South Phoenix Rules

by Jon Talton

  Lindsey had rented an apartment in the District. She furnished it from Ikea, getting an allowance from the government. Robin slept on the sofa while Lindsey and I shared her new bed. It felt strange, of course. Late at night, I tried to tunnel into Lindsey with compliments—she had cut her hair again, into something called an angled bob; I liked her hair longer but I told her how looked lovely she looked, which was the truth. Her blue eyes were still so stunning against the darkness of her hair. She had new glasses. I told her people in Phoenix thought she was such a star in the new cyber war. Little neighborhood gossip was another light topic, such as whose house had been on the market for two years now, or how the new sheriff was training deputies to be immigration enforcers. My tunneling attempts failed. She said matter-of-factly, “You have a beard.”

  She wanted to know how Robin was doing. Inside, I wanted to rage “what the hell about us?” I didn’t. The crisis back home kept me oddly in control during this visit. I gave her the details of the case but she didn’t react much. I felt as if we were back home over the past year, when her silences had grown to terrify me. The closest we came to a fight was when Lindsey once again refused to let Robin stay with her in D.C. The job was too all-consuming right now. She didn’t have time to entertain Robin, much less look out for her.

  We didn’t make love. I lay down in bed nude, like I always used to sleep with her. She slept in her panties, a new innovation. We made out a little but then she patted me on the arm and pulled away, gently but obviously. It was like a switch flipped off. This had been happening for a long time. It made what took place last year more remarkable. Every marriage has its ups and downs. Every marriage has moments when you think you’ve awakened with a total stranger, when you have moments when you really dislike this person you know that you love. Our story was nothing special. That’s what I told myself. But Lindsey’s waning interest in sex didn’t mean she wasn’t interested. I wasn’t that self-absorbed. It meant she wasn’t interested in sex with me. I lay awake as she slept. On her side of the bed, I noticed a blue pack of Gauloises Blondes. She was smoking again, but not around me. I wondered who else she might share a cigarette with?

  In the study now, Robin joined us. Judson Lee stood and introduced himself, holding her hand in a courtly way. “What a beautiful name, Robin,” he said. I thought he was going to kiss her hand.

  He sat back down and resumed. “This isn’t about Harley Talbott, directly. My client is Nick DeSimone, the restaurant owner. He’s a great guy. Have you been to his place?” His hands gesticulated in his small lap.

  “When I can afford Scottsdale prices.”

  “Ah.” One of the black slashes of eyebrows arched. In the light, his face bore the signs of Scottsdale or Paradise Valley privilege—or rather lack of signs: in spite of its sun-leathered color, it was barely wrinkled. “Well, Mr. DeSimone’s grandfather Paolo worked for Harley Talbott when he was young. He was an impressionable kid. Harley was a big personality. Paolo went to prison for Harley Talbott.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m out of the cold-case business.”

  “This was a miscarriage of justice,” he said. “Paolo was no angel at times, that’s true. But he had cleaned himself up, started a family. Then this incident happened and he was made to take the fall. His family deserves to have his name cleared.”

  I told him I could recommend some good private investigators.

  “But you’re a historian, no? What I’m proposing, Dr. Mapstone, and what my client is willing to pay for, is what you might call family history.”

  “A family history that clears his grandfather?”

  “I can’t think of a better person to do it. You solved the murder of the FBI agent, after how many decades? And the Yarnell kidnapping. I know your reputation.”

  Out of the lawyer’s vision, Robin smiled and winked at me.

  I told him I appreciated it, but no. I would have my hands full teaching at ASU. I hoped so: I kept waiting to get the final sign-on. Things moved so slowly in academia. Or maybe we would sell the house and move to Washington—I had offered that to Lindsey and she had said no. That was another example where she calmly made a hard pronouncement and ended the conversation, another reason to lie awake. Was she really trying out this job for a few months, as we had discussed? Now the round brown face in front of me kept talking.

  “He’d be willing to pay five thousand dollars.”

  “I can’t. But thanks for stopping by. I’m sorry I gave you a scare. We’ve had some trouble in the neighborhood lately.”

