“Have you ever been unfaithful?” She let her small hand rest atop mine and the atmosphere in the big closet closed in on us.
I gently pulled my hand away.
“So you have.” She smiled. She had a very nice smile. “Men have secret lives.”
“Women, too,” I said.
She sighed. “True enough.”
I turned with my back to the drawers and faced her. “Did you suspect your husband was gay or bisexual?”
She smiled again, sad this time. “Elliott was a man’s man. He was of that generation. So much of him was hidden. Again, I think it’s a generational thing. Men his age didn’t talk about what was going on inside. Men your age can be different, thank God.”
I started out of the closet but she blocked me.
“Do you want to know what he was like in bed, David?”
That smile again. Not the sad one. The one with chemistry and danger. The kind that had taken me many years of experience to decipher its meaning. I still felt the electricity of her hand atop mine. She took off her glasses and tilted up her chin. I felt a finger in the pleat of my slacks. Then it ran down my leg.
I could have picked her up and fucked her against the wall right then. She was small and I was tall and as our romp continued we would knock down the dead man’s golf shirts, rolling around on them.
I crossed my arms.
“I was a horny young woman, David. I still like sex. I need it. Don’t you?” Her voice was husky. “Elliott liked that at first. After we’d been married for a year, we might have sex every eight months. If I was lucky. Believe me, I counted. But I liked the life he paid for. Do you think that makes me a prostitute?”
“No.”
“Then Zephyr came along. I didn’t want her to be raised in a broken home. I suppose that was foolish. There was no prenup. This is a community property state and I could have taken half of everything. But I stayed.”
I nodded.
She ran her other hand through her hair. It fell back in place perfectly. “You know what’s strange? He always had male assistants. Good-looking guys. I mean real hunks. I never gave it a second thought at the time. I was happy that he didn’t have little babes that would bring out the green-eyed monster. Women who might replace me if he grew bored. But when I saw those photos, it all made sense. I wanted to throw up.”
“Why did you bring the wallet to Sheriff Melton?”
She dropped her hand from my slacks. The electricity shut off.
“I looked at the driver’s license and did a Google search. I found a little article about this young man being found dead in the desert in 1984. It was his wallet. I thought his family might want it.”
She walked out, brushing past me, now more with impatience than flirtation.
I followed her into the bedroom.
“Do you suspect your husband was involved with Tom Frazier?”
“Who the hell knows?” She sat in an armchair and crossed those slim legs. “I don’t even know Elliott, I realize now.”
“He never mentioned the name?”
She shook her head.
“This is a suspicious death,” I said. “Probably a homicide.”
Her face lost color. She stared at me, opened her mouth but no words came.
“Was your husband violent?”
She nearly jumped out of the chair. “What the hell are you implying, Deputy?” The “David” stuff was gone. “How dare you? Who do you think you are to say that Elliott could have murdered this young man?”
“You said that. I asked if he was violent.”
She whirled around and strode to one of the French doors. For a long time she stared out at the mountain. The top of the camel’s hump had disappeared in the clouds.
Finally, a small voice: “Elliott was a man of extremes and he could be very generous. When I told him that I hated north Scottsdale, he bought this property and built this house for us. The more I learned about Native American and Mexican art, the more he bought me pieces. Very expensive ones.”
She turned back and her face was composed.
“I’m terribly rude. May I get you something to drink?”
“No. Thank you, though.”
She fixed me with her enormous beautiful eyes. “The answer to your question is that Elliott had a bad temper. It was worse when he was drunk, which was a lot. He hit me more than once. My dad had been an alcoholic, too. He beat me with a belt when I was fifteen years old! Shit, I thought it was normal. With Elliott, he would slap me and the next morning turn sweet and give me an expensive present. He’d want to take me out to dinner even if I had a black eye. I had worse than yours, believe me.”
“If he was involved with Tom Frazier and something went wrong, do you think he was capable of hurting him?”
Her shoulders rose and fell. “We always want to think the best of the people close to us, don’t we? But those pictures showed me how little I really knew the man. So the honest answer is, I don’t know.”
I handed her my card and started to leave.
“David, about what happened back there in the closet…”
“Don’t give it a second thought, Mrs. Whitehouse.”
That smile again. “It’s Diane. I wasn’t going to apologize. I see something in you, David. You’re special. I feared that Chris would send some knuckle-dragger and he sent you, instead. I always fell for brains. It’s not as if I throw myself at men.”
I tried to smile back. “I’m very honored. I also love my wife.”
“To whom you’ve been unfaithful before. Only children confuse passion with love.”
She handed me her card and stroked my fingers. I let her do it.
“Call me if there’s something you want, David.”
What I really wanted was someone who could find millions in missing rough diamonds and lead me to Peralta. Most of all, I wanted Lindsey to get better.
She watched me closely, this compact still-lovely woman, in her expensive black jeans and huge house and ancient pottery with kill holes, who had deposited this secret on Chris Melton’s doorstep.
Until Ed Cartwright told me otherwise, until we knew Peralta was safe, it was my doorstep, too.
I left her in the bedroom and let myself out.
Chapter Thirty
I got half a mile when the phone rang. Kate Vare. Would I meet her?
She was sitting in an unmarked Chevy Impala in a parking lot off Twenty-fourth Street and Osborn. The homely one-story building nearby had once been a home-cooking restaurant named Linda’s. Now it was a Mexican eatery. I pulled next to her in the timeless cop fashion, driver’s door to driver’s door.
Her elbow was resting on the doorframe, window down, and she looked me over. “Why are you so dressed up?”
“I went to see Diane Whitehouse.”
She cocked her head and I gave the elevator speech about Tom Frazier’s wallet.
“Jeez.” She laughed, a strange sound coming from her. “Old Man Whitehouse in the closet? He hit on me once, you know. Years ago when I was a uni. Went to a burglary call at one of his subdivisions under construction. He talked to me about how hard it must be for me, being tough all the time, and I wouldn’t have to be that way with him. It was a smoother come-on than it sounds.”
I took it in and said nothing. Even though it was getting toward noon, the streets were slick and moody, the rain clouds low and misshapen like boiling lead.
“I’d love to be there when you log in those photos as evidence,” Vare said. “Do you like him for this?”
She meant did I think the late Elliott Whitehouse, the legendary Phoenix homebuilder, had murdered his lover. Oh, and the lover was a young man.
I shook my head. “Frazier was found dead of a heroin overdose, but there’s no evidence he was a user. If he was Whitehouse’s lover, this seems like a lot of bother. Why not simply bludgeon him with a piece of rebar and dump the body in a mineshaft or bury it under a concrete slab? Hire a hitman. It doesn’t make sense.”
“And why keep the wallet?” she said. “Maybe he thought it would make identification more difficult.”