Cactus Heart (13 page)

26

I needed to get out of the city, so the next day I followed Lorie's notepad-sheet full of directions to the outskirts of Black Canyon City, a village loosely spread across the foothills along the interstate north of Phoenix. I was on business. Peralta was getting testy, the Yarnell case distracting him from the Harquahala Strangler. That morning, he had presided over a meeting downtown. Two detectives named Kimbrough and Mitchell—I'd worked with them before and we'd established something like mutual respect—would do the traditional cop work on the Max Yarnell murder. They would also handle liaison with Scottsdale PD on the attempt on James Yarnell's life. I was to focus on the kidnapping of the twins, and find out how, or if, it connected to the other crimes. I was happy to be working back in the past, where you were shot at less frequently. Still, I had the Colt Python .357 magnum on my belt now, the black nylon holster feeling uncomfortable and comforting at the same time.

The directions led me to a sun-beaten, single-wide trailer perched on the edge of a squat mesa. Scrub-covered hills and blown-apart rock formations swept away in every direction. The purple mass of the Bradshaw Mountains piled up to the northwest, and off to the east a ten-story-high rock prism sprouted out of a butte. Down below, Interstate 17 emitted a steady moan and I could smell the exhaust fumes this far away. To the south, the mountains were obscured in a brown soup: Phoenix. I parked the BMW next to a Harley, grabbed a satchel of file folders and stepped out onto the hard ground.

“I got a twelve-gauge and you're way lost, mister,” a woman's voice came from the trailer. Another day, another gun aimed at me.

“I'm looking for Zelda Chain,” I called.

“Who the hell are you?”

“David Mapstone. Lorie Pope sent me.”

A screen door flew open and a large, pear-shaped woman, poured into a brown house dress, scrambled out. “Why the hell didn't you say so, honey? You almost gave me my morning target practice. My, you're a tall one. No wonder Lorie likes you.”

I knew she was pushing eighty, but her face had a youthful animation. Her hair was long and colorless, falling back over her shoulders. Her eyes were large and full of fun.

“Things have gotten too dangerous,” she said. “That damned city.” She gestured toward Phoenix.

“We have Major League Baseball,” I volunteered.

She gave me a vinegar look. “When I moved out here years ago, it was a half-hour drive before you even got to the outskirts. Now, I hear they're doing one of these goddamned ‘planned communities' right across the wash from me.” She gestured across the dry creek bed. “It will have forty thousand people. Hope I'm dead by then.”

She saw me eyeing the Harley. “Don't worry, honey. That hog doesn't belong to some big drunken boyfriend who's going to come home and catch us.” She laughed until she drowned in a phlegmy cough. “That's my bike. Don't ride as much as I once did. Fell too damned many times. It's a credo for life: don't ride if you're afraid to lay the bike down.”

Zelda Chain invited me into a living room crowded with books and furniture, and insisted on serving iced tea. It was in a mason jar and smelled of bourbon. She pulled a Marlboro and lit up.

“I always used to joke that I'd end up in a trailer outside Gallup, New Mexico,” she said, dropping across from me on an ancient stuffed sofa. “Hell, I couldn't even get that far away from Phoenix. But, as Lorie probably told you, I was the librarian at
The Republic
for forty-seven years. I'm damned proud of that. I retired in 1985. Well, they retired me. Now I don't even read newspapers anymore. I don't want to know how awful the world is. Never watched television. I'm tempted to tear out the phone.”

I asked about Hayden Yarnell and the history of the kidnapping, but she leaned back, rearranged her long, dry hair like a shawl over her shoulders and smiled like a young girl. “Lorie tells me you're a history professor and a deputy sheriff.”

“That's true.”

“That's like being a gas company and an Internet company all in one,” she laughed. “I own stock in one like that. Bastards. Never gets above nineteen dollars a share.”

“Kind of like me, I guess.”

She crushed out the cigarette and lit another. “Young people aren't taught history any more,” she said. “They haven't been for thirty years or more. It's one reason the world's so insane.” She waved the cigarette around like a smoky wand. “My uncle fought in the Spanish-American War,” she went on. “And he lived to see Americans walk on the moon. We don't have that sense of connection to our past now. But that doesn't mean it's not there. What did Faulkner say? ‘The past isn't even past.' We just have to rediscover every truth the hard way. Such arrogance.”

