Cactus Heart (18 page)

36

Pull a strand and it breaks. There was as much chance of talking to Luis Paz as there was that Phoenix would become a city of rain like Seattle. It put me in a rotten mood for the shooting board, which met all afternoon. I had been a bit player in the incident on Buckeye Road, but that didn't prevent the usual savaging by internal affairs, an assistant county attorney and a board of senior officers. “Why didn't you fire?” they kept demanding. “Why did you hesitate?” The kid seemed pretty dead without my assistance.

Back in the courthouse, I was arranging neat piles of work on the big counsel's table that sat beside the white board when the phone rang. It was James Yarnell.

“We're home free, Mapstone.”

“Oh, sorry I didn't tell you about the suspect in Max's homicide. I just assumed the other detectives…”

“I'm not talking about that. Didn't you hear? Scottsdale PD made an arrest this morning.”

I sat in my chair, letting the creak echo off the high ceiling.

“It was this woman, she was obsessed with me,” he went on. “She was on the art scene in Santa Fe, and I thought she had a little talent. It turned into an affair. Bad judgment on my part. That was a year ago, and after we broke up she moved to Scottsdale. She would come by the gallery. Then she started getting nasty, making threats. But I thought she was harmless.”

I stopped him. “Are you telling me this woman has been arrested for taking the shot at us?”

“Yes, yes! Lisa showed up outside my house, screaming at me. The cops were watching me, of course, and they arrested her. They told me she had a pistol in her car, the same caliber as the one that was used on me. Right now they're calling her a ‘person of interest,' whatever that means. I guess they have to run tests.”

Why wasn't I happy for him? Another neat bow was being tied around the case, and all my fears about a link to the kidnapping were just so much paranoia. So what if the same kind of doll that had been delivered to my office door was also found in Max Yarnell's house, with the charming addition of bloody doll hands? Calm down, Mapstone. Get in the holiday spirit. So I told him it was great news. Then I was about to tell him that Jack Talbott couldn't have been at the hacienda the night of the kidnapping, but he was in a hurry.

“Let's catch up after the first of the year, Mapstone. I'll call you.”

My next call was to Gretchen. I told her I had to work for the next few nights. Believe me, I didn't want it that way. But the Yarnell kidnapping was still unsolved. In my mind, it was more unsolved than it had been when I fell into the freight elevator in the dark a month before.

I finally had to settle down to the hundred small disciplines that separate the historian from the cop. We live in a state of incomplete and contradictory knowledge. It's what keeps historians arguing and publishing. That wasn't much comfort now, because I lacked the scholar's critical distance from this piece of history. But I would try. And if I were lucky, I would live with a little less uncertainty. I discussed my theories with no one.

I needed the comfort of research, informed by technique and imagination. I wanted evidence. I wanted contrary evidence even more. Reconstruction. What happened? Interpretation. Why? Pattern and bias. What was I missing? It was solitary work.

I mined archives scattered across the city: the state archives, the library at Arizona State University, the Arizona Room at the Phoenix Public Library, the state historical society, the Arizona Historical Foundation. I returned to the old files of the Phoenix Police, and added data from the county assessor and recorder. I spent half a day at the state vital statistics department. I tore apart ten boxes of court transcripts that had been boxed up longer than I had been alive. Dusty pages and decaying volumes. Each one said, “I was there”…“I have something to tell you.”

I sat in on the monthly breakfast held by some retired Phoenix cops at Bill Johnson's Big Apple, and each one had an opinion about the case. Unfortunately, none had firsthand knowledge of it. I pored over maps and blueprints of the warehouse district, old plans from the city water department, and a survey of the area by the Salt River Project. At the Phoenix Police Museum, amid the display of a real police motorcycle and a mockup of the city jail in frontier times, the curator showed me Joe Fisher's memoirs. He let me borrow a desk and I settled in to read it.

It was a hardcover book, but it looked self-published.
My Years on the Phoenix Force
, by Joe Fisher. Using the skimming technique familiar to any former graduate student, I leafed through. It was badly written, although, hell, throw in some statistics and you could probably get it published in a professional history journal today. Fisher wrote about his role in the 1931 case of Winnie Ruth Judd, the trunk murderess. There he was again helping the Tucson cops arrest John Dillinger and his gang in 1934. If the writing hadn't been so dry, I would have been tempted to linger. I knew that Fisher had been repeatedly decorated for bravery. He brought the most modern techniques to the force. And he had amazing success in coaxing confessions. Unfortunately the book seemed to offer no insights on these things, and I didn't have the time. I moved forward, looking for the Yarnell kidnapping.

