By the time we were winding through the Desert Mountain area, the gas gauge was below half-full. I hadn’t noticed one open gas pump on the way up here.
“God, I hate Scottsdale,” she said. “The attack of the plastic pod people. I always feel like the shortest, fattest, poorest person up here. But at least I’m not a plastic pod person.”
“Definitely not.”
We cruised slowly along streets lined with exquisite desert landscaping, stucco walls, and heavy iron gates. The road rolled here and there with the land to make way for a dry wash. Where they were visible, houses sat back in tasteful spotlights. You could almost feel the aura of conquest. Up here, middle-class was a house that cost two million. But being rich in Arizona wasn’t always what it seemed. More than one was unfurnished on the inside except for a card table and a couple of lawn chairs. I was happier in Willo.
“Slow down,” Lindsey said. “It’s got to be right up here.”
For such a big-time developer, he had a smaller house by Desert Mountain standards. But it looked pleasant, a single-story, Santa Fe-style adobe. Two cars sat in the rustic gravel drive, one a gray SUV. And SUVs are so commonplace on the streets of Phoenix, even gray ones called Armadas, that I wouldn’t have given it another thought. Except at that very moment—and the dashboard clock said 2:14 a.m.—at that moment, the door to the house opened and a woman with strawberry blond hair walked out. She had an overnight bag in one hand, and the hand of a tall, husky man in the other. Then she turned and gave him a kiss. It wasn’t the kind of kiss that business partners exchanged, even in north Scottsdale.
31
We had a quick breakfast at Susan’s Diner and returned to the house in north Scottsdale at eight a.m. The goal was to catch Jared Malkin before he could hide behind the broad-shouldered security men in the lobby of the Arizona Dreams office. It was Wednesday now, and by Peralta’s clock we had until Friday to find something that would make this investigation something more than a political hot potato. Another clock was ticking now, too: Robin. She was scheduled to go before a judge today at eleven. So far, we had too many leads and too few answers. John Locke said “the great art of learning is to understand but little at a time.” Maybe so, but he never had to deal with Mike Peralta.
After seeing Dana Earley kiss Malkin outside his door, we followed her back to Gilbert. When she pulled into her gated subdivision, we returned home for a few hours of restless sleep. Lindsey had asked a prime question, the one I had yet to answer: “Why did this woman come to you in the first place?”
The door to Jared Malkin’s house came open even as we were walking up the flagstones, past the carefully manicured desert plantings. Someone had told me these took as much water as the lawns and trees of the historic districts in Phoenix. Inside the doorframe stood a tall man with curly black hair, a shaggy black moustache, and a meaty face built around a pendulous red nose. His eyes fixed on Lindsey. I might as well have been one of the ocotillos whose blooms were dying in the summer heat. But his voice and mannerisms seemed agitated even before we identified ourselves.
“You must have the wrong house,” he said.
“You’re Jared Malkin?” Lindsey asked.
“Yes, but…”
“So how could we have the wrong house?”
“All right, all right, come on inside,” he said, and disappeared into the house. “No telling what the neighbors will think.”
The great scholar Jacques Barzun celebrated a cultured person as one with a well-furnished mind. I didn’t yet know about Malkin’s mind, but the people that furnished motel rooms had decorated his house. It was all forgettable sofas, end tables, and desert scenes framed behind glass; maybe they were even bolted to the wall to keep guests from carting them away. There were no books. He led us back to a kitchen table and sat down. I went through it again, as I had with Shelley Baker. Malkin used a butter knife to put sardines slathered in mustard on a cracker. When he ate, his moustache became a broom for crumbs and yellow residue.
“So why do I care?” he said simply. He was continuously shaking his right leg.
“You’re the managing partner of Arizona Dreams, right?”
“Right.” He kept chomping and shaking his leg, both at about the same rhythm.
“Why would one of your top executives have her card found on the scene of a homicide?”
“Deputy, I don’t have the foggiest goddamned idea. Are we done now?”
“No,” I said. Then I went through the questions about Harry and Louie Bell, about the property west of Tonopah, about the school bus near Hyder. Did he know them? Had he been there? He kept shaking his head.
“Earl Rice?”
“Rice,” he said. “Sure. He was a consulting hydrologist for Arizona Dreams.”
“Who did what?” Lindsey asked.
“I don’t have time to give lessons in development,” he snapped. Then he smiled, “Even for a young lady with such beautiful dark hair and fair skin.” You could almost smell cheap cologne coming off him. He went on, “The Groundwater Act of 1986—you gotta have a one-hundred-year supply of water, guaranteed, if you’re going to do a project out in the desert, like Arizona Dreams. A consulting hydrologist is part of the process, so you can document the water supply for the state.”
“A water supply anywhere?” Lindsey asked.
“No, no. It’s got to be water on the property, under the ground, the aquifer.”
“Have you heard from Mr. Rice lately?” I asked.
“No,” Malkin said. “He retired about a year ago. I heard he moved down to Panama. Talk about getting a lot of house for the money. It’s a steal in Central America. Lot of folks here are retiring down there.”