Arizona Dreams

by Jon Talton

  36

  A dust storm was coming in Friday night when I stepped through the door into Portland’s bar. I said hello to a few people I knew. They wanted to know if I was safe—the shooting had been on every television station and in the newspapers. I looked around the bar. Many people were dressed in artist black, giving me hope that Phoenix might become a real city. There wasn’t time to linger. I was meeting someone. There she was, sitting at a table, wearing a blouse that was as orange as her hair. She smiled as I approached. I nodded at her and sat down.

  “David,” she said, “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. Are you all right? Are you hurt? Thank God. I know you’re on leave, because of the shooting. That’s got to be routine, right? If this wasn’t justified…”

  I let the bartender bring me a Beefeater martini. Before Dana sat a full glass of white wine.

  “There’s good news,” she said. “The gas pipeline has been fixed. I won’t have to drive forever to fill up that SUV.” I said nothing, and in a moment she asked, “Do they know anything about who this man was?”

  “His name was Adam Perez,” I said. “Thirty years old. He had a record of assault and attempted murder.”

  “He was obviously the one who was blackmailing us,” she said. “Even so, it can’t feel good to kill a man.”

  I said it didn’t feel good. I watched the ice crystals float across the top of the martini glass, then took a sip.

  “David,” she went on. “I’m actually glad you asked me to meet you tonight. I wanted to thank you, of course, for saving Tom’s life. Maybe he won’t be so down on you and the Sheriff’s Office now.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed.

  “And I also wanted to explain myself a little better,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. She looked much the same way as the first time she came into my office. She had pretty green eyes, an average mouth, a weak chin. She still had butterscotch in her voice. Her hair fell to her shoulders in a respectable bob. It was the perfect voice and face for a liar. She saw me watching her and smiled at me. I watched the wind rustle the palm trees out on Central Avenue and raise dust from the light-rail construction.

  “When I couldn’t meet you at El Pedregal,” she said, “I know what you must have thought. I wanted to. I wanted to show you the blackmail letters. But I told Tom what I was doing and he forbade me to go.”

  “You don’t strike me as the kind who can be told no,” I said.

  She sipped her wine and pursed her lips. “We’re a pretty traditional family,” she said. “I had to do as he asked. He wouldn’t even let me call you again.”

  “Maybe it’s just as well,” I said. “Adam Perez came into the gallery that night, and he wasn’t browsing. I never knew if he was after you or me…”

  “Oh!” Her mouth was a perfect lipstick doughnut. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Thank God that horrible man won’t hurt anyone again. And you’ll have to forgive me if I say the same about Mister Louis Bell, who put him up to all this to ruin my husband—and when that didn’t work, to kill poor Tom.”

  “It’s a happy ending.”

  She beamed and took my hands across the table. “Yes, thank you, Professor Mapstone.”

  I was watching a blonde getting teary at the next table, describing something to a friend: the boyfriend who won’t commit, the workplace slight that she wouldn’t remember in a year. Outside the window, a homeless man struggled by, his shirt standing out in the wind.

  “Dana,” I said, “you’re still lying.”

  She let go of my hands and her smile blew off down Central.

  “We have the documents,” I said. “They make it clear that you and your husband were trying to buy the Bell property. They make it seem like a pretty desperate thing. Bell was resisting and you weren’t taking no for an answer.”

  She gave a wounded cry. Several bar patrons looked over. She stared out the window.

  “Before you tell the next set of lies, you should know that I’ve talked to Jack Fife, and he told me your husband hired a couple of men from him. He said your husband made it clear he wanted the men to put a scare into Louie Bell. Those are the same two men who assaulted me the day I went out there on your wild goose chase. He’s signed a statement. He’ll testify.”

  Dana’s profile might as well have been cut out of marble. She didn’t move. She watched the traffic snake through the construction on Central. A palm frond blew into the glass and smacked it. She didn’t react. I just let her be. I had said my part. Finally, she crumpled over and sobbed. Her back heaved and shook through the orange blouse. I made no move to comfort her. When she looked back at me, her eyes were bloated and her fair complexion had turned bright pink.

