Desert Run by Betty Webb Page A

to be asked what I suggested on the menu, and a relief not to monitor my date’s alcohol intake. Although Warren ordered a glass of white wine, he never touched it. I, as usual, ordered tea. In between bites of his chicken piccata, he told me about Jaheese, the Arab mare he stabled in an equestrian complex near Griffith Park, and I told him about Lady, the bay mare I kept in Cave Creek. We made tentative plans to go riding together sometime, but I doubted either of us would follow through. When his schedule lightened, he’d be gone. And why take a flight to Los Angeles just to go horseback riding in Griffith Park?
    Then he told me about his classic car collection, which he’d started when his father gave him a 1937 Buick sedan for his sixteenth birthday. “It was midnight black and looked like something that Al Capone would drive. Man, I felt tough in that thing! It scared the crap out of all the kids at Hollywood High.”
    Most of the rich kids in Scottsdale got Beemers for their birthdays, so I had to applaud his father’s creativity. The Buick was probably safer for a teenager than a snot-nosed import, too. “Your dad must be an unusual guy.”
    â€œYou could say that.” He looked over to the bar, where despite my assertion that Pasta Brioni was a quiet place, one of the bartenders had just launched into a surprisingly good rendition of One for My Baby, backed by a customer on the piano. When the bartender finished, he got a big round of applause, then everyone went back to eating.
    Warren picked up where he’d left off. “And for my eighteenth birthday, I got a 1959 Edsel Ranger. Turd brown, butt ugly, and in terrible condition, but by then I’d learned enough to restore it myself.”
    â€œUm, tell me about your dad.” Not having one of my own, I always liked hearing about other peoples’ families. “And your mom. What was it like growing up in Hollywood? Were your folks in the business?”
    When he smiled, he looked like a California beach boy. The restaurant’s warm lighting erased the lines at the corner of his eyes, and softened the creases that ran from the corner of his mouth to his almost too-perfect nose. “Let’s talk about you, instead. I notice that you don’t drink.”
    Talk about a segue.
    But there was no point in being secretive about my background—most of it had aired on the local news a year earlier when I solved a high-profile murder case—so I gave him the same sanitized version I gave everyone, leaving out the beatings and rapes. “Since I don’t know who my parents are, I don’t know what kind of addictive genes I might be carrying around. So I don’t indulge.”
    He put his fork down. “Let me get this straight. You can’t remember who your parents are, why you were shot, or who shot you?”
    I smiled, shook my head, and shoveled more Shrimp Brioni into my mouth. “Nothing before the age of four.” A small lie there. I remembered the bus I was riding in just before I was shot, the gun itself, a red-headed man standing in a forest clearing. But those things I only discussed with Dr. Gomez.
    Warren looked down at his chicken piccata, then said something unexpected. “If you ask me, memory can be overrated.”
    In light of some of my memories, I agreed with him. But I was determined to keep the conversation as light as possible. “Hey, everything turned out fine. I received a scholarship to ASU, became a police officer, and when I left the Force, opened Desert Investigations.” I left out the part where I’d been shot in a drug raid. “Now I’m working for a famous Hollywood director! Lots of foster kids do worse.” Most of them, in fact. A study I once read revealed that only one of five ex-foster kids were mentally healthy and/or regularly employed. Few graduated from high school, went on to college, or led lives that could be considered