Arizona Dreams (6 page)

11

“There's no history here, it's so new.” People who moved to Phoenix from the Midwest often said that. That's what Dana, or whatever her name was, said. It's a lie, born of an inability to look beyond the brand-new houses they bought and the brand-new Wal-Mart down the road. Arizona has a richer and longer history than the places many of them considered home. Ancient Indian peoples created diverse cultures. Conquistadors and padres cut a trail for European settlement. Cowboys and Buffalo Soldiers, Confederates and Federals, Mormons and Chinese railroad builders, miners and Navajo code talkers. Nope, there's no history here. We also had our share of crime history. Dillinger came to Tucson thinking he could hide out from the small-town cops. He was wrong. Winnie Ruth Judd—the trunk murderess; now we know she was probably railroaded by the Phoenix elite, trying to cover up for one of their own. From the rustlers and bushwhackers of the nineteenth century to the international gangs of the twenty-first century, Arizona had always drawn badlands people.

One or more of them stuck an ice pick in my neighbor's brain. Only the police didn't have a suspect, and my sister-in-law Robin had known the victim.

“I knew him casually,” she had said. “I met him on a First Friday, at a gallery down on Roosevelt. He seemed like a nice man…” Then she told a story about riding her motorcycle to Denver and stopping in every honky-tonk along the way to dance with a cowboy.

Later, Lindsey and I had talked about it. It was a conversation that didn't end well. Lindsey and I have few fights, and we're quick to seek mutual forgiveness. But I'd be damned if I knew how we got into this one. Toward the end, she seemed agitated but said I seemed agitated. And I felt misunderstood—that's just what she said I was doing to her position. Which was: Robin said she knew the guy, what's the big deal? “I didn't say it was a big deal,” I said. “I just wonder if she should tell the police she knew him.” She said, “She met him at a gallery with a hundred other people. Dave, you're being paranoid.” We went on this way for fifteen minutes, when Lindsey said something I had never heard her say before, “I just can't talk about this any more.” And, uncharacteristically flushed and red-eyed, she got up and left the room.

Later, she hugged me close as I prepared to leave for work, and gave me enough of a French kiss to please a Parisian. But the encounter left me feeling a little raw. I remembered saying something about whether we should trust a woman who had a history of substance abuse. “That's not fair!” Lindsey came as close to a shout as I had ever heard her use in conversation. In a calmer voice, she said, “Robin is thirty-five years old, and she has ten clean years behind her.” My blood was up by then, too, and it was an effort not to say, “she claims she has ten clean years.” But I said nothing. I knew we would talk about it later.

The fight was still on my mind that afternoon as I left the Hayden Library at the university. I had spent the day surrounded by Hollinger boxes and files that contained source material for the book. Now, I walked down Cady Mall, past buildings that hadn't changed much since I was a student. The money went to biotech, business, and athletics, not liberal arts. It was hot enough to be uncomfortable, the sun reflecting intense light back from the sidewalk. But a breeze was blowing from the north, and coeds walked past in the latest incarnation of provocative miniskirts. I was the model of worldly discretion, marital fidelity yet appreciation.

Then I saw a slender, well-dressed man walking directly toward me. He saw me, so it was too late to switch course. I should have done so anyway. He was not the kind to wave. He merely held out his hands appreciatively and smiled.

“Dr. Mapstone, are you teaching again?”

“Hello, Bobby.”

“You look so at home on campus, Dr. Mapstone,” he said, and changed direction to fall in at my side.

“We shouldn't be seen talking,” I said.

“And why should I not talk to you?” He had a slight English accent. “Because Sheriff Peralta has convinced you that I am the godfather of organized crime in Phoenix?”

I stopped and faced him. Bobby Hamid was wearing a navy pinstriped suit that covered his trim form with perfection. His lovely muted blue tie went with a white shirt that was dazzling in the sun. Not a molecule of sweat dared visit his movie-idol face. I faced him and said, “Look me in the eye and tell me it's not true.”