  “Ah.” He stood and shook my hand. “I totally understand. I don’t even know anyone who would live down here.”

  I kept my neighborhood pride tamped down. I didn’t tell him you couldn’t pay me enough to live in his gated property or mountainside mansion.

  He said, “I hope you’ll keep my card in case you change your mind. If what I hear about you is correct, this story might really intrigue you.”

  I walked him to the door, eager to get him out—eager, desperate really, to make drinks.

  For the first time in weeks, I put on jazz. Bill Evans, Stan Getz, McCoy Tyner. Coltrane, of course. I drank two martinis and Robin had one. I was drinking too much. It was the least of my problems. Robin opened our last cans of chili, used up the box of crackers, and made me eat something.

  When the music stopped, Robin said, “This isn’t your fault.” There was no question what this was. “There’s nothing you could have done differently.”

  “I wonder about that every day,” I said.

  “I know you do.” It wasn’t a reproach. Just a gentle commiseration. “There’s nothing anybody could have done. Nobody is to blame.”

  “That may not be what Lindsey thinks.”

  She didn’t respond.

  Her face brightened. “If you’ll go running with me tomorrow, I’ll take you to a bookstore.”

  “Will you wear the vest?”

  “Hell, no.” She tried unsuccessfully to pull her hair behind her ears. It fell back, gently framing her smile.

  “You are a pain in the ass.” I said it fondly.

  We sat a long while in the dark living room, until she asked, “Do you want your space tonight?”

  I closed my eyes, remembering the previous night, after Lindsey and I had strolled together along the Mall, the monuments grandly lit, the cold sharp. It felt important to try again to make a connection, to find my way back to her. It was a bad idea. I talked and she met me with silence. Until we came back to the Washington Monument, and then she spoke for all of ten seconds.

  Lindsey’s words were still burning inside me like white phosphorous. The compartments had shattered and now I was carrying the shrapnel. But my body was giving in to alcohol and east-coast time.

  I looked at Robin and shook my head. “Come be with me.”

  Part 2: The Bitterest Method

  13

  The bedraggled, single-story building on Grand Avenue looked somewhere between sixty and eighty years old, with a single door and a square window on each side. All were covered by bars that might once have been painted. The square structure itself was bleached brown, done in cracking stucco to resemble adobe, and it sat atop the remains of an asphalt lot. It had once been the office to a motel in the golden age of driving, and this was the highway west out of town.

  A battered sign on a pole near the street read, very faintly, Easy 8 Auto Court and beneath that, Air Conditioned—It’s Cool Inside!, but all the cottages were long gone. Now the office sat by itself, surrounded by barren lots on either side that held dirt and rocks the same color as the building. The only signs of newness were a twelve-foot-high security fence, a couple of halogen lights aimed from the roof, and Peralta’s silver Dodge Ram pickup parked in front. The Prelude bumped across the perimeter of the open gate. We got out, went inside, and found Peralta.

  “I can’t believe this.” Those were my first words.

  “What, Ma
pstone? You don’t believe in entrepreneurialism? It’s the American dream.”

  He stood from behind an ancient metal desk, came around, and hugged Robin.

  To me, he said, “What’s that growing on your face?”

  A second desk sat at an angle across the room. Two institutional armchairs with green-cushioned seats that might have been new during the Eisenhower administration flanked both, and tall gray metal filing cabinets took up one wall. The floor was old linoleum, the color of coffee with three creams. The sheriff’s cigars had augmented the musty smell. Behind Peralta’s desk was a framed poster that proclaimed “Diversity.” It was meant to look exactly like one of those insipid motivational placards, but the image was of a dozen mean-looking assault rifles laid out neatly on white sand.

  “Why are you not in some luxury suite in north Scottsdale?”

  “Fake tits on a stick, not my style,” he grunted as he sat. To Robin, “Sorry about my language.”

  She smiled at him.

  “And you turned down how many high-powered offers to be corporate chief of security or a national consultant?”

  “Thirteen,” he said. “But it’s a slow job market. I wanted to be on my own.”

