by Jon Talton
It was midnight when I got home. That made it three a.m. in Washington, D.C. The cops on the scene in Carefree thought it was an armed robbery gone wrong. I was certain it was something more. But Dana’s phone went unanswered. At home, I made a martini and settled onto the leather sofa in the living room with William Taubman’s biography of Nikita Khrushchev. Distract myself with Stalin’s purges. It wasn’t easy, because my heart was doing a tango inside my chest. I couldn’t stop feeling every beat, and every beat felt wrong, felt fatal. I knew this was all an illusion. Some mistake of my brain chemistry. It didn’t help that my ear felt as if it had been ripped off my head, even though the sap had inflicted only a small nick.
After half an hour, there was a knock on the door at the top of the book-lined stairway, and Robin let herself in. When she saw the shape I was in, she insisted on bringing me a Vicodin for the pain; she had been prescribed the drug for an injury while playing soccer. I took the pill and declined another martini. Robin poured herself a glass of red wine and we talked for what seemed like hours. I learned more about her past and told her a bit about mine. The easy talk evaporated my remaining suspicions about her. At some point, I fell into a heavy sleep, and when I woke up we were still on the sofa. She was asleep, her mane of straw-colored hair roiled up around her head. Her warm bare feet were in my lap, covered by my hands. I didn’t recall how they got there.
Chapter Twenty
Bobby Hamid’s office overlooked Phoenix through a glass wall that must have been thirty feet long. His desk was a blond wood, chrome and glass aircraft-carrier deck, and its top was as uncluttered as the lid of a crypt. He was wearing a wheat-colored suit and a black T-shirt, wearing it like a male model, that is, if you didn’t know that beyond his sleek looks sat something sinister. I didn’t want to dwell on the office’s other appointments, or how they had been funded, but I couldn’t miss the beautiful Persian carpets under my feet, or the many pieces of Acoma pottery glistening in a large display case, lighted just right. It was hard to believe he’d started out as a student at Arizona State University, managing a strip club on the side.
“Ice picks and saps,” he was saying, shaking his head and clucking in a strange feminine way. “Dr. Mapstone, you seem to have landed in some kind of 1940s noir movie.”
“What do you know about it?”
“No, no!” he said sharply. “Dr. Mapstone, this is where you say something like, ‘If it’s a noir movie, I don’t like how the story line is going.’”
I just looked at him and his view. The city was spoiled by the smog. Beyond the skyscrapers along Central Avenue, the South Mountains lurked in a brownish haze.
“You have no sense of play, David,” he said. “I can understand, with Miss Lindsey being gone…”
The worry point directly below my breastbone started sending out red alerts. I said, “It really disturbs me that you know that.”
“I also know what it means to be the ‘odd man out,’ as the expression goes.” He leaned back and put his manicured hands behind his head. “The intellectual in a city of developers and construction workers...” I let him run on, his sentences a smart parade of empty words. It was part of his act. My head still hurt from my sap-on-ear encounter of Friday night; that, and the combination of two martinis and Robin’s painkiller. I had left her sleeping on the sofa, and quietly went into the bedroom for another couple of hours’ sleep. Lindsey called at six a.m., before her meeting with the feds, and her voice did a lot to heal me. But I didn’t tell her how afraid I had been when the tall man came at me. I sanitized the incident. I knew she wouldn’t want that, but there was nothing she could do from Washington except worry. I had worried all weekend with nothing to show for it. Now it was Monday, and I could look forward to a week of worry. I tuned back in to Bobby again: “…a historian in an age where people care nothing for history. A man who dresses well, when many men wear their clothes like adolescents. You know, they spend all their money on electronics instead. I’m not that way, of course. I think that’s why we appreciate each other. History, ideas, a sense of style, beautiful women…”
“We appreciate each other until the sheriff puts you away for several lifetimes. But I do value your expertise. That’s why I’m here.”
