South Phoenix Rules

by Jon Talton

  The dead body belonged to a male about my height with an athletic build. His thighs, calves, and hands were bloody from wounds. One hand was larger than the other. A large pool of blood congealed between his legs, which were slightly open. I stepped around a cordless drill. It had a small, bloody bit in its mouth. Close to the refrigerator, a stained handsaw lay on the fashionable Spanish tiles of the upgraded kitchen. The body was missing its head.

  Even in Phoenix, there probably weren’t that many headless bodies at the moment.

  “Jax.” I whispered it.

  Vare shook her head. “Is that his name? Your girlfriend’s…”

  “She’s…not!” Something in my voice actually made her take a step back.

  “Well, she’s looking at some major trouble, Mapstone. She’s lying. I can tell it. You can, too—don’t deny it. I can’t tell if you’re lying because I never believe you anyway. You both had better start cooperating.”

  I asked her how she had found the body. It didn’t look as if any of the neighboring houses were occupied, so this was no place for a block watch. A tip, she said.

  “A tip? From where? What kind of tip?” I turned away from the corpse and faced her straight on, trying not to let my anger take over. It wasn’t easy.

  “I can’t tell you that, sir,” she said, wagging a finger at me, emphasizing that last word, leaving no doubt that I was now just a civilian. She had a large gold wedding band on her hand with diamonds in it. Somebody once told me she had three children. I couldn’t imagine. She went on, “Let’s go through it again. Jax Delgado…”

  So I went through it again: I’d known him for six weeks, since about the time he and Robin had started dating. She met him at a First Friday gallery exhibit. Lindsey and I liked him and invited them both for drinks and dinner. His grandfather was from Cuba and he’d grown up in Miami. I’d seen him maybe a dozen times, mostly fleeting.

  “You’d better notify New York University,” I said. “He’s on the faculty. They’ll have next-of-kin information.”

  Vare laughed, showing her prominent incisors. “Mapstone, if you’re telling the truth, you’re a fucking idiot.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time both those things were true.”

  The new voice was deep, commanding, familiar. I turned my head to see Mike Peralta filling my vision. Behind him was Robin.

  Vare rounded on him. “This is not your jurisdiction. You’re almost ou…” She stopped herself.

  Peralta smiled slightly. “Everything is my jurisdiction, Kate. For a few more days, at least.”

  4

  The uniformed cops in the entry hall had already made room for the big man in the tan suit. His thick hair was combed straight back from a wide forehead and the years had turned it from black to charcoal. His face: carve it into a mountainside. You had to know how to watch his eyes and mouth to see what was really going on inside him. Now he walked into the room with his deliberate tread. His dark eyes ignored mine, taking in the scene even as his head barely moved. Robin stood beside him, her hand on his arm. Two of her could have fit inside him.

  “Is this him?” Peralta spoke with uncommon gentleness. Robin nodded.

  “What’s that, Miss Bryson? I need a positive identification.” Kate Vare took Robin by the arm and led her close to the body, waving an outstretched arm as if she were showing off a new car. “Was this the man you had been seeing?”

  Robin wrapped her arms tightly across her sweatshirt, pushing up her breasts. Vare kept hold of her. “Yes.” Her eyes were wide and wet. “It’s Jax.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We were lovers.” Robin’s skin grew pale.

  “Accomplices, maybe?” Vare held her close to the corpse.

  Robin shook her head adamantly. “You don’t know anything.”

  Vare released her grip. “Now I want these civilians outside.”

  Peralta held up a hand. “Robin can sit in my car. Mapstone is still a deputy sheriff.”

  Vare’s face dropped in dismay.

  “I haven’t put through his papers yet.” He reached in his suit-coat pocket, produced my sheriff’s office identification card, then pinned it onto my shirt like a shabby medal. Peralta said, “I think we’ll both see what you’ve got.”

  “Well, Mapstone’s history won’t do any good here,” Vare sulked. Peralta might have been the outgoing sheriff, but he was still close friends with the police chief, so she was stuck with us.

  “La Fam?”

  “Looks that way,” Vare answered.

  Peralta grunted. I stood back, trying to keep up.

