Camelback Falls (5 page)
By 10
A.M.
Wednesday, I had already spent two hours in the records bureau, looking through case records of the Guadalupe shootout. I’m not a morning person, but I wasn’t sleeping. Until two days before, I could come here as a nobody. Or a curiosity: that former history professor who worked for Peralta. Now I created a sensation. Records clerks scurried forward to meet me, to find every file I sought, to cover their asses. With difficulty, I persuaded them to return to work and let me have some quiet. Hell, I was still nobody, and would happily return to that state as soon as Peralta popped his eyes open and started making his usual demands.
But two days after the shooting, that still hadn’t happened. The night before, we sat with Sharon as nurses came and went from his bedside like initiates in an obscure cult. We watched his heartbeat on the scratchy electronic line of the EKG, watched his chest rise and fall to the command of the respirator. I had asthma as a child, and the fear of suffocating still lingers. The respirator scares the hell out of me. The swelling of his brain had gone down, the doctors told Sharon. And their devices measured brain activity, a good sign. But he was still out cold. Sharon sat by his bed speaking to him in her soothing coloratura, a voice even nicer in person than on the radio. But the only response was the steady trace of a heartbeat, a blue-white line on the screen by his bed.
With that memory, I finished off the remains of a bagel, took another sip of my mocha, and went back to the work before me. The trauma of that May evening so many years before was reduced to four file folders on a table. Paper records. The department was moving backward, putting files into the computer database that could be viewed by deputies using laptops in the field. But that effort petered out with documents dated around 1990. I was looking at antiques of law enforcement record-keeping.
The files were a mess of incident reports, witness statements, news clippings, detectives’ notes, and court transcripts. Some faxed pages were almost entirely faded out. But sheet by sheet, the events revealed themselves. There was even a copy of the arrest report of Leo Martin O’Keefe and Marybeth Watson, with my signature and badge number—“D.P. Mapstone, 5718”—at the bottom of the page. I didn’t remember being there for the booking, but obviously I was. It was a long time ago.
The memory of the files was incomplete, but it went like this: At approximately 6:45
P.M.
on the evening of May 31, 1979, sheriff’s deputies Harold Matson and Virgil Bullock stopped a suspicious vehicle in an alley in Guadalupe. The occupants of the car apparently opened fire on the deputies as they approached. Matson and Bullock never knew what hit them. Their .38 Special service revolvers weren’t even drawn.
At 7:02
P.M.
, Sergeant Mike Peralta and Deputy David Mapstone arrived on the scene. They encountered the suspects, who immediately opened fire on them with automatic weapons. Peralta killed two suspects. (Mapstone was pretty fucking worthless, though the record happily omitted that fact). The two dead suspects were Billy McGovern and Troyce Meadows. They were prison escapees from Oklahoma, in for armed robbery and, at ages twenty-three and twenty-four, carrying hardcore records. They had escaped from the state prison in McAlester the previous July by hiding in a laundry truck.
Charged as accessories were Leo and Marybeth. They were Okies, too. Just kids: Leo was twenty-one and Marybeth was seventeen. Billy McGovern was Leo’s cousin. Somehow the four had hooked up on the afternoon of May 31. Then the paper trail faded and disappeared. The files held no statements from Leo or Marybeth. It was the frustration of dealing with records that had been picked over a period of years, then relocated as the department grew, and finally neglected until the past reached out and threatened us. I made a note to call over to the County Attorney’s Office. Maybe they had a more complete file.
Still, the outcome was clear from court papers and press clippings. Leo and Marybeth were charged as accessories. Arraigned as a juvenile, Marybeth received five years’ probation. Leo agreed to a plea-bargain, accessory to assault on a police officer, and got a year in the state prison. It jarred me to see the name of his public defender, Hector Gutierrez, who was now one of the best known white-shoe lawyers in town. Back then, he had been called “Red Hector” for his radical politics and courtroom diatribes against “the system.”
A frayed clipping: Leo O’Keefe, imprisoned for his role in a 1979 killing of two deputies, was charged with the murder of another inmate. Then it was life for Leo, which in Arizona meant more than seven years and out on good behavior. So he was capable of killing.
A mug shot from 1979: Leo looking scared and a little stoned. A stupid kid with stringy black hair over his shoulders and black plastic-framed glasses. But he had an old-man’s face, with a knobby chin and raw cheekbones. He hardly looked the role of the hardened killer.
