Desert Lost (9781615952229) (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-five

Madeline slept in Monday morning so I kept the bedroom door shut as I dressed for work, which in my case simply meant pulling on a clean black tee shirt, a new pair of black jeans, and my photographer's vest. While eating a hasty bowl of Total in front of the TV, my gloomy mood lifted somewhat when CNN announced that an agreement ending the screenwriters' strike had finally been reached.

An hour later I was on the phone to Angel, who as Hollywood folks go, was considered an early riser. “How soon before you start filming again?” I hoped it would be a location shoot somewhere in Arizona, which would help keep threatening letters away.

“First thing next week, so be ready to attend a production meeting this Friday, same place, same time. Oh, and there's other good news. The judge signed an emergency order transferring Nevitt to an in-patient mental health clinic, where he's going to get the treatment he needs.”

I murmured that that was indeed good news, especially since the letter writer would now have to stop. I had my theory as to the writer's identity, but no proof. It didn't matter. Halting the letters was the important thing. If they ever started up again, which I doubted, I'd share my suspicions about Stuart Jenks with the police. I thought about telling Angel, then decided against it. She still had to work comfortably with the sonofabitch, so the less she knew, the better.

“But I was saving the best news for last,” Angel continued, happily oblivious to the truth about her business associate. “Warren brought my babies back!”

My mouth fell open. Only a few days ago he'd been talking about suing for full custody. “When did this happen?”

“Late last night. He just showed up at my house with them in tow, and after they'd toddled off to their rooms, explained that he'd suddenly become too busy to give them the time they deserve.”

What made him so busy; the new blonde? But perhaps I was being unfair. “Did he explain what changed?”

“Apparently he's come up with an idea for another documentary. About stars and their stalkers.”

Oh, Jesus. “How do you feel about that, Angel?”

A low laugh. “At first I was shocked, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a story that should be told. He's bringing over a film crew next weekend and will start the project with my interview.”

Hooray for Hollywood, where personal trauma and film projects merged into one. “Well, good luck.” Just as I was about to ring off—after all, I'd see her again at Friday's production meeting—something she'd said finally registered. “Wait a minute. You said he came by your house. Does that mean you're out of the Beverly Wilshire already? How does the Black Monk feel about that?”

Her voice took on a hard edge. “How Otto feels doesn't matter.”

Poor Otto. I wondered if she knew he loved her, then decided she probably did. Angel didn't miss much, except when it came to villainous producers.

I sighed. “See you Friday, then.”

And I rang off.

While I was still digesting our conversation and the sharp turns my own life had taken over the past couple of weeks, the phone rang. It was Jonah's attorney. Although murder charges might still be pending, the judge was cutting the kid loose for now.

“He'll be through Processing in about an hour. The bondsman you set up for him gave him a strong talking-to, but he'll forget it in a New York minute if he goes back to his old haunts. Didn't you say you'd found a possible placement for him?”

True. We made arrangements for me to pick Jonah up at the jail, and less than two hours later, I delivered him to the same safe house where I'd taken Clayton.

Bernie, a volunteer with a careworn face, said Clayton was in his room studying, and while he went off to get him, Jonah and I settled ourselves in the large day room, which had been furnished entirely by donations. As usual in such cases, the room was a polyglot horror of styles, with the early Sixties represented by a massive kidney-shaped coffee table; the Seventies by a U-shaped, screaming-gold velour sectional; the Eighties by a green-plaid La-Z-Boy armchair; and the Nineties by two ersatz Laura Ashley-flowered love seats. This millennium was represented by a thirty-seven-inch flat screen TV tuned to the Discovery Channel.

“Man, this is classy,” Jonah said.

Saving me from a reply, Bernie arrived with Clayton. The surprise reunion between the two was so emotional that we left them to it. After all, boys don't cry—at least not when someone's watching.

