Concrete Desert

by Jon Talton

  “If you knew this, why didn’t you arrest him?”

  “Look, Ivory Tower, I didn’t know. Nobody knew until Felix Hernandez got scared and came to us. I knew it was the work of one man. But he was smart, careful. No fingerprints. Not even a partial. He didn’t seem to have any patterns, except for choosing young women with fair hair who were alone. And he didn’t make any of the mistakes that solve most cases, like getting his car ticketed sitting outside the murder scene. No, we didn’t have squat until Felix started singing.”

  “But Evans never went to jail.”

  “Let me tell you something. We went to his place, a little apartment off Seventh Street and Garfield. Nobody home. We stake it out. And over the radio, we hear a call about a knife fight down in the Deuce. Then they broadcast the victim’s name: Eddie Evans.”

  He ate a forkful of enchilada. “I guess I could have figured it was a kind of rough justice, like the God of the Old Testament reaching out to get this bastard. But I didn’t. I wanted him so bad. I wanted to know. Know why he did it. How he got away from us all those years. It was the worst night of my life.”

  “Was any of this ever put in a report?”

  He shook his head. “I wrote it all down and the county attorney took the reports. I never saw them again. Other cases came along. Life goes on.”

  “And Stokes?”

  “Not connected.”

  My day was getting a lot worse. “How can you be so sure?”

  “I know. It sure as hell wasn’t Eddie Evans, because I had him on ice the week she disappeared.”

  “That wasn’t in his file.”

  “‘His file,’” Harrison Wolfe spat out. “‘The report.’ That’s why I left the cops. We were turned into bureaucrats and pencil pushers. Where some teacher”—he looked at me hard—“can walk in and claim to clear old cases, working for the sheriff no less. Let me ask you something, bookworm. Do you trust Napoléon’s Correspondence if you’re a historian?”

  “No,” I stuttered, surprised. “He was writing from Saint Helena with his reputation in mind.”

  “Well, there you go. And that’s what most cops are doing: covering ass. I never wrote an arrest report on the little creep because I couldn’t charge him. Today, he’d have a lawyer and the ACLU down our throats. Back then, we had some discretion. Some latitude.”

  “But Stokes had the same MO as the other girls.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “The Stokes girl was raped and strangled and dumped in the desert. But not the way Eddie would do it.” He held up a hand. “Don’t go asking for the report. Nobody ever wrote down the way Eddie mutilated and tortured those girls before he killed them. He was a monster.”

  “So Eddie wasn’t the Creeper? Or the Creeper didn’t kill Stokes, either?”

  “Eddie may have been the Creeper,” Wolfe said. “I think he was. But neither one killed Rebecca.

  “You see”—he polished off the food and wiped his face roughly with a napkin—“the worst thing an investigator can do is confuse his instincts with his prejudices. You work a hundred murder cases and they’re all the same. So you’re tempted to think murder one hundred and one is the same, too. That’s where you screw up. Because there’re a million reasons why people end up dead. A million secrets behind those dead eyes. And nothing keeps secrets better than the desert.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Rebecca Stokes was killed by somebody she knew.”

  ***

  I drove with no destination, just to be moving. Out to the Squaw Peak Parkway and north toward the mountains in the clot of rush-hour traffic. I called Peralta on the cellular phone, but his secretary said he had gone to a Mounted Posse awards dinner. I tried Julie at my house and at her home, but there was no answer. Lindsey’s voice answered her phone, but it was only her answering machine. I didn’t leave a message.

  Harry Truman said the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know. Harrison Wolfe had lived some of that history. And I was drowning in what I didn’t know. I didn’t know who had killed Rebecca Stokes. I didn’t know who had killed Phaedra Riding or where she had been for the month since she disappeared. I didn’t know why Phaedra’s killer would want to copy what he thought was the MO of the Stokes case. I didn’t know why Greg Townsend was dead or how that was related to Phaedra. And I didn’t know the secrets that the desert was hiding from me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The phone rang at 1:45 the next morning. It was Julie.

