Cactus Heart (17 page)

33

I swam in the ocean at night. Me, a desert rat who refused to swim in places where I couldn't see the bottom. But I had lived seven years in San Diego, where the ocean was always in your sight or your nostrils. One night, on a first date luminous with connection, conversation, and laughter, my new friend and I had gone for a walk along the beach. When we came to a little cove, she had stripped off her clothes and run straight into the surf until only her blond head had been visible in the blackness of the waves. Then I had waded into the blackness, too, casting aside my native caution, letting the seaweed sweep against my legs and the fish bump me. I am a strong swimmer, so I had no trouble keeping up with her as we swam against the sea until finally we had become part of the swell and tide ourselves. When we were maybe a mile out, she had pointed back toward the land. I had turned to see, from our vast solitude, a dazzling necklace of lights on the horizon.

After I had married her and we had moved into a little house a block from the beach in La Jolla, I often swam out at night, often alone. The Pacific off San Diego is usually so calm that you can get careless. I always remembered that first night of revelation, when I had swum to catch her, fighting my own fear of being consumed by this world-making thing, and then finding myself a part of it. And I had always tried to remember the terrible power waiting in the gentle waves.

One night, angry over some now-forgotten academic feud, I had driven home from the university, changed into my trunks, and plunged recklessly into water that looked as calm as black glass. I had swum until every muscle burned with pain and I had ejected the argument from my mind. I recall very clearly thinking how much simpler it had been being a deputy. And then I had felt the current change beneath me.

A cold, black wave had hit me full on, then it pulled me straight down into the swell. Salty water had forced its way into my nose. I had felt as if I did a somersault and didn't know the way to the surface. My lungs had ached for new breath. But the cold had kept my head straight, so I just let the wave carry me out to sea. In a few seconds, that seemed like something less than a year, I had popped to the surface again. Then I had swum as best I could parallel to the lights, feeling a current insistently bearing me south. By the time the ocean let me go, I had been carried a mile away, down to Pacific Beach.

Treading water, exhausted, feeling the ocean say,
Don't mess with me. I will kill you
, my mind had calmly rested on things I didn't think of much on land. Things like God and family and the measure of a man's life. A sense that I had let too many sunny weekend afternoons slip on by, and now maybe I wouldn't make it back to shore before I froze to death or that rip current came back. When I walked across the rough sand, safe, I had promised myself I wouldn't lose that clarity.

I wasn't making promises Monday. I was shaky and nauseated. My ears rang from gunfire in a confined space. The only lucky break was that the elevator at the courthouse was working again. I went up to my office, closed the door and locked it. I sat at the desk and just stared into the bright Arizona sky and thought of swimming at night in the ocean. Still, I couldn't stop shaking, couldn't tone down the metronome in my chest.

I sat long enough that my eyes focused on the edge of an unmarked brown envelope. It had been set up against the door last week. I had brought it in and forgotten it. Now I pulled it out of the new pile of files that partially obscured it, pulled it across the desk. It didn't even have my name on the outside. I ran a letter opener through it. Two sheets of papers were inside. They were Photostats. The quality was rotten—but good enough to make out. I read them and set them aside, staring up at the old high ceiling. Then I read them again. By that time I wasn't shaking.

“Talbott. He wasn't…” I realized I was talking to myself. Grandmother had done that when she was older, and now I wondered if it was hardwired in the family. The first Photostat was the same booking record Zelda Chain had shown me. John Henry Talbott, also known as Jack Talbott, was arrested for misdemeanor drunk and disorderly at 1:10 on the morning of Nov. 27, 1941. The second record was new: it was a Phoenix City Jail prisoner release for Talbott, two days later.

Maybe a burglar had murdered Max Yarnell. Maybe the attack on James Yarnell had been completely unrelated. But Jack Talbott couldn't have been at Hayden Yarnell's hacienda on the night of the twins' disappearance.

I had the phone in my hand with the first two numbers of Peralta's extension dialed, but I stopped. There wasn't enough information yet. I knew that Talbott claimed he was framed for the kidnapping, that Win Yarnell had done it. The Photostat before me showed Talbott couldn't have done it. That Thanksgiving night he was in the city jail one floor above my office. I also knew that Hayden Yarnell had a codicil in his will that implied he had doubts about who had taken his grandsons. But why had Talbott gone to Nogales, and why was he carrying part of the ransom money and children's pajamas when he was arrested? And what had gone wrong in the kidnapping that had led to the deaths of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell?