  He produced a set of latex gloves and snapped them on, then stood over the kitchen island like a surgeon examining the work of a demented colleague.

  “So did you track the package?” He already knew what had happened. It had only been twenty-four hours since I had last seen him, but somehow it seemed longer. I couldn’t tell whether I was glad to see him here or not. Considering Kate Vare was the lead investigator, I decided I was delighted.

  Vare spoke reluctantly, pausing to give me the cop eye. “It was sent from the FedEx Office store on Central, uptown, you know, the old Kinko’s. Fake name and address of the sender. We’re going to interview the employee who saw the sender later this morning.”

  Peralta nodded and went back to the corpse.

  I heard one young uniform whisper to another: “Jax in the Box. May I take your order?” Another: “It gives a whole new meaning to giving head.”

  Peralta’s voice overrode them. “They tortured him with the drill…” He pointed to the dark craters on his legs and the top of one hand, then he stepped lightly in a counter-clockwise circle, his eyes scanning, his head momentarily shielded by his back and broad shoulders. “Slit open his scrotum. That was probably late in the game.”

  He turned back to the rest of us and pointed. “See his left hand? That’s from being dipped in boiling water repeatedly. Make sure crime scene gets that shot.”

  Vare just had to stand there and take it. Her tight frame was almost humming with tension. I wondered if the black pants suit would burst into flames. I loved it. She said, “Yes, Sheriff.”

  Emerson said there is no history, only biography. If that’s true, Mike Peralta encapsulated much of what was worth knowing about the best of law enforcement in Phoenix, not to mention more of my life than I cared to dwell on at that moment. I’d first met him when he was a trainer at the academy, then he had broken me in as my first partner.

  We remained friends for the years I lived away from Phoenix, teaching in Ohio and San Diego. He never stopped saying that it was a mistake for me to be anything but a cop, and when I came home after my first marriage broke up he gave me a job. A pile of old cases—clean them up, he said. So I did, using the historian’s techniques married to my cop knowledge. It became a full-time job, working the crimes that ran from the 1960s all the way back to statehood. I didn’t fool myself: It had been good publicity for the sheriff to have an egghead on staff. I also solved some major cases. The old ID card hung familiarly from my pocket.

  “La Fam,” I said. “I didn’t think they had a big presence here.”

  I heard the naiveté in my voice even before I finished the sentence. La Familia was one of the most notorious gangs in Mexico and Southern California. Its signature execution was beheading. I cleared my throat. “But it wouldn’t be surprising to see them expanding with all the destabilization caused by the recession.”

  Peralta’s eyes fixed on me. They said, shut up. I looked down at the blood spatter on the floor. Gangs were nothing new to Phoenix. Contrary to the local feel-good spin, Phoenix had been a Mafia hangout for decades. Some old cops told me that it had more mobsters per capita than New York City in the 1950s. It was close to the mob’s operations in Vegas, close to the border, easy to be anonymous. They hung out at places like the Blue Grotto, the Clown’s Den, Durant’s, Rocky’s Hideaway, and the Ivanhoe. Old Phoenix h
ad been a paradise with snakes, indeed. It’s what kept my nostalgia for what had been lost from slipping into the lie of sentimentality. But I admitted to myself that I was way behind on the gangs of today, aside from knowing they were large, sophisticated, and deadly. That knowledge rarely penetrated my office in the old courthouse, where the crimes were as old as the architecture around me and where Peralta deliberately kept me segregated from the rest of the Sheriff’s Office.

  “Did you know this subject, Sheriff?” Vare asked, tilting her sharp chin toward the corpse.

  “I met him once. Seemed nice enough.” Peralta slid off the gloves and handed them to one of the young cops. There’d been a time, when the Arizona Dreams case was busted open, when I thought Peralta and Robin might actually become an item. It had never happened and I didn’t know why. That was fine with both Lindsey and me. It would have led to too many complications. And we still missed Peralta’s ex-wife Sharon. Mike as chief deputy and then sheriff, Sharon as a psychologist and best-selling author: They were a power couple without airs. It seemed impossible to imagine him with anyone else. Knowing him, I suspected he didn’t want anyone trying to get close now. The cops, that was what he was all about, and now even that was gone. Of course, he didn’t lack for job offers, all of them paying more than the post of Maricopa County Sheriff. I wondered for a few seconds where he might end up. It helped shave the edge off my emotions.

