Concrete Desert

by Jon Talton

  “Julie.” Peralta waved a little wave. He seemed uncharacteristically awkward.

  “Hello, Mike. Just like old times, isn’t it?” She ran a hand through her tangled brown-blond hair and padded into the kitchen. Peralta arched an eyebrow at me and nodded toward the living room.

  “Where were you yesterday morning when I called you on the cell phone?” Peralta sat heavily into the sofa.

  “I went up to Sedona to see Phaedra’s old boyfriend. I thought he might have a clue as to where she was.”

  “And what made you do that?”

  “What’s going on, Mike?” I began, but his look caught me short. “He called me the night before.”

  Peralta sighed heavily. “Greg Townsend was found dead this morning.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, David. Murdered. His cleaning lady found him this morning in the bedroom at his place in Sedona. He’d apparently been tortured with a raw electrical chord before he was given the business end of a twelve gauge. The Coconino County deputies found your name and phone number written on a pad on his desk. And naturally, they wanted to know what a Maricopa County deputy had been doing on their turf.”

  I sat carefully in the leather easy chair. I told Peralta what Townsend had told me.

  “Goddamn it, David, I told you to stay out of this case!” He was headed to the blowup point, which I didn’t want to see.

  “It wasn’t anything but a missing persons case when I talked to Townsend, and you gave me permission to look into that. Remember?”

  Julie walked in with coffee for Peralta and herself and a diet Coke for me. I patted her hand.

  “Julie, sit.” It was Peralta. “I’m really sorry about your sister. But I have to ask you this. Where were you yesterday before David brought you downtown?”

  “Is this an interrogation, Mike?” She tossed her hair a bit and sat opposite me. Her eyes were red and puffy.

  Peralta sipped the coffee. “Good coffee,” he said, then: “It can be if you want. Should I read you your rights?”

  “Wait a minute, Mike,” I said. “I picked her up at the Phoenician, where she works.”

  I turned to Julie and said, “Greg Townsend was found murdered.” Peralta shot me a dirty look.

  “I didn’t kill him, Mike, if that’s what you’re asking,” Julie said. “Not that I hadn’t thought about it, the way he treated Phaedra.”

  “Julie! Jesus.”

  Peralta said, “I think you should come downtown with me and talk to us about this.”

  “Are you arresting me, Mike? Is that easier than looking for the son of a bitch who murdered my sister?”

  He finished the coffee and stood. “David will be happy to drive you down when you two, uh, finish here.”

  ***

  I was supposed to lecture at Phoenix College that afternoon. Instead, I canceled class to take Julie back to Madison Street. Not that I had taken any time to prepare the lecture. Not that I had made much progress on anything. I was no closer to selling the house than I had been two months ago. I was no closer to getting a new job. What I had accomplished was to land in this strange little drama with characters out of my past—my old partner, my old girlfriend. And the drama had a body count that was rising.

  I spent a frustrating hour being interrogated by two young detectives from the Harquahala task force, who wanted to argue over every sentence in my report on Phaedra. One kept reminding me that he had a master’s degree.

  They went away, and I logged into the sheriff’s computer and read a fragmentary report from the Coconino County deputies on Greg Townsend, who was now neither vibrating nor channeling. It sounded very ugly. Blood on the walls, literally. And the place was just isolated enough that nobody was likely to have heard a thing. Suspect number one in Phaedra’s murder was dead himself, leaving nothing. Maybe the Harquahala task force would make sense of it. Maybe I could let it all go. Let Julie make another statement, straighten out her whereabouts yesterday. And I could get back to my life.

  “Hello, History Shamus.” It was Lindsey. Her black miniskirt was even shorter than usual. She looked me over. “You look like you were out all night. I hope sex was involved.”

  I could feel the blood rushing to my face. She gave a me conspiratorial smile. “Way to go, Dave.” I showed her the report from Sedona.

  “Shit,” she whispered. “He pissed somebody off. Execution city. Are you involved in this?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “He’s some guy who dated the little sister of an old friend of mine. The little sister turned up dead yesterday.”