Then I saw myself. My God, I looked young, so damned young. My photo stared out from an article on the shooting. Peralta was there, too. I had forgotten he was sporting a thick bandito mustache back then. And even though in my mind’s eye Peralta was always the same, he, too, looked impossibly youthful. The article was by Lorie Pope of the
Arizona Republic
. She was a twenty-one-year-old cub reporter then. I wondered what she remembered about the case.
“So how’s it hanging, Sheriff?”
It was Bill Davidson, his long, handsome face peering around a set of filing cabinets.
“Oh, somehow I’m still employed,” I said. “How are you?” It was strange to see these senior commanders, who had mostly regarded with me indifference, suddenly chatting like old friends. Davidson was OK compared to his peers. He’d never treated me like I had two heads and open sores.
“Oh, getting too old to do this stuff.” He sighed and edged against the filing cabinet, a lean uniformed man with careless posture. “Every day I come to work thinking I’ve seen just how cruel human beings can be to each other, and every night I go home with a new lesson I didn’t want to know.” His face regarded me with easy brown eyes, a thick gray mustache, long age lines in the right places on skin that was sundried and taut. It was an adult man’s face, authentic but out of place in an age of teenage boy beauty.
I couldn’t help but notice the long whitish scar on the side of his neck. It came up out of his collar and stopped just below his left ear. Davidson got that when I was still a rookie. He was the first on the scene of a guy trying to kill his baby daughter with a machete. Davidson pulled the kid out of the way and took the brunt of the blade in the side of his neck and shoulder. It was one of the bravest things I ever heard of when I was on the streets.
“I see you’re in uniform,” he said.
“I brief the media at noon,” I said. “It seemed like the right thing.”
He drew his mustache down distastefully. “I don’t envy you that,” he said. “Little light reading?” He nodded toward the array of files on the table before me.
I told him what I was doing. He said, “Sheriff, you pay detectives to do this kind of thing for you. You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, I just wanted to see.” Truth was, I desperately needed something to occupy my time besides going to meetings and worrying about Peralta.
Davidson shook his head. “Poor old Matson and Bullock,” he said. “Talk about the wrong place at the wrong time. I remember right where I was that day: flat on my back with strep throat. Got it from my kid.” I didn’t know Davidson personally back then, and he probably didn’t know of my involvement in the shooting.
He said, “That killing shook up this department for years. It hit home. Hell, Harry Matson had been my training officer when I was a rookie. After that, we knew Phoenix wasn’t the same place any more.” The long etchings in his face tensed and deepened. “People were just crazy, vicious for no reason. They called us ‘pig.’ They’d set up ambushes for us. Pull out guns when all that happened is they were stopped for some petty-ass traffic violation.”
“What do you know about this O’Keefe?”
“Not a damned thing,” Davidson said.
“I just wonder if he’s capable of coming back to get revenge.”
Davidson said, “It’s always the ones you don’t think about. Not the guys that stand up in court and threaten to kill your family. Prison has a way of dealing with most big talkers. No, it’s guys like this little prick.”
We both noticed Lindsey standing behind him. Davidson turned suddenly crimson. “Pardon my language,” he said, and excused himself. Davidson was at least ten years older than me, in a generation of male cops that had been forced to accept women colleagues. But some still held these quaint taboos and social customs from an earlier time. In the right setting, it was kind of endearing.
Lindsey cocked an eyebrow. “We should all avoid little pricks, Sheriff.”
“You are so bad.” I looked at her straight on. She was in civilian clothes, a white, oxford-y blouse, short black skirt, sheer black stockings, black shoes with thick heels. She loved her monochromes, and with her hair and coloring it worked to stunning effect. I said what I thought: “Will you marry me? My God, you are beautiful.”
She smiled. “I’m glad you think so.” She reached down and scratched my shoulder. “You’re pretty sexy in uniform, Dave. This is a part of you I’ve rarely seen.”
I told her about the press briefing.
She leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Sometime you’ll have to wear your uniform at home, give me the discipline I need, Sheriff.” Her soft hair ran across my neck and face. I was instantly hard. Right there in Central Records.
“You’re blushing, Dave,” she said. “I thought all you guys who came of age in the seventies had no inhibitions.”
“I’m not blushing.” I said, feeling the heat running out into my face.
