Desert Wind by Betty Webb

mysteries, cookbooks, and romance novels,” one Book Bitch grumbled before Mrs. Donohue shut the den’s thick double doors behind us. For the first time, I became aware of a faint smell of cigarettes.
    My nose must have twitched, because Nancy Donohue said, “Ike smoked, the awful man, but I made certain he did it only outside the house. The stench clung to his clothes, though, and settled in here. I’ll have to fumigate everything he ever touched.”
    She plopped onto a straight-back chair, leaving the duct-taped recliner for me. Perhaps she thought it had germs. “Ask your questions, Jones, but make it snappy, because as you can see, I have company.”
    Much closer now to the photograph wall, I saw that Ike Donohue was the common denominator in all the black and white photos. Tall, lean, and clean-featured, only a slight stoop to his shoulders kept him from being movie-star handsome. In each photograph, he was smiling his phony smile as he shook hands with an assortment of military and business types. In three of the pictures, a benevolent-looking man who looked like everyone’s favorite uncle, stood next to him. The sole color photograph, which had been too blurry from out in the hall for me to discern its subject matter, was of a mushroom cloud exploding over the desert.
    Mrs. Donohue had said to make it snappy, so I did. “From what I’ve been able to find out, the last time your husband was seen alive was at the Walapai Gas-N-Go early Thursday morning. Where were you that day?” As an afterthought, I added, “And that night.”
    “Home.”
    “Was anyone with you during any part of that time?” One of those good-looking pool boys, for instance?
    Oblivious to my thoughts, she answered, “Elizabeth Waide dropped by around dinner time. She’s the old bat with the purple hair.”
    “How long did she stay?”
    “Until all the Beefeaters was gone. The bottle was almost full when she got here, and considering the speed with which she was knocking back martinis, it might have been a couple of hours. She could still walk when she left, I’ll give her that.”
    A drunk witness makes a bad witness, but I asked the next question anyway. “This would have been at what time?”
    Her eyes tracked up and to the left, something that often happens when people are about to tell a lie. “About an hour before dinner. I was roasting a chicken. By the time the blabbermouth shut up and hit the road, it’d burned. Ike, who had absolutely no taste buds thanks to all those cigarettes, would have eaten it anyway. If he’d lived. Since he didn’t, I threw it out. What a waste.”
    Her comment was so outrageous that Olivia’s observation about the difference between crazy and evil flashed into my mind. Then I reminded myself about the danger of passing judgment so early in an investigation, and forced myself to focus. Nancy Donohue had rolled out an alibi that would be easy enough to check. Neighbors snoop, and someone might have been watching as the purple-haired Elizabeth Waide visited. Come to think of it, the woman might not have been as drunk as Nancy wanted me to believe. Whatever the case, Ted’s attorney would have access to the police report giving the estimated time of Donohue’s death. The autopsy would zero in on it.
    “You said Mrs. Waide visited before dinner,’” I asked. “What time do you usually eat?”
    “There’s no ‘usually’ to it. We kept to a strict schedule. Ike is, was , diabetic and he had to eat his dinner promptly at six every day or his blood sugar went wild. You have no idea how much trouble that caused me.”
    If the chicken had burned, then Mrs. Waide left somewhere between six-thirty and seven. “What did you do when he didn’t show up for dinner?”
    “I finished reading White Hunter, Black Heart and went to bed.”
    “You never noticed that your husband didn’t come home?”
    She shrugged. “It wouldn’t have been the first time. I wasn’t aware somebody had stopped his