While the two blubbered over each other, Bernie took me into his office, which was no more stylish than the day room but considerably smaller. Photographs of the safe house's “graduates” covered the wall. Smiling boys stood with their arms around new families. Other boys posed in front of college dorms. In one of the photographs, I recognized ASU, my own old alma mater.

After taking a seat on a rickety chair, I went into more detail about Jonah's time on the Phoenix streets.

“Drugs? Well, of course the kid's using,” Bernie responded. “How else do you think he could stand his life? He needs a treatment program. There's an opening in a state-funded rehab facility that I know of, and if he agrees, we'll take him over there tonight. When he completes treatment, he can come back here, and we'll start him on the same remedial education classes track Clayton's in. Speaking of Clayton, by the way, it's going to be a while before he'll be ready to take the GED test. His education's too deficient, especially in history, science, and economics—not to mention the fine arts. Fortunately he's emotionally healthy, mainly because you got to him before the street did. Jonah's a different story. That boy's going to have a rough road ahead, but having his friend here will help.”

“Actually, they're half-brothers. Same father—Hiram Shupe—different mothers.”

Bernie grunted. “Jonah's taller and heavier, but now that you mention it, they do have similar features. What else can you tell me about their background?”

“Not much, I'm afraid. Just the usual polygamy upbringing. I've met Clayton's mother and she seems like a nice person. As for Jonah's mother Celeste, I never met her. While she was alive, that is.”

“Par for the course in these cases.” Bernie already knew that Celeste had been murdered, and that I was the person who found the body.

My inability to tell Bernie anything about Celeste started me thinking about all the problems I'd had getting information. Prophet Shupe certainly wouldn't talk to me about her, and neither would Ezra nor Opal. It was doubtful that Josie, with her limited capacity, could shed any light on the matter, and Jonah's view of his rejecting mother was more colored by guilt than fact. Even Clayton…

Wait. When I'd driven Clayton away from the work gang, I'd been so concerned about getting him to safety that we'd not discussed his family situation. I wasn't even certain he knew Celeste was dead. Time to rectify that.

Misty-eyed happiness still radiated from both boys when Bernie and I went back to the day room. Although Jonah tried to disguise his up with a manly scowl, he still looked like a kid on Christmas morning.

“Jonah, Bernie needs you to fill out some forms. Do you mind?”

A quick nod. “See you in a few, bro,” Jonah said, giving Clayton a friendly fist-bump.

As soon as the older boy followed Bernie down the hall, I settled myself next to Clayton on the sofa. “How much do you know about Celeste?”

He looked down. “My mother told me that she's gone to see our Father in Heaven.”

At least I wouldn't have to break that news to him. “Did your mother tell you what happened?”

A shrug, which I took to be a yes. “How well did you know Celeste?”

He looked at me in shock. “I don't know nothing about her! Brother Ezra don't allow the women to mix with the men, so I just mainly saw her when she was serving breakfast and dinner. But I'm sure none of the family ki…uh, did that to her.”

“She never argued with anyone?”

He twisted his hands, a tell that he was about to lie. “Oh, no. She kept sweet.”

Kept sweet
. There was that damned phrase again.

“No woman ‘stays sweet' all the time.”

“Our women do.”

And I'm an aardvark. “C'mon, Clayton. I can tell that you know more than you're saying.”

He sighed. “Well, okay, I guess she did argue with Opal once. It started off kinda funny.”

“Funny how?”

“It was over food! Opal was in the kitchen with all the other women, making up the shopping list, and Celeste wanted her to add a bag of potato chips. Opal said no, but Celeste kept on begging, saying that she needed them, that she was having strong cravings, or some such. When Opal heard that, wow, she hauled off and smacked Celeste across the face.”

“You actually saw this?” Opal sure as hell didn't ‘keep sweet.' Cravings weren't abnormal for a pregnant woman, but apparently Opal felt little sympathy.

“Naw, I just heard it. So did Brother Ezra. We men was eatin' supper at the time, and all that screaming and crying really got him mad, so he went into the kitchen and it sounded like he slapped everybody in there.”

