The Long Fall (11 page)

The newspaper people found a leak and got access to Limbe’s personnel file and arrest records, and there were the usual claims of a long-standing pattern of intimidation and brutality and the usual clamor over departmental cover-ups and looking the other way.

The mayor felt the public pressure and eventually got involved, leaning on the police commissioner, who set in motion an IAD investigation.

Aaron Limbe was temporarily suspended.

He stuck to his story, figuring he could ride things out. The evidence did not go beyond the circumstantial. It was everybody’s word against his.

Limbe was waiting for the city to tear itself apart. He had shown people where they lived. What they were. Reestablished the pecking order. There’d be no room or need for forgiveness after that.

It might have worked, too—Limbe the agent of a truth worthy of the city’s namesake—if Jimmy Coates hadn’t gotten picked up for grand theft auto.

At the time, Limbe had not been able to foresee, let alone prevent, what happened.

While locked up in city, Coates began reading the newspapers and recognized Limbe and Delgado. Instead of playing to the DA or IAD, Coates made noise to the chief, who then called the commissioner, and Coates went on to cut his own deal. He wanted them to lose the paperwork on the grand theft auto and explained about the jumper cable incident, italicizing the fact he could place Limbe and Delgado together the night of the murders.

The chief and commissioner saw the opportunity to quickly clean house and avoid the fallout from the publicity of a trial. Limbe was called in and the situation laid out. The chief and commissioner had already signed his resignation papers. He was handed a pen.

After Limbe left the force, nobody else, not even the private security companies, would touch him.

That’s what he’d become. Untouchable.

For a month, he’d averaged eight pieces of hate mail a day. He’d hoped for more.

It had taken a long time for Limbe to find out the name of the guy with the jumper cables and white pickup. The brass had put a tight lid on the paperwork for the case. Limbe was patient. He waited and quietly asked around, and he eventually hooked up with a few right-thinking white guys on the force who were willing to do a favor for someone who’d once been one of their own.

As soon as he got the name, Limbe set out to kill Coates, only to discover Coates was doing time in Perryville Correctional after having been popped with a tractor-trailer load of black-market saguaros.

So Aaron Limbe had to wait.

He was untouchable. While he waited, he began to understand exactly what that meant.

He snaps to. He’s not sure how long he’s been parked at the curb watching the lights on the blue-and-white strobing the front windows of the dry-cleaning shop. He feels the beginnings of a headache blooming at the base of his skull. He climbs out of his car carrying two of Ray Harp’s metallic blue three-piece suits and crosses the street. He recognizes one of the Tempe cops, a guy named Henderson, and strolls into the middle of the crime scene.

Henderson tips back his cap and scratches his forehead. “Come on, Aaron, you know the drill.”

“I’m just curious is all,” Limbe says. “What you got, a straight armed? I don’t see any blood.” A few feet away a woman with dark blond hair is giving a statement to a fresh-deck rookie.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Henderson says, still going at his forehead.

“I know.” Limbe smiles. He watches the woman, listens to the spin she puts on her words. He unwraps a breath mint, slips it on his tongue.

“You can bring those back tomorrow,” Henderson says, pointing at the suits.

“Who’s the Gash?” Limbe asks, nodding in the blond’s direction.

Henderson shakes his head and sighs. “The owner’s wife. She was working the register.”

“She’s nervous,” Limbe says.

“Of course, she’s nervous,” Henderson says. “She just got held up.”

The rookie cop takes everything the woman says down. He’s polite and attentive. Limbe smiles. She’s nervous all right. But not because someone stuck a gun in her face. Aaron Limbe’s been around enough crime scenes to read a witness.

“What did you say her name was?” he asks.

“Coates. Evelyn Coates,” Henderson says.

Limbe takes in the last name and smiles and listens to the rookie read back her description of the perp. She nods one too many times.

Limbe considers telling Henderson that his primary witness is lying through her teeth.

He doesn’t though.

Instead, he files it away.