  “Look,” she said, in a flat voice. “I took a vow to honor and obey…but…but…” She sighed and wiped away tears. “I just can’t any more.” She drained her glass in a single chug and signaled for another. She said, “I can’t cover for Tom any more.”

  She pulled her chair close to me, so that we were almost knee-to-knee. “Now only the truth,” she said.

  “Dana,” I said. “You know I still work for the sheriff’s department. Anything you say to me could be incriminating. You don’t have to tell me…”

  She waved it away. “It’s time. Long past time.” She managed a smile. “And you wouldn’t hurt me, David. You were my favorite professor, remember?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “You’re a heart-breaker, David Mapstone,” she said. “You were back then, too. Didn’t even know I wanted to throw myself at you. And I was pretty then. I was thin.”

  A new glass arrived and she drank half of it. I stayed with one martini.

  “We’re deeply in debt,” Dana said. “Tom was never a particularly good businessman. And he’s a terrible gambler, but he’s addicted. He can’t stop himself. He has half a million dollars in gambling debts. So much for the values candidate.” She gave a rueful laugh.

  “When Tom had a chance to buy into Arizona Dreams, he was flat broke,” she said. “So the partnership made him a loan. It was good to have his name associated with the project. It helped them get other influential investors. And Tom Earley was going to be governor someday—everybody said it. If we could just have held our own, having a stake in Arizona Dreams would have meant everything. A good education for Madison and Noah. A good retirement for us. But Tom couldn’t stop gambling.”

  “He went to the casinos?” I asked.

  “He was way beyond gambling here,” she said. “And it would have been bad for his image. He went to high-stakes games out in north Scottsdale. They have orgies out there, too, you know. And he went to Vegas as Mister Thomas. So, anyway, at one of these games he meets this hydrologist named Earl Rice, and Earl told him about the Bell property. It’s got water under the land, a lot of it. But it’s not near anything, so it wasn’t widely known that the water was there.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why would Rice share his secret?”

  “He was as in debt as Tom, but he didn’t know Tom was in debt. Earl thought he was making a partner out of this big political leader who could help him. So they scraped together some money. They got another guy they met at the games, named Cordesman, who was a lawyer. They went in together to buy out the Bells. Only it didn’t work out that way. Harry Bell hated the developers and he never wanted to see that land sold. When he died, he had himself buried out there. Louie Bell might have been open. But after Harry died, Louie said he’d made his brother a promise not to sell. It was insane. The partners were low-balling Bell, sure, but it would have been more money than he ever had. Tom just knew if he got that land it would be appealing as a resort, or a new town. He could flip it to somebody else for a fortune.”

  She blew her nose into a cocktail napkin. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “We lost our stake in Arizona Dreams today. The investors brought in a man from Malibu. Somebody with real money, one of those rich ones you’ve never heard of. Somebody named Dimah something-or-oth
er. All the foreigners have the money now, you know. And they restructured the partnership, and Tom was out.” She corrected herself. “We’re out. All our hopes, hell.”

  I said, “So Tom hired the muscle?”

  “I didn’t know about it at the time,” she said. “I swear, David. He just wanted to scare the old man.”

  “The old man ended up dead,” I said.

  Her shoulders heaved and she started crying again. “I know,” she sobbed. “Once I would have said Tom couldn’t possibly do anything like that. Now, I don’t know. Are you married? Of course you are. How well do we know anyone, especially our husband or wife?”

  “Did Adam Perez work for Fife?”

  She shook her head. “He was another thing that crawled out from Tom’s gambling life. Tom promised to make him a partner in the deal.”

  “So more than sadism was motivating him. Why would Adam try to kill your husband?”

  “Tom was going to cut him out,” she said.

  “Why did you come to me?” I asked.

