IN THE END, it wasn't all that big a mystery. It was solved by a University of Arizona woman basketball player with the all-time great name of Lieberman Clipshaw. It came to her while she was driving along in the Chevy Cavalier she bought at the police auction. She remembered wondering how the cops managed to keep all the cool confiscated cars for themselves. What kind of pathetic drug dealer drove a Cavalier? What did he sell, bootleg Tylenol? And when she thought Tylenol, she remembered the bottle.
Her mother had named her after Nancy Lieberman, the great woman basketball player. Of course, Mom had also given her the middle name of Tereshkova, after the first woman to go into (and, more importantly, to come back down from) space.
After leaving Lieberman's dad for no real good reason, Mom changed her name to Susan B. Anthony X, with the B. standing for Butterfly and the X to show solidarity with her black sisters. The poor woman had been eyebrow-deep in the Sixties. When Lieberman got the athletic scholarship to the UA, Susan B. had first joined an all-woman commune, then had moved on to Montana, where she now works with the ignorant native militia people and Ted Turner.
An avid reader and news junkie, Lieberman had followed the Gemstone story as best she could. The morning daily dumped it as soon as possible so as not to offend anyone. Plus, with their skeleton staff, they couldn't solve a two-piece jigsaw puzzle if the pieces came with a zipper. The afternoon rag had run a 72-point headline which screamed "MACHO HOMBRE!," hit up SAHBA to foot the bill for a special tribute section to the departed Gemstone, then quickly returned to features on the wonders of wearing sweaters.
The police fumbled around, then moved on. The joke was that the case-breaking clue had been taped to a light pole, but was destroyed when the police captain crashed into it. And the TV folks, well, they ran a series on fast food, dangerous intersections, and, during sweeps, nudie bars.
But it was Lieberman Clipshaw, she of the sweet jumper and slight problem with shopping, who'd solved the mystery. Actually, she liked to point out that she really didn't have a problem with shopping. There was the matter of the restraining order keeping her off Fourth Avenue during the street fairs, but that was just a misunderstanding. And there was absolutely no truth to the rumor that when she would be driving along the street and see a yard sale, her left hand would involuntarily jerk the wheel toward the curb only to be overpowered by the right like Dr. Strangelove stifling a "Heil, Hitler."
She'd taken some useless Woman's Studies class just to please her mom, and the assignment was to disprove the sexist notion that women are shopaholics. She knew that to be absurd, but she did find out that she was a world-class shopper (not a buyer, necessarily, but a shopper). It had nothing to do with gender, she told herself, but rather with her competitiveness.
They kicked her out of Women's Studies after she turned in a term paper extolling the virtues of waiting for the "50-percent off the lowest marked price" clearance at Dillard's, pointing out that a plain 50-percent price-cut wasn't enough, and 50 percent off the lowest-marked price came too late, after the available stock had been depleted. So she switched to the Economics Department.
As she'd explained in a recent interview, she'd always considered herself an amateur sleuth. She bought all the Tony Hillerman books (used) at Bookman's and figured she could match wits with Jim Chee any time. She realized that in any mystery, most clues were either extraneous or red herrings.
Take, for example, Gemstone's johnson being in permanent salute mode. He'd had that surgically done years before to save time on foreplay. The way his gut hung kept him and everybody else from being embarrassed or, more likely, nauseated. The procedure was public knowledge (though it'd been relegated to thankfully forgotten specter of the HMO wars until his untimely demise).
And all this hype about the pygmy owl? Obviously the work of the EMD Movement. The initials stood for either Emil Must Die or Every Marana Dickhead, depending on whom you asked. They were a bunch of no-growthers who'd gone bad when they learned that Tortolita wouldn't let them in.
Like that Twilight Zone episode where all the neighbors tried to break into the guy's fallout shelter, the EMDs attacked Emil Franzi and other visible Tortolita targets. (Lieberman loved that episode; she'd bought the entire series on videocassette for only 48 easy monthly payments.) Since the EMDs couldn't be a part of the wide-open owl protectorate, they'd discredit it. They'd even spread false rumors about the virility-boosting powers of the owl's gizzards. That way, poachers and impotent lowlifes would be tramping all over the area where that high school should have been built.
Part of it, however, had been sheer luck on Lieberman's part. She'd been sitting at the table next to Gemstone on his last night in kicksville. She was celebrating the purchase of her new Nikes (not from the Nike outlet, but from Just For Feet on markdown day). It was all-you-can-eat night at Popeye's, and both were seeing to it that the best-tasting fried chicken franchise didn't make a profit off them.
She'd noticed that Gemstone popped a couple pills between platefuls of spicy chicken, buttery biscuits, and red beans and rice. She'd glanced at the bottle and read the label. When she thought back to that night and remembered the label, it all became clear.
The cop had misread the label, understandable considering he was a graduate of a TUSD high school. It hadn't said "MACHO HOMBRE"; it said "MUCHO HAMBRE."
Lots of hunger. That's what Gemstone was noted for--a voracious appetite for food, drink, and pristine desert landscape. A quick check at a farmacia in Nogales, Sonora, showed that the pills had been a mixture of metabolism accelerator, diuretic and laxative. Not real smart for the average Joe; and fatal for an obese, sedentary man with a real bad gut-to-heart ratio. As in no heart.
He'd walked out of Popeye's that night taking off his coat and tie and loosening his belt. The "medicine" would've helped him eat more than he should have, but he'd gone way past that. No one knows why he took off all his clothes, but the autopsy showed his blood-chili pepper level to be four times the norm.
The funniest thing of all was that even the MUCHO HAMBRE was a fraud. Someone had sold him a phony gluttony pill. In Spanish, hunger is feminine; the correct term is MUCHA HAMBRE. If only he'd taken the time to learn a little bit about the area he chose to live in...and to destroy. He could've been a real macho hombre if only he'd cared.
But then again, if he'd cared, he wouldn't have been Jimbob Gemstone.
