The Night Detectives

by Jon Talton

  I knew by now that I shouldn’t push against the drywall, but I did.

  I couldn’t stop myself.

  I always did.

  That was when the explosion came.

  We were in the back yard on Cypress. Night. Robin was on the ground and I was on my knees, trying to resuscitate her, trying to stop the bleeding. Her blouse was wet from the blood and it was all over my hands.

  I looked up and this time the woman with the gun was still standing there.

  This time the woman was Lindsey.

  Then the dark bedroom greeted me and I was awake, in the dimension where the mountains were low and the city was not reclaiming Central. Where the downtown skyline was still squat, monotonous, and ugly and the only real event of where I had been was Robin’s death in the back yard from a single gunshot.

  I had this dream nearly every night. I called it my maze dream.

  6

  Peralta slid into my driveway at precisely seven a.m. I walked out with my bag and the surly attitude of a non-morning person, stowing my gear in the extended cab of his gigantic Ford F-150. I would leave the argument about his personal contribution to greenhouse gases and climate change for another day. He surprised me with a venti non-fat, no-whip mocha from Starbucks, my usual drink, and one he has disparaged on many occasions as virtually anti-American. He, of course, was drinking black coffee. We backed out, cruised through Willo and Roosevelt, and then slid onto Interstate 10 where it pops out of the deck park by Kenilworth School. It was only ninety-nine degrees. I was in my tan suit with a blue Brooks Brothers polka-dot tie, about to keel over from heat exhaustion.

  Neither of us said a word as the suburbs fell away and the truck turned onto Arizona Highway 85 for the short but dangerous connection to Interstate 8. The state was gradually widening what had been a two-lane highway, but people still drove like maniacs and fatalities remained common. Today, the road was nearly empty. If only my head were that way. Jagged bare mountains rose up on either side. I remembered from Boy Scout days that one was called Spring Mountain. I also recalled it was about 355 miles from Phoenix to San Diego. I adjusted the vents again to get the most out of the truck’s air conditioning.

  When he caught I-8 at Gila Bend, I made my first attempt to breach the battlements of his stubborn personality.

  “What about the lawyer Felix mentioned?”

  “I called him. He never heard of any of those names.”

  I asked him if he had given the lawyer a description and he shot me a cutting glance. I thought about Felix sitting there yesterday, so straight and self-possessed in his expensive suit, French cuffs, tattoo, and prosthetic leg. He was not someone to forget.

  “So tell me what again we’re doing?”

  “Driving to San Diego.”

  Five more miles brought a passing Union Pacific freight train and flat desert.

  “You know what I mean.” The mocha was finally cool enough to drink.

  He declined to answer, so I settled into the seat and watched for more trains. We rode high and mighty along the highway, a steady eighty miles per hour, dwarfed only by semis.

  The retiree tract houses and fields of Yuma trickled out to greet us, hotter than hell, and ugly. We went through a McDonald’s drive-through and ate on the road like two street cops as we crossed the Colorado River and entered California.

  I tried again. “Why did you give a false report to the police, saying Smith, or whatever the hell his name is, was never in our office?”

  “It was easier.” And that was all he said between mouthfuls of a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Peralta was the most by-the-book hard-ass peace officer I had ever known. I told him this.

  “Don’t be so quick to judge, Mapstone.” Bite, chew, swallow, steer with one hand. “And don’t get grease on that arm rest. As I recall, you did a little selective application of the law after Robin was murdered.”

  That was true, but I wasn’t going to let him get me into that dark alley.

  “I’m talking about now. We don’t owe this guy anything.”

  “You wanted to break the law yesterday by tampering with evidence.”

  He was right. I wanted to see the number Felix had called from our parking lot. I was a long way from being a Boy Scout.

  Peralta shrugged his big shoulders. “He put us on retainer for ten grand. Our obligation is to the client, and that includes privacy.”

  Sand dunes loomed up on the south. I knew that a plank road was built here in 1915. I didn’t know anything about being a private investigator. Listening to our conversation made me question myself again about joining him in the rough little building on Grand Avenue. Robin had suggested it. She expected to live to see it. I violently shook my head.

  “You have a headache?”

  “No.” I ate the Big Mac and daintily wiped my fingers to protect his fake leather or whatever the hell it was on the armrest. “What would you as sheriff have done to a PI who pulled the stunt you did?”

  “Probably prosecute him.”

  “But now you’re applying situational ethics.”

  “Don’t be using your fancy academic language on me, Mapstone.” The burger was gone and now his right hand was grabbing French fries. Peralta always ate one fast-food course at a time. “I’m just a simple boy from the barrio.”

  I cut him off. “You went to Harvard.” He knew very well what I meant. I gave up for the moment.

  We were now in the Colorado Desert, a very different place from the lush Sonoran Desert that surrounded Phoenix and Tucson: no saguaros or any of the other hundreds of plant and animal species of my home country. It was sun-blasted moonscape, a sea of tranquility: long vistas, distant mountain ranges, few colors beyond off-white, ochre, and brown—and in this spot it declined into a sink that was below sea level.