He smiled, kept eye contact, and affirmed that it was not true. “But of course you do not believe me,” he said. “You see it as a cheap trick of revisionist history. You have a strong loyalty to your friend, the sheriff. And in his anti-Persian bigotry, he cannot handle it that I, who came to this very campus as a foreign student, could become such a success. To me, an American success story involving a Middle Eastern man is nothing but good for our society today…”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, resuming my walk. Unfortunately, he matched my stride. “You're a venture capitalist, and an Episcopalian, and on the board of a dozen worthy charities.”

“All true,” he said. “Now I am not saying our city is without crime and corruption. Far from it. Things happen in Phoenix, Dr. Mapstone, and they seem inexplicable. But then you realize there's a certain, let us say, alignment of interests. The moneyed and political classes get their way. Funny thing. But those are the friends of your sheriff. I am happy to be an outsider from such things.”

A flock of coeds walked by and Bobby asked, “So how is your book coming?”

By now I was sweating from frustration. “How do you know these things?” I said. Peralta had been convinced for years that Bobby had a mole inside the sheriff's office.

“I'm a big fan, Dr. Mapstone. Are you writing about my case?”

“Not until Peralta puts you away for many years,” I grinned.

“Oh, David, please. You do the tough cop act so badly…although you seemed to protect yourself well enough when those two hoodlums assaulted you a few months back.”

“Peralta is right. You've paid off a spy in the department.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I just hear things, keep up with the people I care about.”

“How can I get off that list? Or, maybe given your reputation, forget that last request.”

“I was talking about the Hayden Yarnell case,” he went on. “It was one of your most remarkable. The grandsons of the famous rancher, kidnapped in the Great Depression and disappeared. Dr. Mapstone's greatest triumph, I would say.”

“I remember it.”

“And whatever happened to that lovely young woman you were seeing then, while you and Miss Lindsey were on the ‘outs'?”

“I don't know,” I said, too hurriedly.

“She seemed very sensual, very sure of herself—so American,” he said. “Gretchen, I think her name was.”

I just kept walking.

“Ah, well, I can understand you choosing Miss Lindsey, once she had tired of, what should we call it, ‘testing the waters' with that handsome young detective. And you conceive yourself too American, too upright, to have taken Miss Gretchen as your mistress. I must confess, I might have had a hard time choosing between the two…”

“Bobby, what is your fucking point?”

“I'm sorry I upset you,” he said, lightly touching my sleeve. “I just hoped that you were writing about the Yarnell case.”

“Rest your worried mind,” I snarled.

We walked in silence for a moment, then he said, “I am not one to seek anything to which I am not entitled. But I did save your life, David.”

“You did.”

“So the one time I really did shoot someone in the sheriff's jurisdiction was to save his best friend.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue and teeth. By that time, we had reached the bus stop.

“Used any ice picks lately?” I asked.

“Such an imagination,” he laughed. “Where are you parked?”

“I took the bus, Bobby.”

“Very responsible.” He applauded softly. “Soon we'll have light rail, and almost be like a real city. Well, I must be off.” He insisted on shaking hands again. “I don't want to make the class wait. I'm teaching this semester, in the executive MBA program.”

“Goodbye, Bobby.”

He walked back into the campus. Then he turned, as if he had forgotten something. He said, “Do be careful out in the desert, Dr. Mapstone. And I can't wait to read my chapter in your book.”

12

Counter-factual history. It's a fancy way of imagining things—say, if America had stayed isolationist during World War II and the Nazis had won, what kind of world would we be living in? Counter-factual history: What if Bobby Hamid had not appeared three years ago when a bad guy was about to put a bullet in my brain? My world would have been over. Bobby was a killer, and I owed him my life. What if I had stayed with Gretchen? No contest there—although why did I feel the flush of guilt over remembering her? It was a guilt that probably informed my intense dislike of Patrick Blair. Lindsey and I weren't together then. She had run away from me, remember? After we were back together, we hadn't compared notes about our time apart. We weren't the kind of couple who shared every detail, right down to the anatomical specifics, of our past lovers.