She stopped and looked at me. “Ah, Mapstone, you are in the clutches of an old lady with too many crotchets and grudges against the world. What did you specialize in, in graduate school?”

I hadn't been asked that question in a while. “America in the Progressive era and the Depression.”

“To each his own,” she said. “Pardon my sexist language. I specialized in eighteenth-century England.” The merry eyes reasserted themselves. “But my dad also made me learn to type. So you're lucky you have a skill to fall back on.”

She waddled over to a bookshelf filled with file boxes labeled in old-lady-scrawl. “Can you believe the newspaper wanted to throw all this out?

“So,” she said, “which one of you wants to know about Hayden Yarnell? The history teacher, or the lawman?”

She pulled out a large file box, blew the dust off and set it on a Formica table. “The year was 1941. Pearl Harbor hadn't happened yet. Phoenix was still a small farming town, with some dude ranches and tuberculosis sanitariums—they called the patients ‘lungers' then. Hayden Yarnell was the richest man in the state. He had a big house on South Mountain. It burned in 1942, not long after the kidnapping. He died soon after that. Talk about a string of bad luck. The ruins of the foundation are probably still out there. He also kept an apartment at the Hotel Westward Ho, like the rest of the Phoenix elite. Rumor had it he kept a mistress there, too. Back then, they called the big men in town the ‘summer bachelors.' When it turned hot, they'd ship their wives off to someplace cool, and their summer girls would show up.”

All this was before she even looked into the files.

“What if I told you we found the skeletons of two children, entombed in a basement wall in a downtown warehouse owned by the Yarnell family? And somebody is now killing off the remaining Yarnell brothers.”

She exhaled from somewhere in her ankles. “I'd say I need a drink.” She took my mason jar and banged into the small kitchen. “You need one, too. Bourbon is the house specialty.”

“Easy on the dose for me.”

She returned and leaned on the table, watching me intently. “You found the Yarnell twins? Holy crap. Maybe I'll have to subscribe to the newspaper again.”

“What do you remember about the time of the kidnapping?”

“Well,” she eased herself into a chair, “everything. It was Thanksgiving, an unusually cold autumn. Do you know we used to get hard frosts in Phoenix before they paved everything over? Anyway, I'd been at the paper for about three years. We all had our eyes on the war in Europe, and we knew it was just a matter of time before Japan jumped on us. But Phoenix was so isolated then, and things were very quiet.”

“Morgan Yarnell waited a week before reporting the kidnapping to the police.”

She nodded. “Strange, huh? He was the father of the twins. But the fact that they waited to call the cops was never very widely reported. The family had pull with the newspaper publishers, so no surprise there. I assume they figured they could handle it themselves, and any publicity might make the kidnapper kill the twins. Remember, the Lindbergh kidnapping was still very fresh in everyone's minds. Talk about a media circus. The Yarnells were very well known, much more so than today.”

“But did Morgan get a ransom note, or what? It's not clear from the record.”

She opened the file box and leafed through some yellowed papers. She produced some reading glasses from her pocket and angled them on her nose. “He told the police that the twins were taken from their rooms at the Yarnell mansion on South Mountain on the night of November 27, and their nanny discovered them missing the next day. He received a telephone call that day demanding a hundred thousand dollars be put in a locker at Union Station. He complied, but after a week the boys still weren't returned, so he went to the police. No mention of a note or any communication beyond the call.”

“Did they have direct dial in town then? Maybe an operator helped the kidnapper place the call. I wish somebody had tried to find where that call came from.”

“Honey, I wish I was twenty years old with a cheerleader's body, still with my IQ, of course. Nobody was asking these questions. When Jack Talbott was caught, everyone was convinced justice was done. Wait.” She leafed through a file of yellowed newspaper clippings and paper. “Maybe not everyone. Here, look at this.”

