Dry Heat Page 8

  “What is that?” his young amour Kathleen had asked. She was holding his hand, wiping a cool cloth on his bony forehead.

  I recalled Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

  His voice was still in my head when I went out to the county’s records storage warehouse on Jefferson Street, a few blocks east of the baseball stadium. I avoided decades of property tax assessments, voter records, court documents, and jury rolls. Now I was playing hunches. Digging in cardboard boxes, shockingly un-state-of-the-art manila file folders and paper reports. Getting paper cuts, sneezing at the dust from the space age and the disco era. Exhuming microfiche reels from heavy metal cabinets and praying the old dried-out film wouldn’t break in the creaky old reader. Taking chances in bottom drawers, in card files and leather-bound registers. After two more hours, just when I thought the Rev. Quanah Card had played me for a fool, I again picked up the trail of George Weed.

  ***

  That night I grabbed Thai takeout at Wild Thaiger. I swapped cars and made my circuitous way home, believing I could still smell the last sweet vestige of citrus blossoms in the streets of Willo. Then I slipped down into the underground garage of our hideaway and took the elevator past a watchful deputy to the eighth floor.

  Lindsey was in the back bedroom, which had been converted into a home gym. She was in gray spandex, an oval sweat stain darkening the fabric from her breasts down to her belly. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her fair skin was flushed, and she sat cross-legged on the floor. Her old tomcat, Pasternak, watched her from a chair. Liz Phair was coming out of the stereo, “Johnny Feelgood.” Lindsey’s fine head was lolled back against the wall. She was mouthing the lyrics and smoking, greedily inhaling from a cigarette.

  “Sorry, Dave, you caught me.”

  I bent down and kissed her. Even in her smoking bouts, she had the sweetest breath. I noticed the pack on the floor, Gauloises Blondes. An indulgence she had picked up on our trip to Paris two years ago.

  “How’d you get a deputy to find French cigarettes for you?”

  “I asked nicely,” she said. “Now I’m on the road to hell.”

  “I found the name of the homeless guy,” I said, eager to share my triumph. “George Weed. A preacher knew him. Then I found he had a county hospital card from the 1980s. But he was hardly in the system at all.”

  “He couldn’t escape my History Shamus,” she said softly, a small smile.

  “It doesn’t tell us how an FBI badge ended up sewn into his coat,” I said. “But it’s a start.” After a long silence, I said, “You’re working out, at least.”

  “I’m going nuts, Dave.” A long plume of smoke left her lips, on the way to the open window.

  I had seen Lindsey smoke twice under pressure. Then she could stop again. It was a neat trick for a vice. I didn’t smoke cigarettes, but I knew that wasn’t because of moral greatness. It just wasn’t one of the itches I couldn’t scratch. Otherwise, my vices were my virtues. So I saved my judgments for major historical questions and tastes in different Mexican cuisines. Hell, I didn’t know what I was missing—the sensual cigarette after sex, humanity’s dance with death captured in a strange looking paper-wrapped consumer product, fire harnessed for our pleasure. We were all going to die—that was reinforced again by the fate of Dan Milton the health nut.

  I took her hand, pulled her up, and walked her into the living room for another vice, a fine martini.

  “I know you’re bored,” I said, once we were settled on a long, deep sofa that gave a magnificent view of the city and the Sierra Estrella.

  “I’m shit,” she said, her voice darkened with anger. “I’m a piece of shit.”

  “Because you’re here?”

  “Rachel’s dead.” She gulped her drink and lit another Gauloise. “I’m the one who told her she should loosen up and come to the party that night.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, too hastily perhaps. Her eyes drilled into me. I shut up and we watched a muted sunset accumulate over the mountains.

  “I keep imagining what she must have been thinking going down that freeway,” she continued. “She was a gentle nerd girl, not some hero type. But in a nanosecond, there she is, being dragged into a car by people who are capable of anything.”

  Lindsey studied the blue smoke drifting away to the window, and said in a low voice, “They were going to rape her. Then they were going to torture her.”