  “Phaedra,” Lindsey said. I nodded.

  “I saw the report come through. Neat name. The daughter of Minos.”

  I smiled at her. “Lindsey, you are always full of surprises.”

  “I’ve read Racine,” she said with an endearing smugness. “This Phaedra found a world of trouble, too. It’s been assigned to the Harquahala task force.”

  I nodded.

  “Was she turning tricks?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s one of the Harquahala killings.”

  Lindsey looked at me quizzically.

  “I know this sounds nuts, Lindsey. But something about this isn’t right. Peralta called me out to the scene yesterday to identify Phaedra’s body. And it was like she had just been murdered.”

  “One would think that would be enough,” Lindsey said.

  “Her body, the crime scene, they had been”—I searched for the right word—“‘arranged.’ Like serial-killer performance art. It was the same way the bodies were found back in the late 1950s.”

  “You’re getting weird on me, Dave.”

  “You read the reports. You’ll see it.”

  There was a detective standing in the doorway. “Mapstone.” He cocked his head toward the hall. “Chief Peralta wants you.” He turned and walked away.

  Lindsey pulled me close to whisper, “I’m glad you’re not one of those knuckle-draggers.” Her dark shoulder-length hair was very soft.

  Chapter Twelve

  Peralta hunched down in his big chair, head propped on his hands, staring at a can of caffeine-free diet Coke, gnawing his cuticle. He didn’t look at me when I came in.

  Then, in a little high-pitched sneer, he said, “‘Oh, gee, Sharon, Julie and I are just friends now.’”

  “We are,” I said. “Sometimes things happen between friends, especially during times of stress.” My head was throbbing. I sat down. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “It is my business, since you are a Maricopa County deputy,” Peralta said. “And you’ve really stepped in some shit here. Two bodies in two days. Julie can’t account for her whereabouts when Townsend was killed. And when I come by to ask you about it, she’s climbing out of your goddamned bed. I thought I’d been sent back twenty years in time.”

  “It was a case you didn’t give a shit about, Mike. While we’re digging up unfortunate quotes of the past month, I recall a certain chief deputy saying something like ‘Phaedra’s just shacking up with some guy and she’ll turn up.’ Now you’re acting like I somehow created this situation.”

  His eyes darkened visibly and I knew I was in for it. But he just sighed and leaned back in his chair. Up came his legs, and his fine lizard-skin boots claimed the desktop.

  “I suppose you have a hypothesis?” he asked.

  “I thought this belonged to the task force.” I didn’t have a clue.

  “It does, for now. But Townsend complicates things. If he was Phaedra’s lover, it’s hard to believe it was just a coincidence. There were thousands of dollars’ worth of art and electronics in his house up there, and it was all left. This was no robbery gone wrong. Maybe big sister decided to give paybacks to little sister’s nasty-boy lover.”

  “Wait a minute.” My head was spinning. I vowed never to take another drink as long as I lived. “When was Townsend murdered?”

  “Best guess until the lab work comes back is yester
day afternoon. Probably not long after you left.”

  “So you’re saying Julie already knew Phaedra was dead, drove at ninety miles an hour to Sedona to ice this guy, turned around and drove at ninety miles an hour to get back to the hotel so she could be there when I told her about finding her sister’s body?”

  Peralta’s face tightened. “I don’t know what I think,” he said. “Something’s not right about this, David.”

  “Have you gotten lab work back on Phaedra?”

  Peralta shook his head. “The medical examiner takes his time because he knows this thing is going to be seen by everybody, including the feds. Hell, it only happened half a mile from the La Paz County line, so I’ve got this little-town Buford Pusser busting my chops. And it’s only a matter of time before the Republic starts doing more on this serial killer than the isolated stories about the body of a suspected prostitute turning up in the desert.”

  My stomach did a little free fall. “What did the evidence technicians find?”

  Peralta looked disgusted. “They didn’t find dick.”