“Ah, I am your, quote, organized crime expert, unquote,” he said merrily. “Very well. Both weapons are quaint. Consider the three teenagers executed last night behind the 202 Freeway wall. I know this from the newspaper, by the way. But they were shot, pop, pop, pop.” He did it with his index finger, aiming toward the far wall. Even so, it stirred a kind of unease in me. Bobby went on, “This is efficiency in the post-modern capitalist style. You have a non-performing asset, you get it off the books as quickly and neatly as possible.” He studied his cuticle. “The only reason someone would use an ice pick or a sap is to make a point.”
“Which is?”
“How would I know this, Dr. Mapstone? You are the History Shamus, as Miss Lindsey calls you. May I fix you a drink? There are some amazing red wines out of Australia now, you know.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Somebody tried to smash me up along with the Chihuly sculptures, and I don’t think it was for writing a book. That leaves me with the other issue that’s taken my time lately. Why would someone use an ice pick to murder a guy who owns some check-cashing outlets, and then do it again with some old guy who owns nothing but some worthless land?”
“Were there fingerprints on the ice picks?” Bobby asked in the voice of a surgeon at a medical conference.
“No, that’s another thing that bothers me,” I said.
“But I thought they had charged that unfortunate, disadvantaged Hispanic youth with that crime.”
“Well, what if he didn’t do it?”
“Ah, a who-done-it.” He said each word carefully. “Maybe it’s one of those serial killers that seem drawn to our fine city. Maybe the two victims shared some hidden connection.”
“I’m not after Sherlock Holmes, Bobby,” I said sharply. “You know things and hear things. Hell, you do things.”
“Oh, David, please. Sheriff Peralta fills you with fantasies and half-truths. Look out that window. That’s where the money is made. In real estate, building, retailing, and tourism. Why would I need to break the law?”
“I thought you were a venture capitalist. Now you’re a developer? Better find a story and stick to it.”
“Alas, the Phoenix economy is not what the chamber of commerce types claim,” he said. “All my VC investments are in California and Austin. Phoenix is not exactly on the cutting edge. So as a businessman here, of course I invest in real estate. Everybody does. It’s the only economy we have. Someday the bubble will burst, of course. Then I will move into Treasuries.”
I gave an exaggerated yawn, even though my forearm hurt like hell when I raised it. Nasty things, saps.
Bobby said, “I’ve heard the Samoans from LA are trying to move in on the meth trade here. Think of it as a maturing industry with many scattered players that is attracting takeover artists. But they don’t seem like the ice pick types to me. The check-cashing outlets? Some are compromised with the smuggling trade, which is an international, well-capitalized operation. That might be a more profitable avenue for you.”
“How so?”
He shrugged. “My suspicions as a civilian would probably be useless to you, History Shamus. It does strain my credulity to believe this young man, Esparza, walked into a crowded casino and killed the man for his wallet. What was his name? Bell?” He leaned toward me. “How is your book coming?”
“It’s coming,” I said.
“I wonder if I’ll be in it?” he chirped. “I wonder if Miss Gretchen will be there? She certainly had edge, as they say.”
I tried to ignore him. “What do you know about Tom Earley?” I asked.
His thin lips stretched into an icy smile. “A slick character, I think,” Bobby said.
I just waited, watching jets in the distance land at Sky Harbor. On
ly four days until Lindsey came home.
Finally, Bobby said, “Mr. Earley is deep into our two growth industries: real estate and conservative politics. All I know is what I read in the papers, as Walter Winchell said.”
“Will Rogers,” I corrected. “Ever met Earley?”
“Once, at a fundraiser for Barrow Neurological Institute. It was at the Phoenician, as I recall. He had his wife with him. A pretty woman with red hair. Do you know them? Are they connected with your murders?”
“Thanks for your help, Bobby,” I said, rising to leave. “If you hear anything…”
He nodded, and rose to shake my hand.
“David,” he said, “you have a tendency to over-think things. Sometimes there’s not an elaborate plot or cosmic evil at work. Sometimes it’s just simple, feral greed.”
My feet had crossed a hundred thousand dollars in Persian rugs when his voice came again. “Why were you at El Pedregal? You don’t strike me as the resort type.”