A future with Gretchen would have been impossible—she lived too many lies, carried too much darkness beneath them. It had been a crazy time in my life, and not surprisingly, the liaison with Gretchen had carried all the thrill of the temporary and the dangerous. What if Lindsey hadn't come back, come to my door that Christmas Eve? It was a history too bleak to contemplate. That winter of Gretchen and Lindsey—that was a story to tell another day.

The bus was passing the tattered oleanders of State Hospital, where the Trunk Murderess escaped twice, when my cell phone rang. The readout glared
peralta
.

“Where are you?” he demanded, with no preliminaries.

“On a bus.”

There was a long pause.

“What are you doing on a bus, Mapstone?”

“Riding it.”

“Are you crazy? What's your twenty?”

He was talking cop-speak. I told him my location.

“Get off now. I'll pick you up at 24th and Van Buren. If they don't throw you in the loony bin.”

I hit the call button just in time, and was soon standing on the curb with the diesel fumes and the shopping-cart mumbler. I was still thinking of counter-factual history: What if I hadn't come back to Phoenix four years before? My world wouldn't exist at the whim of Mike Peralta.

In only ten minutes a shining black Ford Expedition pulled up. Peralta was using his driver today. I got in the back with him. He filled up his side of the seat, but his attention was focused on a file in his lap.

“Who is Louis Bell?” he asked, still reading.

I was in a brain fugue for a moment, then remembered sharply.

“He's the brother of a guy who was found dead in the desert,” I said evenly.

“Harry Bell?”

“Right.”

“You're a very bad boy, Mapstone. Finding dead bodies when you are supposed to be working on our book.”

“Sorry,” I said, staring at the red ears of the young deputy driving. I made myself take a quiet deep breath. There was no telling how the sheriff might react to the stimulus of insubordination, incompetence, or trying to sneak something past him. Put a gun in his face or a dying child at his feet and he's the calmest man on the planet. He has other moods, too.

“So tell me what led you to this body of Harry Bell?”

I went through it with him as we drove. I imagined the brother had somehow complained to the Sheriff's Office. Maybe he was mad that the chain gang tracked up the property, or a deputy had been rude. Maybe he was claiming we had robbed the corpse—I've seen civilians make worse charges. Sometimes they're true. So I told Peralta about the appearance of Dana What's-her-name, reminded him in fact that he had briefly seen her the day he was leaving my office. He refused to remember. I told him about Mrs. Every Soccer Mom, with her hands in her lap and her memories of me as a teacher. About the letter from her father, with a confession to homicide and precise directions to the body.

“Where are we going?” We were now on the Red Mountain Freeway, speeding past Tempe Town Lake.

Peralta set aside his folder and looked at me. His eyes were unreadable. “You'll see. You aren't the only one who gets to keep secrets.”

“This wasn't a secret,” I said. “I just didn't think…” I let the sentence trail off.

“Go on,” he said. “You got the letter from the old man, and you went out to the desert. You find the body of this Harry Bell. Did you know him? Know his brother?”

“No and no.”

“Go on.” He opened a new file and started making notes with a gold pen.

I went on. But I was also wondering. Peralta had been a genuine friend to me over many years. Some days, though, I tired of his games, his pride in having people beholden to some transaction or obligation. I'm sure he wasn't even aware of them, as most of us are not fully self-aware. It was worse for him. Although he was brave and charming, he was also stubborn and, on so many fronts, shut down. His curiosity didn't extend beyond cop stuff and golf—even a younger interest in custom cars had been set aside. He didn't read books and was proud of it. He didn't know much beyond an encyclopedic knowledge of law enforcement, and wore that comfortably. In this, he was different from his late father, Judge Peralta, and from Sharon. They had been divorced for a year now. Without her, his worst tendencies seemed to come out. I used to think Peralta was a throwback. But now I realized that he is the American male of the new century. I admired Peralta for many things. But I wondered if I liked him.