One perpetrator, mass punishment. Ezra liked hitting women. Before I could ask another question, Clayton leaned forward, a worried look on his face. “Uh, Miss, now that we're talking, maybe you can help me with something that's been bothering me. Since you brought me here, I been watching a lot of TV, and it's most always turned to the Discovery Channel. Yesterday they was doing this program on geenics…”

“Genetics,” I corrected.

“Yeah, geenics. Anyway, they was talking about this family out in Tennessee or some place, and this family was all the time marrying between themselves, and there was a lot of things wrong with the kids. Cripples. Retards. Stuff like that.”

No mystery to where we were headed. “Studies have shown that when closely related men and women marry, their children run a high risk of birth defects. Profound mental retardation is just one of them.”

“Is that what happened to Josie?”

Josie, the pretty but blank-faced young woman I'd seen with Opal and Darnelle at Frugal Foods. “Were her parents related?”

He had trouble meeting my eyes. “First cousins.”

This was hardly surprising, given that most people in the polygamy compounds were related to each other by one degree or another. “Distant cousins can marry and not have problems, but if first cousins marry, or brother and sister, or uncle and niece, grandfather and granddaughter and whatever, birth defects are a distinct possibility.”

He looked down at the scuffed linoleum floor. “Prophet Shupe and Opal is brother and sister.”

Hoping I hadn't heard right, I asked, “
Full
brother and sister? Or half, like you and Jonah—same father but different mothers?” Not much better.

The tips of his ears glowed red. “Same mother, same father. And they got several kids can't even talk, just grunt. That's why they was all left up at Second Zion. The Prophet only wanted healthy-looking folks down here. Or at least, people that didn't look any worse than Josie.”

Polygamists don't view congenital defects as problems, but not because of any compassion they might feel toward those afflicted. No, it all came down to money. Although the government had curtailed straight-out Welfare payments to several years total per woman,
not
per child, genetically-damaged children continued to draw monthly SSI payments for the rest of their lives. But since incest brought so much extra government money into the compound, something confused me.

“If Shupe and Opal—his sister—were able to have so many children with birth defects and get all that government money, why did he reassign her to Ezra?”

“Oh, The Prophet always does that when a woman is getting close to, uh, the end of her, you know.” He looked away in embarrassment.

“The end of her periods, as in menopause?”

“Yeah.”

In other words, once Shupe's cash cows dried up, he was through with them, and his hand-me-downs became his brother's wives. “Your own mother—Darnelle—is still young. I happen to know she used to be with the Prophet, so why'd he reassign her to Ezra?”

“Because of the First Revelation.”

I thought back to what little I knew about the Bible, and vaguely remembered a story about a wife being passed from one brother to the next. As I recalled, it was because the first brother died. Then again, maybe I was mixing that story up with another.

“Maybe you'd better tell me about that First Revelation, Clayton. My biblical knowledge is pretty much zilch.”

“When the Old Prophet died…”

“Wait a minute. Which prophet are we talking about here? Hiram's father?”

From the research I'd necessarily done on Arizona's polygamist compounds, I knew that Jeremiah Shupe, who'd been reputed to be even crazier than his crazy son, had reigned over Second Zion for almost forty years. Prone, like his son, to fits that seemed more epileptic than divine in nature, he'd delivered revelation after revelation, most of them on that favorite topic of fundamentalists everywhere, the End of Days. But his revelations were invariably followed by new “commandments,” such as the one his followers had to turn three times in a clockwise direction before going to bed in order to “slip free of demons.” Another ordered that no one, not even children, drink anything after sundown; another directed the women to…

Oh, there were just too many commandments to keep up with.

“Yes, Miss, Jeremiah was our Prophet's father. After Prophet Jeremiah ascended into Heaven, God told our new Prophet to reassign all the women and kids, even the babies. And Prophet Shupe always follows the word of God.”

“Did God tell Shupe
why
he needed to reassign all the women and children?”