I turned to face him. “I was meeting someone.”
“Ah,” he said. I left it at that.
Chapter Twenty-One
For a place in the desert, my town sure had a lot of deep ends. One day, I was just another guy with a Ph.D. and a badge writing a book. The next, I was defying the sheriff’s direct orders, going to meet my mystery soccer mom, who happened to be married to a powerful politician who would like nothing better than to see me pulling espresso shots at Starbucks. Only she doesn’t show up, and I was the china shop for a bull with a taste for old-time gangland hardware. I was in over my head. Why stop there, Mapstone? Keep going. If you really work hard, you can be unemployed by the time Lindsey gets back from Washington.
That knowledge hadn’t kept me from making two trips to Gilbert over the weekend. The house looked deserted. I didn’t even hear from the Rottweilers. Finally, I went next door, where a smooth-faced man yielded to my badge-based way of making friends and influencing people. He told me the Earleys had left for Europe on vacation. Was anything wrong?, he asked. More than you know. Was there any way he could help?, he asked. No, and I’m sorry to disappoint the neighborhood gossips. Just think of me as collecting for the sheriff’s DARE program. Or think nothing at all. I was thinking too much, as Bobby noted. Dana lured me into a trap. That’s what my gut said. Or had the blackmailer been real, and somehow either scared her off or…? She had definitely left for the airport Saturday morning, the morning after the episode in the glass shop. The neighbor had seen her with her husband and children, getting in the SUV.
I spent the rest of Monday in my courthouse garret. Yet somehow the pages I had written seemed stale. Duke Ellington through the headphones failed to comfort me. The archives that I had carefully laid out on the big counsel’s table looked at me with disinterest. I wrote two pages over and over on the Macintosh; the process lacked even the bathos of filling wastebaskets with wadded-up paper sheets, as I had in grad school. Eventually, I closed up shop, grabbed a burrito at Ramiro’s, and went home. The only thing to show for the day was Lindsey’s goodnight call.
The next day, I rode the bus downtown, checked out an unmarked Crown Vic and took a road trip. It wasn’t the kind of trip most people took willingly. I stopped at a Circle K to buy several bottles of water and put them on ice in a small ice chest. I was going to a place that was about as close to Yuma County as you could get and still be under the jurisdiction of Mike Peralta, and I was doing it on the first day of summer. It couldn’t even be reached directly. So I took Interstate 10 south to Casa Grande and headed west on I-8. Seemingly everywhere but the Indian reservation there was new framing for subdivisions. Where were these people going to work? All building, selling, furnishing, servicing, and financing new housing, I supposed. Where was the water going to come from? This part of the state was using more groundwater than was being replenished. Nobody seemed to want to talk about that one. Most of the newcomers didn’t even know where their water came from—in their civilized minds, the answer was the water tap, of course! On I-8, the subdivisions fell behind, replaced by cotton fields, then empty desert. Follow the interstate far enough and you ended up in San Diego. I had lived a very different life there long ago. I didn’t think of it often now. I missed the pleasant weather.
At a nothing exit called Sentinel, I left our equivalent of the Roman roads and turned toward wilderness, where barbarians were, perhaps, included. The road quickly turned to dirt and gravel, rising and falling gradually with the land. Scrubby desert surrounded me, with strange mountain shapes off in the distance north and south. After a while, I came to the little hamlet of Hyder. When the mainline of the Southern Pacific Railroad was built to Phoenix eighty years before, Hyder was one more place to put a water tower, to keep the locomotives from expiring like dehydrated horses in the blazing wilderness. In more recent years, you heard stories about the desert rats, hermits, and one-time hippies out here. Back in the early ’90s, the Sunset Limited passenger train had derailed nearby—sabotage, and unsolved. The village was its own little world of forlorn trailers and folks who wanted to be left alone. This day, it looked deserted in the manner of desert towns when the temperature is over one hundred. I took a dirt road back to the east, following the old railroad. After a few miles, I found the place where the Bell brothers had lived out their last years.