  Peralta stepped back and thrust his hands into his pockets, pushing back his wide-cut suit coat enough so that I could see the .45 in his shoulder rig. He faced Vare. “So why would Professor Delgado here have ended up with La Fam? Unless he wasn’t who he claimed to be…”

  “That’s the whole deal!” Vare’s voice trembled in agitation. I felt my chest grow tight. “He’s a fraud. There’s no Jax Delgado on the NYU faculty, contrary to what Mapstone and the girl keep telling me.” She glared at me. “Oh, you’re surprised?”

  “How…?” It was all I could manage.

  “He’s not on the faculty. Nobody by that name. Nobody matching his description. We emailed a photo. No, Mapstone, we didn’t wait. We woke people up. This is a major case. Somebody beheaded by La Familia in Phoenix, or a La Fam copycat—whatever—and the head shipped to a woman who lives in a historic district? If the media get hold of this it won’t be just another forgotten asshole-on-asshole homicide in Scaryvale.”

  “What about this cat’s ID?”

  “No wallet, nothing on the body. No clothes left.” She leaned toward him. “Sheriff, I hate to tell you, but the girl is lying and I wonder about Mapstone here.”

  “We all do, Kate. But I’m going to give them a ride home now. You got your positive ID. You know where to find Mapstone and Robin.”

  “What’s that under the drill?” I said.

  I had been desperately searching for gravity as they were talking and my eyes had wandered. Something the color of dull silver was sitting beneath handle of the power drill.

  Vare just stood there, as if anything I said was illegitimate, but Peralta took out a cheap plastic pen and slightly lifted the tool from the floor. I was expecting to see a bolt and learn some new, unwanted information about torture, but no. Underneath was a ring. Vare knelt—her knees cracked—and lifted it in her gloved hand. Peralta gently let the drill down exactly where it had sat.

  “Shit.” She said it quietly. Then she held it up for the sheriff to see.

  He bent towards her, squinting. “It might be a copycat,” he said. “A wanna-be.”

  “Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “It looks like platinum. Not cheap.”

  I moved over to them, bent down on my haunches. It was a man’s signet ring with a sharp engraving protruding from it.

  It was an image of a rattlesnake’s head.

  I said, “Kate, it’s you.”

  “Asshole,” she said quietly.

  “El Verdugo.” Peralta spoke with gravity and fluency. My Spanish was rusty but I knew the word. “The executioner.” Nobody said anything for at least a minute.

  I held out my hands, waiting.

  Vare sounded like my fourth-grade teacher lecturing the bad kids in the front row. “Pedro Alejandro Vega. Big-time hit man for the Sinaloa cartel. When he kills, he leaves the ring’s implant on the victim’s forehead. Like an artist signing a painting.”

  “I’ve never seen Jax wear that ring.”

  “That doesn’t mean shit,” Vare said. “There’s no photo of Vega. He’s never been arrested. He’s almost like a folklore legend in the narcocorridos.” She rolled her r’s, something I could never master, using the word for the songs that romanticized the exploits of the drug world. “Your Jax could easily be Pedro Vega. And then, I’ve got a whole list of new questions for you and this Robin Bryson.”

  “Whatever.” Anger burned my throat. I processed, trying to see the world as it was, not as I wanted it to be. The foulness of the air was now in my taste buds.

  “If La Fam killed El Verdugo…” Vare was talking to herself, tucking her head down, saying words that would confuse any Iowans who just moved to town but were obviously of great interest to the PPD. She dropped the ring into a plastic evidence envelope, muttered profanities. “What the hell was he doing in Phoenix, posing as a college professor?”

  “That’s not my problem, Kate,” I said. “Sounds like a gang-unit deal, and you can go back to trying to close screwed-up cases from the eighties.”