By this time we were pulling off the Pima Freeway and entering a parking lot. It was smaller than a New England state, and full of cars. Beyond was a dun-colored building that could have been a Wal-Mart or a Best Buy. It was a big box—a big box of gambling. Going a few hundred yards east of the Scottsdale city limits made the difference. Casino Arizona was the economic prize of the Salt River Indian Reservation. We were in a sovereign nation, and also a part of suburban Phoenix. The city ended abruptly and changed to fields—the Pima and Maricopa Indians had been farming in Arizona for centuries. It was a good bet they were related to the Hohokam, the ancient people who dug the canals and settled in the valley that became Phoenix, and then disappeared. No history here, remember? Fast forward to the twenty-first century, where the sweet spot for these Indian nations is the gambling addiction of the white-eyes. Indian gaming had come to Arizona while I was living in California, and although I was vaguely aware of casinos encircling Phoenix I had never been in one. I was no prude. Gambling was one of the few vices I had passed on when going through the devil's cafeteria line.

It was three p.m., but the parking lot was full. By the time we pulled under the portico marked for valet parking, it was clear Peralta was not thinking of an afternoon of blackjack. Several tribal police cruisers sat bumper-to-bumper, flanked by sheriff's vehicles and unmarked sedans. I turned to Peralta. The SUV had stopped but he was getting out the door. I followed him inside, past a cordon of tribal cops.

We walked through the lobby into a vast, dimly lit space. It seemed that way, at least, after the intense sunlight outside. Light came from row upon row of slot machines packed closely together and from a discreet purple glow around the ceiling. More light identified the Pima Lounge and Starz Bar. Then the room opened into a large space under a circular ceiling. The noise was overpowering, electronic pings, blips, and gurgles, snatches of up-tempo songs that changed every few feet, nothing coherent, just a wave of unending sounds. All the sensory inputs were meant to focus on the business at hand. I recalled Grandfather's admonition that casinos were not built by the money of the winners.

We walked quickly past the machines, which looked high tech and elaborate—not at all my memory of slots. They had names like Xanadu, S'mores, Triple-Double Diamond, and Wild Thing, and comfortable seats were attached. Few were unattended. The crowd was mostly older and badly dressed, although that description embraced much of the population of Greater Phoenix. From the slack look of their faces, they could have been working in a textile mill. Nobody looked to be having a good time. None turned to notice as we walked through, escorted by two linebacker-sized tribal cops in uniform.

Then we were alone, stepping around a row of chairs that had been set up to block off a far province of the slots empire. More tribal police stood watch. Beyond them, all I could see was a circle of men wearing plainclothes and badges on their belts. One of them broke free: Patrick Blair. He looked at me with the suppressed glee of a tattling child. Then another man came forward. He was small, with worried, hooded eyes and TV preacher hair. He wore an olive dress shirt and tie of the kind picked out by a certain kind of wife. He was a white man with a loud whisper.

“Sheriff, we need to deal with this quietly and get this out of the sight of our patrons.”

“Everyone here will have to be interviewed before they can leave,” Peralta said.

“But that could be two hundred people.”

“Everybody,” Peralta said. He looked around. “I don't see anybody taking offense. Anyway, it's a tribal and federal case…”

I left them talking and walked ten feet farther.

“So the professor didn't tell the sheriff about his little adventure…”

“Fuck you, Blair.” I was all out of devastating one-liners.

Our dustup was threatening to disturb a man who was sitting before a big slot machine called Damnation Alley. The machine was still making sounds of gunfire and action-movie music. It informed us that it could take every kind of bill up to twenty dollars. The man looked frail inside a checked short-sleeve shirt and old blue jeans. Some gamblers are so dedicated they will sit for hours before the slots. It's understandable they might even fall asleep on one. Unfortunately, the small man slumped backward in the seat was merely perfectly balanced by some odd combination of gravity, body mass, and the onset of rigor mortis. When I saw the ice pick handle protruding from his right ear, I'm sure the whole casino could hear the catch in my throat.

Blair watched me. “His wallet's gone. But I met him a while back, with Snyder, when we interviewed him about his brother's body being found in the desert.”

“Louis Bell.”