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“We have the documents,” I said. “They make it clear that you and your husband were trying to buy the Bell property. They make it seem like a pretty desperate thing. Bell was resisting and you weren’t taking no for an answer.”
She gave a wounded cry. Several bar patrons looked over. She stared out the window.
“Before you tell the next set of lies, you should know that I’ve talked to Jack Fife, and he told me your husband hired a couple of men from him. He said your husband made it clear he wanted the men to put a scare into Louie Bell. Those are the same two men who assaulted me the day I went out there on your wild goose chase. He’s signed a statement. He’ll testify.”
Dana’s profile might as well have been cut out of marble. She didn’t move. She watched the traffic snake through the construction on Central. A palm frond blew into the glass and smacked it. She didn’t react. I just let her be. I had said my part. Finally, she crumpled over and sobbed. Her back heaved and shook through the orange blouse. I made no move to comfort her. When she looked back at me, her eyes were bloated and her fair complexion had turned bright pink.
“Look,” she said, in a flat voice. “I took a vow to honor and obey…but…but…” She sighed and wiped away tears. “I just can’t any more.” She drained her glass in a single chug and signaled for another. She said, “I can’t cover for Tom any more.”
She pulled her chair close to me, so that we were almost knee-to-knee. “Now only the truth,” she said.
“Dana,” I said. “You know I still work for the sheriff’s department. Anything you say to me could be incriminating. You don’t have to tell me…”
She waved it away. “It’s time. Long past time.” She managed a smile. “And you wouldn’t hurt me, David. You were my favorite professor, remember?”
“I don’t,” I said.
“You’re a heart-breaker, David Mapstone,” she said. “You were back then, too. Didn’t even know I wanted to throw myself at you. And I was pretty then. I was thin.”
A new glass arrived and she drank half of it. I stayed with one martini.
“We’re deeply in debt,” Dana said. “Tom was never a particularly good businessman. And he’s a terrible gambler, but he’s addicted. He can’t stop himself. He has half a million dollars in gambling debts. So much for the values candidate.” She gave a rueful laugh.
“When Tom had a chance to buy into Arizona Dreams, he was flat broke,” she said. “So the partnership made him a loan. It was good to have his name associated with the project. It helped them get other influential investors. And Tom Earley was going to be governor someday—everybody said it. If we could just have held our own, having a stake in Arizona Dreams would have meant everything. A good education for Madison and Noah. A good retirement for us. But Tom couldn’t stop gambling.”
“He went to the casinos?” I asked.
“He was way beyond gambling here,” she said. “And it would have been bad for his image. He went to high-stakes games out in north Scottsdale. They have orgies out there, too, you know. And he went to Vegas as Mister Thomas. So, anyway, at one of these games he meets this hydrologist named Earl Rice, and Earl told him about the Bell property. It’s got water under the land, a lot of it. But it’s not near anything, so it wasn’t widely known that the water was there.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would Rice share his secret?”
“He was as in debt as Tom, but he didn’t know Tom was in debt. Earl thought he was making a partner out of this big political leader who could help him. So they scraped together some money. They got another guy they met at the games, named Cordesman, who was a lawyer. They went in together to buy out the Bells. Only it didn’t work out that way. Harry Bell hated the developers and he never wanted to see that land sold. When he died, he had himself buried out there. Louie Bell might have been open. But after Harry died, Louie said he’d made his brother a promise not to sell. It was insane. The partners were low-balling Bell, sure, but it would have been more money than he ever had. Tom just knew if he got that land it would be appealing as a resort, or a new town. He could flip it to somebody else for a fortune.”
She blew her nose into a cocktail napkin. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “We lost our stake in Arizona Dreams today. The investors brought in a man from Malibu. Somebody with real money, one of those rich ones you’ve never heard of. Somebody named Dimah something-or-oth
er. All the foreigners have the money now, you know. And they restructured the partnership, and Tom was out.” She corrected herself. “We’re out. All our hopes, hell.”
I said, “So Tom hired the muscle?”
“I didn’t know about it at the time,” she said. “I swear, David. He just wanted to scare the old man.”
“The old man ended up dead,” I said.
Her shoulders heaved and she started crying again. “I know,” she sobbed. “Once I would have said Tom couldn’t possibly do anything like that. Now, I don’t know. Are you married? Of course you are. How well do we know anyone, especially our husband or wife?”
“Did Adam Perez work for Fife?”
She shook her head. “He was another thing that crawled out from Tom’s gambling life. Tom promised to make him a partner in the deal.”
“So more than sadism was motivating him. Why would Adam try to kill your husband?”
“Tom was going to cut him out,” she said.
“Why did you come to me?” I asked.
She laughed bitterly. “I had read about you in the papers, and I thought about just looking you up and seducing you. Fulfill my old college fantasy. But I tried to make the marriage work. Then Tom started taking shots at you and Sheriff Peralta. He kept talking about you, this hippie professor who was a bad influence in the Sheriff’s Office. How ironic. He didn’t know I knew you. He wanted me to come to you with a bogus historical case that would get you out to the Bell property. He wanted to provoke some kind of incident that would put pressure on Louie Bell. If you were beaten up on Bell’s property…”
“And it could have been used by your husband to embarrass the sheriff.”