  5

  I stalked out into the sunlight where Robin was leaning against the hood of Peralta’s black Crown Victoria, her sunglasses on, staring down a street of bank-owned houses that was empty except for the police cars. A crime-scene van was pulling up. The two plainclothes deputies in Peralta’s security detail sat in another Crown Vic. They waved. I nodded. I felt like a chump. It was okay. It was a good feeling, in fact, like the clean air I was sucking in to get the smell of dead body to leave my head.

  Sure, I’d had a couple of good cocktail conversations with Jax Delgado about Churchill as a wartime leader and our current endless wars, and about the civilizations of Mesoamerica. But anybody can read a book. Anybody can play a role. He could be a cartel killer from Sinaloa. I’d been played, made a chump. I laughed inside and shook my head. Considering the weights around my heart the past few months, being played was almost a holiday.

  But this amusement was a product of one hour’s sleep in the past forty-eight hours. It was a feeling, a wish. It wasn’t a thought. My eyes found Robin, surprised by how uncharacteristically fragile she appeared. Then Vare caught up with me.

  “I’ll be in touch, smartass,” she said. “In the meantime, you’d better be wondering why the severed head of El Verdugo was sent to your house. And you’d better get Ms. Bryson and check into a motel. Let me know where you go.”

  I am not generally a stupid person, but of course what she said was as obvious as a mountain falling on me. But my emotions had been living moment-to-moment lately. Combine it with the turmoil of the past four months, a bad hangover, and the suffocating feeling of being in the death house and you get a stupid person. All the weights stacked back up inside me.

  “You will protect her,” I said.

  Vare shook her head. “I could lock her up as a material witness. I might still do it.”

  I told her that wasn’t what I meant.

  “Do you understand budget cuts, Mapstone?”

  “Don’t make this personal, about you and me, Kate. They know where she lives. They know she was seeing him. So they were sending her a message, like ‘you’re next’—and you’re telling me you won’t protect her?”

  She moved close in, poked me in the chest with her finger. “That’s exactly what I’m saying, you worthless-piece-of-shit excuse for anything. Right now she’s a suspect. If she wants my help, she’d better start telling the truth. Otherwise, she’s your problem, fuck-face.” Spittle came out of her angry mouth, shining in the sunlight. “You’re a deputy sheriff.” She snapped my I
D card with her nail. “I feel better about her safety already.”

  She spun around and stomped back into the house, nearly colliding with the supertanker of Peralta.

  Now two unmarked PPD Chevies came speeding down the new pavement of the street. Two pairs of detectives got out: slim, young, male, shorthaired. They walked over to Peralta and shook his hand, telling them they were sorry he had lost the election. He nodded and clapped them on their arms.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. They slid under the crime-scene tape and walked to the house.

  “They probably voted against you,” I said.

  “Nah. If the new sheriff really does what he promised and uses the department to play Border Patrol, it’s going to complicate things for every agency. People in the immigrant neighborhoods will go back to fearing the police. We worked years to overcome that. Worse, more paperwork.”

  His normally immobile face managed a wink.

  “You’re pretty fucking tranquil about all this!” My hands ached from the fists they had been unconsciously molded into for who-knows-how-long. “Here, take this goddamned thing.” I handed him my identification card. Robin gave me what might have been a look of concern or sympathy. I ignored her.

  I felt Peralta’s large arm steer me aside and move me down the sidewalk.

  “You have an anger-management problem, Mapstone.”

  Peralta was the most cant-free person I had ever known. The world turned upside down again and it only made me madder.

  “You sound like Sharon now!” I was baiting him. I didn’t care.

  His voice was calm.

  “Mapstone, you have been the moodiest son of a bitch the past few months. It was just an election. The voters have spoken, the bastards.” His eyebrows subtly philosophized with each other. The corners of his mouth raised a few millimeters. “I came up with that. Pretty good, huh?”

  “You didn’t come up with it. Mo Udall said it.”

  “Whatever. I’m the one who lost the election, not you. People fall for this ‘be scared of the Mexicans’ crap, even though they want cheap housecleaning and lawn care and never wonder why their homes are inexpensive.” He sighed. “Anyway, you’ll do fine. You’re going to be a professor again, right?”