“Speaking of husbands,” Charles said. “I also checked on your old pal Rick Austin.”
“What about him? Where’s he?”
“Deceased. Katherine—she was still Faith back then—married him shortly after she left you. That was followed by a time when they both did a serious amount of coke. She ended up in rehab, cleaned up her act, and left him high and dry. Austin blew his brains out after she left.”
Karma’s a bitch. Much as I thought Rick deserved everything he got, I couldn’t help having a moment of sympathy for the guy. After all, there but for the love of Grandma Hudson would go I.
“By the way,” Charles said, “I managed to lay hands on the vic’s telephone records.”
“How did you do that?”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell. Harold can subpoena them later if he needs to, but it’s always better to know what they’re going to say before you do that. I’ve got the dates and times for all the calls that were placed from the pay phone downstairs. I’ve also got a record of the call to her cell phone that was placed from the swimming pool pay phone at the Talisman at 2:05 A.M..
“Katherine took the call. It lasted for over three minutes. Twenty minutes later she is seen on surveillance tapes leaving her building. That’s the last record I’ve been able to find of her, although I’ve got someone in Vegas looking at the surveillance tapes of all the hotels along the Strip. Talk about looking for a needle in the haystack, but we have a little better idea of what we’re looking for now. It’ll turn up. As for the Talisman? What a dog of a hotel! They may have surveillance cameras hanging on ceilings all over the place, but that’s just for show. The problem is, not one of them works.”
“In other words, the surveillance tape that might have caught the killer and exonerated me doesn’t exist?”
Charles nodded. “That’s the way it looks. So, are you ready to take a ride?”
I wasn’t so sure. My most recent experience with being given a ride hadn’t turned out very well.
“Where to?”
“I want to show you something.”
“Can’t you just tell me?”
“Showing’s better than telling. Come on.”
Not particularly happy about it, I headed for the stairs. Out in the parking lot I was surprised to discover that Charles’s ride was a fire-engine-red Corvette. Not brand new, but new enough to make a statement. The man may have hit bottom years earlier, when Tim O’Malley’s daughter had walked out on him for another woman, but that had most likely been the beginning of a long upward path for which Pop O’Malley was most likely largely responsible. I wondered what Tim would think if I called him by that handle, too. Somehow I suspected that he wouldn’t mind.
As Charles and I headed down Highway 60 and turned onto the 101, I was dying to ask where we were going, but I stifled. Both highways were clotted with late afternoon traffic. Inching along in the HOV lane, we drove across the near north end of the city—not the real north end because the city has now expanded northward far beyond where those traditional boundaries used to lay. On the far side of Scottsdale and still on the 101, we turned south, exiting toward downtown Scottsdale on East Chaparral, just north of Camelback. Charles turned left onto Scottsdale Road, drove past Goldwater, and pulled into a parking garage at Fashion Square. Instead of parking in a space on one of the lower levels, he drove all the way up to the roof and pulled into a spot at the far edge of the lot, looking north.
“What do you see?” he asked.
I looked at the mid-rise across the street. It obviously housed high-end condos. The spacious balconies were filled with plants in wildly colorful pots and furnished with equally high-end deck chairs and tables. The grounds around the base of the building were meticulously landscaped with towering palms, a carpet of lush green grass, and flower beds thick with recently planted petunias. Clearly this was a building where the residents weren’t the least bit concerned about the high cost of water in the Valley of the Sun.
“It’s a building,” I said grumpily, annoyed at being forced to play a guessing game. “Condos for the rich and famous.”
“Rich and infamous maybe,” Charles replied with a sly grin. “Who do you suppose lives here?”
“I have no idea.”
“Your cleaning lady,” he said. “Marina Ochoa. That’s not the name she goes by here. Folks in the condo complex know her as Maria Fuentes, but believe me, this is where the woman known to you as Marina Ochoa lives. By the way, she doesn’t have any kids. None at all.”