  She laughed bitterly. “I had read about you in the papers, and I thought about just looking you up and seducing you. Fulfill my old college fantasy. But I tried to make the marriage work. Then Tom started taking shots at you and Sheriff Peralta. He kept talking about you, this hippie professor who was a bad influence in the Sheriff’s Office. How ironic. He didn’t know I knew you. He wanted me to come to you with a bogus historical case that would get you out to the Bell property. He wanted to provoke some kind of incident that would put pressure on Louie Bell. If you were beaten up on Bell’s property…”

  “And it could have been used by your husband to embarrass the sheriff.”

  She nodded slowly. “Then he came up with the blackmail story. It was a lie. But, my God, I never knew you would be in any danger…”

  She took my hands. “David,” she said. “I’m so sorry! I wanted to tell you the truth. That night, when I told you I had to meet you in Carefree, I was going to tell you everything. But Tom came home early. He started quizzing me, where was I going. I blurted something out. He told me he would kill me if I told anyone. David, I believed him.”

  She stared at me, eyes bright with tears.

  “Please help me,” she pleaded.

  “OK,” I said, reading her eyes.

  And she leaned over and kissed me.

  In a few minutes I paid the bill and I walked the soccer mom to her SUV. The wind was still gusting, but the dust had passed and the night was clear and hot and evocative. I walked back toward the door to Portland’s, and to the old white Honda Prelude that was parked directly in front. I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat.

  Lindsey smiled at me and poked me in the side. “You’ve really got to stop kissing strange women, Dave.”

  I tousled her bangs. “Did you get it?”

  “Every word,” she said, patting the DVD recorder sitting on the back seat. “And,” she said, “I’ve finally met someone who lies more than my sister.”

  37

  Dana’s gray SUV pulled out of the parking garage and turned south on Central. Lindsey slipped the Prelude into drive and fell in about a block behind. Lightning shot across the eastern sky, but the wind had died down and the air only smelled vaguely of dust. The ballpark glowed under its closed roof. Thirty thousand Diamondbacks fans were inside, in the air conditioning, and until the game wound down the streets of downtown would be deserted except for a few pedicabs and cops. At Van Buren, Dana dutifully signaled, slowed, and turned right.

  “This isn’t the straight path back to the suburbs,” Lindsey said. She followed, and we drove west through the northern edge of what city boosters hopefully called the Capitol Mall district, because of its proximity to the state capitol. Once it had held some of the loveliest houses in town, including most of Phoenix’s small stock of Victorian homes. That was before the seventies and eighties, when abandonment and drug dealers had turned it into a war zone. Blocks of houses had been leveled. While other cities had been saving their painted ladies, Phoenix, so new, so much land, saw no reason. Now the area was slowly coming back, but nothing could replace the loss. On Van Buren, we passed a darkened car wash, the old bakery, a liquor store, a park fenced off as securely as a military installation, another liquor store. My old girlfriend Gretchen had an apartment near here, in a building that dated from territorial days.

  Dana crossed Nineteenth Avenue and the railroad tracks, and the street became progressively poorer. The signs changed to mostly Spanish: La Raza Motors, Llanteria Hispania, Yerberia San Francisco. But people were out on the narrow sidewalks, and appearing as dark phantoms in front of car headlights as they jaywalked. This was definitely not Dana’s part of town. After Twenty-Seventh Avenue she drove slower, and home boys in their low-slung custom Hondas buzzed around her. At Thirty-Fifth Avenue, she turned around in the parking lot of a Taco Bell. There were only five taquerias on every block in this part of Phoenix, and yet here was Taco Bell. Maybe the new migrants wanted to eat like real Americans, at a Taco Bell. On another night I would be telling all this to Lindsey. But my middle was tight with anxiety as Dana turned back onto Van Buren and headed east. Where the hell was she going? After a few blocks, she turned into an old drive-in.

  “Jimmy Jacks?” Lindsey said.

  “It was a hangout when I was a patrol deputy.”

  “I didn’t even know they had cars back then, Dave.”

  “It was a horse drive-in. A gallop-in.”

