Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’m not trying to revive your pain. I am trying to wrap up an open kidnapping and homicide case, and there aren’t many people still living who can give the information I need.”

  Whether that satisfied him or not, I don’t know. He stared at the doors, maybe wishing Megan would appear in her nicely cut powder-blue suit and elegant legs. Hell, I did, too. I asked, “Did your father carry a pocket watch?”

  “No, he wore wristwatches.”

  I showed him the photo of the pocket watch with the HY brand. “That’s grandfather’s brand,” he said. “But I’ve never seen that watch. What does it mean?”

  “We found it with the remains.”

  He shook his head a couple of millimeters. “What can any of this mean?” he said. “They caught the man and executed him. This is all history.”

  “They caught a woman with him, too,” I said. “I talked to her yesterday.”

  He sat back, stared out the window toward Camelback Mountain and gave the top of his right hand a savage scratching. Then he stopped and regarded me again.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Frances Richie is still in prison.”

  He raised his hands as if to let the information slip through.

  “She’s nearly senile,” I said. “She wasn’t much help.”

  He was on his feet. “I have another meeting, Mapstone. I’m sure you understand. You read the paper, so you know Yarneco is involved in a very difficult project at the moment. Lots of controversy. We’ve received threats.”

  I rose, too.

  “What kind of project?”

  The thin executive lips pressed hard together. Then, “We’re in a consortium to build a new copper mine in the state. It will be the first new mine here in decades. I’m sure you can understand, this has angered some environmental groups.”

  I thanked him for his time.

  “This Lieutenant Hawkins said the DNA test should establish the identity. So we will finally have some closure.”

  Closure. Even CEOs had learned the therapeutic language of the age. “I may need to call you again if there are other questions.”

  “I can’t imagine that would happen,” he said, and saw me to the door. He didn’t offer his hand.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I was falling into a rotten mood on a beautiful day. Within an hour of leaving Max Yarnell, I was summoned down to police headquarters for as much of an ass chewing as a lifer bureaucrat like Hawkins could muster. “Mr. Yarnell was offended by your questions and manner,” Hawkins said.

  I was getting offended, too. After had I left Hawkins, I went to the County Recorder’s Office, where I pulled the deed records on the Triple A Storage Warehouse. It had been owned by Yarneco before the company even took that name. The original paper listed “Yarnell Land and Cattle Co., 1924”—seventeen years before the kidnapping. There was more: The recorder kept a clipboard for signing out paper deed records. It wasn’t much used, what with grantor-grantee records on computer. But the occasional title company employee needed to go deeper. The records to the warehouse had been checked out just the day before, to a Megan O’Connor of Yarneco. She had to be Max Yarnell’s Megan. So why did he tell me he didn’t know the warehouse was owned by his company?

  By the time it was five, I didn’t want to stay in the office and I didn’t want to go home. Earlier in the day, I sent Lindsey a dozen yellow roses, her favorites. But when I got back to the courthouse, a note was folded into my office door.

  I opened it and read in Lindsey’s rat-a-tat-tat handwriting:

  Dave, I am taking Linda back to Illinois for the funeral. I know you would want to go, too, and try to save me from myself. So I will remove the temptation. You can have a nice, normal Thanksgiving with El Jefe and Sharon, and I will be with my crazy family and thinking of you. If you would look in on Pasternak from time to time, I will do unspeakable things to your body when I get back. Don’t worry, History Shamus.

  L

  So I sat on a bench in Cesar Chavez Plaza, between the old courthouse and the municipal building, and I read and re-read the note. Then I watched the western sky gather pink and orange. The killjoys liked to say that the Phoenix sunsets were a product of smog and dust in the dry air. That was probably information that would please Lieutenant Hawkins, if he ever looked up at the sky in the first place. I didn’t care. The deepening streaks of color restored me little by little. When I started to dislike Phoenix again, the sunsets reminded me of the things I had missed so much the years I had been away.

