Arizona Dreams (10 page)

19

The next night was a Friday. The sunset took over the entire sky, starting with a subtle pink in the east, then turning to ever more lurid oranges and crimsons in the west. The colors spread out across ripples of high thin clouds that seemed drawn by gravity into chasing the end of the day. If you haven't seen it, you wouldn't believe it. I didn't get the best view, driving northeast to Carefree. By the time I reached my destination, all that remained was a pencil-line of flame across the horizon and the beginning of the long deep indigo desert twilight. I hadn't intended to be there, but I had no place else to be. I had taken Lindsey to Sky Harbor that afternoon for her flight to Washington. Unlike me, she wasn't afraid of flying. So until I got the call that said she had reached the hotel in D.C., I would be at loose ends. From the airport, I went back to the courthouse. The phone was ringing when I unlocked the door.

“David. I need to see you. Can I see you tonight?”

I recognized Dana's voice without prompting.

“I don't keep office hours on Friday nights. Or don't you remember that from college?” She wasn't to blame for my mood, but hearing from her wasn't helping.

“David, please…” I could almost see her watery eyes tearing up.

“I'll be happy to give you the name and number of a detective who can handle this case,” I said. “It's not good for my career for us to be seen together.”

“But I have the proof you asked for. I have proof of the blackmail.”

I just let dead air fill the phone. Somebody was pounding on the floor above, where the old jail was located before it was closed in the 1960s. I could claim a ghostly visitor and just hang up.

“I have more for you. Maybe my information can help you find who really killed Louis Bell,” she said.

“So tell me. I'm listening.”

“I can't say this over the phone.”

“So tell a detective.”

“No.” Her voice was lower, harder. “I need to see you, damn it. Don't you give a damn about that kid taking the fall for murdering Louis Bell? You know he didn't do it.”

I stared at the ceiling, toward the old jail, then acquiesced. She gave me the name of a shop at El Pedregal, a fancy shopping center that's attached to the Boulders Resort. She didn't want anyone to recognize her, she said. I wasn't looking forward to the drive. I was dreading trying to explain to Peralta why I was making contact again with Dana Earley. But I was more than curious. If it hadn't been for Dana's lie, I would never have known Louis Bell. His murder would have been one more macabre Phoenix cop tale, even though it echoed close to home, in the similar killing of my neighbor, Alan Cordesman. With Dana, the coincidences became too much. She had launched me into something that was still playing out.

El Pedregal looks like a cross between an adobe Anasazi village and a Cold War blast shelter. But there was nothing to complain about with the natural surroundings: buttes made of gigantic boulders, each unique in its construction and the image it might concoct in the eye of an imaginative viewer. I had first seen all this before it was part of one of the priciest resorts in town, before the dry sun-bleached boulders were spectators on the edge of an emerald golf course. This night, there was not much to see beyond the black silhouettes of the buttes and the Carefree Mountains. The parking lot was mostly empty. As I walked toward the shops, most looked closed.

I checked the cell phone on my belt, wishing I would get Lindsey's call. I couldn't say that we had parted coolly that day. But neither had we gone beyond our brief spat of the day before, over my Patrick Blair comment. That night, I had made overtures with my fingers and mouth as we lay in bed. But she had kissed me and turned over. It wasn't a big deal. She hadn't refused. She had merely declined. A fine thing, words. Why was I reading anything into it? Was something more on her mind? Had I opened a line of a dangerous memory for her? Why did men never turn down sex? All important questions for which I had no answers.

I walked across the different plazas, pavilions, and ramadas. Here were the galleries and stores that made the tourists salivate: Canyon Lifestyles, the Blue Sage, the Desert Paradise Shop, Adelante. Every door was shut, although inside a few stores, a last employee was ending the day. A handful of resort guests strolled along, enjoying the low prices that the swanky hotels use in the hot weather. But low here was still out of my price range. A security guard gave me the once over and decided I was okay, for now. The temperature had dropped into the high nineties, but I was still sweating.

Finally, I came to the place Dana had mentioned, and it was open.
Milagro Glass Works
was etched on a large slab of glass outside the entrance. I stepped inside, said hello to a clerk sitting behind a counter, and looked for Dana. I was the only customer. I checked my watch and looked around. Several large Dale Chihuly blown-glass sculptures sat on display, with their colorful pipes and horns looking like the serpent-hair of Medusa. For those who didn't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars, several shelves held smaller items. There were flowers, shells, bowls, beads, and vases, in everything from the traditional to the wildly abstract. These were not exactly cheap, either. There was a lot of money in the world, and none of it going to honest cops. I was looking at a twisty sculpture called Rites of Summer when I saw something in my peripheral vision.

