bud. What did Joe Zekk do before he came out here?”

“Bummed around. The guy’s not a powerhouse. He’d be happy down there in the village if they had electricity. Well, and bars and women.”

“Bummed around? In the U.S.? Overseas?”

“I think he worked tramp steamers.”

“A sailor? Someone familiar with knots.”

“Yeah. Why are you—? Oh, knots.” He nodded.

Kiernan finished the beer. “You don’t seem surprised.”

He leaned his head forward over his arms. His dark hair hung. Tan dust still coated the top, and the occasional gray hair, kinkier than the dark ones, stood out. “I don’t know,” he said, looking up. “I can’t picture Joe Zekk hanging Vanderhooven. The guy was his friend. And yet …”

“Yes?”

“Well, this probably doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yes?”

“I went up to the main road to meet Elias the night Austin was killed. Since I was up there, I stopped at Joe’s to change movies. He wasn’t home. And after Elias left, he still wasn’t home.”

T
HE KHAKI-COLORED SKY
muddied the outlines of Joe Zekk’s castle-house. It blurred into the dome at end of the mesa and the rocky peninsula of land that overhung the valley.

The switchback road down to Rattlesnake was empty. The village itself looked the way it had when Kiernan had first seen it: deserted. There were McKinleys down there, of course, but they were not bursting out of their houses for another shot at the Jeep. Not yet. Still, she didn’t kid herself that her arrival would go unnoticed.

A green panel truck stood by Joe Zekk’s front door. She parked next to it, took a drink of water, pulled her shirt free where it had become stuck to her back, and headed to the house. The quicker she could deal with Zekk and get away from Rattlesnake, the better.

She knocked and waited. In California the change from blue to overcast sky signaled a decrease in temperature; here it meant merely a qualitative change, like stepping from a barbecue into a steamer. She was about to knock again when she heard slow, heavy footsteps approach.

Unlike the McKinleys below, the man who opened the door was no behemoth; he was just out of shape. He wasn’t fat—yet. But there was an unhealthy roundness to him, to his cherub cheeks, his squishy arms, and the abdominal flesh that pushed against his teal polo shirt and blue deck pants. Looking at him, Kiernan realized that at some level she had been picturing a leftover hippie. But this man’s short dark hair was swept stylishly back from his face and stood stiffly in place. His porcine face was remarkably pasty for a desert dweller, and the lines that crossed his forehead and ran down under the mounds of his cheeks gave him the appearance not of maturity but rather of a dissolute adolescent.

“Are you Joe Zekk?” she asked.

He nodded, eyeing her appraisingly.

“I’m investigating Austin’s death. Can we talk inside?”

Zekk leaned back against the doorframe and continued his survey of her body. An adolescent smirk played at the corners of his mouth. She’d seen that look before, the look of the bully assuring himself he could handle this small woman. From experience she knew he’d need to be set straight, fast. “Zekk, Austin Vanderhooven has been killed, and you are in a very bad position. ‘Deadbeat’ is the kindest word I’ve heard to describe you. Somebody strung up your friend, and everyone involved in this case would be delighted to hear that that somebody was you.”

Zekk’s fleshy face stiffened. He glanced nervously at the room behind him, then at the bedroom.

Had he already discovered the McKinley will was gone? Or did he have a weapon she had missed in her earlier search? “You have a gun in there? Forget it. Half of Phoenix knows I was headed up here today.”

Zekk took a step back.

Keeping an eye on him, Kiernan moved inside, grateful for the icy air, and made her way through the litter to the sofa. Dislodging a blue striped jacket, she sat. Joe Zekk flopped down on the far end of the sofa and landed on a pair of gray sweat pants and a brown slipper. He made no move to pull them out. She felt sure he no longer noticed the pervading stench of old soda, old food, old God-knows-what. He looked so much like a rebellious adolescent it was hard to remember he was over thirty.

Using the most parental tone she could muster, Kiernan said, “Let’s start with the two hundred dollars a month Austin Vanderhooven was giving you—”

“What? Two hundred dollars?”

“Don’t lie about something that’s so easily traced. Now why was he paying you?”

She could almost see him mentally regrouping. Hardening her voice, she said, “Elias Necri reported the money, Philip Vanderhooven knows about it. What did you have on Austin?”

“It wasn’t blackmail!” He sighed, glanced hopelessly at the bedroom door, and said, “Okay, I’ll tell you about it, but let me get a drink first.” He grabbed a brown-ringed old-fashioned glass from the table, shoved a pile of
Hustler
magazines to the floor, and excavated a one-serving bottle of rye. He emptied it into the glass and drank slowly, eyes half-closed in thought. “He paid me to be the caretaker; he wanted someone he could trust here.”

Kiernan laughed. “No one has called you trustworthy.”

Zekk shrugged, but the movement looked forced. The flesh at the corners of his mouth quivered.

She had hurt his feelings! The man really was an adolescent. “Okay, start from the beginning. You were in seminary with Austin.”

He took another drink. Already the glass was nearly empty. He lifted his right ankle and set it on his knee. The teal bulge of his stomach protruded over the edge of his blue pants. “One of the big mistakes of my life, seminary. I don’t know what I thought I’d find there, but it sure wasn’t another year of catechism and a bunch of asshole rules and years of running errands for a flock of old duffers who think the world hasn’t changed since the first encyclical. It didn’t take me long to see what bullshit the whole business was.”

“You left after the first year?”

“Yeah.”

“What about Austin? How come he stayed?”

Zekk took a mouthful of rye and swished it noisily around his teeth. “It was different with Austin. He realized the bullshit, of course. Anyone’d do that. But the thing was, he just couldn’t believe that was all there was. See, Austin wasn’t like me. Now, I know what people think of me, what you think of me, what they thought of me in seminary. They figured I was lucky to have squeaked past the admissions board. But Austin, he was a star. He abandoned graduate school for the church. Star, scholar, it was written all over him. He was going places, and he was going to carry the good fathers with him. He was one of the ones who’d be sent for graduate courses to the North American College in Rome, maybe the Pontifical Gregorian University, maybe Academia Alfonsiana, who knows? Maybe he’d be the one to take charge of the Church’s investments, which would have been a damned sight more appreciated than any theological insights he might have come up with.” Zekk laughed, a whiny sound. “Besides, when Austin made his decision to enter seminary, he burned a
lot
of bridges. He couldn’t give it up without looking a fool.”