Concrete Desert

by Jon Talton

  I dreamed about Julie that night, dreaming in the heavy sleep that comes after a day spent in the desert heat. But whatever we said and did was forgotten in the sudden smashing of bumpers and screeching of tires out on the street. I was immediately awake. The clock read 3:30.

  My bedroom fronts the street. I could hear shouts and cursing in English and Spanish. Then threats. Then a gunshot, sharp and deep. Then another two—higher-pitched, maybe a .22.

  I dropped painfully to the floor, grabbed up the cordless phone, and dialed 911. Talking to the dispatcher, I crawled over to the window and cautiously lifted one blind. They were gone, not a body left behind, not a trace. Just the vivid white circle of the streetlight. Four minutes had passed. I explained three times to the 911 operator that I hadn’t seen the incident, only heard it. I told her it wasn’t necessary for an officer to make contact.

  When I was growing up in this neighborhood, even in the turmoil of the 1960s, it had seemed the safest place in the world. The biggest worry for parents was the traffic on Seventh Avenue. Now there were no safe places. I pulled on some shorts, went into the garage, and pulled a dusty, slender box out of a carton I had brought back from San Diego, along with my books and lecture notes. Inside was a Colt Python .357 with a four-inch barrel and ammunition. When I was a deputy, this had been my pride and joy—“one of the finest handguns in the world,” Peralta had pronounced—and had cost about a month’s worth of paychecks. It had less usefulness for a college professor. I hadn’t seen the revolver for a month, since I qualified at the range to get my deputy credentials and keep Peralta off my back. I took the box back inside, turned out the light, and listened a long time in the darkness until sleep came again.

  Chapter Six

  Phaedra Riding’s apartment sat fifty feet back from Hayden Road in south Scottsdale, on the second floor of one of the cookie-cutter stucco complexes that popped up around the city back in the 1970s. The front door faced a courtyard, with its pool, landscaping, and ornamental lights, while a rear balcony looked out on a parking lot and, beyond a stand of olive trees, the street. This part of Scottsdale lacked the moneyed glitz of the resorts and walled-off neighborhoods a few miles farther north, but it was still comfortable and pleasant. I used the key Julie had given me to let myself in.

  The place was gently disheveled, clothes and books strewn about, and it had that expectant smell of pricey perfumes and broken-in denim that you find in the apartments of some young women. A pile of old mail was on the desk—nothing but some bills and advertisements. The room was dominated by a watercolor from a Santa Fe artist. Several gorgeous pieces of Acoma and Santa Clara pottery sat under a light sheen of dust on a shelf. In one corner was a music stand, chair and a cello case. Monochromatic Scandinavian furniture: tasteful, minimalist, and expensive. Not exactly like my apartment when I was twenty-eight—or now.

  Back in the bedroom, a queen-sized bed was neatly made. More clothes were piled onto a wicker basket. She had photos of Julie and her parents on the bedside table, as well as a paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged. I whispered the book’s first line in my head: “Who is John Galt?” I picked carefully through drawers, looked under her bed, pulled up the mattress. The closet was full of clothes and two pieces of luggage, both empty. The bathroom was spotless, but if she was off with a new lover, as Peralta was so sure, she’d left her diaphragm and a partly used tube of spermacide in the medicine chest.

  I closed the cabinet gently enough to hear a movement on the carpet behind me, then to see a shadow against the wall. I’d like to say I didn’t jump.

  “No, you get back,” she yelled, holding out a small can of Mace.

  “Wait, I’m a cop,” I said, the words sounding so strange to me. She stepped back to the bedroom door. “I’m going to reach in my pocket for an ID.” I opened up the wallet with my star and identification. She read it, compared my face with the one on the ID card, and reluctantly put the Mace down.

  She was not Phaedra, but she looked the way I might imagine Phaedra in, say, fifteen years. She was slim and fairly tall, wore a tailored charcoal gray suit, its skirt cut above the knees. Her strawberry blond hair fell to just above her shoulders, and her fine, high cheekbones had a heavy dusting of freckles. She stood, wary, watching me with green eyes.