“Who’s that?” She put a long finger on the mugshot of Leo O’Keefe.
“He doesn’t look like a cop killer,” she said after I told her. “Just looks like a kid.” She pulled up a chair next to me and sat, crossing her fine dark-stockinged legs. “Now these guys.” She reached over to the prison photos of McGovern and Meadows. “You can see the sociopath in their eyes. But this kid, what was he doing out with the other two?”
“He was this one’s cousin,” I tapped McGovern’s surly face. “He and his girlfriend Marybeth somehow hooked up with them.”
Lindsey bit her lower lip. “What a mess. Could those kids have even done anything to stop the shooting?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was trying to find their statements to refresh my memory. But a lot of the deputies thought they got off too easy, probation for her and a year for O’Keefe. But he’s a loser. Iced a guy in prison and they tacked life onto his sentence.”
She rubbed her hand over my back. “Oh, Dave, you’re not that hard. You know how bad luck comes to people.”
I nodded, felt a pang of something like compassion, and put my hand on her thigh. Right there in Central Records.
Lindsey said, “But if he tries to hurt you, I’ll put a nice tight pattern of hollow-point ammunition in his chest, reload, shoot him again, and then read him his rights.
“I’m actually here on a mission, Dave.” she went on, absently picking through the files. “You asked about Camelback Falls.”
“Yes.” I lowered my voice. “It was the notation in Peralta’s calendar.”
“Camelback Falls was the name of a house,” she said. “It’s still there, actually. On the south face of the mountain. Anyway, does the name Jonathan Ledger mean anything to you?”
“The sex guy?” I asked.
“You are the sex guy,” she whispered as I stroked her leg. “Dave, let me concentrate. Yes, Ledger wrote
The Sex Instructions
and
More Sex Instructions.
Best-sellers, as you know. Not that I’ve ever read them. He owned the house until his death in 1989. He called it Camelback Falls. Maybe it was some wordplay on Falling Water.”
“Who owns the house now?” I asked.
“Some rich guy who lives in North Carolina. The house has changed hands five times since Ledger died. The current owner is trying to get a permit to demolish it and build something grander. But the house hasn’t been called Camelback Falls since Ledger. When I called the Realtor today she didn’t even know that was what it was called.”
I sat back in the chair. Now I was more baffled than ever. What could Peralta have wanted to know from me about Jonathan Ledger’s house on Camelback Mountain?
“Thanks, beautiful,” I said. “You’re pretty smart for a propeller head.”
She licked her lips, “What are you doing for lunch, Sheriff?”
“Media briefing,” I said sadly. “But afterward…”
“Actually,” she said, “I have another mission. I’m going to the briefing, too. That’s why I’m kind of preppy-looking today, and I know that look really turns you on, Dave. But I am your new bodyguard.”
“I work alone, ma’am,” I said, deepening my voice. “Anyway, the cyber-terrorists of the world won’t take a holiday while you baby-sit me.”
“Sorry, Dave. You have to be accompanied by a deputy from now on. It’s new policy. So you can have me, or some knuckle-dragger from the patrol bureau. Kimbrough is getting very ticked off that you’re just wandering around unprotected. And so am I.” She sat back, luminous, smiling, proud of herself.
I smiled, too, and said, “Well, don’t expect me to get any work done.”
The phone’s ring broke me out of a nightmare about Peralta, shadows at my office door, and suffocating on the end of a respirator hose. But when I picked it up there was only silence on the line, silence in the dark bedroom, Lindsey’s hand against the sweat cooling on my back.
Then a voice said, “David Mapstone?”
“That’s me.”
“Acting Sheriff David Mapstone?”
If this was a telemarketer, I was going to get homicidal. Instead, the voice, a man’s voice—average, unremarkable, baritone—said, “This is Leo O’Keefe.”
I sat up straight, turned on the light and mouthed the words “Leo O’Keefe” to Lindsey. She angled out of bed and disappeared down the hall.
“Leo, we need to talk to you.”
“I saw the news,” he said. “You’re after me.”
“You’re an escaped convict,” I said. The little pinpoint of pain pushed at my middle. “You know the detectives suspect you shot Sheriff Peralta.”
“I didn’t,” the voice said calmly. “Who are you, David Mapstone? Why are you the acting sheriff?”
Beats the hell out of me, I thought. Lindsey came back in the room, a cell phone at her ear. She pantomimed with the other hand: Keep him talking.