  “David,” she said. “Do you know I really love you? I’ve always loved you.”

  “I—”

  “You are so kind, David. You turned into such a fine man. I never doubted it. I just haven’t had much experience with men like you in my life.” She laughed unhappily.

  “Where are you, Julie?”

  “I have to go away, my love. Please don’t ask questions. I think we’re in great danger. I have to do this, David.”

  There was something in her voice—a peculiar trill.

  “Do what, Julie?”

  “David, please don’t ask right now. We’re in danger.”

  I asked her why we were in danger.

  “Phaedra’s dead.” Her voice went up a notch. “Greg is dead. I can’t talk now.”

  “Julie, Peralta is not going to like this. You could be a material witness in a capital murder case.”

  “Fuck him.” She laughed. “I’ll be in touch.”

  The line went dead.

  I replaced the receiver as if it were a live bomb. My heart was beating hard. The dread of the early-morning phone call. I walked through the darkened house and checked the doors and windows. I tried to laugh aloud about the Creeper—what a silly, melodramatic name—but the house swallowed up the sound. Outside, the street was silent and deserted. Back in bed, the sheets smelled of Julie. Maybe around 5:00 A.M., I fell asleep.

  ***

  I got downtown around 4:00 P.M. Peralta was on the phone when I reached his office, but he waved me in. I scanned the Republic on his desk: lots of crime news, but nothing about Phaedra or Greg Townsend. A few minutes later, he hung up.

  His jaw clenched and unclenched as I told him about Julie.

  “I’m going to get a warrant.” He snatched up the phone.

  “Mike, she was at work. It would have been a neat trick if she could have driven to Sedona, murdered Townsend—with a twelve-gauge shotgun, no less—and gotten back to work, but I don’t see it.”

  He twirled the receiver in his massive hands. “Did you check?”

  “No,” I said. “I thought I was off the case, or ‘never on it,’ as you put it.”

  “Check,” he said. Then, into the receiver: “Melinda, I want you to find Judge Garcia—I know he flew to Crested Butte to gamble this weekend—and draw up a warrant for him to sign on Julie Riding.” He gave her the file number so she could find Julie’s address and Social Security number. “If you don’t hear from me in the next two hours, get the warrant signed and BOLO her. Murder one.”

  “Mike, I’ve been sleeping with her,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “That could lead to a mistrial.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Check. You’re a sworn sheriff’s deputy, whatever fucked-up personal history you have.”

  “And you like to fuck with people.”

  He barely—barely—cracked a smile.

  “Do I get paid for doing this?” I asked.

  “You get reimbursed with my goodwill,” Peralta said. “And considering everything that’s happened, you’re probably going to need it.”

  “I talked to Harrison Wolfe yesterday.”

  Peralta sat up straight. “Wolfe?”

  I told him what I knew. He listened through two caffeine-free diet Cokes and then pinched the bridge of his nose. “God, I need a drink and a cigar,” he said.

  We concealed our badges and ID cards and walked over to Tom’s Tavern, which for half a century had been the meeting place of Arizona’s political elite. I didn’t ev
en know it still existed. When we walked in, I was sweating nonstop. Peralta was immaculate in his cream-colored suit, bola tie, and summer Stetson. We made our way to the back through the cool semidarkness as Peralta worked the room: a congressman here, a superior court judge there. There was a caricature of him on a wall of famous people, riding a horse, aiming a six-gun. I was happy to be nobody. When we were settled, Peralta had a Kentucky premium bourbon on the rocks and I had a martini. He clipped and lighted a Churchill, luxuriously protected from politically correct conventions out in the broad world.

  “This is an amazing place,” Peralta said. “And here I am, just a poor kid from the barrio.”

  “Who studied at the Kennedy School at Harvard.”

  He took a languid drag on the cigar. “Why does he think she was killed by someone she knew?”

  “He said the landlady found Rebecca’s door opened, unlocked, and her luggage inside. He said if she disappeared that night, she would have had to open her door. Who was she likely to do that for? Someone she knew.”