It was newspaper copy paper, flimsy and brittle with age. It was datelined Florence, Arizona, July 20, 1942. I read the lead aloud:

“‘Convicted kidnapper John Henry “Jack” Talbott was executed in Arizona's gas chamber early this morning, but not before his last words accused Hayden “Win” Yarnell Jr. of masterminding the kidnapping of his four-year-old nephews.'”

I sat up straight. “I never saw this story.”

“That's because it didn't run in the newspaper. The publisher himself spiked it. The publisher was a good friend of the Yarnells, remember, and this Talbott character was hardly the most reliable witness. So the account of his last words never ran.”

Another Marlboro flamed to life. She swept away the smoke with an incantatory wave of her bony hand.

“As I said, Mapstone, it was a small town. People talked. They knew Win Yarnell—that's the name Hayden Jr. went by—they knew he was the black sheep. He drank, womanized. His wife left him. He had a terrible gambling habit. Used to gamble in the old Duece—they bulldozed it in the '70s to make that horrible Civic Plaza. He gambled with Bravo Juan.”

“Great name.”

“Bravo Juan ran the numbers in the Deuce. He had an arrangement with the sheriff and the police chief, and kept everything in order. But the story went that Win Yarnell was deeply in debt to him. How do you like that, Mapstone? A loser named Win? Anyway, it all made the old man so mad, he disowned him, cut him right out of the business and the will.”

I asked when that happened. “The late 1930s,” she replied. “Everybody talked about it. It was a little town. People felt sorry for Mr. Yarnell, ending up with the sons he did. I guess Morgan was okay, but never that bright. And Win was a lost cause.”

I gingerly sampled the bourbon. “So was Win enough of a lost cause to kidnap his nephews?”

“Maybe.” Her voice became momentarily precise and delicate. “People are capable of anything. Didn't Solzhenitsyn say that the line separating good from evil doesn't run between nations or parties but through every human heart? Maybe it was Dostoevsky.”

“Solzhenitsyn, I think.” I thought of Lindsey, my Russian literature expert.

Zelda exhaled a plume of smoke. “What if Win stole Morgan's children to get a ransom to pay Bravo Juan and something went wrong? Nobody thought Win was a killer, much less of his own nephews.”

I thought about that. “On the other hand, it might make more sense that Bravo Juan or somebody like him snatched the kids to put pressure on Win or the family to repay the gambling debts. Why didn't the police ever do any checking?”

“Oh, even a college professor can't be that naive. This was the most powerful family in the state. Phoenix was a corrupt little town where the elite got what they wanted. Look at the way they had railroaded Winnie Ruth Judd just a few years before that. Anyway, in this case the cops had a man caught red-handed with the ransom money, or part of it at least, and with the pajamas. Why would they need to do more?”

I just let the bourbon and information burn my throat.

She fished out a brown file folder and handed it to me. Yellowed papers bulged out from the sides. “Here's Jack Talbott's police record. Do you have it?” I shook my head. “You can add it to your collection.”

I slipped off the rubber band and leafed through the papers. Talbott had received a suspended sentence for burglary back in Elwood, Indiana. In Phoenix, he served a month in the county jail for assaulting a fellow drunk. That was in June 1940. Another arrest came in November 1941 for public drunkenness. I slowed down my reading. I read it again.

“This is strange. Jack Talbott was arrested for public drunkenness outside a bar on Second Street on November 27.”

She reached for the report. “Let me see that. I never noticed that before.” She stubbed out the Marlboro and scanned the page with her finger.

“Mapstone, that was the day of the kidnapping. Could he really have been set up, just like he claimed?”

“Maybe not.” Peralta's skeptical voice was in my head. “The booking record shows he was arrested at one-ten a.m. that day. He could have been released in a few hours. The kidnapping was later that night. Maybe he got just sober enough to steal those little boys. It's impossible to know without the jail release record. What about the art collection that disappeared? Could that have played into this?”

“Oh, you know about that. It was another thing the newspaper never reported. Supposed to have been quite a collection. But it disappeared after the kidnapping. Let me think…after the kidnapping, and before the old man died.”

“Maybe you
can
take it with you.”

She gave a wheezy laugh and slugged down the remains of the bourbon.