  “Mapstone,” she said. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Welsh.”

  “Ah. You look more like a college professor than a deputy,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I might ask you the same thing,” I said. “And I will. But I’d like to know who you are.”

  “I’m Phaedra’s boss,” she said. “Susan Knightly. I run the photo studio where Phaedra was working. She’s my assistant.”

  She dug into her shoulder bag and handed me a business card:

  “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Susan Knightly asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Phaedra’s sister filed a missing person’s report.”

  “Julie,” she said, with something untranslatable in those green eyes. “I know about that. Have you found her?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve been watering her plants, keeping an eye on the place. Phaedra had given me a key.”

  That struck me as odd. Why hadn’t Julie told me this?

  “Do you know where Phaedra is?” I asked.

  “No idea,” she said. “She told me she might need to take a few days to take care of some business, and she asked me if I’d water her plants. Then I didn’t hear a word from her. I’ve been worried, but I didn’t know what else to do but wait, since Julie went to the police and all.”

  “That’s how she put it? ‘Take care of some business’?” She nodded. “Did Phaedra seem different, upset?”

  “She was a creative person, very tightly wound. But, yeah, she seemed, you know, strung out about something.”

  “But no idea what?”

  “No,” she said. “Here, help me water.” We went to the kitchen and filled a couple of pitchers. “Give the cactus just a shot. Give the ivies lots of water.”

  “What kind of an employee was she?” I asked, moving over to one shelf of greenery.

  “Very conscientious. Very hardworking. Being a photographer’s assistant can be real shit work, pardon my French. But Phaedra really worked.”

  I asked Susan Knightly about her photo business.

  “You have to do a little of everything to survive in this town. Some PR, some freelance for Phoenix Magazine, advertising, social scene. I don’t do weddings and babies, if that’s what you mean.” She examined me to see if I was a philistine, but declined to share the verdict. “I had a show at the Gilbert Gallery in Scottsdale earlier this year.”

  I nodded, then asked, “Do you have any reason to believe Phaedra might have been a victim of foul play?”

  “Of course I do,” she said, her voice gathering intensity. “That’s such a stupid cop question. Look at the newspaper every day: driveby shootings, kidnappings and rapes, random killings. My neighbor was mugged a week ago in broad daylight. An attractive young woman just doesn’t disappear like this.”

  “My boss thinks she’s off with a new boyfriend. She has a history of that, you know.”

  “Tell your boss I think he’s a pig,” she said. Then her face softened. “Phaedra really wants to be a photographer. It really bit her, and she’s worked hard. Has a good eye, too. Tell me why she would just walk away from the chance I was giving her, no matter how sexy a new boyfriend might be?”

  It was a good question, and I didn’t have an answer for it yet.

  I left Susan Knightly to finish watering the plants while I knocked on doors. I had deliberately come early to find people at home, but the neighbors had only a passing knowledge of Phaedra. Such was the norm in a transient city.

  “She’s sure loud when she has sex,” the woman next door told me, blushing. “Makes me envious.” But the woman didn’t even know Phaedra’s name, much less actually see any men or realize she�
�d been gone for weeks. “I thought it was pretty quiet lately,” she allowed. The landlord said Ms. Riding had paid her rent three months ahead, and that was really all he cared about. By the time I left, I had again become accustomed to flashing my badge to get people to talk to me.

  I had to move on. Class was at 10:30, but it went by quickly: lecture and discussion on the origins of the Civil War, two chapters to read before Friday. By the time I drove the three miles from Phoenix College to the Sheriff’s Office downtown, the temperature was well over 110 degrees. I regretted that I had worn a blue shirt, and I ran the Blazer’s air-conditioning on high to make some of the sweat disappear.

  I spent the afternoon in Central Records, working on the Stokes case. If Rebecca Stokes had run into a serial killer nicknamed “the Creeper,” who was he and what might have happened to him?

  I’m not great with computers, but a young deputy named Lindsey showed me how I could set up search parameters to comb the database for certain kinds of offenders from that era.