  This part of downtown was utterly deserted. The government employees raced to the suburbs early on a Friday evening, and the Suns and Coyotes were out of town tonight. So you could have lain down in the middle of the five lanes of Washington Street and been completely safe. Even the panhandlers and street people were nowhere to be seen.

  Then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and Gretchen Goodheart stepped out from between two palo verde trees. She smiled and waved and walked to me.

  “I was walking up to your office when I looked out one of the stairway windows and you were out here. You looked lost in thought.”

  I smiled and stood. “Come join me.”

  She didn’t have the cowboy hat today, and her auburn hair fell free in a longish pageboy, brushing the tops of her shoulders. She was wearing a denim top and print cotton skirt, looking springy in the fall as you can do in Arizona. She looked me over and sat next to me.

  “You clean up nicely,” she said. I still had on the blue pinstripe from my meeting with Max Yarnell.

  “Thanks, I went visiting. Mr. Max Yarnell.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s a prick,” I said. “But maybe I’m in a mood to judge harshly.”

  “Not everyone, I hope.”

  “Not Gretchen Goodheart,” I said. My girlfriend’s mother just committed suicide and here I was flirting. I closed up that compartment and watched the sunset.

  “Max Yarnell is developing five thousand acres of pristine desert north of Scottsdale,” she said. “In two years, you’ll have houses and roads where there are only saguaros and empty spaces now. As if Phoenix needed more space. Then his company is trying to build a new copper mine near Superior, and they’re doing everything they can to sidestep the environmental reviews.” She shook her head, making the red-brown hair wave gently against her collar. “So I’m no fan of Mad Max.”

  “Is that what people call him?”

  “I don’t know, it’s what I call him.” She held up a file folder. “I have something for you. These are copies of plans submitted to the city over the years on your warehouse. I thought they might be useful.”

  We spread the sheets of paper between us.

  “See, it’s actually two buildings.” She traced a ring-less finger across a floor plan. “This is from 1947, when a new water main was routed down Fourth Avenue to Harrison.” Sure enough, the paper showed a larger building abutted by a smaller one on the corner by Union Station.

  “The larger one was a hotel until 1958,” Gretchen said. “Then in 1961, the new brick facade was put across both buildings and the whole thing was converted into a storage warehouse.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “I used to love to come down to the station to watch the trains when I was a kid. It was a bad habit my grandmother indulged. But I never really paid attention to those old buildings.”

  I picked through the floor plans. “So the skeletons of the Yarnell twins were below this old hotel.”

  Gretchen nodded. “The plan doesn’t show a tunnel running from the elevator shaft, see. But it’s clearly the same building.” She reached into the paperwork and pulled out a couple of dense pages. “These are out of city directories, so you can get a sense of what was around the hotel when the kidnapping happened.”

  “You’re going to put me out of a job,” I said.

  She smiled that dimpled extravaganza. “It was called the Sunset Rou
te Hotel until the late 1940s. I’m not quite sure why.”

  “The Southern Pacific’s premier passenger train through here was the Sunset Limited.”

  “See, David. You’ve got the moves.”

  “I am a storehouse of useless knowledge.”

  “I think you’re a very intelligent man.” She fixed those baby browns on me, an intense connecting gaze. I invited her to have a drink at Majerle’s.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Now I am entranced, David Mapstone,” she said. “A martini man? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cop drink a martini. I am shaken and stirred.”

  “I picked it up in another life.”

  “Ah, this was the life in the federal witness protection program?”

  “How did you know?”

  “So you lost the girl but kept the vice?”

  I smiled. “Something like that.”

  She set aside her chardonnay and caught the barmaid’s eye—not hard to do, since we were the only people in the bar. “I’ve decided I must have a martini, too.”

  “Bombay Sapphire,” I instructed, and the barmaid went away, her black tennis skirt swinging saucily behind her.

  Gretchen said, “When I was twenty three, I dated, well let’s say he was the youngest son of one of the richest men on the West Coast. He was a total idiot, but, oh, how I loved his toys.”