  “The car? Blue Nissan Sentra?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  I walked over to his little refrigerator and got a diet Coke. I sipped it cautiously. “Mike, answer me this: How many times before did your Harquahala killer call the Communications Center to say where a body could be found?”

  “None.”

  “Have the others been this close to La Paz County?”

  “No, no, goddamn it. But what does that prove? Green River crossed county lines. Ramirez did Orange County and L.A. County—hell, even San Francisco. None of these guys can read a map ’cause they’re too busy talking to Satan or their neighbor’s terrier.”

  “And did the MO of the body dump jibe?”

  Peralta sighed again.

  “It didn’t, did it?”

  “We can’t be sure,” Peralta said. “He changes his routine every time. He’s not as ritualistic as some I’ve seen. Look, David, even if she wasn’t turning tricks, we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. By your own report, Phaedra answered personal ads, had lots of men in her life. Who knows who she met out there.”

  “Come on, Mike! Most people who answer personal ads don’t end up dead. You know this isn’t related. You’re just letting this thing run on bureaucratic momentum. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to group some homicides so when you get your Harquahala killer, you’ll have a higher clearance rate.”

  “Okay, hotshot. What’s your theory?”

  I sat back down and sipped the cold drink. “I don’t have one yet. But I have a strange feeling about it.”

  Peralta looked at me.

  “She was meant to be found. Most body dumps, the killer hopes the victim won’t be found. This guy calls nine-one-one and gives directions. And she was meant to be found in a certain way, just like those women forty years ago.”

  Peralta threw up his hands. “This shit again.”

  “Hear me out,” I said. “So he’s a media junkie. He read about Stokes, saw you and me on TV. Wanted to make a point.”

  “What point?” Peralta fairly shouted. “Why would he even know you knew Phaedra from Adam? And how do we know he didn’t grab her weeks before the story broke about the Stokes case?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know yet.”

  ***

  Two days passed. Julie and I holed up at my house like two hermits in winter. Only we were hiding from the sun and the heat and our own heartbreaks. We made love and held each other. It was both familiar and strange, as if we had always been together and yet we were only touching copies of our sensual selves from long ago. The oleanders and citrus trees protected us from the world for a while.

  We talked more. Julie slowly filled in some of the blanks of her life: She married a lawyer named Royce. He beat her up at least once a month. They went to a lot of parties and did a lot of cocaine. They had a daughter. When Julie finally grew sick of the beatings and the husband’s affairs, she sued him for divorce. Royce got custody of the daughter, Mindy, after a protracted fight. “He went to law school with the judge, for God’s sake,” she said. Then a couple of aimless years—“I went kind of crazy when I lost Mindy”—spent with a succession of bad-news lovers. Then some therapy. Now, she was trying to get her life back together, maybe get the court to modify the custody award. And was dealing with the death of her younger sister. There was nothing for me to do but listen.

  At night, I slept fitfully, the .357 just under the bed, the outside noises casting sinister echoes. Julie burrowed deep against me, pulling my arm across her body, nesting her feet against my legs. Sometimes I would wake up and hear her sobbing softly, and I would hold her closer.

  In the daytime, we wandered off separately for our lonely rituals. I tried to read some, write some, keep my mind distracted. Books had never been a comfort to Julie, so she watched daytime TV and drank alone, until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Then she came and wrapped me up in her arms, trembling and sobbing.

  On Saturday, I woke up from a five-fathom-deep sleep and the other side of the bed was empty. The phone was ringing and the clock said five minutes ahead of noon. When I picked it up, the line was silent. And then a deep voice said, “Mapstone. This is Harrison Wolfe. Detective Harrison Wolfe, Phoenix PD, retired. I think we need to have a talk.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Palm Lane took me east through monotonous, declining neighborhoods of cinder-block ranch houses and lawns of dying grass. Not a dog, cat, or human ventured into the midsummer heat. Forty years ago, when Phoenix became a city of several hundred thousand nearly overnight, these homes symbolized the American dream. The vets came west to live in endless sunshine and work at places like Motorola and Sperry Rand. Builders like Del Webb and John F. Long would put them in a house for twelve thousand dollars on a VA loan.

