Concrete Desert

by Jon Talton

  “None of this had to happen,” the voice said. “If that Mexican sheriff and that goddamned history teacher hadn’t gotten back into it. In my day…” He chuckled, an odd, unsettling rumble. “Well, in my day, you knew what would happen.”

  Silence. A very long silence. The wind whipped against the door and made it creak. The adobe felt rough and reassuring against my hand.

  “I’ve got nothing to confess to you,” the voice went on. “You don’t scare me. You didn’t scare me forty years ago. That girl’s death was an accident. You know that. I didn’t mean to grab hold of her the way I did. It’s just that she went crazy, just like a wild animal.”

  The other man said something I couldn’t make out.

  Then the old man’s tenor rasped, “My God, I had a wife and a family. I had a law practice and standing in the community. Things were different then. She wanted too much. We could have settled things. But she wanted too much. I am so goddamned sorry it was John Henry’s niece, so goddamned sorry. I tried to make it up to him, to his son. But that’s all in the past. Killing me won’t change one minute of it.”

  I unholstered the Python and stepped into the room. It was a small front room, made smaller still by stacks of law books and newspapers, by the halfhearted light of a tattered floor lamp. One man sat deflated in an old chair. Everything about him was the color of cigarette ash: his loose skin, the wisps of hair ringing his bald head, even the old-man pants and shirt that were now too big for him. The other man was Harrison Wolfe.

  Wolfe said, “Mapstone, meet Sam Larkin.” He added distastefully, “The Kingmaker.”

  “You don’t need that,” Wolfe said, indicating the Python. “My God, that’s a piece of artillery.” Stuck in his belt, Wolfe had a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber Chief’s Special: old-fashioned, compactly lethal. I holstered the big Colt.

  Wolfe said, “You’re thinking, I didn’t even know Sam Larkin was still alive. Well, I thought the same thing until you stirred this up again. Then after you and I met, somebody’s muscle started following me. That got me to thinking, Who would give a tinker’s damn about this case after all this time? And I knew I had to pay a visit to old Sam here. He looks every one of his eighty-seven years, doesn’t he?”

  Larkin regarded me with watery eyes. “You could have left well enough alone.”

  “I needed a job,” I said. “Now I think that Mexican sheriff is going to want to talk to you.”

  “Nobody’s talking.” It was a new voice, coming from behind me. The next thing I felt was a gun barrel push me into the room. I turned, to see Dennis Copeland. His eyes were like burned glass.

  Larkin laughed until he started wheezing and coughing.

  “My associate arrived just in time,” he gasped.

  “He doesn’t work for McConnico?” I demanded, mustering a bravado I didn’t feel, looking down the barrel of a .44 Magnum. The Python was now a hand’s grasp away—might as well have been a light-year.

  “You’re a young fool,” Larkin spat at me. “This man works for me. If you’d have paid attention to him, none of this would have happened.”

  He ran a bony hand across his bald crown. “Brent is a young fool, too.”

  I noticed Harrison Wolfe again when he subtly shifted his weight and faced Copeland.

  Wolfe said, “Mr. Copeland, you murdered a Phoenix police officer. If you don’t put that gun down, I will kill you where you stand.” His voice was different now, calmer, almost sleepy.

  Copeland laughed and cocked his head back contemptuously. It was a stupid move.

  Before I could even process what was happening, Wolfe had the Chief’s Special in his hand and put two rounds between Dennis Copeland’s eyes. The small man collapsed backward into the doorway, his fall seeming to take longer than Wolfe’s move. Then the loud crack-crack faded into a hum in my ears, and a haze of gun smoke sat at eye level like thin morning clouds. I knelt down and confiscated the .44 Magnum.

  Wolfe’s cold features didn’t change. He merely turned and put the gun to Larkin’s temple.

  Larkin was sweating terribly, and I could see a large stain spreading in the crotch of his pants. He forced his eyes closed and said quietly, “I’ll meet you in hell.”

  Then Wolfe stuck the .38 back in his belt and tossed me a pair of handcuffs.