“I’m nobody, Leo. I’m the department historian. I was the one they got to fill in after the sheriff was wounded.”
“I’m sorry he’s hurt,” the voice said. He didn’t remember me from Guadalupe, or my name, anyway.
“What about Dean Nixon,” I said. “Did you try to contact him?”
The line went silent. Finally, “That’s right. Have you talked to Deputy Nixon about me?”
“Leo, you’ve got to turn yourself in. I give you my word, you will be treated well.”
He laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I know about that.” His voice picked up momentum, edged up half an octave. “Mapstone, they can’t let any of this come out. That’s why Peralta was shot.”
I started to speak, but he cut me off.
“I have information for you,” he said, now speaking frantically. “I can’t explain now. If you’re interested, walk to the pay phone at the Jack in the Box at Third Avenue and McDowell. I can see if you come alone or not, and I can see if cops are in the parking lot. Make sure you walk.”
“Leo…”
“Come now, Mapstone. Your life depends on it.” And the line went dead.
Lindsey was speaking quietly into the cell phone, incandescently nude. Then she shook her head. “Not enough time. Shit! We should have had this number wired up in advance.”
I stood up and pulled on some jeans and a sweatshirt. The house was quite cold, the way we keep it so my Arizona body heat doesn’t smother Lindsey in bed beside me.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to the Jack in the Box down on McDowell, the pay phone. That’s what he said to do. He’ll call again.”
“No way.”
“I’ve got to, darling.” I pulled on socks and laced up running shoes.
“I’m calling Kimbrough. Phoenix PD.”
“Not enough time,” I said, pulling on my black leather jacket. “Phoenix PD will fuck it up.”
She turned off the phone. “Damn it!” she whispered.
I pulled the black nylon holster off the bedside table, checked to see the Python was loaded, and slid it securely into my belt.
***
Seven minutes later I rounded the corner onto McDowell, leaving behind the dark quiet of Willo. It was a little after three on Thursday morning, and traffic on McDowell was light. The red porch light of Fire Station 4 glowed in the dry, chilly air. Behind the glass doors, all the fire engines were home asleep. Across the street, a two-story inflatable gorilla looked down on me. He went with the pawn shop, which, in one of Phoenix’s more tasteless ahistorical acts, occupied a building that had been a synagogue when I was a kid.
I walked quickly on McDowell. A Phoenix police cruiser flew by heading west, paying no attention to me. Up ahead, a couple of low-riders sat in the drive-in parking lot, steam coming out of their tailpipes. A large black kid in an Arizona Cardinals parka stood at the drive-through window ordering. As I walked into the cones of light I made out the pay phone at the edge of the lot, nobody around. I thought it was a fool’s errand, but didn’t know what else to do. Maybe Leo O’Keefe had been in prison so long he didn’t realize these inner-city pay phones were rigged so they could only call out, to foil the drug trade.
But as I walked closer, it was ringing.
I sprinted the last fifteen feet and picked up a receiver that was chipped and sticky with grime.
“Mapstone,” I said.
“Walk to the front of Kenilworth School. Come up the steps into the dark under the columns. Do it now.”
I didn’t even try to engage him. I hung up the phone, jogged across McDowell and headed west. At Fifth Avenue, I could see a figure in dark sweatshirt, hood up, hanging out at the Mexican shrimp cocktail shop: Lindsey. I keyed the auto-dial on my cell phone, still concealed in my pocket, and told her where I was going. I turned south at Burt Easley’s Fun Shop and disappeared into the darkened neighborhood. I was aware of her behind me, but when I turned to look around me the sidewalk and street were empty.
Leo O’Keefe, in my neighborhood, on the steps of my grade school. At the press briefing, we had handed out the newest prison photo of him. We had explained our theory that he had come back to get revenge. Why, the press asked? Because he felt railroaded in the Guadalupe shooting, we said. Why now, the press pressed? Because the media coverage of Peralta winning the election had driven him to make a dramatic statement. It was a neat theory. It was the only one we had. But theory was running into reality in the cold desert night.
I walked down the sidewalks I had walked as a kid, dragging my way to school, flying home. Past the stately trunks of palm trees and the smart little World War I-era bungalows that had survived the coming of the underground freeway. Tonight they were all dark and silent, not even a dog to bark at a tall man in a leather jacket moving along at a half jog, half walk. Half a mile southeast of here the streets degenerated into a nasty mix of crack houses and young hustlers—the cops called it “Boys Town”—but up here I felt only solitude. If O’Keefe was nearby, I could only sense him in the aftertaste of my nightmare.