  “There’s no point—” I began.

  “You know what happens in the world,” she said, a hard edge in her voice. “They were going to rape her. And if they didn’t kill her, they’d sell her into slavery. You know that goes on. She’d end up drugged in some…place…in Russia or the Middle East, where an American girl is a prize. Then in a few years, she’s worse than dead.”

  I sipped my drink and stroked her hand. It took me a minute to notice the tears filling her eyes.

  “I miss my garden,” she sobbed. “I miss seeing you in your library, and us reading to each other in bed. I miss our old life.” I put my arm around her and pulled her close, feeling the warmth of her body through the thin fabric of the workout togs. I once favored fair-haired women just this side of voluptuousness. But Lindsey was dark-haired, long-limbed, and undeniably leggy. Her breasts were handful sized and perfectly shaped, which I could feel rubbing pleasantly against me. With my free hand, I took her cigarette and deposited it in an ashtray. She whispered, “Oh, baby, I’m afraid I’ve gotten us into something really bad.”

  Lindsey rarely called me “baby.” She never called me “honey,” much less “hon.” Mostly, she called me Dave, as she had since we first met, and sometimes, with affection, she called me History Shamus. I called her Lindsey. My wife was kind and wise, smarter than her husband in most ways. She did not have a college degree, having escaped from her family to the military when she was eighteen and the PC revolution was taking off. I had enough degrees for the whole family.

  Lindsey managed her demons with a discipline that made it seem effortless. But I knew her better than most people. She had been born in 1968 to hippie parents, had been forced to raise herself, had seen her mother destruct under schizophrenia. This made her afraid to have children, which was OK with me—I didn’t handle noise and chaos well. But she didn’t believe me, knowing I was an only child, the last of my line. It was one of our few uncomfortable topics.

  We rarely fought, and when we did one or both of us were tired or scared. We had built a good life, our “old life.” It revolved around the house my grandparents had built before the Depression, a house Lindsey loved even more than I did. We didn’t have the money to keep up with the exquisite restorations going on up and down Cypress Street. But Grandfather’s house had good bones and wore well.

  Our old life was walks in the neighborhood, on the narrow palm-lined streets with the sunset bursting across the horizon, the enchanted metropolitan twilight of the New West. We might stop by Cheuvront for a glass of wine, or the Thursday night event at the Phoenix Art Museum. I had learned to ride a bike on these streets—spent all my young years there. The ghosts were mostly benign.

  Lindsey had taken over Grandmother’s gardens and brought them to new glories. I worked intermittently on a history of the great Central Arizona Project, which brought water from the Colorado River to the desert of Phoenix, and I taught a class at Phoenix College every fall. We cooked on the chiminea in the backyard and celebrated with cocktails in the courtyard that filtered out the sun on even the worst days of August.

  My old friend Lorie Pope, who wrote for the Republic and knew me in my restless years, had remarked more than once on the change in me. “I never imagined you living such a domestic life, David,” she had said. I didn’t take it as a criticism.

  I pulled Lindsey close and kissed the top of her head. I said, “You didn’t get us into anything. You were just doing your
job.”

  I added, “Peralta can fix this.” I wasn’t sure if I really believed it. “It might take more than two weeks.” That was closer to reality. What we did for a living was inherently dangerous, and all over the world—Colombia, Sicily, Bosnia—cops were killed as a political statement or a business expense. A New Economy of borderless evil. Another manifestation of Dan Milton’s new dark age.

  I felt an involuntary shudder. The absentminded professor lost in his reveries of archival research jolted back to reality. Lindsey held me closer as the sun slipped behind the mountains.