  “You can have him,” he said. “I won’t give him the satisfaction.”

  He stepped across Copeland and then turned on the porch.

  “You did okay, Mapstone,” he said. “Give my regards to Chief Peralta.”

  Then he walked off into the night.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Susan Knightly greeted me at the door and led me into her condo, an airy, sunlit space of plants and wicker furniture and photographs. On one wall was a moody black-and-white shot of workers in a farm wagon under an ancient oak tree and cloud-scudded sky. “California,” she said as I lingered. Inside another simple black metal frame were the faces of two little girls—a color print this time—with old eyes and haunted looks. “The Amazon,” she said. We sat on a dark wicker sofa under high windows dense with palm fronds.

  “You’re a hard man to find,” Susan said.

  “She said without irony.”

  She laughed. “Well, I figured after what I read in the paper, it was safe to come out of hiding.”

  “You hide well.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I know it seems silly to you, but I was so unnerved by what happened to Phaedra, I didn’t know what to do. After that night at the shopping mall, I went to San Francisco for a few days. A friend put me up.”

  “You could be charged with withholding information in a homicide.”

  “What?” she laughed. “I told you what I knew. I think you had just promised me protection when the gunfight broke out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So much for the tough cop routine. You called me. I’m here.”

  “Look,” she said. “Phaedra Riding has caused me more trouble than I would ever have imagined. I was just trying to give her a break.”

  I watched the palm trees and didn’t speak.

  “She played the cello, you know,” Susan said. “It’s a very mournful instrument, when you think about it. I think Phaedra spent most of her life running away from a lot of sadness.”

  “Sadness with men?” I asked.

  “She was a very sensual creature. That part of her set her free from her devils, I think. Maybe only temporarily, and maybe it was self-destructive. But it was enough for a while.”

  “Love?” I coaxed.

  “It wasn’t love. Love hurt too much. She told me, ‘Always be the one to leave; never be the one who’s left.’ Quite a philosophy for a twenty-eight-year-old. Once, she told me she always tried to juggle two or three lovers at once so her heart would never be exposed, as she put it. They never knew about one another, of course.”

  “Sounds like Phaedra had a lot of secrets.”

  She looked at me with those green eyes. “Haven’t you ever had secrets, David? Cheated on your lover? Had a one-night stand with a friend, or with a stranger? Did something you never thought you’d do, and it was strange and wonderful and exciting? You felt alive like you never imagined possible. The next day, you acted like nothing ever happened. That part of your history belongs only to you.”

  “What I’m after is the secret that will catch a murderer.”

  We sipped tea and watched a bird fighting to get into the palm tree to nest. She asked, “Why are you here?”

  “You called me.”

  “No, David. I mean, why are you investigating this case? This isn’t an unsolved murder case from 1959. Why in the world are you involved in this?”

  She had turned the tables on me very neatly. So much for my great interview skills. “It started out personal. Phaedra’s sister, Julie, is an old friend of mine from college.”

  “Talk about secrets,” Susan said. “She’s an old girlfriend, right?” I nodded. “Men have a way of referring to their old girlfrie
nds. Something in their voices. I’ve been referred to that way before.”

  I laughed unhappily. “Julie showed up at my door one night and asked me to see what I could do. I thought I was going to make a phone call and be done with it.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.” I sighed. “No, I stayed with it.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t really say. Something about Phaedra got under my skin. Something mysterious, maybe. Something tragic.”

  “I think she had that effect on people. She did on me.

  “Look,” she said, pushing back her hair, “I’ve been working since I was fourteen years old. Otherwise, God knows what kind of a mess I could have gotten into. I remember when I was Phaedra’s age. There’s no end to the trouble that can find you…especially where men are concerned.”

  “And you think it was her boyfriend Greg Townsend who got her into the trouble?”

  “I never met the man,” Susan said. “And Phaedra was afraid to tell me much. But once she got drunk with me and said she had dated a man who flew in cocaine from Mexico. She said she felt like a fool because she didn’t even realize it at first; she just thought they were flying to Mexico every other weekend to have a good time.”