It wasn't there. No index, damn. I went back through, but it still wasn't there, and the book was nothing if not chronological. One of the most famous cases of his career, and he didn't write about it. The book ended with a murder in 1943, and a typewritten insert in the back gave Fisher's bio, including the fact that he had died in 1947.

I gave the book back to the curator, explained my dilemma, bought a museum membership, and lingered over a photo of the detective bureau, circa 1940. Fisher was identified, a short man in a fedora and suit with a broad, forgettable face. He didn't look like a tough guy at all.

I spoke to him under my breath. “What the hell were you up to?”

“Deputy,” the curator called out and I walked over.

“I have one other idea for you,” he said.

37

“What do you mean Frances is dead?”

“She had a stroke the afternoon after your visit, Deputy.” Heather Amis' voice was raw as sunstroke. “She slipped into a coma, and she died last night.”

It was Thursday morning and I was back at my office in the old courthouse, and suddenly the cavernous room felt claustrophobic. My travel plans for that day were evaporating.

“So now she's finally free. Fifty-seven years she spent in here. I just can't believe the cruelty. This poor, poor woman. And please spare me your speech about the rights of the victims.”

“I wasn't going to make a speech. What happened to her sounds rotten.”

“You have no idea.”

I felt all my theories crashing into the wall of silence that developed on the phone. Finally, I asked, “Did you get a chance to ask her any of the questions I left for you?”

“No. You got her to talk more than I had ever seen. And she never said another word before she had the stroke.”

“Do you know about the crime?”

“I learned everything I could,” she said. “I also went back in her medical records.”

“I've learned a few things.” I shouldn't have been discussing the case with a civilian, but how could my luck get any worse? “I learned that Jack Talbott couldn't have been there the night of the kidnapping.”

Heather gasped, and I told her more.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “So old Hayden Yarnell must have suspected his son Hayden Jr. had done it. My God, that explains everything.”

“I can't go that far,” I said. “I don't know Talbott's involvement. He was found with some of the ransom money in Nogales and the boys' pajamas. That would still sway a jury today.”

“But Frances!” she nearly yelled. “My God, Frances was just caught up in this.”

“Maybe. She was an accessory. She went to Nogales with Talbott. Why?”

“I don't know!” Heather's voice was taut with frustration. “But I believed in her! It's not like she had any family or even a lawyer. Nobody was fighting for her. And don't think I'm a pushover, David. I know every inmate says she's innocent. I think Frances really was.”

“Did she ever say so?”

“No. But have you found anything new that implicates her?”

I had to grant her that I had not. But if Frances had explained her innocence at the trial, told how she was caught up in something with which she had nothing to do, it was on pages of lost court transcripts. That was possible, but the newspaper accounts had no mention of it. She also never took the stand.

Heather started talking even before I was finished. “Maybe she was covering up for someone!”

“But then to not talk for all those years in prison? Why? Why still be covering up in the sixties, even the nineties, for God's sake.”

“You're dealing with the Yarnell family. Anything is possible when money and power are involved.”

“So why didn't they have her killed, or have her released and buy her off?” I said. “Her silence was an act of her power, when you think about it. She made this choice. Most of the ransom money was never recovered. Maybe Frances knew where it was hidden, and she thought she would get out someday and retrieve it. That's a powerful motive to keep silence.”

“God, I'm sick of men talking about power and women living without it! Do you believe what you just said?”

After a pause I had to admit I didn't.

“I've been reading some of the notes the lead detective made in the case,” I said. “Joe Fisher. I just found some of his files. He had reservations about whether Frances was involved in the kidnapping. He testified at her trial for leniency.”

“My God…”

“But he couldn't get past the fact that she was found with Talbott, with some of the ransom money and the pajamas. I have no idea whether he knew that Talbott was in jail the night of the kidnapping, but he did interview a lot of people about the possibility that others were involved.”

“Why didn't he…?”

“I don't know. Maybe he wanted to do the right thing, but he could never make the case.”

“You cops,” Heather said. “Always sticking together. Can't you do anything, Mapstone? This woman was a victim! She never got justice. Don't you care?”