J
immy wishes he’d had a say in where he was to meet Evelyn. He’s got this thing about Scottsdale. The place gets on his nerves. It’s one of those peculiar American cities, like Key West, that have mortgaged their history with charm. The place started out in the late 1800s as nothing more than a bunch of tents and adobe houses that catered to lung cases from back East, but by the 1930s, Scottsdale was promising more than cures, branching out into recreation and elegance, the tents giving way to high-profile hotels and rustic resorts promising desert vistas; and with more big bucks pouring in from back East, Scottsdale began billing itself as the “West’s Most Western Town,” continually feeding the myth and enlarging its allure, reinventing itself to the tune of 183,000 square miles, the place now a trendy hybrid of the biggest lies from the Old and New West, the tourists and locals, as if by unspoken agreement, conspiring to hold each other hostage to its fabled charm. Everything in Scottsdale had the feel of something italicized, the place doubling as noun and its own adjective.

When Jimmy gets to the country club, he’s relieved to see Evelyn’s reserved a table in the smoking section. His server’s name is Peter, the guy coming down hard on the first syllable and letting up on the gas for the second. Jimmy tells Pete he wants a cold one and then torches a Marlboro.

The table’s next to a window. Below Jimmy is a bunch of flowerbeds, then two small ponds ringed by palms and boxwoods, and in the distance, a cluster of golfers teeing up.

Eighteen hours since the Tempe job and he hasn’t been arrested yet.

None of it makes any sense.

Even though Evelyn had made him at the scene, she had handed over the money in the register and the safe, but then told him if he tried to leave town, she’d call the police and turn him in.

Jimmy sips at his beer. Evelyn shows up a half hour late.

He watches her cross the room, pausing to say hello to some of the moms, waving and smiling at a couple of tables of suits, the ghost of her years as a flight attendant in the way she carries herself. Her hair’s just brushing her shoulders. It’s the color of a slice of wheat bread. She’s wearing a red sundress covered in clusters of tiny yellow flowers. Jimmy reflexively checks out the cleavage, and he’s thrown off a little because the breasts aren’t as big as he remembers. Not that Evelyn’s lacking in the chest department—a view’s a view—but Jimmy can’t help feeling like he did when, as a kid, he first saw Mount Rushmore, the real thing just not matching up with the idea he’d been carrying around in his head.

Evelyn sits down across from him and pushes her sunglasses high on her forehead. Pete, the server, nods, and without her having to order, delivers a large martini.

Jimmy lights a cigarette. Evelyn waits, head tilted, until he offers her one.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” he says, sliding the pack over.

“Family secret,” she says and waits again until Jimmy lights it for her.

“I can’t imagine Richard there, him lighting one up for you.”

“Richard doesn’t know everything about me,” Evelyn says, “and neither do you.”

“Hey, you’re a complicated person,” Jimmy says. “We’ve established that.”

“You don’t like me very much, do you, Jimmy?”

Jimmy takes a sip of beer.

“You think you have me all figured out. I’m the second half of a boxed set in your eyes.” Evelyn raises her hand, and Pete’s right there with another martini.

“What do you want me to say? You married the guy, stayed with him, what, going on eighteen years? Your choice. I didn’t have one. That’s the thing about brothers. You’re stuck with what you get.”

Evelyn studies him over the rim of her drink. There’s a light flush building at the base of her throat and slowly spreading upward. She takes another of Jimmy’s cigarettes and lights it herself this time.

“Anyway,” Jimmy says, “what does how I see you have anything to do with why we’re here?”

“It does, Jimmy. It has a lot to do with it.”

Jimmy leans back in his chair and looks at the ceiling. “Am I missing something here?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, that’s for sure.” Evelyn’s pointing at him with the cigarette when he lowers his head.

“Okay. Tell me this. How’d you make me for the robbery?”

She explains about the T-shirt, the split seam, and the tuft of shoulder hair.

Jimmy starts laughing, despite himself. “I got to give it to you, Evelyn. That was good, you noticing that. You were supposed to be looking at the gun.”

“Afraid for my life,” Evelyn says.

“That’s the general idea, yes.”

Pete comes up for their lunch order, Evelyn going with a Greek salad and another martini, Jimmy a burger, heavy on the mustard and mayo, some house fries, and another cold one.

After ordering, there’s an awkward silence, Jimmy figuring since he’s about to eat lunch at the Scottsdale Country Club that Evelyn hasn’t told Richard what she knows about the robberies, but Jimmy not sure how to maneuver to keep it that way. The Evelyn sitting across from him is not the one he’s used to dealing with.

