Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

walking off with shopping bags full of computer chips. I, having no computer skills at all, drove to South Phoenix in order to get the owner of a discarded tire dump in South Phoenix to admit that, yes, he knew burning tires leaked pollutants into the atmosphere, and yes, hiring his son, who had racked up two juvenile arson convictions by the age of sixteen, had been a lapse in judgment. The South Mountain Citizens for Clean Air had hired me, pro bono, of course, in hopes that I could do something about the continued fires, but so far, the dump’s owner refused to admit that his son was the source of the problem.
    I could almost hear the vinyl upholstery in my 1945 Jeep sizzle in the triple-digit heat as I cruised west on the 202, happy to put Esther Corbett’s problems aside for awhile. The glass-fronted high rises of downtown Phoenix provided no shade worth speaking of; they only succeeded in blocking the view of the White Tank Mountains. Not that the White Tanks looked particularly scenic at this time of year. Like everything else in the Sonoran Desert, they’d been burned almost black by the unrelenting sun. Only hardy creosote bushes and saguaro cactus survived on their slopes.
    I exited the freeway at Nineteenth Avenue and headed south into the Barrio, where a motley collection of mesquite trees and palms did what they could to relieve the desert’s omnipresent browns and umbers. Unlike most Scottsdale residents, I maintained a fondness for the Barrio, and not only because the family which had once saved my life lived close by. The small adobe homes, some of them a century old, were a welcome respite from Scottsdale’s pseudo-Mediterranean mansions, as were the Barrio’s pink flamingos, the garden gnomes, and the occasional live chicken scratching for its buggy dinner.
    Despite its charm, the Barrio could be a risky place for a leisurely drive. I kept a lead foot on the Jeep’s accelerator as I drove past the graffiti-covered walls which proclaimed that the turf belonged to the Crips, the Bloods, and the West Side Chicanos. This hard-core gang territory seldom failed to lead off the ten o’clock news broadcasts.
    Even more insidious, South Phoenix remained the site of too many commercial waste dumps and industrial parks. The people who lived there suffered from respiratory ailments rarely found in the rest of the valley.
    South Mountain Tire Storage, with more than six hundred thousand tires destined for the state’s recycling program, had long been one of the neighborhood’s chief offenders. In the past couple of years, it had belched huge columns of smoke on an almost regular basis. The Environmental Protection Agency proclaimed itself not amused, but so far, the fines they levied against Dwayne Alder, the dump’s owner, had not solved the problem.
    As I drove into the storage yard, I could still smell burning rubber, even though the last fire had been put out three months earlier. The stench emanated from the three-story-high mound of tires known sarcastically by the locals as Black Mountain. The smelly heap did not appear all that stable, either, and looked as if it would topple over any minute. I was just thinking that I would make this visit as brief as possible when a nasty-looking Rottweiler the size of a Shetland pony trotted from behind a mound of bald Firestones to greet me with bared fangs.
    “What a good dog,” I said hopefully, remaining in my Jeep while awaiting rescue. “And what nice, sharp teeth you have.”
    Good Dog informed me in his rumbly voice that he hoped to use them on me, but his hopes were dashed when a middle-aged man sporting a belly the size and shape of a bowling ball exited the single-wide used as the dump’s office. The man’s face had been so burnt by the sun that it almost matched his red hair and scrawny beard.
    “Ringo, sit!”
    Ringo sat, although he did not look happy about it. I climbed out of the Jeep, giving him a wide berth. His eyes followed my every move.
    The man studied my Jeep with the same amount of beady fascination as Ringo studied me. Not long ago, some of Jimmy’s relatives had decorated the Jeep with a series of Pima story-telling designs, and now the entire history of the Pima Indians marched across its hood, doors, and rear. A set of steer horns mounted on the hood finished off the Jeep’s fashion statement.
    “I’m Lena Jones, the private detective,” I said, when the man finally faced me again. “If you’re Dwayne Alder, we’ve