And who had dug up the release record that seemed to clear Talbott of at least direct involvement, then put it in a plain envelope and placed it before my door? Someone who was interested that I make progress on this investigation. It couldn't have been Zelda Chain; it was delivered the day I was visiting her. Not Peralta: he would have lorded it over me that he had found a record that had eluded my searches of the city and county records. Bobby Hamid? More likely. It seemed like a lot of trouble just to consummate a real-estate deal. But this was Phoenix, after all.

I must have visibly jumped when the door opened, and then Gretchen was running across the room to embrace me, saying how worried she had been after hearing about the shooting. Suddenly it felt so damned good to be alive. It felt so good to be alive to hold and kiss this beautiful woman, who looked at me with adoring eyes. The other feeling that kicked me was guilt, for momentarily thinking about Lindsey and missing her.

34

That night the rain came, watery inflections on the pavement. Seven inches of rain water this desert in an entire year, so every drop is memorable. Every streak from a seldom-used windshield wiper. Every patter on the bedroom window. Every misty sprinkle on my face on a cool December evening.

When the winter rains come, the sidewalk restaurants move inside. The Fiesta Bowl promoters worry. The resorts cover up the pool furniture, and the snowbirds grumble. But we Phoenicians quietly exult—that after all the punishing months of sun and heat, the sky brings back the healing water. That, after all, the desert is God's chosen, sacred place.

More secular thoughts were on my mind as I cruised the parking lot at Biltmore Fashion Park for ten minutes before finding a parking place anywhere close to the Coffee Plantation. I had reluctantly turned down Gretchen's offer of company tonight. Maybe it was the post-shooting jitters, or maybe it was the fact that the Yarnell kidnapping was still unsolved, and these loose ends, forgotten for decades, were still my loose ends. So I worked. The buildings were draped with white holiday lights and steam came out of the car exhausts. The cars glided across the wet parking lot like a dream. By the time I got inside, a familiar blonde in a smart suit with a high hemline was waiting for me. This time the suit was pink. She was sipping from a tiny espresso cup.

“I told you on the phone I shouldn't even be speaking to you,” said Megan O'Connor, looking around as if bulky Yarneco security guards might spring from under the empty tables nearby. “I thought the crime had been solved. That awful young man, they ran his mug shot on the news tonight. Of course, it's terrible you had to kill him, but I understand you were doing your job. In any case, I'm meeting my fiancé in just a few minutes. We need to do our Christmas shopping.”

I sat down with her. Taking time to get anything to drink seemed too risky. This skittish bird might fly.

“I didn't shoot the kid.” Why was I making that point? “There are still a few things we need to clear up. I'm interested in a codicil to Hayden Yarnell's 1942 will. Are you familiar with it?”

You would have thought I had caressed her fine inner thighs. Her eyes grew wide and she pulled back.

“You know of it?” I asked again.

She gave a slight nod and looked around again.

“Is someone following you?”

She laughed. She had a big, fun laugh and it made me smile. She said, “I'm sorry, Deputy Mapstone. I know this seems absurd. You work around a company like Yarneco for enough years and you get paranoid. Yes, I know about the codicil. Working for Max meant that I did a good deal of work with the Yarnell Trust.”

I asked her about that. She ran a long finger around the rim of the cup in front of her.

“The trust supports twenty-seven heirs of Hayden Yarnell and his sister. I know, must be nice. Few of them live in Arizona any longer. Anyway, the trust is entirely funded by the wealth that Hayden Yarnell left, plus the investments made since then by the bank, advised by an independent board. Not even Max or James Yarnell were given seats on the board.”

“It doesn't sound like Hayden Yarnell trusted his family.”

“He was a self-made man,” Megan said. “And I guess he saw what a little money and leisure time did to his son, Hayden Jr.”

“The one they called Win.”