  The crowd noise from the basketball game on TV drifted over our way and then the server did, too. Gretchen sampled the martini.

  “Oh, my,” she said.

  “So how does one get to be the city archaeologist?” I asked and heard her story.

  Gretchen Goodheart grew up in Tempe, where her dad was a teacher. She was a tomboy, and excelled at track and gymnastics in high school. She went to UCLA and then worked four years as a smoke jumper, fighting forest fires around the West. “I survived,” she said. But she also loved history. “I decided archaeology was a good mix of the outdoors and the past. But it’s not like you can take that degree and open an archaeology shop on Mill Avenue.”

  So she came home to Phoenix, worked in several dead-end jobs. Then she answered an ad for the city archaeologist’s office. For fun, she rode horses and hiked in the desert. She wanted to collect Santa Clara pottery but couldn’t afford it. She read Montini in the Republic because he made her mad and she was a Big Sister to an eleven-year-old girl in the barrio.

  Gretchen was safe, pretty, athletic. She’d probably never had anything really bad happen in her life. She’d never sat up with a lover through a dark night of the soul. She had none of Lindsey’s edge or surprises. She would never dig black platform heels into my back as we made love. I had that thought and then wondered why I would presume to think it. I imagined she had a pleasant-looking boyfriend who worked at Bank One.

  “So what’s your story?” she asked. “You don’t seem like the other cops I’ve met.”

  “Oh, I’m a bona fide graduate of the Sheriff’s Academy.”

  “David Mapstone keeps his mystery up.” She smiled. “I know you left law enforcement to teach history. You were a professor. A friend of Mike Peralta. And you came back to Phoenix this year and took a job with the Sheriff’s Office again.”

  “Gretchen, you don’t miss a thing.”

  “I read about you in the newspaper, solving old crimes. It must be very satisfying. Who said, ‘The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice’?”

  “Martin Luther King, Jr. Although his words were ‘arc of the moral universe’ and he was quoting an abolitionist preacher named…” I let the sentence trail off. My flirty nervousness with her was turning into pedantry.

  She smiled and touched the top of my hand. “I’m interested. Just from reading about you, I kind of felt like you were a kindred spirit, a refugee from the social sciences trying to make a living in the real world. I’m afraid I don’t have a Ph.D. in history, though.”

  “Well, then you’re more employable than me,” I said. “I’d like to think I bring something special to all this, but mostly I think Peralta had pity on me and gave me a job.”

  “You seem pretty impressive to me,” she said, and a flush of visceral pleasure coursed through me. “So what’s he like? The famous Chief Peralta.”

  I shook my head. “Beats me.”

  We each had two martinis. Then I walked her to her truck, parked in a garage across from the new city hall at Third Avenue and Washington. I was feeling good and yet virtuous. That was until she turned at her truck door and gave me a hug.

  “Thanks for the talk,” she said in a voice as soft as the red-brown hair that brushed across my face. “I’m enjoying getting to know you.”

  “My pleasure,” I said. I watched her start up the big SUV and head down the ramp, then I walked to the stairway awash in lust and guilt. It wasn’t a particularly bad feeling.

  The street was empty and the only sound was a distant train whistle, something that always reminded me of when I was a kid listening through the bedroom window late at night to the Santa Fe trains coming down from the main line at Williams Junction.

  Sound is a funny thing here. It gets trapped in the dry air and bounced around between the mountains. So I didn’t hear the old white van until it was right up on me. It crept down Fourth Avenue on the lane closest to the sidewalk, exactly matching my pace. A Ford Econoline, like ten thousand others in the city. I glanced inside and was barred by heavily tinted black windows. How many times had Peralta told me to carry a gun? Now I just looked like a guy in a suit, working late, a good target. Where the hell were those PPD bicycle patrols? I got to Jefferson and the nearest car was a pair of headlights half a mile away. The lights from the Madison Street Jail looked down like the windows of a medieval castle. Otherwise, we were all alone.