  Lindsey had straight black hair, pale skin, a small gold stud in her left nostril, and very shapely legs set off by sheer black panty hose and a black miniskirt. She was pretty, but with a look of constant sardonic detachment. She asked why I wasn’t smiling, and I said, “I’m smiling inside.” She adjusted her oval tortoiseshell glasses and said, “There are no ironic deputies.” Then she smirked at me, and we became fast friends.

  We looked for men with convictions for murder, assault, or rape, along with ones convicted of breaking and entering, who might have been in Phoenix in the late 1950s. We checked files from MCSO, the Phoenix Police Department, the Arizona Department of Corrections, and NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. By four o’clock, we had built a program to look for what we wanted. While Lindsey ran the computer, I looked the old-fashioned way, through my cache of records over at the old courthouse and in the microfilm of old newspapers. All this was an imprecise exercise, dealing with old data and a hundred variables, but it was information Peralta would want.

  ***

  Wednesday night, I had dinner by myself at a little Cuban place off Camelback Road. I read Lindsey’s report and sipped a Negra Modelo from the bottle. Then, full and comfortable, I went back into the heat and drove home.

  I turned onto my street just as the digital clock on the Blazer’s dash turned a phosphorescent green 10:00. The houses nearby were dark, the only sign of life being the sound of wind chimes across the street. When I was growing up, we all knew our neighbors. On the west was Mrs. Street, a widow who gave chocolate-chip cookies to the neighborhood kids. On the east were the Calhouns—I’d had a mammoth crush on Kathy Calhoun. Across the street were the Jarvises and the Herolds and old man Goodman—he hated it when we kids made noise. They were all gone now. I couldn’t tell you who my neighbors were. For ten years after my grandmother’s death, I had rented the house, returning only rarely. That seemed to have been enough time for the block to become a stranger to me.

  Into the carport, out into the heat. I was in that happy, sleepy state after a good dinner, and looking forward to reading Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking—I was about halfway through it, and it was riveting, moving; a stunning work. Not the kind of impenetrable mess history professors are encouraged to write nowadays. Oh well. I could always work for Mike Peralta. I closed up the Blazer and walked toward the back door.

  He must have been hiding in the oleander to the east of the carport, because I never saw him. I only felt it when he hit me hard on the back of the neck. My knees just gave out and I instantly wanted to throw up. I didn’t even think of fighting back. For what seemed like several minutes, I couldn’t even feel my arms and legs.

  “I could kill you right here, hero,” he hissed in my ear, and I felt a gun barrel, surprisingly cold, considering the hot night, press against the side of my face. I was beyond coherent thoughts. I was scared as hell. “Some fucking cop you are.” He had very bad breath. “You’re in way over your head.” A sharp kick in my side. “The message is: ‘Back away.’ Back away. Get the message, or I can find you again.”

  That was all I heard before I passed out.

  Chapter Seven

  The first time I ate a plate of Sharon Peralta’s trademark chicken enchiladas was fifteen years ago. I had worked my last shift as a deputy sheriff; I was a freshly minted Ph.D. in history, with a new job at a midwestern college; I was anticipating living away from hot, dry Phoenix for the first time in my life, and I ate way too much. Now, Friday night, I was still hurting from the ignominious ass-kicking of two nights before, and our conversation about life, work, and Phoenix was nonstop. But I still managed to polish off four of those wonderful enchiladas. I helped clear the table while Sharon and Mike fussed; then Mike steered me into the study for cigars and cognac.

  The Peraltas had an airy new house in far north Phoenix, situated just below some of the low, bare mountains that once sat nameless and secluded well outside the city limits. While most of the house reflected Sharon’s careful touch, the study was cluttered with western furniture, a couple of knockoff Remington sculptures, three walls of books, more photos and awards, and a very large oak gun cabinet. This was Mike’s room. He went to his humidor, extracted two large dark brown cigars, and gave me one.

  “Anniversario Padron,” he said, cutting it for me. “Make sure you light it evenly. Let the smoke waft across your palate.”