“Right. Anyway, this always struck me as strange. But when I started dealing with trust business, I heard about this codicil. I thought it was just a family legend. But one day I was researching something, and there it was. If it turned out that any family member had conspired or participated in the abduction of his grandsons, the conditions of his bequests would change. Among other things, the trust would be liquidated and given to charity.”

“That sounds extreme.”

“It's very odd,” she said. “Before I went to work at Yarneco, I had worked at a big law firm that did a lot of estate planning. I never saw anything like it before. Kind of like vengeance beyond the grave.”

“Did Max ever talk about this?”

“Never. The one time I asked, he got really flustered.”

“Did he talk about the kidnapping?”

“No. It was understood that we didn't discuss it.”

“You were close to him?”

She flashed angry eyes at me; they were green. “Not what you think, deputy.”

“I didn't think anything. I'm just trying to understand.”

She kept sipping the espresso, but the level of the liquid never seemed to go down. I needed to develop that technique with liquor. After a moment, “Max said his grandfather died a bitter, crazy old man. He said the codicil was a result of that. He also doubted it could even be enforced by a court.”

If that were true, it made me wonder why he became flustered, to use her word.

“Max wasn't close to his brother?”

“You could say that. Or you could say they just despised each other. James still controlled a share of Yarneco—within the parameters of the trust, of course—and he would vote against Max, just for spite, it seemed to me. James lives in this art world. He's very connected and handsome, charming in a way his brother never is. Was, I mean. He doesn't know anything about business.”

By this time a tall, boy-faced man was hovering. He was dressed in an over-long T-shirt, baggy jeans and expensive sneakers. Megan excused herself without introducing me, and walked away with the fiancé. There was no time to ask why she felt paranoid working for Yarneco, or whether her boss had felt the same. There was barely time to appreciate her elegant beauty as she walked out with her slob boyfriend. I unconsciously straightened my suit coat and headed to the rain-anointed parking lot.

35

Choose a strand and pull it, follow where it led. That had been Gretchen's advice. So on Tuesday I drove down Central into the south Phoenix barrio, across the Salt River that stayed dry despite the rain, past the brightly colored storefronts with signs in Spanish. A brave ice-cream man patrolled the corner of Southern Avenue with his pushcart, even though it was fifty degrees outside. Shops covered their wares in plastic against the rain. Working people huddled on the muddy, broken concrete of city bus stops.

Every face I saw was Hispanic, and it made me think of the kid in the old motel, Hector Gonzales. Just before Peralta arrived, when I had asked him if he had killed Yarnell, he said something odd. He said, “Yarnell, he…” I had forgotten about it in the mayhem that followed. Now I remembered it. “Yarnell, he…” He said it as if he knew whom I was talking about, and yet it wasn't necessarily the way you'd begin a sentence of denial, or confession. “Yarnell, he…” Nothing about these cases seemed right. I was thinking too much, or so Peralta had said. So I drove on, but didn't stop thinking.

The Phoenix I had grown up in had been little removed from its roots as a largely Southern town, and south Phoenix was the segregated wrong side of the tracks. It was a very Anglo city, with a relatively large African-American population, and Mexican-American families that had lived here for generations. All this had been swept away by the past ten or fifteen years, as hundreds of thousands of first-generation Latino migrants had crowded into a city whose population had tripled since 1960. The historic Golden Gate barrio had been bulldozed for Sky Harbor expansion. The newcomers had turned everything from the onetime white-bread suburb of Maryvale to many of the formerly black neighborhoods of south Phoenix into new barrios. Now the Midwesterners were coming, too. The citrus groves and Japanese Flower Gardens that had encircled the south edge of the city like a cooling, green necklace were falling to subdivisions, shopping strips, and gated properties. There were hard feelings and tensions on all sides.

I was after different history: a man who had been at the Yarnell hacienda the night of the kidnapping. Finding people was easier than when I had been a young patrol deputy. Now the department had a software program called AutoTrack that allowed us to search through public records using as little as a name. I had more than that, because Luis Paz's Social Security number was still in the Yarneco records from 1941, and the Department of Motor Vehicles had issued him a driver's license in 1988. But his old phone number had been disconnected. With AutoTrack I found he was still alive, and living with his son. I tried to keep my heart from leaping into my throat in excitement.