  Block after block, mile after mile, the subdivisions took over the lettuce fields and citrus groves. Now the speed, volume, and thrift with which the houses had been thrown up was only too apparent. The old owners had long ago moved to newer neighborhoods, leaving thousands of seedy rentals, the homely ghosts of 1950s dreams. Gang graffiti sat everywhere, defiant and ugly. Cars leaked oil into yards once lovingly tended. A Sun Belt slum, crumbling and rusting and dying under the relentless sun. It salted my black mood, made me hate Phoenix all over again and vow to get out as soon as I could.

  At Twenty-fourth Street, I turned south and found the little taqueria where Harrison Wolfe had said he would meet me. It sat in an old Circle K building, another soulless cinder-block relic from “old” Phoenix. I parked the Blazer next to half a dozen low-riders. Inside, I was the only Anglo in the place. I ordered a Negra Modelo in Spanish and sat in a corner booth, feeling everyone’s eyes on me.

  When the old Anglo walked in, I knew it had to be Wolfe. The machismo in the young Mexican-American men milling around the jukebox just seemed to die, and they sullenly shrank away from him. He was tall, slender, and ramrod-straight, and he was wearing a crisp white shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. As he looked at me, I took in his craggy, sunburned face, his shock of white hair. He must have been a handsome man once, but he had cop’s eyes, narrow and searching. And although he walked stiffly, his movements held the confidence of potential violence. He sat carefully across from me, did not extend his hand or greet me in any way. When he had settled, he fixed blue eyes on me.

  “So you’re the great history professor who’s been investigating the Rebecca Stokes case.”

  “So you’re the little lady who started the great war,” I could hear Lincoln say as he greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe. I met Wolfe’s eyes, knowing that to have done so years ago would have meant a sudden visit from the sap or the club. Cold blue eyes in a face ruined by age and the sun.

  “Yes, I found some new information,” I said.

  A slender girl with black hair down to her waist brought him two shots of tequila and a plate of enchi
ladas. He downed both shots, one after another, and started eating. I drank the Negra Modelo, feeling a sour knot growing in my stomach.

  “Nobody in the department even knows you’re still alive,” I ventured. He had to be at least eighty.

  He looked at me sourly and mopped up salsa with a large tortilla.

  “I don’t want the bastards to know where I am.” He signaled for more tequila. “I would have been happy never to see another cop in my life. Just another old man tossing bread to the pigeons at Encanto Lagoon, which is all Mexicans now anyway.”

  I started to talk, but he cut me off with a look.

  “I was the first full-time homicide investigator in the Phoenix Police Department,” he said. “It’s hard to believe, but nobody now can appreciate how small the town was just a few years ago. I got my start in L.A., then came over here as a sergeant in 1950. I was a personal friend of Chief Parker. I could have done anything. But my wife had tuberculosis. The dry air was better for her. Hell, there was no smog then.”

  The young men had left, and we were alone with the smell of grease and tortillas and the soft clink of dishes in the kitchen.

  “When those girls turned up dead, we’d never had anything like that here. The patrol officers, the brass, they didn’t know what to do. Hell, we didn’t even know what we were dealing with at first. The only thing that had happened in Phoenix up to that point was Winnie Ruth Judd back in the thirties, and that was just a love triangle. When Ginger Brocato turned up in the desert, we went looking for an old boyfriend, somebody who knew her. We looked for the obvious. It only dawned on us slowly that we were dealing with a psycho who killed randomly.”

  I put the beer bottle down and studied his face. It revealed nothing.

  He went on, counting on arthritic fingers. “Ginger, Leslie Reeves, and Gloria Johnson were the work of Eddie Evans. Very good.”

  And that was more Lindsey’s work than anything, I thought.

  “Betty Moran was Evans and a partner, a little two-bit burglar named Felix Hernandez, who tagged along with Eddie one night and got in over his head.”