Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

“Consuelo, that’s our maid, she’s feelin’ sick, so I’m pretty much on my own. I need to finish up some cleaning and after that, I gotta help Leo with the bookkeeping. At least the cook’s okay. Don’t know what I’d do if Juan turned up sick. I’m not much of a cook, myself. Maybe I’d just draft a stable hand, though I bet the guests would get awful tired of franks and beans.”
    She started to leave, then turned around. “Remember, now, don’t you unpack. Leo and I, we’ve got something in the works.” Then she left.
    Something in the works?
Virginia’s final words worried me. Both the Lawlers seemed nice enough, but their devotion to anti-polygamy activities could pose a problem. If they thought I was up here to become their foot soldier, I’d have to set them straight. I’d already noticed how emotional I became when thinking about Purity. Captain Kryzinski had once warned me that an emotional detective was a sloppy detective, so I needed to remain cool. After all, my purpose here was to find out who killed Prophet Solomon, not obsess about the fate of women I didn’t even know.
    To keep my mind off the women’s troubles, I took my pistol out of the carry-all and checked the closet and the space under the bed. Then I relaxed with a leisurely shower. By the time I changed into fresh jeans and a T-shirt, I felt ready to get to work. Leaving my carry-all and gun in the room, I wandered downstairs in search of the office. A few tourists still lingered in the living room sipping drinks and singing little snatches of “Home, Home on the Range” in deeply accented English. A Frenchman, his dark eyes dancing, offered to share his Pernod but when I told him I had business in the office, wherever that was, he pointed helpfully down the hall.
    “The office, it is just to the left of the dining room. And then, when you are finished in there, perhaps you would care to join me on that secluded little patio in the back? It is so very pleasant with the afternoon breeze, much more private than in here. My wife, she is hiking in the Zion Park, and will not be back until the evening.”
    The Frenchman was cute, but not that cute, so I headed down the hall.
    I found the Lawlers seated at a no-frills steel desk, frowning at a computer. While the thing beeped and whirred at them and they muttered back, Leo motioned me to a chair. I looked around in amusement. With its modern office equipment, including a copier and a fax machine, and almost total lack of Western paraphernalia, the office could have belonged to an insurance company.
    “I hate that uppity thing,” Virginia growled over her husband’s shoulder as he shut down the computer. “We just paid all the bills and now it’s tellin’ us we’re broke!”
    Leo managed a wry smile. “You being in business yourself, Lena, I’ll bet you know all about that.”
    It would be cruel to tell the couple about Albert Grabel’s largess, so I just smiled. “Self-employment can be tough, that’s for sure. Now, what did you want to talk to me about? Do you have some information about the murder of Solomon Royal?” Hopefully, this pointed question would steer the Lawlers away from the recruitment speech I feared they’d rehearsed. I had no intention of driving to Zion City and handing out anti-polygamy leaflets.
    “We’ve got some ideas about that, but first we want to give you some background on the way things are run at Purity,” Leo said, as the couple moved from the desk to the frayed sofa across from me.
    I suppressed a sigh of impatience and settled myself more comfortably into the chair.
    “The legal situation is a little convoluted, but here’s the short version,” Leo continued. “The polygamists circumvent bigamy laws by divorcing one wife before they marry another. Of course, the relationship with all the other so-called ex-wives remains exactly the same. The guy sleeps with every one of them, but that’s not all. Most of the husbands keep a record of each woman’s menstrual cycle so that they can ‘catch’ her at her most fertile. Making babies is the name of the game, Lena.”
    I didn’t get it. “You mean they’re purposely impregnating all those women? But
why?
”
    Leo gave me a wry smile. “Two reasons. One, the official reason, is religious. The polygamists believe that the more children a man has, the higher level of Heaven he’ll be sent to when he dies and the more servants he’ll have to wait on him.”
    He made a