  “But?”

  “But something happened. She never told me what. But somehow it became clear to her what Mr. Wonderful was doing. So she told him adios and came back to Phoenix. That’s when she went to work for me.”

  “Did she ever mention somebody named Bobby Hamid?”

  She shook her head.

  “So what went wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Susan said. “After she’d been working for me a couple of months, she said one Friday that she was going to Sedona for the weekend. I must have looked at her like, Are you nuts? because she said, ‘Susan, don’t worry.’ That following Monday, she was late, and when she finally came in, she looked like hell. She never seemed the same. About a week after that, she said she had to go away to take care of some business.

  “After that, she might call me once a week. I saw her twice. She told me she had overheard something she shouldn’t have. She said she was afraid she was going to be killed.”

  “By whom?” I asked. “By Greg Townsend?”

  “She wouldn’t say. It was never clear. But as I told you at the mall, she was convinced the cops were paid off and that nobody could be trusted.”

  “And now Greg’s dead, too,” I said. “So where does that leave us?”

  Susan was silent for a long moment and then said, “I want to show you something.”

  ***

  The sun was nearly gone when I pulled off Grand Avenue into a vast ministorage facility, a rat’s maze of low concrete buildings and orange doors. Gang graffiti was splayed across some of the white walls. I drove slowly through the passages until I found two white Ford Crown Victorias sitting bumper-to-bumper, their engines idling. Four detectives got out when I parked and stepped out into the heat.

  “John Ford, Glendale Police,” said a tall blond man in jeans and work shirt. He nodded to his partner, a short, beefy woman with a sour expression. “Sgt. Carol Quarrels,” she said. I showed them my star and ID. All jurisdictional courtesies would be followed.

  “You’re Mapstone?” This from a member of the second pair, a salt-and-pepper team of sheriff’s detectives. I nodded. “We’re Kimbrough and Krugell, Sheriff’s Homicide, Harquahala task force,” the black deputy said. “Got the warrant?”

  I pulled out the paper and handed it around. We were in a section of large storage units, accessible through roll-up metal doors. I stared for a moment at the unit I wanted. It had a strong-looking padlock on the door.

  “Excuse us for a moment.” Kimbrough nodded to me and we walked maybe a dozen paces away from the group. He was tall and handsome, with a shaved head and skin the color of expensive coffee. He looked me over and obviously found me wanting.

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but this is our case. If the sheriff hadn’t taken a liking to you for some fucked-up reason, I’d arrest you for interfering in a police investigation. Posse members like you are supposed to ride in parades and help raise money for the sheriff’s reelection, and leave the police work to professionals.”

  “Well, if we find any professionals around here, I’ll let you know,” I said. He stuck a finger in my chest and gave me a warning look. “And take your goddamned hand off me. I’ve had a really bad month.” I turned away and walked back to the group.

  “Let’s execute this,” I said. “It’s hot out here.”

  Sergeant Quarrels pulled out some bolt cutters, nudged them into the padlock on unit 1663, and snapped the lock off smartly. Her partner slid back the bolt and pulled up the door. Gazing into the gloom inside the storage unit, I could plainly see the dusty hood of a blue Nissan Sentra.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “Call the crime lab. And run that tag,” I could hear Kimbrough telling his partner.

  We walked in, two on the driver’s side, Kimbrough and I on the passenger side, flashlights cutting through the dimness. It smelled of dust and hot concrete and mold.

  “Locked this side,” said Ford, the male Glendale detective. We shined our lights into the windows and looked through several weeks’ worth of dust. “Don’t touch anything,” Kimbrough told me.

  “When did you graduate from the Academy, Kimbrough?” I asked.

  “In 1986,” he said.

  “I graduated in 1979,” I said, and walked to the back of the storage unit. Only the car was here. The place was otherwise totally empty, not even trash on the floor. Our steps echoed faintly.

  “Why don’t we have keys?” Quarrels asked.

  I lapsed into cop talk: “Subject stated that victim Riding, who was her employee, left behind only an address for the car, not the keys. Let’s pry open that trunk.”