At Culver, the old school building loomed ahead. Barry Goldwater went to school there. Many years later, so did I. Now, as the constant low moan of traffic attested, it had an eight-lane freeway running beneath it. It was classic, columned and floodlighted against vandals. But, sure enough, gloom sat securely at the top of the front steps.
I spoke softly into my jacket. “I’m at Kenilworth, I’m going to the steps now.”
Suddenly the trunk of a palm tree shattered beside me, and then came the deep boom and echo of a large-caliber weapon. I followed the shreds of palm tree down to the cold sidewalk, banging my knees and elbows. Rolling behind the tree trunk, I clung to the ground, my heart hammering against my ribs. I brought the Python up next to my face, resting the coolness of the barrel against my cheek. With my other hand, I pulled out the cell phone.
“Dave, Dave…”
“I’m OK. Don’t come up.” I scanned the school, the park, the darkened houses. Everything was still. The shot could have come from anywhere.
Lindsey said, “What was that noise?”
“Somebody took a shot at me with something very large.”
“Can you get under cover?”
“I’m OK. Behind a palm tree at the northwest corner of Culver and Fifth Avenue.”
Just then I saw a blur at the far end of the school steps. O’Keefe.
Instinct took over and I sprang up, crossing the old playground quickly, my magnum held in a combat grip, two-handed. I made it to the side of the building and fell against the wall. No shots came.
“We’re on the move,” I said into the phone. “Suspect is headed south from the school. Let them know he is being pursued by a plainclothes deputy!” I stuck the phone back in my pocket and sprang forward up the stairs. The gloomy area behind the columns was empty. But beyond, I caught a glimpse of a figure running hard out the other side of the playground.
He wasn’t that fast. I took the steps down three at a time, my knees crying in protest. Then I dashed past swings and unidentifiable play equipment at a hard run. My lungs ached against the cold air, but I was gaining on him.
“Sheriff’s deputy!” I yelled. “Stop! I am armed!”
I could make out a man in dark clothing and some kind of a baseball cap. He ran down the sidewalk, paused, then took off again running west toward Seventh Avenue. I put on the jets and got to within 100 yards of him when a pair of headlights shot up out of the earth and a horn screamed an angry klaxon.
He disappeared down the freeway onramp.
I went after him.
Suddenly we were in the tunnel. Interstate 10, the Papago Freeway, the mainline between Jacksonville, Florida, and Santa Monica, California, running like an underground river of metal and headlights. It smelled like catalytic converters and leaky oil and confined concrete. I made a fool’s calculation and cut across the ramp just as a city garbage truck came through at battle speed. Then I reached the shoulder, hard against the tunnel wall, with nothing but a white line between me and the automotive age, going 80 miles an hour. The roar of engines and wheels was constant and deafening, even at this time of morning. To this white noise was added frantic honking at the fools running down the freeway. But I could see. The tunnel lights cast a strange arctic daylight. Car headlights shot past like comets from hell.
“We’re in the freeway,” I shouted into the phone. “Moving eastbound in the westbound lanes.” The little digital display glowed happily back: “No service available.”
I ran gingerly along the oily concrete as cars rocketed past. I lost sight of O’Keefe. Then I had him: bounding across the traffic lanes like a desperate squirrel.
Screeching tires cut above the noise, and suddenly there was a cascade of snaps and concussions, the odd sounds of metal and composite materials striking substantial objects at high speed. I looked toward the oncoming lanes and saw two cars collide trying to avoid the crazed man running toward them. Car parts abandoned ship and flew wildly into the thickening air. Metal scraped on the pavement, releasing showers of orange sparks too close to gas tanks. The two cars were spinning together, not slowly, and they were headed right for me.
I jammed my feet into place and forced my mental transmission into emergency reverse. It was maybe ten feet in the opposite direction to a little setback in the concrete wall, but it might as well have been 1,000 miles. My stomach filled with panic and bile. There was another sickening
screee
!
booff
! kind of sound as a third vehicle smashed into them from the rear. I didn’t turn back to see. There wasn’t time. The wall finally gave up a precious corner. I dived into it and prayed.