I just listened. Anything I said would seem insincere.

“Mapstone?”

“I'm here. I do care, Heather. That's why I'm asking these questions. I just can't figure out what would have caused Frances to keep silent.”

Heather said, “I can think of one thing.”

38

The rap on the door was tentative, almost like someone made a mistake. Still absorbing the news from Heather Amis, I wanted to let them walk on. Whoever it was couldn't want me that bad. But I set aside my notes and went to the door.

Before me stood a small, dark man in a starched white shirt and a bola tie. His face looked as lined and cracked as the desert itself, but his hair was vividly black and slicked back on his scalp. He carried a Stetson in one hand, a large, powerful-looking hand for such a small man.

“I am Luis Paz.”

I invited him in and sent Carl down to the marriage license bureau to get him a cup of coffee. Carl wouldn't like it, but I was afraid the old man might walk out if I kept him waiting. Or he might just disappear like the apparition he seemed to be. I led him to one of the straight-back wooden chairs and invited him to sit. He put the Stetson on my desk.

“My son gave me your card.”

I told him that I appreciated that.

“He didn't want me to come here. To open up things that should have been closed so long ago.”

“But you came anyway,” I said. I sat cautiously behind my desk. He regarded me in a long appraising glare.

“You work for Chief Peralta?”

I said I did.

“He's a good man. I knew his father, the judge.”

“Mr. Paz, you worked as gardener…”

“I worked for Mr. Yarnell for nearly twenty years.”

“Hayden Yarnell?” I coaxed.

Paz stiffened. “There is only one Mr. Yarnell,” he said. “His older sons were…” He let the sentence hang between us, as if only a fool would not understand.

“After he died, I started my own lawn business.” He relaxed a millimeter, no more.

“Sir, may I ask how old you are?”

“Ninety-three,” he said.

“You don't look it.”

He smiled a little. “I feel every year,” he said. “But I am not here about me.” He sighed and looked across the desk, then met my eyes. “What happened in 1941, all those years ago, I've carried it in my heart.”

We fell into quiet that seemed endless. It was a taste of the silence the Yarnell twins must have felt, an absence more frightening than their cries for help, the silence of Jack Talbott before the executioner did his job, or the endless years for Frances Richie. But I didn't dare break it. Finally, Paz did.

“At first I could tell myself stories, that maybe I was mistaken about what I had seen and heard. And then it didn't seem to matter, so much had gone wrong it couldn't be made right.”

I spoke into the next long gap. “What couldn't be made right?”

“You don't understand. They were so powerful…”

“The Yarnell family?”

He nodded slowly. “First they told me to keep my mouth shut, that Mr. Yarnell wanted it that way. I couldn't believe that, but he became so sick, and I couldn't talk to him.” He sighed heavily. “I was afraid. I had my own family, and I was afraid. Later, when the Yarnells offered me money to start my own business, I took it.”

His hands bunched into gnarled, hard-time fists that sat on his knees like holstered weapons. “Do you know what it is like to hold something terrible in your heart for so many years?” he asked. “Do you know how heavy it becomes?”

Carl stepped in and put the coffee on the desk. He started to say something. Then he saw Paz's face, and walked quietly out, closing the door without a sound.

Paz sipped the coffee. “They tell me I should not have caffeine, or anything else I love. Am I going to live another twenty years? I hope not. A man can live too long.”

I didn't try to guide him. I just sat and listened.

“Mr. Yarnell could have lived forever but he died of a broken heart,” Paz said. “I was so young and stupid then, I would not have believed such a thing. But I watched it happen.”

“When his grandsons were kidnapped.”

“Yes!” Paz erupted. “Yes, it killed Mr. Yarnell.”

“You were there the Thanksgiving they were kidnapped?”

He nodded.

“And you stayed with Mr. Yarnell until he died?”

“I was there the entire time,” he said. “I didn't understand all that was happening. I didn't know how to help Mr. Yarnell. There was no straight course that I could see.”

“You cared about Mr. Yarnell.”

Paz stared at his fists, opened them and stared inside, as if the lifelines on his palms could translate for him.

“Do you understand what I am trying to say?” he demanded.

“I think I do,” I said. “But I need you to tell me in your own words, from the beginning.”

He sat for a long time in that death silence, the big room swallowing up even the sound of our breathing. Then he set the coffee cup carefully on my desk and began to talk in a strong voice.