  We finished lunch at eighty-five miles per hour. I policed all the containers and napkins, and then the flat, green fields of the Imperial Valley surrounded us, all irrigated, quite irrationally, by a canal running from the Colorado River. If not for the geology of the Colorado’s delta, the Sea of Cortez would go all the way north to Indio. It was an amazing thing to contemplate. North of us was the Salton Sea, accidentally created in 1905 when the Colorado, as it would do before being nearly killed by dams, flooded into crude irrigation canals dug to divert water into what had been the dry Salton Sink. The “sea” became a major bird destination, created its own ecosystem. Now it was dying, helped by the Imperial Valley’s toxic runoff. I read the other day that the noxious air from a massive fish kill drifted as far as Los Angeles.

  We stopped to relieve ourselves in El Centro. No offense to the local chamber of commerce, but that seemed all it was good for, even though the town now had a Starbucks. The air was hot and hazy and smelled of agricultural chemicals.

  Ahead were Plaster City and the startling escarpment of the Laguna Mountains. San Diego had one of the finest natural harbors in the world, but the railroads couldn’t easily get there in the nineteenth century because of that mountain range. Instead, they went to Los Angeles and that was that. We passed over one track at Plaster City and it reminded me of the railroad that was finally built to San Diego from the east. If memory served, the sugar baron John Spreckles underwrote it, and the San Diego and Arizona line was one of the most ambitious engineering accomplishments of its day. But it never made money and the land it traversed was so harsh, including a perilous crawl through Carrizo Gorge, that maintaining the railroad was prohibitive.

  The wall of mountains and its forbidding canyons beyond did not intimidate Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. So I-8 was built in the mid-1960s and San Diego finally had its connection to the east. Every year it brought more Phoenicians to the coast in search of relief from the summer heat.

  None of this would have interested Peralta.

  We started the serious grind uphill and the
n we were climbing through terrain strewn with giant boulders, the marble game of the gods. Behind us, the Imperial Valley spread below like a dry seabed. The Interstate twisted and curved, an unwelcome intruder. The sun was on his side, glinting off his thick hair and bringing out the aristocratic profile. I knew this highway well, but the majestic land never ceased its ability to move me.

  “So we’re going to San Diego,” I said. “Do we know if anything this guy told us is correct? He lied about who he was. How do we know this Grace Hunter even existed or killed herself?”

  “We don’t. We’ll find out.”

  Robert Caro writes about how Lyndon Johnson was a reader of men. Nobody could read Peralta, not even LBJ, and certainly not me. Only occasionally did a “word” reveal itself to a careful observer of his professional mask. As I studied him, I could see an unusual determination in the set of his thick jaw. To be sure, “determination” with Peralta was like saying “deep” about the Grand Canyon. It was always there and spectacular to behold, much less try to hinder. Now, however, the canyon of his tenacity was unusually on display. But I saw something else, too, another word. Concern.

  I said, “What if we’re being set up?”

  “Then it’s better to take the initiative.”

  “What if we’re being set up by going to San Diego?”

  “I told you, you’re not going to see Patty.”

  When I lapsed into silence and he realized his effort to piss me off had failed, he spoke again.

  “Whoever did this would expect us to give a full report to the police and lay low in Phoenix. That would be logical. So we’ll do what they don’t expect. All you have to do is your history thing.”

  This was what he used to say when he would barge into my office in the old Court House. It became a longstanding joke. But I blew. “What history?!” It was amazing how his luxurious cab absorbed the sound of my tantrum. “The dead man in front of our office didn’t have any history! This isn’t a historical case.”

  As usual, my outburst failed to move him. In as soft a voice as he could manage, “Mapstone, everybody has a history. You need to find it. ‘The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know.’ Saint Paul said that.”

  “Harry Truman said that.”

  “Same difference.”

  I resisted the familiar urge to reach over and try to strangle him, even if I would lose the fight and he would never even swerve out of his lane.

  He said, “We have a name, D.O.B., Social Security Number and photo…”

  “Right, and she’s a sweet girl who went to Chaparral High in Scottsdale, was a student at San Diego State, worked part-time at the Nordstrom perfume counter at Horton Plaza. She had a boyfriend and somehow she ended up at Larry Zisman’s condo on the night of April twenty-second.”

  “See how much you know?” He lazily draped his arms over the steering wheel despite the tangled road we climbed.

  I slumped in my seat. “If any of it is true.”

  “David.” He never called me David. “You have a gift for history. I never thought you’d be happy as a professor. You’re a cop down in your bones. But you’re a historian, too. You look at a case the same way a historian studies the secondary sources and published material on a subject. You talk to the primary sources, read their recollections. Then you apply a historian’s skepticism and diligence, come up with new interpretations, dig out fresh facts, add context, shine the light in a different direction seeking the truth. It’s what you do.”

  It shut me up. Even made me feel better about myself for the moment.

  When we crested Laguna Summit, he spoke again.

  “Here’s something else to consider, Mapstone. We don’t know why Felix was shot to hell. Maybe it was because of this girl, or something else in his life that made him carry that Desert Eagle that was on the car seat.”

  He had been there so briefly, it surprised me he had time to notice and identify the gun on the passenger seat of the Benz. But that was Peralta.