  “Or somebody impersonating a cop.”

  I looked at him through the smoke and gloom. “Wolfe also said Rebecca’s body didn’t have the mutilations found on the other Creeper killings.”

  “That’s thin,” Peralta said.

  “I think he’s probably right.”

  “Why?” Peralta waved the cigar. “None of this was in the original reports.”

  “He said the county attorney took the reports.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Peralta said. “Just another old cop trying to settle a score with his bosses.”

  “I believe him.”

  Peralta just looked at me like I was pathetic.

  “Because he was the investigating officer,” I went on. “He was there. Gut feelings count, too.”

  “Shit, here I am defending your work against you.”

  “I was sloppy, Mike. I moved too quickly on the research. I didn’t do enough to verify what I found was true. It was methodology I wouldn’t have allowed from an undergraduate. Cicero said the first law for a historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth.”

  “Oh, who knows what truth is?” he said airily, mostly to get my goat, I think.

  “Jesus, you sound like the tenure committee at San Diego State,” I said, annoyed. “I think we need to look at the case further.”

  “You’re obsessed.” Peralta finished his bourbon and motioned for another. “You do it if you want, but it’s gratis. And I have new work for you to do.”

  He knocked off an inch of fine ash and smiled a wolfish grin. “Tell me what the old son of a bitch was like.”

  ***

  Monday morning, I drove to the Phoenician. Julie’s desk was empty when I walked into the marketing office. I asked to see the supervisor and was greeted by a pleasant-looking woman with high cheekbones and bobbed blond hair. She was wearing a trim gray suit. She introduced herself as Karen Dejulio, the director of sales. When I showed her my ID, she led me into a spacious private office overlooking the unreal green of the resort’s vast golf course.

  “Deputy Mapstone, is it?” She sat opposite me in front of the desk, crossing elegant legs. “A real-life western deputy.”

  I smiled and she went on. “I moved here last year from Michigan, and everything is still new and wonderful. My God, all the places to go rock climbing—I’m seriously into the lifestyle!”

  I sunnily agreed, then asked about Julie Riding. First, she told me Julie was off today. Then, when I persisted, she told me it wasn’t the Phoenician’s policy to discuss personnel matters. I hated threatening beautiful women with search warrants, so I told her I had a mean boss—hell, that part was especially true—who wanted Julie for questioning in a case. Her smile went away, which was a loss. Then she closed the office door and came back. The elegant legs crossed again, this time the other way.

  She sighed. “I wondered how long it would take for something like this to happen, Deputy Mapstone.”

  When I said nothing, she continued. “I mean, we’ve worked with Julie over and over. We have a very good employee assistance plan, and she’s been referred to it twice. I suppose I was too indulgent.”

  “Why do you think I’m here, Ms. Dejulio?”

  “Karen, please,” she insisted. “Why, about Julie’s cocaine habit, I assume. I mean, it’s no secret, God knows. I just didn’t think it would lead to the law getting involved. I mean, frankly, it’s not as if a lot of the leading lights of Scottsdale don’t like their nose candy. The back-to-basics nineties? Yeah, right.”

  I asked her if Julie had worked straight through the day Townsend was murdered.

  “Yes, she was in at eight and stayed in the office all day,” Karen said, “although she said she had to leave for a family emergency around four that day.” I didn’t exactly feel relieved. “We specifically worked on promptness and absenteeism with Julie during her last performance evaluation.”

  “You know her sister was found murdered that day?”

  Karen Dejulio put her hand to her mouth and uttered a small gasp. “Oh, dear, I didn’t even know she had a sister. That’s horrible.”

  “Tell me about the cocaine,” I said.

  “Well, Julie had been here about six months when I took over, and it was obvious something was wrong. Her mood would change a lot. Some days her eyes just seemed rolled back in her head. And she was missing a lot of work. At first, I thought it was drinking, but then one day I caught her doing a line in the bathroom.”

  “Why didn’t you fire her?”