  “No way,” Krugell, the other sheriff’s dick, said behind me. “We’re waiting for the evidence techs. Tag comes back to the victim, Phaedra Riding.”

  I glanced at Kimbrough and shrugged.

  Kimbrough looked at me for a moment and then pulled two pairs of latex gloves from his pocket, handing me one pair. “Go get a crowbar,” he said to his partner.

  In a moment, Krugell came back with a crowbar.

  We were all really sweating now. My hands felt especially strange inside the latex in such heat. I grasped the crowbar under the trunk latch and jammed it in deep. Then I leaned down. At first, the lock held, fought me. Then there was a pop sound and the trunk lid came up. Flashlight beams converged on black athletic bags laid neatly side by side. I pulled out an Uzi and handed it to Kimbrough.

  “Always be prepared,” he said, checking the action. “Loaded, full magazine.”

  “I’m opening one of the bags,” I said, finding a zipper and pulling it toward me. Even before I opened the bag all the way, I could see the bundled stacks of hundred-dollar bills inside.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Peralta’s black Ford swept into the narrow passageway nearly an hour later, a red light rotating lazily on the dash, reflecting off the orange doors all around us. The sun was all the way down, and the Crime Scene Unit guys had set up floodlights around the storage unit, which only made things hotter, if that was possible. The big man shook hands with the Glendale officers and then walked over to us, losing his smile.

  “This is not one of the Harquahala ones, Chief,” Krugell said. “Phaedra Riding is not one of our serial victims.”

  “What, Krugell, do I look like a moron?” Peralta said. “I’ve known that for days.” That was news to me. He looked over me and Kimbrough. “Well? Any new gunfights involving 1950s homicide investigations tonight?” It was asked without humor.

  “No, but we have three bags full of money,” I said. “I always knew I’d get rich off the SO.”

  Peralta snorted. “How much?”

  “Rough guesstimate, a million, million two,” Kimbrough sai
d. “We haven’t had time to count it.”

  “I should have known our ‘Phaedra like Phoenix’ was running dope if she wasn’t turning tricks,” Peralta said.

  “We don’t know that, Mike.”

  “I really think you have a thing for this girl, Mapstone,” he said. “Too bad the department shrinks don’t work with part-time deputies.” He looked over the car.

  “Prints,” he shouted. “I want prints.” The evidence technicians put their heads down and dusted.

  “So it’s drug money?” he asked.

  “Lindsey found the DEA file on Greg Townsend. He was Phaedra’s boyfriend. Rich boy, part-time pilot. And, according to confidential informants, he was a mule for Bobby Hamid, flying in cocaine from Mexico.”

  Peralta’s jaw tightened. “Bobby fucking Hamid. I should have known he’d eventually turn up. Who is Lindsey, and why is she looking at DEA files?” He looked at me. “Never mind. Jesus, were you this much trouble when you were a history professor?”

  “Probably worse,” Kimbrough said, but the edge was gone from his voice.

  I asked, “Have we checked in with Coconino County on the progress of their investigation of Townsend’s murder?”

  Everybody was silent.

  “What’s so hard about this?” said Kimbrough’s partner. “Chick and boyfriend are supposed to carry the cash down to Mexico and bring back cocaine, whatever. Instead, they keep the cash, rip off Bobby Hamid, hide the car here, and wait for the heat to cool down. Bobby finds ’em first, kills ’em both.” He made pistols out of his fingers. Pop. Pop.

  Peralta and Kimbrough looked at me.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Phaedra was plainly on the run. But if Greg Townsend was, too, why was he waiting at home in Sedona when I found him?”

  “Cause mules are stupid,” Kimbrough said.

  “This guy wasn’t stupid,” I said. “Ignorant, perhaps, but not stupid. And a million bucks is a lot for a mule to be entrusted with, don’t you think? And Phaedra hated drugs. Everybody says that. And why would Bobby Hamid leave Phaedra’s body where it would be immediately found, posed like Rebecca Stokes’s was?”