  “But,” he went on, “he might have been killed because he came to see us. And I don’t want the word on the street to be that you can kill our clients. It’s bad for business. And it might encourage the wrong kind of people to reach out and touch us.”

  I let him alone. It was a reminder that there were three ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way, and Peralta’s way. Soon we would begin the long descent to San Diego, through the lovely little meadows of eastern San Diego County that looked as if they hadn’t changed for a hundred years, back up to Alpine at the edge of the Cleveland National Forest, then dropping and curving into El Cajon, massive Silverdome mountain dominant on our right, the cool sea air coming up to kiss away the memory of the desert, the city swallowing us up, the freeway packed with traffic, and the ocean straight ahead. San Diego: my adopted hometown. I would need to pack my emotions tight.

  7

  Among the benefits of being the former sheriff of one of America’s most populous counties was cooperation from other law-enforcement agencies even after you were out of office. An added perk was that Al Kimbrough was a San Diego Police commander. I first met him when Peralta had hired me back at MCSO and Kimbrough had been a detective. He could have stayed and become chief of detectives, but San Diego made him a better offer, one that didn’t include 108-degree May days. Peralta scheduled a meeting with him downtown and complained about the overcast.

  “It’s the onshore flow,” I instructed. “The June Gloom.”

  “It’s not June.”

  I rolled down the window and looked over the bay at one of the aircraft carriers moored at North Island. “It’s cool. I’m happy.”

  He handed me a copy he had made of Grace Hunter’s photo. “Why don’t you take the truck and go talk to the boyfriend? Here’s the address.”

  I didn’t breathe for about five seconds and handed the address back to him.

  “What, you’re showing off your photographic memory to an old man?”

  “No,” I said. “I used to live there.” I sat for a few minutes in silence as a big jet going into Lindbergh Field rattled the cab. Sometimes coincidences were serendipity. Not this one. This was creepy. But there was a job to do. “Drop me off at Old Town. I’ll take the bus.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  “I couldn’t find a parking place, especially for your beast.”

  “You can always find a parking place if you’re patient.”

  “Not in O.B.”

  As I gave directions to Old Town, he shook his head and shrugged. “You’re one weird guy, Mapstone.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was on a half-full 35 bus, rolling down Rosecrans Street, turning onto Midway Drive for the ride across the hump of Loma Portal and into Ocean Beach. Behind us was the bay, ahead was the ocean. I counted twenty Arizona license tags and quit counting. This time of year, San Diego was Phoenix West. Native San Diegans hated the invasion. When I lived here and rode this bus almost every day, I learned not to let on where I was from. The bus started downhill, with the sun beginning to burn off the clouds behind me, toward downtown. But ahead, it was still gray, the vast expanse of the Pacific a sheet of lead blending into the overcast. The Pacific played a trick of the eye, seeming to rise into the horizon, even though we were merely descending a long slope to the ocean.

  If you stay on Interstate 8, you’d run right into O.B. But most tourists didn’t. They went north of the San Diego River to Sea World, Mission Bay and the more popular neighborhoods of Mission Beach or Pacific Beach, or they went south on I-5 to downtown. San Diego had changed substantially since I had lived here, but Ocean Beach looked much the same: the narrow streets, quaint and pricey cottages, one-story businesses lining Newport Avenue and the long municipal pier jutting into the ocean. I had lived two lives in San Diego: pre-Patty in Ocean Beach and with Patty in La Jolla.

  It reminded me of the
old days, getting off at Cable and Newport, and then walking past the business district down to Santa Cruz Avenue. A couple of guys carrying surfboards walked past me, going west. Seagulls passed overhead making their distinctive calls. The old apartment building was still two stories, painted white, and shaped like a U surrounding an interior swimming pool. My unit had been on the second floor. The boyfriend’s apartment was directly beside it. I felt an involuntary urge to check my mail, smiled at it, and walked up to No. 205. The windows were open, as was common here, and the drapes were drawn and partly hanging out.

  The loud, angry voice coming from the apartment wasn’t surprising, either. O.B. was an eclectic place, where CPAs lived alongside bikers. Once I had been kept up all night when one of the latter had engaged in an all-night screaming fight with his old lady. Now I would put a stop to it, but I was different then.

  The voice was deep and menacing, the dispute involving a woman, money, and perhaps more. The dialogue was generally, “I want Scarlett, motherfucker, and your white ass is out of excuses. Where is she? I need her ass back out making money,” on and on. “You think you can hide from me? Nobody gets away from me. I own her sweet little booty. Now where the fuck is she? Tell me now or I stomp your white ass to death and find her my own self.”

  My mind momentarily thought of search warrants and probable cause, but, as Peralta said, we weren’t the law anymore. When I heard a fist connect with flesh, cartilage snap, and a man squeal, I opened the door.

  “What the fuck?”

  The voice belonged to a very large man with caramel-colored skin, mustard-yellow driving cap, delicately manicured beard, eyes way too small for his face. A Bluetooth device was attached to the left side of his head. He was my height and about a third wider. He wore a black T-shirt proclaiming RUN-D.M.C. Below his shorts were heavy stomp-your-white-ass boots.