  She said, “I know these people. This will never be over.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Friday, eight days since George Weed’s body was found and a week after the shooting in Scottsdale, I was in my office on the fourth floor of the old courthouse. I was leaning back in my chair, feet up on the big wooden desk. Downtown sounds were filtering through the expansive, arched windows—this place had been built to last in 1929. I was thinking about Lindsey. Across the room was the black-and-white photo of Carl Hayden, sheriff of Maricopa County a century before. Sheriff Hayden looked back at me across time from beneath his Stetson. The future senator from Arizona had met his wife at Stanford, I recalled. She had never been threatened by the Russian mafia. When a knock came on the pebbled glass, I called out that the door was open, and the security guard stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

  His name was Carl, too, and he had been a highway patrolman for thirty years before retiring. But he had a white pencil-thin mustache and an erect bearing that always made me envision him in the uniform of a British army officer at a remote post. After exchanging pleasantries, I was about to ask him what he knew about the John Pilgrim murder, when he said, “This is my last day, Mapstone.”

  “You don’t want to be bothered protecting the sheriff’s office historian anymore?” I beckoned him to sit, and he did.

  “It’s been fun to know you, Mapstone. But Marcia and I are leaving Phoenix. We’ve got a little piece of land in southern Arizona, about an hour from Tucson. We’ve built a house.”

  Sometimes I get stir crazy, alone with my records and my idle thoughts. I was glad for the company, and made obligatory small talk about Carl’s milestone, wishing him well. I’d probably talked to him every day I came into the courthouse over four years, but I never knew he and his wife were thinking of moving.

  “It’s this damned place, Mapstone,” he said. “It’s been ruined. Too many people, too many cars. They’ve paved over the citrus groves and the Japanese flower gardens. The whole damned Midwest moved here, but nobody really wants to be here. Nobody knows anybody else, or wants to.” He stared past his hawk nose, through the windows at the hazy shape of the South Mountains. “The heat, the damned smog…”

  I wasn’t going to try to defend Phoenix. Everything he said was true. It broke my heart. Carl was about to continue when a mountainous shape appeared beyond the office door, and Peralta burst into the room.

  “Sheriff,” Carl said. About to say more, he noticed the foul storm massed over Peralta’s brow and withdrew in silence.

  When the door closed, Peralta slapped a cassette on my desk.

  “The noon news,” he snarled.

  “What?” I pulled my feet off the top of county property and sat up.

  “Play it,” he said. “I want you to have the full experience, just like I did when it came on an hour ago.”

  I took the cassette, rose warily and slid it into a player attached to a small TV on a nearby bookshelf. TV news logos flashed across the screen.

  “What am I watching?”

  “Turn it up,” he ordered.

  It was the top story. “A dramatic break today in a fifty-six-year-old murder case!” the blond anchor chirped. I felt the subbasement drop out of my stomach. The voice continued, “For details, let’s go to Melissa Sanchez, who is at a special briefing at Phoenix Police Headquarters.” Peralta appropriated my chair and sat back, his meaty hands folded across his chest, his suit coat and tie bunched beneath.

  “…Kate Vare, the department’s cold case expert, made the revelations, Megan,” the reporter said. “A cold case expert is someone who works on some of the very toughest crimes, the ones that have been unsolved for years.” I heard Peralta sigh loudly I didn’t want to meet his eyes. I looked at my fine rolling bulletin board, which stood there in all its ridiculousness.

  “An FBI badge, missing for fifty-six years, has been recovered by Phoenix Police. Sergeant Vare said this badge was lost when FBI agent John Pilgrim was found shot to death in November of 1948.”

  “This is bullshit!” I said. Peralta held up a hand for silence.

  “Pilgrim’s badge was found on the body of a homeless man, who died last week from natural causes…”

  I mumbled, “They don’t even have the date right.” On the screen, Kate Vare stood before a crowded room of reporters, nodding her head officiously, pointing to a diagram that included a photo of Pilgrim and the reproduction of the badge.

  I reached over and shut off the TV.

  “This is bullshit,” I repeated. “Grandstanding. I’ve actually got the homeless guy’s name! I’ve got a Social Security number, a date of birth, even an address from 1981.”

  “It’s not about the rummy, Mapstone. The rummy died of natural causes. It’s about the goddamned FBI badge!” His voice echoed into the far corners of the high ceiling.

