“I seriously doubt it, Tom.”
“Well, it looks like our boy’s shirt is pretty accurate, anyway.”
Conover noticed the lettering on the young man’s shirt, nearly obscured by blood—Bad Brains. He humored Blanken-ship with a smirk.
The detective glanced at his watch. It was just after 6 a.m. He’d wait for the autopsy and ballistics reports to con-firm his suspicions. In the meantime, he refrained from saying much to the uniform. Blankenship was basically a decent guy, but he wasn’t too smart and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. This was true of a lot of cops Conover had known over the years.
“It’s going to be hard to contain for very long. We’ll have to break the news to Hodge before the media gets wind of it,” Conover said.
“There’s gonna be a shit-storm.”
“Yes, I imagine there will be.”
“Perhaps we can hold off the vultures for a bit. I’ll see what I can do,” Blankenship said.
“I’d appreciate that, Tom.”
The detective ducked under the crime scene tape and walked out the front door. He stood for a moment looking up at the castle. Half the windows were broken or missing and graffiti stained the stucco walls. Must have been something back in the ’30s, he thought. But that was fifty years back. These days the property’s only occupants were junkies, prostitutes, and squatters.
Conover shook his head and proceeded down the weed-strewn path, Blankenship falling into step behind him. The sun finally appeared over the mountains to the east, and the decrepit, overgrown cactus garden lay exposed in the golden light.
“Anybody contact the Tovrea family yet?” Conover asked.
“We’re trying to reach the widow. She lives out in Paradise Valley.”
“Right.” Conover walked down to where he’d parked his car, an old ’73 Dodge Polara. There were now six or seven patrol cars parked in the dirt lot, and the detective noticed the first TV news truck pulling up to the gate out on Van Buren.
“Shit, here we go,” he muttered.
Ron Wheeler dug working at Brookshire’s Coffee Shop. It was one of the few twenty-four-hour restaurants in central Phoenix and the place was always packed with good-looking chicks, especially after 1 o’clock when the bars closed. The coffee was strong and drinkable, not like that watered-down shit they served at Denny’s, and for a greasy spoon the food wasn’t bad. He’d only been there for a few months but he was already popular with the customers and the tips were great.
Ron usually worked the graveyard shift, which suited his lifestyle. A few months back he’d moved out of his parents’ house into a studio apartment off Twenty-fourth Street and McDowell, just around the corner from the restaurant. In the evening he’d hang out with friends, maybe smoke a little weed, and practice the guitar. Then he’d work all night until 7 a.m., go home, crash until late afternoon, and do it all over again. His best friend Brian Cortaro had a bass guitar and they planned to start a band. Ron was thinking of asking his new girlfriend Kelly if she’d be interested in taking a stab at singing. He’d graduated from East High in ’82, two years back, and his twentieth birthday was coming up in a few days.
To celebrate, Kelly had taken him to see X, one of his favorite bands, over at the Silver Dollar Club. Billy Zoom was his guitar god. Ron thought he was the epitome of cool with his slicked-back hair and silver Gretsch, his fingers racing over the fret board while he just stood there with that insane smile. Yeah, Billy Zoom was bad-ass, and Ron’s copies of Los Angeles and Under the Big Black Sun were all scratched to hell from playing them so much. He’d sit there with his crappy Memphis Les Paul copy and twenty-watt Peavey amp and try to fig-ure out the songs. Zoom’s guitar parts were deceptive—they seemed straightforward enough, but then the sneaky bastard would slip in a weird jazz chord or some damn finger-picking run that would fuck with Ron’s mind.
He’d taken to calling Kelly his “devil doll” after one of his favorite X songs. She definitely had that Exene Cervenka look, like a lot of the girls in the punk scene—tousled Raggedy Ann hair, thrift store dresses, Dr. Martens. Occasionally she’d do the Dinah Cancer thing—leather pants, gauzy black tops, ghoul makeup. Kelly had the body to pull it off, but her stepmother didn’t get her fashion sense at all. “You’re such a pretty girl,” she’d say, “why do you try to hide it so much?”
To Ron she was beautiful, way out of his league. They’d met at a TSOL gig over at the Metro earlier in the year. That night he’d learned that she’d gone to Xavier High, and, although they were almost exactly the same age, Ron suspected that she was more experienced than he was. Several weeks later when they had sex in Ron’s twin bed, he’d lied when Kelly asked him if it had been his first time.
After the X show, they drove around downtown and killed the last few beers from the cooler in the backseat. Kelly always had booze around. Ron didn’t know much about her father, but he did notice that adults seemed to treat Kelly differently when they found out who her dad was. He’d met the old man only once, when Kelly had invited Ron over for a sit-down meal at the family spread in Paradise Valley. Hodge had seemed irritable and distracted, excusing himself from the dinner table several times to take phone calls. Kelly’s stepmother Charlotte was right out of central casting—late-thirties cokehead, former model and dancer, peroxide-blond hair, year-round tan. Bitch even drove a fire engine–red Camaro. Ron thought she looked like Morgan Fairchild, but not as hot. He’d made up his mind that the old guy was a dick, but Hodge obviously doted on his only daughter.
Ron asked Kelly to pull into a U-Totem on Seventh Street, just north of Roosevelt. Nobody in the car was of legal age but it was easy to buy beer in Phoenix if you knew the right places to go.
“Dude, think your uncle’s working?” Brian said from the backseat.
“I don’t know, man. Probably.” Ron’s uncle Cliff was one of those Vietnam vets who’d come back all messed up and just couldn’t get it together. Cliff cruised Central on his Electra Glide with a bunch of other bikers, got in fights a lot, had trouble holding a job. When Ron was a little boy, his father would go out looking for Cliff, who often disappeared for weeks at a time. Lately, though, he seemed to be doing a bit better.
They pulled into the parking lot and Ron saw Cliff’s long ponytail and beard. He turned around, gave Brian the thumbs-up, and stepped out of the car.
“Be right back. Need more smokes, Kelly?”
She nodded and blew Ron a kiss as he disappeared into the store.
“Damn, you got him whipped,” Brian said. “Dude’s like a puppy dog.”
“Would you stop it with that shit?” she said, laughing. Kelly put a Marlboro between her lips and crushed the empty pack. Brian leaned over the front seat with his Zippo. She cupped her hands around the flame and drew in a lungful of smoke. She let her fingers linger against his wrist for a few seconds longer than necessary.
“It’s the truth,” Brian said.
“Whatever.”
They sat silently in the car. Kelly smoked her cigarette.
“Seriously, man. When are we meeting that guy? I’m not feeling too good,” Brian said.
Kelly glanced back and noted the hunger in his eyes, the pale and sweaty sheen of his skin. She sighed and reached into the front of her T-shirt, producing a thin silver chain, from which hung a tiny glass vial. She tapped out a small amount of white powder into Brian’s palm. He scooped it up with his pinky’s extra-long fingernail, raised it to his right nostril, and inhaled sharply.
“I’m running out too. Don’t worry though, I talked with my guy earlier. We’re supposed to meet him at Party Gardens at 1:30. He says he’s got something special saved for me.”