Free Desert Shadows (9781615952250) by Betty Webb Page A

other person of color at our table. If anything, she was quite courteous. Generous, too. That trip to Oak Creek was her idea, taken at her expense.”
    But I thought Gloriana’s generosity seemed unusual for such a self-involved old harridan, and I said so.
    â€œIn my case, perhaps she looked upon me and the library as customers, and was eager to curry favor. But I doubt it. She was no more polite to me than to Mr. Zhang and Mr. Ramos, although she did remark at one point upon Mr. Ramos’ German first name. She said it didn’t match his last. He didn’t take offense. Remember, we were all invited on the Oak Creek trip.”
    It seemed important to Gordon for me to believe she had no motive for Gloriana’s death. For now, I’d play along. “How about Owen? Did you hear any exchanges between him and Gloriana? Anything that sounded a bit heated?”
    She didn’t answer right away, just stretched her hands out on the table and pumped them, as if to exercise her fingers. I noticed a plain gold wedding ring, but saw only one suitcase sitting on the stand by the door. Hubby stayed home?
    â€œThe banquet hall was noisy,” she finally answered. “I’m afraid any conversation that Gloriana and Owen might have had while she was in the hallway was lost to me.”
    â€œGloriana went into the hall?”
    â€œSeveral times. I took it for granted that she was visiting the ladies’ room. Elderly bladders can be quite sensitive, I understand. And she was drinking quite a bit of tea.”
    After a few more questions, I realized that she would offer little more, so I thanked her for her time and let myself out. Once in the hall, though, I reflected that Mrs. Gordon had been more guarded than necessary.
    And I didn’t believe a word she said.
    ***
    I spent a couple more hours interviewing other attendees at the SOBOP convention, but without success. Eerily similar to a banger drive-by in the ghetto, nobody seen nuthin’, not the California woo woo publisher, the Washington state ecology pressman, nor the Vegas how-to-beat-the-odds publisher. When I pressed them, they made me feel about as welcome as an ex-wife at a wedding.
    Finally giving up, I returned to the Jeep, but now that the distraction of questioning was behind me, I realized that I was starving. Instead of driving straight back to Scottsdale, I decided to detour through the nearby town of Cave Creek, eager for a big, fat hamburger at the Horny Toad Saloon. As soon as I turned west on Carefree Highway, though, the traffic thickened. To my surprise, I was soon bumper-to-bumper with a herd of Harley Davidsons and a long, snaky line of graffiti-covered vans, many of them bearing Idaho license plates. The motorcycles made sense. Cave Creek was the gathering spot for the Scottsdale Harley-Davidson Club, which despite its macho-sounding name consisted of a couple hundred business executives. But the vans.…
    Then I remembered what I should have at WestWorld.
    Attracted by Arizona’s rising tide of anti-immigrant feeling and Cave Creek’s immigrant-friendly day labor program, the Aryan Nation and its brethren had selected the town as the site for their yearly picnic. Now the vans’ graffiti made sense. The groups might have been too cowardly to display the swastika itself—they were too frightened of the Crips, Bloods, or even scarier, the Jewish Defense League—but they had found more subtle ways to trumpet their beliefs.
    Four-foot-high blue letters on the rear of the white van in front of me blared, 14/88. Every cop knew that the “14” stood for the “Fourteen Words” holy to White Supremacists everywhere: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” The “88” meant the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, as in “Heil Hitler.”
    Next to me idled a black van with the numbers “311” painted in red on the sides.