“I’m not a lawyer.”
“I didn’t think so. You don’t have that transactional look. You’re very tall.”
She placed her hands on my shoulders. “You’re a little old to be Diane’s new distraction but I suppose you’ll do. Yes, you will do. She usually likes them young, after she snagged Daddy, of course. Maybe she’s turning over a new leaf. I find young men boring.”
She was inside my comfort zone. I took a step back and she stepped with me, as if we were dancing. Later, I thought how she was close enough to try to disarm me or run a blade into my stomach, but I put down my defenses because she was pretty and the surroundings moneyed.
She kept her hands on my shoulders long past appropriate and looked at me smoothly.
“Who did that to your eye? You don’t look like a brawler.”
“I’m not, usually. Who are you?”
“Zephyr.” She tossed her hair, which glistened in the bright room.
“The west wind.”
Her lips curled up. “You know your mythology. I like you.”
I knew more about trains. The Denver Zephyr had been a premier passenger train before America decided it wanted to throw away its great rail patrimony. They stayed on life support with Amtrak, which operated the California Zephyr. Lindsey and I had ridden it through the Rockies.
This Zephyr started to say more when a new voice came behind us.
“Zephyr, dear, leave the gentleman alone. He and I have to talk.”
She finally removed her hands. “Of course, Mother. Have fun. He’s good looking and I bet he knows it.”
Now I was being played. Women her age had rarely found me attractive, not even when I was twenty.
Zephyr sauntered through an archway and disappeared.
“She’s very mischievous. Do you have kids?”
“No.” I introduced myself and showed her my badge and identification.
She gave me a firm handshake. “I’m Diane Whitehouse.”
Diane Whitehouse was petite with thick dark hair cut to her jawline and parted on the left. She wore black Prada jeans, a simple white sweater, and diamond studs in her ears. She appeared to be about my age, with big eyes behind the black plastic-framed glasses that were fashionable again.
Her forehead was defined by natural wrinkles. I respected that. Being rich in this town almost mandated a trip to one of the pricey plastic surgeons in Scottsdale, “Silicone Valley.” A large solitary diamond sat on a ring, the only other piece of jewelry she wore.
She was also the widow of Elliott Whitehouse, the last of the old generation of local residential builders, who had died last year.
I had never met the man but he made his fortune laying down suburban tract houses all over the Valley. When I was young, his corny flag-draped billboards promised, “You don’t have to be president to live in a Whitehouse.”
I was surprised he had chosen to remain here after selling Whitehouse Homes and retiring. The usual playbook was to leave the city for coastal California or the San Juan Islands. Of course, this was probably only one of his homes.
Like so many of its custom-designed cousins that ran from here across to Paradise Valley and up into the slopes of the McDowell Mountains, this one managed to appear expensive and trashy at the same time.
Diane led me through one of the arches into a study lined with light-brown built-in bookshelves, interspersed with a marble fireplace, a large mirror, and French doors leading to a terrace. All of this except the mirror was colored butterscotch. A heavy black wrought-iron chandelier hung from a snowy ceiling. The room had too much furniture. She invited me to sit on a sofa and settled across from me in a chair, crossing very slender legs.
“This rain is so depressing.”
“I love it,” I said.
She nodded like a scientist whose experiment had produced something unexpected. “You must be a native.”
“Fourth generation.”
“Not many of you,” she said. “That must be lonely.”
I thought about that and decided she was right.
“I’ve lived here long enough that I should appreciate the rain,” she said. “But I don’t. What do you think about that?”
That had nothing to do with the weather. It was signaled by a pedigreed toss of her head. Like mother, like daughter. She indicated a glass display case holding a very old piece of pottery, geometric design, with a shard broken out near the middle.
Or it was a very good fake. Yet considering Elliott Whitehouse’s wealth and the abundance of various styles of large, ornate native pottery, Hopi Katsinas, and Mexican Day of the Dead figurines on the shelves, I knew it must be authentic.
“Beautiful,” I said. “Mimbres, with a kill hole.”
The Mimbres were part of the Mogollon culture, one of the prehistoric peoples of the Southwest. The “kill hole” was part of the burial tradition, placed with the deceased so his spirit could escape through it to the next world.
“Very good,” she said. “I asked Chris to send me his best detective. He told me he had a professional historian on his staff. I’m impressed but not surprised.”
I was not an archaeologist and the three thousand years of human habitation of Arizona was not my specialty. I had dated an archaeologist once, or at least that’s what she claimed to be. Instead, I was pretty sure she was a murderer and I very nearly fell in love with her. Talk about a footnote. No, I knew only enough in this field to be dangerous and yet impress Diane Whitehouse. But her comment made me wonder if she ever read the local newspaper when it reported on my successes working for Peralta?
“Chris is going places, you know,” she said. “You stick with him. Governor is next and beyond that, who knows?”
So she was a campaign donor. That was why Melton had roped me in.
“He’s such an improvement over Mike Peralta.” Diane recrossed her legs, idly stroking an ankle with her fingers. “I can’t believe Elliott contributed to his campaigns all those years.”
Every muscle in my face remained relaxed. Her expression grew intense. “I had intended to go to that jewelry show, you know? And Mike Peralta, our former sheriff, shoots a man, steals the jewels. This is such a dangerous place. One doesn’t want to be called a racist, but…”
She sighed and smiled.
Of course one didn’t even need to finish the sentence.
“Elliott took me to Antwerp once. I visited the old diamond district. Amazing place. The deals were done with a handshake. And generations of craftsmen did the cutting and polishing. Much of that has moved offshore now, where it can be done much cheaper.”
Like Jerry McGuizzo and Bogdan, she knew a good deal about diamonds.
“You don’t strike me as someone who would be interested in bling,” I said.
She laughed. “No. I thought Zephyr might like something. Maybe Tupac’s rings on a chain to take back to Stanford. Her birthday is coming up and it’s only been a year since Elliott died. She’s terribly spoiled but what can you do?”
Stop spoiling her, I wanted to say. Instead, “Is she your only child?”
Diane hesitated and pushed back her hair. “She was my child with Elliott. We were twenty-five years apart in age but it never felt that way. He had two sons by his first wife.”
“Do they live here?”
She shook her head. “It took some getting used to, for all of us. When Elliott and I started dating, I was seen as the home-wrecker. The boys resented me. How could they not? They couldn’t see into the reality of that marriage, how dead and passionless it was. Anyway…now they have their own families. There’s respect between us…”
In another setting, I might have said something to show I understood or sympathized. But I was here on police business. Not only that, in the eyes of Diane and Chris, I was here as the hired help in his political aspirations, tending to a wealthy patron. It made me feel dirty.
I said, “The sheriff told me you found the wallet.”