  “You must be crazy. You have a law degree, for god’s sake.”

  He actually smiled. “Res ipsa loquitur.” The thing speaks for itself.

  We sat in the chairs. He didn’t look much different. He wore a starched white shirt, red tie, and black slacks, with his usual firearms accessory.

  “I’m a private investigator now, Mapstone. It’ll be fun. I don’t need to make much money. My ex has been very indulgent with her book royalties. But business comes anyway. I just got back from Douglas. Client wasn’t satisfied with how the police handled her brother’s murder. So I put some fresh eyes on it. Got out and saw a beautiful part of the state.”

  I repeated, “I still can’t believe this. Why here?”

  “I like it. The freight trains go by. I’m near my people. You know, I’m just a simple campesino.”

  “Who went to Harvard,” Robin said.

  He lowered his head and squinted at me. “Where’s your cannon?”

  “I’m learning to love the Five-Seven.” The semi-automatic was tucked in my jeans, in the small of my back, concealed by my shirt. February, which was once the sweetest month in Phoenix, had come in hot, with today’s temperature near ninety. I wished that I had worn a short-sleeve shirt.

  “Good.” He reached in a desk drawer and slid across a laminated card. “You won’t need this once the Legislature makes everything connected to guns legal, but here’s your concealed weapons permit.”

  “But I didn’t…”

  “Sure you did. I had you sign the paperwork for it the day you resigned.” I was irritated but reached over and took the card. He said, “So, give me an update?”

  It didn’t seem as if there was much to tell. We had survived January, with no more scares, no more watchers sitting on the street at night. Sometimes I had seen a marked PPD unit drive down the street, but it could have been routine patrol. Vare had not even checked in with a phone call. When I called her to get an update, I was told to leave a message. It was, of course, never returned.

  He put his elbows on the desk and folded his fingers in front of his face as I talked.

  In a way, the lack of action had made the tension worse. But I had kept my anxieties to myself. Robin had become more comfortable, the trauma of opening the FedEx box receding. We held long discussions about the Great Depression—she knew much about the art and artists of the era—and comparisons with things now. She laughed more easily. She had a great laugh, uninhibited and delightfully distinctive. I could find her in a crowd just by her laugh. Although we relaxed some of the house rules—I was getting the mail and newspapers now—I tried not to let us get careless. I wouldn’t let her sunbathe outside and she complained that her tan was fading, but the result was quite attractive, at least to me.

  …Oh, and I’m sleeping with my sister-in-law…Just that, although sometimes she caresses me in the night and I smooth back her soft hair and when I lie behind her, my front to her back, she knows how I feel about her, unfaithful bastard that I am…I’m not myself. Am I?

  The only big news was the email I had received from ASU, blowing me off because of a new round of budget cuts. After all the in-person courting that I received after the election, I lost the job via an email. And it was just to be an adjunct professor, the minimum-wage counter help of academia.

  “That must have pissed you off.” He leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. The only item of luxury in the entire office was where he sat, in a new executive office chair.

  “History teaches humility and skepticism.”

  “Right. Told you that you couldn’t go back to that P.C. shit. And that they wouldn’t have you. When Jennifer was at Stanford…” This was his oldest daughter. “…she said to me, ‘Why do I have to study something called HIS-story. What about HER-story?”

  I could have pointed out that the word came from the Greek for inquiry and had nothing to do with pronouns, but he was right about the broader issue. I was mad as hell. Hurt, too. Me, the guy who couldn’t get tenure at San Diego State University, for God’s sake. Now I was rejected for a part-time teaching gig when I knew they were still taking on kids with half my credentials. I felt like even more of a failure, that I let down Lindsey, too. A couple of times I went off on Robin, although I immediately apologized. She accepted my outbursts with surprising equanimity, considering that I always imagined her to be someone who would cold-cock anybody who crossed her. But I had learned new things about her and we had grown closer. She would say, “You’re not yourself, David.”

  Peralta spoke. “I hear you went to visit Amy Preston.” He dropped it light as a feather.

  “That’s true.”