  “Well, she was very good when she was herself. I didn’t want to lose her. And our lawyers felt we might be open to a lawsuit if she was found to be disabled by her addiction.”

  “But this was going on for at least the last year, right?”

  “Deputy Mapstone, I think it was going on last week.”

  I left a business card with Karen Dejulio and asked her to call me if she heard from Julie. Then I walked out into the heat, feeling like a chump. What else had Julie lied to me about? Right that minute, in the harsh judgments the Arizona sun encourages, it felt like I had spent a lifetime being misled by Julie Riding. But it was hard to stay mad at her, not after all the pain she had confessed to me over the past several days. I just felt sad for her.

  I got on the cellular phone and advised Peralta that she had been at work all day the day Townsend was killed. He ordered me to see him Wednesday for a new case. He and Sharon were going to fly over to San Diego tomorrow, he said. San Diego made me think of Patty and my mood got darker still. I shook my head and drove west.

  When I pulled up at home, the front door was standing open. I jammed the Blazer into park, then pulled the Python from the glove compartment and unholstered it. I walked quickly to the side of the house and looked through a window. Inside, drawers were pulled out and shelves rummaged through. I couldn’t see anybody. Insanely, I thought about the spike in the air conditioning bill the open door would cause. I cocked the Python and edged to the door.

  I came through low and quick, then moved immediately behind the big leather chair. Nothing. Not a sound. There were papers and books all over. Somebody had given the place a real going-over, somebody with the balls to do it in the middle of the day no less. I made it room by room, checking under the bed, in the closets, behind the shower curtain. I was breathing very hard for no reason. I uncocked the revolver and walked to the front door to close it. The lock had been picked, not broken. It relatched itself with no problem. But whoever had been there didn’t want to conceal the fact.

  I dropped into the big chair and surveyed the mess. My family’s home, violated. For what? This was no burglary—the valuables, such as they were, were all still here. Someone had been looking for something.

  The phone made me jump.

  “You’re still looking where you’re not supposed to look,” came a man’s voice. It was the voice from the carport, measured and detached.

  “Who is this?” I asked stupidly.
>
  “You’re all alone in the world, Mapstone. No wife or family. No real job. Nobody’d miss you if you just disappeared into the desert. Leave it alone.”

  “Looking into what?” I demanded, but he had already hung up. And in my head, I could hear Julie’s strange trill, hear her saying, “I think we’re in great danger.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I was watering the hedges and palm trees the next morning, thinking how for the first time in my life Julie Riding had said she loved me, when an old Honda Prelude pulled up. My first jumpy thought was that the gun was inside the house. But out stepped Lindsey, looking very cool in a cotton print skirt and carrying a bag and some files. She called out, “Hey, History Shamus,” and we went in out of the heat.

  “I have the day off, and thought you might like a bagel,” she said, then, surveying the living room, added, “You’re kinda messy, Dave, not to be judgmental or anything. It just seems at odds with that orderly Virgo mind of yours.”

  “Somebody paid me a visit yesterday, looking for something. They went through every drawer and cabinet and closet, even looked under mattresses and in the crawl space of the attic. I’ve also learned the Rebecca Stokes case is still wide open.”

  She took my hand and led me into the kitchen, where she pulled out bottles of champagne and orange juice. “You put the nova lox spread on the bagels, and I’ll make mimosas,” she said. “Where were your case files?”

  “Safe. I had my briefcase and PowerBook in the Blazer.”

  Lindsey tossed her dark hair a little and popped the cork. “You are jumpy, Dave,” she said, putting a hand on my wrist. I told her about the conversation with Julie and the warning phone call—and the encounter in the carport a few weeks ago.

  “Cheers,” she said, handing me a mimosa. “You’ve landed in some bad shit somehow. Who is this Julie?”

  “We went together back in college.”

  “Did you, like, disco dance and wear platform shoes?”

  She made me smile. “I didn’t hear from her for twenty years. Then she turns up on my doorstep a few weeks ago, asking me to find her sister.”

  “Phaedra? I read your report. How did Julie even know you were back in the city?”