  Sheriff Hayden looked on but declined to intervene. “Don’t you know how the media works, Mapstone? We never announced we found the badge. Nobody knows. So now Kate acts like she’s made a breakthrough. And in the mind of the public she has made a breakthrough.”

  “Jesus!” I yelled back. “Is this about your petty little who-gets-the-credit game?”

  “It’s been a good game for you,” he snapped back. “Why the hell would the sheriff’s office need a historian, a deputy with a wooptieshit Ph.D. in history, if it wasn’t all just a goddamned media effort!”

  I sat down, wounded amidships.

  Peralta went for more damage. “I’ve supposedly got the smartest cold case guy in the country, and he makes us look like morons. He spends his week playing social worker with all these fucking derelicts, and he comes up with dick.”

  “I’m just a consultant.” I said quietly, all the smart ass drained out of me.

  “What’s the matter with you, David?” He stared hard at me. I gave my head a shake and held open my hands, no answer.

  “You’re not working this case. It’s like you’re in dreamland.’’

  ‘Well, let’s see. My wife is targeted for death. My mentor died a terrible death…” I was getting madder and madder, which did no good with Peralta. I knew this. “Not all of us can lose a loved one and just go into the office next day like nothing happened.” Like the way you reacted to your father’s death, I wanted to add.

  “Did you know she was going to do this?” he demanded.

  Of course I didn’t. I told him about Kate taking herself off the case. He snorted and unleashed a string of profanities, slamming his fist down on my desk as the encore. Then we sat like survivors of a bomb detonation, until the ringing faded and the room was only silence.

  In a conversational voice, Peralta said, “There was a laundry mark in the jacket. She traced it to the Salvation Army used clothing program. So the jacket was at least secondhand, and the badge might have been sewn into it for years.”

  Nausea washed over me. I sat in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs facing my desk.

  I asked, “Did Eric Pham agree to release this information, that we had found the badge?”

  “How the hell do I know,” Peralta said. “Maybe she batted her goddamned eyes at him or something…”

  More silence. I could hear the bells at St. Mary’s, all the way across downtown, chiming two o’clock. A train whistle blared from the south.

  “So,” Peralta said finally. “Tell me again what you found.”

  I went
through it again. With the information I had now on George Weed, it could lead me to his family, some sense of where he was all those years before he ended up dead in a pool.

  “Why do we care, Mapstone?” Peralta said, his voice calm again.

  “These guys are all over. All they want is money. You give ’em the money and they go buy booze and drugs. Some of ’em are as able-bodied as you and me, but do they get work? No.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “How often do you hear about a case where some transient is the suspect? Remember that poor little girl a few years ago, when I was still chief deputy? She’s walking to school when this fucking pervert grabs her, a ‘homeless man,’ the news stories said. Homeless, my ass. He was just a predator vagrant scumbag.”

  “Sheriff,” I said. “Weed is all we have. You wanted me to work this case, remember? I wanted to be on the vacation that you told me I am not allowed.”

  “The badge, Mapstone. Kate Vare doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your vagrant.”

  “I can’t do anything about the badge without the vagrant,” I said. “You heard the TV. The badge is in Washington for extensive testing in the FBI labs. Now, I can go to Washington and wait for a press release, or I can follow the only human thread I have.”

  “What if the poor bastard was wandering around for years without even knowing he was carrying it?”

  I stared down at the floor. “I don’t believe that,” I said. These guys check the coin return in newspaper racks that haven’t been stocked in years. He’d know if something was sewn into his jacket. A jacket he wore even on hot days.”

  Peralta raised his bulk out of the chair and looked me over from the summit of six feet, six inches.

  “I want progress within a week,” he said as he stalked out of the room.

  ***

  Or what? You’ll put my wife in danger, treat me like a twenty-year-old rookie and not even allow me vacation time? Oh, my mind was full of arch and devastating comebacks all the way home that evening. I was nearly talking aloud to myself when the elevator came up from the garage to the lobby, the doors opened, and standing there was Bobby Hamid.