  “This is very weird,” Lindsey said, passing the drive-in, and turning into an alleyway. Indeed, here was Dana getting out in her suburban clothes from Kohl’s and walking over to the window to order a Coke. Around her were immigrant men in their cowboy hats, and young Latinas in T-shirts and miniskirts. Dana’s body language didn’t look uncomfortable. Only five minutes passed when a cream-colored vintage Porsche coupe pulled into the lot and Dana got in. Jared Malkin was driving.

  “Seems like a lot of trouble to meet your boyfriend,” Lindsey said.

  “Not if you’re going to report what happened in your meeting with Mapstone,” I said.

  This time there was no leisure driving. Malkin gunned the Porsche east on Van Buren and Lindsey had to goose the Prelude to keep him in sight. He raced through the yellow light at Nineteenth Avenue veering north and Lindsey blew through the red as her tires screeched in protest at the tightness of the turn. He turned again on Roosevelt and Lindsey followed, letting space gather between the cars. In a few blocks, the little cream car did another of its sudden tacks.

  “He’s going into that alley,” I said. Lindsey shut off her lights and pulled to the curb. We sat in silence on the otherwise deserted street. A few abandoned shopping carts sat nearby.

  “You’re pretty smart for a propeller-head.”

  “You’d better hope I’m right,” she answered quietly.

  I watched cars cross in the distance at Grand Avenue, and soon enough time passed that I began to worry. But then a creamy blur came back out of the alley with his lights off, came in our direction.

  “Get down!”

  We both tried to scrunch down around the console. Neither of us had the presence of mind to simply drop the seat back.

  “This is pretty intimate,” I said.

  Lindsey said, “I always knew undercover work could be fun.”

  “I’ll take you under cover.”

  That would have to wait. Lindsey swung the car around, also with headlights off, and followed at a distance. Back at Nineteenth Avenue, I saw the Porsche’s taillights come on, and he turned south.

  “Now we know he’s afraid of being followed,” Lindsey said. “And he knows some basics of evasive driving.”

  I said, “Or Dana does.”

  “You’ve got a thing for that soccer mom, Dave.”

  I said, “Ma Barker was a soccer mom, too.”

  By now, we’d returned to Van Buren and once again were heading west. The road was crowded enough that we could follow by a few c
ar lengths and not be conspicuous. At Twenty-Seventh Avenue, the Porsche turned right. By the time we made the turn, it was gone.

  “There,” I said.

  They had pulled into a driveway by a gate. Lindsey drove past. After a couple of blocks she wheeled around and parked so we could watch. The car sat at the entrance to a large terminal of some sort. It stretched for what looked like a quarter of a mile, a modern warehouse with numerous doors for trucks to load and unload cargo. But it was dark and abandoned-looking. Only the white of the walls glowed out at the street. We watched as Malkin unlocked a gate, swung it open and returned to the car. They then drove across the empty parking lot and stopped the car beside a loading dock. Again, Malkin got out and disappeared inside a door. In a few minutes, one of the large loading doors came up. This time Dana left the car and entered the warehouse.

  “Are they hiding the car?” Lindsey asked.

  I watched it for a minute and said, “Maybe they’re using the headlights for illumination. Maybe the power’s off…”

  “Let’s go over,” Lindsey said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go,” she said. “I’d say this is hot pursuit. You’d rather wait all night for a warrant?”

  I thought I knew what she had in mind, and I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. We stepped out into the hot night and sprinted across Twenty-Seventh Avenue.

  “You’re obviously burning off a lot of frustration from being cooped behind a computer,” I said, trying to keep up. We ran through the gate and made a dash for the side of the building. Out here we were exposed, but fortunately the vast parking lot was dark. Lindsey was wearing one of her customary black-top, black-jeans outfits, so she was mostly camouflaged, except for her fair skin. I did the best I could, wearing khakis and a black polo shirt. Once against the wall, we moved toward the open door. By this time, I was wearing what felt like an inch of sweat on the surface of my skin.

  I caught Lindsey by the shoulder. “What are you going to say if they’re standing just inside that door?” I whispered.