  I crossed behind the van and checked the license plate. It was covered with mud and the light was out. A sudden wild gush of panic came up my legs and into my belly. I fought it down with breathing. Slow and steady. I walked easy and straight across the street, moving east down Jefferson now. Another block and I could get in the sheriff’s administration building with my bar-coded ID.

  The van turned on Jefferson and paced me again. Now I was on the driver’s side, but the windows were still opaque. I didn’t want to keep looking over. I started running scenarios in my head. Wondering how much of the self-defense training I got from Peralta twenty years ago was still second nature. I knew one thing: nobody was going to get me inside a van.

  “Excuse me.”

  The window was down now and a face peered out.

  “Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?”

  He was just a guy: white, thirties, doughy face, balding into a comb-over, his eyes buried in heavy lids. I stopped and looked.

  “Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?” he asked again.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It’s down there at Second and Madison. Park on Madison and check in with the deputy at the front counter.”

  “Thank you.” His eyes became merry slits. “Aren’t you David Mapstone?

  “I am. Have we met?”

  He looked at me for a moment and the window went back up. Then the van accelerated around the corner and I was alone again on the street. Just then, two bicycle cops rode by. The female officer looked like Steffi Graf.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Little-known fact: Mike Peralta is a fabulous cook. It makes it easy to be adopted by the Peraltas for family holidays like Thanksgiving. This year, he served the finest turkey and dressing I’d ever eaten—and I had to admit that include Grandmother’s sublime cornbread dressing from my childhood. Of course, the meal didn’t stop there. We had the usual array of Thanksgiving vegetables and side dishes, all fresh and delicately spiced. Plus there were Peralta’s trademark carnitas, just in case our metabolism dared to process any of these excesses. And liberal amounts of quality liquor: he favored Gibsons, followed by an undiscovered Sonoma pinot noir Sharon had picked up and, after dinner, a port whose taste st
ayed on my tongue like a good memory. I only thought about Lindsey every few minutes.

  The two daughters were home from law school. Jamie was at Stanford and Jennifer was at Cal-Berkeley. They were luminously beautiful and very smart, and since I’ve known both since they were babies, seeing them now made me feel strangely old. I didn’t feel forty years old—I felt like I was my early twenties. Time is a real bastard. But spirits were high and the conversation tripped from football to life in the Bay Area to the big expansion the Heard Museum was planning to some catching up on everybody’s life. These people were as close to family as I had, and I was grateful for the holiday spell of belonging and well-being.

  Peralta and I weren’t allowed to discuss work, and that was fine. I had little new to report on the Yarnell case. Now we were just waiting for the DNA results, and that would be the end of it. Gretchen would go on to greater things and I would go back to my Philip Marlowe office in the old courthouse, writing a history of the Sheriff’s Office and taking whatever forgotten workaday mysteries Peralta cared to pass my way.

  I seemed to be the only one bothered about the neat bow being tied on this case, and I couldn’t even tell you why. Maybe it was the pocket watch. Why had it been entombed with the little boys? Maybe it was talking to the endlessly incarcerated Frances Richie, or the way Max Yarnell was so cagey about the ownership of the old warehouse. Or maybe it was Bobby Hamid’s visit the week before—about which Peralta was strangely passive, by the way. He didn’t even threaten to get the warehouse condemned and turned into a Super Fund site.

  So that was Thanksgiving. Except for the strangeness of the unsaid: whatever marital battle sent Peralta to find shelter at my house that night was carefully cleaned up for the holiday. Mike and Sharon didn’t even fuss at each other with their usual gusto. Sometimes my mind wandered, imagining Mike and Sharon as I didn’t want to imagine them: Bitch! Prick! Slut! Bastard! Diminuendo for a drowning marriage. I was aware of my presence keeping a brittle peace. Or maybe I imagined that, too. For just a moment, I recalled the last Christmas Patty and I were together. We had given each other expensive gifts and no cards. Lindsey was big on cards, and I had kept every one she had given me. The dusk came up early and I declined Peralta’s invitation to smoke cigars and watch the big game on TV.