  Sharon, wearing blue jeans and a white cotton short-sleeved blouse, her long black hair pulled over one shoulder, sat opposite us with a glass of white wine. “If I haven’t left him over this cigar habit, I guess we’re together for life,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  “You know you love this, honey,” Mike Peralta said, puffing and rolling the cigar as he lit it.

  “I think it has interesting Freudian undertones,” she said, sniffing.

  Mike and Sharon had been childhood sweethearts. By the time I met Mike, they had been married nearly five years. Now they had two grown kids and managed to make a good life for themselves. God knows, it couldn’t have been easy living with Mike, and I knew they came close to breaking up while Mike and I were partners years ago—but somehow they had made it.

  If Mike had barely changed, Sharon had become nearly unrecognizable from the person I knew fifteen years ago. Then, she was a pudgy, shy social worker who was fighting her husband about continuing her schooling. I guess she won, because she went on to get her doctorate in psychology, go into private practice, write a popular book on eating disorders, and, for the past two years, host a radio psychologist show on a local station. Dr. Sharon was a minor celebrity now, poised, polished, and aerobicized. Another thing that struck me was how Sharon had a calming influence on Mike. His coiled anger seemed subdued that night, his mood almost playful.

  I sat back on the brown leather sofa, dragged on the cigar, and felt peaceful. My ribs still hurt like hell, though. I hadn’t told Peralta about the encounter in the carport. I couldn’t say exactly why. I guess I felt stupid for being so careless. Not only was Peralta a kind of big-brother figure to me, but he was my old self-defense instructor. I couldn’t bear to admit to him that I had been on the losing end of a fight.

  I’d come to in the carport maybe half an hour after I’d passed out, with a big tomcat licking my face and purring at me. I was covered in sweat and my head felt like I had been through a week-long binge of drinking bad whiskey. I pulled myself into the house, locked up behind me, and thought about what had happened and why. I wasn’t as scared as I was surprised, and then angry, and then embarrassed. Working the streets for four years as a patrol deputy, I had seen plenty of violent situations, especially the family fights where the cops are target number one, and I had learned to take care of myself. But it was clear that years of the soft, safe life of academia had settled into me far more than I wanted to admit.

  As to the why: I didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t imagine my work on the Stokes case mattering to anyone. I doubted it was some Marxist
historian trying to settle an intellectual score with me; they had gotten me kicked off the faculty already. So it had to involve Phaedra. I hadn’t been prepared to draw a conclusion Wednesday night, and I still wasn’t. I’d called Julie Riding the next morning to see if she was okay, but she was distracted with work and we didn’t talk long. I didn’t tell her about the attack, either.

  “So when are you going to bring me Stokes, signed, sealed, and delivered?” Peralta asked.

  “Soon,” I said. “Tell me why you tossed this case my way?”

  “No,” Sharon interjected. “No more work talk. I am sick to death of work talk.”

  “You do shrink talk,” Peralta protested through a plume of cigar smoke.

  “Not tonight, my love,” she said. “We’re going to talk about David.”

  I shifted uncomfortably and nursed the cognac.

  “Mike tells me Julie Riding has come back into your life,” Sharon said. I nodded and told her about the search for Phaedra.

  “What’s Julie like now? What’s she doing?”

  “Everybody changes,” I said. “She’s not the same woman I knew twenty years ago.”

  “I bet she’s gotten old and ugly,” Peralta said.

  “You are so low,” Sharon said, then turned back to me. “I don’t know if I should say this. I never thought Julie was right for you, David. Too immature, too insecure. You two were so different. You gave a lot more than you got.”

  “That was a long time ago, Sharon. I have no illusions about Julie. I just told her I’d help her find her little sister, Phaedra.”

  “That’s a pretty name,” Sharon said.

  “Ahhh.” Mike puffed. “She’s just run off with some boyfriend, or to get a tattoo or some Doc Martens, or whatever the hell it is they do now. Probably has a ring in her nose.”

  “Not from the pictures I saw,” I said.

  “And where has Phaedra gone?” Sharon asked.