It was a small trailer in a clearing between the road and the railroad, sheltered from the wind by raggedy tamarisk trees. The metal walls looked faded and ready to fall off, but the roof held a new-looking satellite dish. The entrance was guarded by a heavy security door with yellow paint peeling in potato-chip sized patches. I parked as a dust devil cut across the rail embankment and battered the car briefly before heading south. That gave me time to get the keys to the place out of an evidence envelope. As I stepped out, the heat hit me like opening the door to an oven set on high. I looked around. There was a bedraggled school bus, maybe two hundred yards down the road. Otherwise I was alone. No cars. No sound. Getting inside the trailer meant climbing a rickety wooden stairway. Underneath were years of old cans—coffee, chili, tuna, and God knows what else. I tried not to imagine the rattlesnake, Gila monster, black widow, and scorpion refuge they had created.
The lightweight inner door came open with a shove, and a hot, stale smell hit me. Old food, tobacco smoke, gym socks—something like that. The inside of the trailer went with the odor. It was impossible to tell if someone had ransacked the place or if the brothers had lived this way. Old clothes, tools, newspapers, pieces of cardboard, and beer cans were everywhere. There was too much furniture for the limited space, and all of it junk from other eras, right down to the beanbag chair that had been patched with duct tape. In one corner stood a giant plasma-screen TV, wildly out of place. A window air conditioning unit miraculously worked. I tried to be as methodical as possible. There had been no crime committed here, so the deputies had made only a cursory search. They might have come back, but they had a suspect. Their inventory of items retrieved from the Bell trailer was small and of no help to me.
I moved slowly through the confined spaces, checking my blind spots, coughing from the dust that inevitably seeped in. Even though the air conditioning worked, I couldn’t get the lights on. If not for the sunlight breaking through the ancient curtains, the inside would have been even murkier. I kept checking those curtains, to see what was outside, who was coming down the road. There was only one door in and out. When the wind hit the walls and made the old sheet-metal rattle, my hands started shaking. Calm down, Mapstone.
One thing about country living was simplicity. Atop the peeling linoleum counter was what passed as the brothers’ desk. But there were no bills for credit cards, cell phones, or water softener. Just a stack of girlie magazines, some old lottery tickets, and a letter from the county. Inside was a second notice demanding back taxes. I slipped it in my pocket, wondering if the parcel was the one where Harry Bell was laid to rest. Death and taxes, indeed.
The drawers and closets were similarl
y unhelpful. Old men’s clothes and underwear. Under a pile of work shirts, I found a .38 revolver that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned or fired in decades. No property records. No indication of an involvement with the Earleys. No photographs. No blackmailer kit. Behind some muddy shoes I found an old frame, the kind bought for a dollar in the kind of stores that were once called five and dime stores. Inside was a faded certificate, the honorable discharge from the Army of Harry Truman Bell, dated 1968. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. The cities were in flames. The Vietnam War was going badly. I was at Kenilworth School. Lindsey was born.
What is the sum of a life? What will the cops find if misfortune comes calling? Lindsey and I have a house full of the personal and peculiar. They would find her Oaxacan carvings and Day of the Dead art; her hardback collection of Russian literature and everything written by and about J.R.R. Tolkien. There would be my collection of suits that were usually too hot to wear in Phoenix, too many ties, a bag full of old presidential campaign buttons that was probably worth something, files of my old publications in history journals and background material for the two obscure history books I wrote. Books and books and books. And photographs by the boxful, from one showing Grandmother and Grandfather on their wedding day to another, taken nine decades later, of Lindsey and me on our day. Life is stuff. Most of Robin’s things were in a storage unit on Thomas Road; I had lived that way once. Peralta and Sharon had yet to fully divide their household, the accumulations of thirty years of marriage. Yet here in this dusty trailer, I was most struck by the absence of much that was personal. When I stepped through the outside door half an hour later, I still didn’t know the Bell brothers. I didn’t know if they were blackmailers or victims or nobodies.