Luis Paz, Hayden Yarnell's gardener, would be the only person left alive who had been an adult at the hacienda when the kidnapping took place. Although the case files showed that Paz was there that Thanksgiving night, there was no evidence he had been interviewed. Another case of lost paperwork, I was sure. But what if he had seen something that escaped the attention of young James or Max Yarnell? Maybe he could tell me what happened on the night when Jack Talbott was sleeping off a drunk, not committing a kidnapping. Or maybe Paz was in diapers with his memory gone. I had to try.

I parked the BMW in front of a single-story cinder block house on a street without curbs or gutters. Around me was a poor neighborhood hunched in the shadow of some kind of industrial operation. The air smelled of an unknown chemical. But this house was neat, freshly painted and lushly landscaped. I counted four pickup trucks in the driveway. At the door, I showed my star and asked for Luis Paz.

“He's not here. Who the hell are you?”

A big man around my age pushed out the screen door. I backed away instinctively. He was taller than me, broad shouldered, and carried his arms in the way of weight lifters. Resentment shone on him like sweat. I didn't know what flavor of resentment, but it didn't take a Ph.D. to know it involved cops. I told him who I was.

“I'm investigating the kidnapping and murder of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell. I know that happened a long time ago. But our information is that your…grandfather?…was there the night it happened.”

“He's my grandfather. He doesn't know anything.” His voice was low and decidedly unfriendly.

“I'd like to talk to him.”

“What if he doesn't want to talk to you, huh? Look around, you think cops are welcome in this 'hood? They only come when they bring trouble. Like that kid who was murdered over on Buckeye yesterday. Sounds like he never had a chance. The TV said he had a gun, but you know that's bullshit. You cops carry guns to plant on the people you shoot.”

I let that go on by. My ears were still ringing from the shooting.

“And what kind of a cop has a ride like that?” He nodded toward the BMW.

“You probably don't know that we recovered the remains of the Yarnell twins…”

“What? Do you think I'm stupid? I read it in the newspaper.” My charm was obviously working on him. “I thought that was solved. They caught the guy way back when. He was an Anglo.”

“He might not have done it. There's new information. That's why I was hoping…”

His eyes bore into me and the rain sprinkled on us. “You don't know anything about my dad. You think you're going find some dumb old Mexican. He's a retired small-business man. He took the money he saved while he was young, while he was working for the Yarnells, and he started a lawn service. By the time he retired, he had more than a hundred men working for him.”

As he lectured me, I could see the glow of a television screen beyond the doorway, but it was impossible to see who was inside. Then someone was watching me, a little girl with luxurious black hair and a nose pressed against the screen.

“I learned all about the police as the arm of the dominant power establishment when I was a student at Princeton,” he went on, watching me closely. “Does it surprise you a homeboy went to the Ivy League?”

“No.”

“Bullshit! I come back here and there's no work except in real estate, and there's a cop on my doorstep. Class and race and power, man. If this house were in Paradise Valley, you wouldn't dare come here. You'd be dealing with some lawyer.”

“I just want to ask Mr. Paz if…”

“Hey, Pablo!” I turned to see a low-rider Honda stopped on the street. Four heads with close-cropped haircuts were staring at me. “This guy giving you trouble?”

My stomach tightened. Suddenly this seemed like a really bad idea. The little girl kept watching me.

“Look. I'm not here to hassle you or your grandfather. I saw the bones of the two little boys. It's all that's left. Andrew and Woodrow. They were four years old. I've seen a photo of them in cowboy outfits. I bet they were like any kids that age. Then somebody took them. They were sealed into a wall, and they probably suffocated in there. I don't care whether they were rich kids or poor kids, they didn't need to die that way. And we've gone for fifty-eight years without knowing what really happened. I think your grandfather could help. I can't imagine he wouldn't want to try.”

Pablo's mouth turned down. Almost involuntarily he looked back into the house, at the little girl, and in a voice of unbelievable tenderness, “Go back in now. Go be with Lito. I'll be right there.” Then he cocked his head. “It's okay,” he called out, and gave a meaty wave to the occupants of the Honda. “We're glad you're back in town,” they yelled and rolled off.

“At least consider it.” I held out my card, and after a long moment Pablo took it.