  “Why were you out there at that gun shop?”

  “He misses the cops,” Robin chimed in, gently punching my shoulder.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Peralta said. “How’d you like Barney?”

  “Barrel of laughs.”

  “He’d kill you in a heartbeat. Did it occur to you that ATF might have an operation going?”

  “Actually, no.” I felt the anger start to pulse in my temples. “If PPD wasn’t going to protect Robin, why wouldn’t I try to follow a lead and get ahead of the bad guys? Kate Vare takes this from a major case to the circular file and I’m just supposed to let it be?”

  Peralta stared at me and grunted. Then, “Let’s go for a ride.”

  He didn’t ask about Lindsey. But considering he was a good friend of the former Arizona governor who was Secretary of Homeland Security, he probably knew more about my wife than I did. I looked down, feeling my face burn.

  ***

  The three of us fit easily into his pickup, which sat high off the road. He drove down 35th Avenue past warehouses and the entrances to half-century-old subdivisions of faded ranch houses. This was Maryvale, Phoenix’s first automobile suburb, laid down starting in the late 1950s. It was aging badly, like most of the city. This was a hunter-gatherer place, and when one location was used up the people with means simply moved farther out. They left behind thousands of tract ranch-style houses that could never be rehabbed as historic homes, could usually not even justify a home-improvement loan. Maryvale would never be gentrified.

  In ten minutes, we pulled into a dilapidated shopping strip. But every store was occupied. One sign promised “celulares,” while another went with a thriving carniceria, a butcher store. One of the ubiquitous 99-cent stores held down the far end. Peralta parked directly in front of the yerberia.

  For most of its history, Phoenix had not been a Hispanic city—that was Tucson, where roots went back to the Spanish conquest, even though an Irishman technically founded the Old Pueblo. Phoenix was the brash newcomer, established by Civil War veterans and assorted fortune seekers in the late 19th century. Whi
le it always had a Mexican-American population with its own proud history, the city maintained much of its Southern roots into the early 1960s. Then it started to change with enormous population growth from the Midwest. Tucson was culturally Hispanic and old. Phoenix was mostly Anglo and new.

  That distinction started to change with the massive migrations from Mexico and Central America that began in the 1980s. Millions of new immigrants came through Phoenix and many stayed, working in restaurant kitchens, landscaping services, and building houses. If that wasn’t enough to destabilize the old Mexican-American population, the city razed many of the poor but historic old barrios to expand the airport. City Hall didn’t give a thought to bulldozing Santa Rita Hall, where Cesar Chavez began his hunger strike in 1972. All that was left there now was the Sagrado Corazón church, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The large Hispanic population moved into Maryvale as the Anglos bought new houses on the city fringes. As a result, Maryvale, the whitest of suburbs in the 1960s, was now almost entirely Latino. The same thing was happening all over the older parts of the city except in the Anglo historic districts. If you hadn’t been in Phoenix since 1980, you’d be amazed at the Spanish-language signage alone—including that marking the ubiquitous herbal healing stores called yerberias.

  This one proclaimed its name in red letters across the plate glass, promising yerbas medicinales de todo del mundo y articulos religiosos. Herbal remedies from around the world and religious articles. We walked in to the sound of a long electronic beep, a sweet scent, and found a typical yerberia: long counters backed by floor-to-ceiling shelves of colorful devotional candles, and containers and bottles of all shapes and sizes. Incense was burning in a metal box at the feet of a statue of Jesus.

  “This is amazing!” Robin said.

  A woman about my age with long black hair and a white blouse ran to Peralta and gave him a hug. Magdalena was the owner, apparently, and introductions were made. She and Peralta conversed in rapid-fire Spanish, of which I could make out about every third word. I heard “pall of death,” but realized they were talking about the Phoenix economy. Which was true enough: a city that lived by real estate and low-wage jobs was now slowly dying. Her sons and nephews had worked in construction and now they couldn’t find any work. Her daughter had bought four rental houses during the boom and had now lost them all to the bank. She asked Peralta if he wanted a tarot reading and he declined.