Some ancient reflex caused me to pull my head aside, and something heavy swooped past my ear. It still nicked me and a bubble of sharp pain burst along the right side of my head. I stepped back to see a tall, broad-shouldered man standing before me in a crouch. Taking up his right upper arm and shoulder was an elaborate, multicolored tattoo. He had a shaved head, a red bandanna over half his face, like in the Old West, and he held a long, black sap in his right hand. I hadn't seen one of those since my patrol days: a heavy piece of lead in a thick leather wrapping, attached to a strap that fit neatly in the hand. Some of the old cops had carried them.

“Asshole,” he hissed, and lunged at me, swinging the sap at my head. I ducked and heard a crash that crossed several notes of the musical scale. One of the Chihulys disintegrated, sending orange, purple, and yellow shards like hard confetti into my face. I heard the clerk scream as I stumbled backward. He came again, faking punches with one hand while trying to get a good shot at me with the sap. My throat felt nearly closed off with panic, and I fought to get my wits back. Another fake punch and I grabbed his fist, trying to pull him down. Instantly my forearm exploded in agony as he brought the heavy weapon down on me. I let go.

Now there was about six feet between us, and I kept retreating toward the back of the store. He screamed in rage and tore down one of the shelves, scattering glass and display easels. I knew from academy days that the trick was to get close to the assailant, to step inside the reach of his arm so he couldn't swing, then do the takedown. I knew that. But for a few moments, I was nearly paralyzed with surprise and fear. My hand found a heavy slab of glass and I heaved it at his face. He ducked, but I used the moment of distraction. I willed my legs forward. Sure enough, when he realized what I was doing, it was too late. His hand came up holding the sap, but I was too close. With my left hand I grabbed his wrist, then brought my right arm behind his swinging arm. He pushed back but I was in a T-position, with my right foot planted securely behind me. I gave a rough push on his wrist, and the tension with my arm behind his elbow brought him down backward.

This is the point where the deputy quickly subdues the suspect, rolls him over, and cuffs him. But I was out of practice. We both crashed down to the hardwood floor, and somehow his knee ended up in my solar plexus. I rolled, so avoided the worst of it. But he scrambled out from under me, and by the time I got to my feet he was at the front door. I saw a flash of white and heard a groan. By the time I reached the threshold, I saw a guard on the concrete with a nasty gash in his head. Another guard was running my way. I flashed my badge and ordered him to call nine-one-one, then ran flat out after the tall man. I formed a description in my brain: six-four, shaved head, blue eyes, late twenties, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, and carrying a red bandanna. The tattoo—I would need some time to remember details.

I lost him by the time I reached the parking lot. Suddenly I heard a guttural roar of a diesel engine and saw a jacked-up pickup round the corner. My assailant was at the wheel. I raced to Lindsey's Prelude. Its bumper sticker said, “Keep Honking, I'm Reloading.” Inside was the Colt Python I had desperately needed moments before. I cranked it and sped toward Scottsdale Road. The truck was a black Dodge Ram, and the license plate was conveniently missing. Something was hanging below the rear bumper. It looked like a large set of testicles. He caught the green light at Carefree Highway, and I slammed through just as the amber was turning red. It was only then that I realized my cell phone had been knocked off in the melee. I only had a moment to worry about Lindsey in Washington. There was nothing to do but follow the truck.

It would have been nice if he had thought he was alone. But he was doing eighty and weaving in and out of traffic. He knew I was back there. To be sure, eighty miles an hour in Scottsdale on a Friday night was not much ahead of the flow of traffic. So much for my hope that he would attract the attention of Scottsdale PD. Still, the road was dark and treacherous. My ear and arm were really starting to hurt now, and my right hand was feeling a little numb. He just kept heading south. I knew what he wanted: the 101 beltway, which we would reach just before Bell Road. There, he could go anywhere he wanted.

He turned left at the 101 and really put on the power. I followed him and was doing nearly one hundred heading up the ramp. I had half a tank of gas and no plan other than to shoot him when he got where he was going. The freeway made its turn to the south and I was still on him. Traffic was thick as the highway went into the cut by Via Linda and curved, but he was quick and fearless. He threaded every needle, jumping into this lane, then the other, bullying any other vehicle out of his way. The oncoming lights blinded me at just the wrong time, and I lost his taillights. I had a sea of taillights, but I couldn't see the right ones. The description of a jacked-up diesel pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona, was as bad as no description at all.

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.

20

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. Only 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.