She’s turned quarter-profile from him when she suddenly asks, “Would you give me the money back if I asked for it?”

“Fact of the matter, I’d rather keep it. But I guess if you were going to turn me over to the cops if I didn’t, then, yeah, I guess I’d give you back my share.”

“Your share? Not the whole thing?”

“You made me, Evelyn, not my partner. He did what he was supposed to, so I gave him his share.”

“What would you do if I said you had to give him up to keep from going to jail?”

“Like I said, Evelyn, this is between me and you, not him.”

“Would he do the same for you?”

“I don’t know,” Jimmy says. “Probably not. For one, he’s got a family. Another thing is he’s afraid of prison.” Jimmy pauses to light a cigarette. “So you want the money back, that’s it?”

She shakes her head no. “I don’t care about the money.”

“Then what was the point, all the questions?”

“I’m trying to get a better sense of who you are, Jimmy.”

Jimmy slowly shakes his head from side to side. “Hey, unlike you, Evelyn, I’m not very complicated. I’m just a regular guy.”

“No,” Evelyn says, flushing. “What you are is full of shit. You’re patronizing me, Jimmy.”

Pete brings up a little two-tiered tray with lunch.

Evelyn’s ordered another martini before he’s done setting out the food. Pete glances over at Jimmy. “You the designated?”

Jimmy tells Pete he’s the designated waiter and not to worry about it. Evelyn’s turned back to the window again, and the noon light’s not going easy on her. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a while. She’s lost the poise and the carefully constructed beauty Jimmy’s always associated with her. The seams are showing today.

After Pete leaves, Evelyn pushes her salad aside and asks, “Why’d you rob Frontier Cleaners in the first place? Why not something else?”

Jimmy ticks the side of his beer glass. “Richard took something that belonged to me. I wanted him to know what it felt like.”

“You mean your grandfather’s place?” Evelyn pauses, furrowing her brow. “According to Richard, he saved it.”

“Well ‘according to Richard’ is not the same as ‘according to Jimmy.’ We’re talking different species of the truth here. My grandfather intended for that land to be mine. My dad knew that. Richard knew that, too.”

“He took your dad’s death hard,” Evelyn says. “It changed him in ways I’m not sure he’s even aware of.”

Jimmy shakes his head. “No way it changed him. It just made him more of what he already was.”

“That’s harsh, Jimmy. Unfair, too.”

Jimmy slowly lets out his breath. “Look, Evelyn, to get back to the point here, I don’t want to end up in prison again.”

She takes a large swallow of her drink. “I don’t blame you.”

“And I don’t want to die either,” Jimmy says, “which is what Ray Harp’s got lined up for me unless I get him his cash.”

“I told you already.” Evelyn waves her fingers. “You can have it.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Jimmy says. “What you haven’t told me is what you want in return.”

There’s no focus to Evelyn’s smile. It’s floating, separate from her features like the lipstick smudges on the rim of her glass.

The smile goes on too long. The same deal with the eyes, the blue unwavering gaze she’s training on him.

“What I want,” she says, “is to commit a crime.”

“Get real,” Jimmy says, looking around.

“I am,” she says. “That’s what I want. A crime. I want to commit a crime, and I want to get away with it, and I want you to help me do it.”

“Come on,” Jimmy says. “You? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Evelyn aims the smile at him again.

O
nly one thing,
Jimmy had told her.
I set something up, no guns. No way, guns.

Evelyn had gone along with that, but still wanted to learn to shoot.

Which is why she’s riding in Jimmy’s pickup this afternoon. The windows are open, filling the cab with a hot rush of air. Evelyn’s got her feet propped against the dash. She’s humming a tune the radio might have played if it worked.

Jimmy’s routing them through a series of back roads toward Dobbins. They pass a stretch of homes that tried out for the middle class but got cut from the team, and then after the land opens a little, they pass small horse farms and wide, flat soybean and cotton fields. Every now and then, he’ll catch a thin glint of light from the surface of the city’s canal system. When the wind shifts, there’s the smell of the stockyards to the west, a rich heavy smell like stale chocolate floating in warm spoiled milk.