Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

  Concrete Desert

  ( David Mapstone Mystery - 1 )

  Jon Talton

  Jon Talton

  Concrete Desert

  Chapter One

  The storms don’t come into the city anymore. When I was a little boy, when we had evaporative cooling and Kennedy was president, the late-summer monsoons swept into Arizona from the Sea of Cortez and cooled Phoenix with wind and rain. Now the city has become a concrete slab eighty miles across and the weather has changed. Most times, we can only see the clouds hovering out beyond the mountains, dropping precious rain on the desert, tantalizing us with lightning, leaving us with dust.

  It was July. High summer in Phoenix, when a temperature of 105 degrees is a relief and workaday guys in traffic jams can turn into killers if they get into a fender bender. It’s the time of year when the asphalt gets so hot, it can leave second-degree burns on your skin; when $350-a-night resorts hold half-price sales, and everybody who can afford it heads to the ocean; when the air-conditioning of 3 million people pushes the power grid to the edge of a shutdown and a headline about a dozen illegal immigrants suffocating in a locked tractor-trailer brings a resigned shrug. My hometown.

  I had been back in Phoenix for exactly six weeks, back in the house that had belonged to my grandparents, the house where I grew up. It was a small Spanish Mediterranean two blocks west of Central on Cypress Avenue, surrounded by oleander hedges, orange trees, and palms. Grandfather built the house in 1924. During the years I was gone, the city had taken to calling the area the Willo Historic District. When I was a kid, it was just a neighborhood and everybody knew everybody else. Now my grandparents had been dead for years, and the families that lived nearby had moved away. The neighborhood was supposed to be popular with young professionals. I hoped so. I needed to sell the house and find a new job.

  It was a Sunday evening, the worst time of the week to be alone. Ellington was on the CD player, the 1956 Newport concert. I was about half a martini away from loose ends when the wind started to unsettle the palm trees outside the big picture window and the doorbell rang. Maybe I’d been a little isolated for those six weeks, but it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the doorbell for years, at least since Grandmother was still alive. The deep clang put a stake of dread in me that usually comes with late-night phone calls. Then I opened the door and saw a ghost.

  “David Mapstone!” The ghost knew my name and rushed to give me a hug. At five feet five, she could fit completely inside my arms and have the top of her head nestle under my chin. Once upon a time, her name had been Julie Riding, my first lover.

  I blathered the nervous small talk of unexpected reunions and invited her inside. In the high-ceilinged living room, she sat in one of the leather chairs that face the picture window and accepted my offer of a drink-scotch, neat. I poured her a couple of fingers of McClelland’s and then sat opposite her in the other chair with my glass of Bombay Sapphire.

  “I can’t believe you’re back in town,” she was saying in a bright alto chirp. She wore a short summer dress that was a little too young for her. But she still had damn nice legs and she knew it. Her hair was a couple of shades darker than the honey color that I remembered, and it was shorter now, businesslike, above the shoulders. Time was beginning to cut itself into the skin around her eyes, but they were still the darkest blue I had ever seen, the color of the dusk sky in the mountains. She was saying how little the house had changed, how she was sorry to hear about my grandmother’s death a few years before, how she’d tried to keep up with my teaching career after I left town.

  Then she turned red and downed the scotch in one gulp. I refilled her glass, and she didn’t stop me.

  “Shit,” she said, the chirp gone from her voice. “I rehearsed this speech a few hundred times, but I know it sounds forced. I know how strange it seems for me just to show up suddenly, when I walked out the way I did. Now, here I am. Wanting something.”

  I filed that away. “I just thought you’d been held up a really long time in the ladies’ room.”

  “David, it’s been twenty years.”

  My head is always full of dates-1066, 1492, 1789, 1914. It’s an occupational hazard when you teach history. The last time I saw Julie Riding was just before Christmas 1979, when she sat across from me in a dark little bar near the university and said she didn’t want to see me anymore. She was in love with someone else, she said. He was older and-let me remember this right-“was a real world-beater,” which I took to mean he had money. I was just a college student with a smoky old convertible.

  For months after that, amid various stages of anger and hurt, I imagined the life Julie was living without me-I have a very vivid imagination-and what I would say and do if she ever came back. But as my life began to change, she faded from my thoughts, until the years pushed her into that fond drawer of occasional memory reserved for first lovers. Now she was here in my living room and part of me was feeling odd, but another part was feeling as if she’d been gone about twenty minutes. Mostly, I was just glad for the company.

  “Do you mind?” She produced a Marlboro Light from her purse. I shook my head. She lit it and took a drag that sounded soothing even from where I was sitting. “I’m seriously addicted,” she said.

  We sat in silence awhile, watching the clouds and wind flow in from the east; then a curtain of dust began to fall out of the sky. I leaned forward and just let her find her words. She played with her hair, pushing it back. She’d always done that.

  “God, you look great,” she said finally. I was wearing jeans and a white polo shirt, nothing special. “No, I mean it. It’s like you’ve really grown into your face. You’re going to be a hell of a good-looking middle-aged man.”

  “Thanks, I think,” I said.

  “Our birthdays are two weeks apart, remember?” She sipped her scotch and gave me a sly smile. “David, it’s the strangest thing. I was at the Hard Rock Cafe with some girlfriends one night, and there was Mike Peralta at the bar. He wasn’t in uniform, of course, and he looked like he was with some pretty high-powered people, but I just went over and gave him a hug, I mean, my God, it had been about as long as since I’d last seen you.

  “Anyway, I asked about you, and Mike said you were back in Phoenix and working for the Sheriff’s Office again. I knew I had to see you, so here I am. My God, are you a deputy again? I thought that was just your youthful adventure.”

  She stubbed out the butt and lit another, melting a little into the chair. “Deputy David Mapstone of the Old West.” She giggled.

  I smiled at her, glad to provide amusement for an old girlfriend. Some people decide at age fourteen that they’re going to be accountants, and that’s all they do for their whole lives. My resume is a little more complicated. Especially after this summer.

  “I’m just doing a little consulting. Researching some old cases for Peralta. I’m in between jobs.”

  “So you’re not teaching?” she asked. “Your great dream was to be a history professor, I thought.”

  Since when do we get our great dreams? I thought, getting up to refresh our drinks. I said over my shoulder, “The tenure committee at San Diego State didn’t like me, and there are too many people with Ph.D.’s in history, anyway. Something will come up.”

  She followed me into the kitchen. “When did you start drinking martinis?”

  “When I was married to a millionaire’s daughter.”

  “Dorothy Parker said martinis lead to all sorts of sexual misjudgments,” Julie said absently, then added, “What was her name?”

  “Dorothy Parker?”

  “Your ex-wife, you goof.”

  “Patty,” I said.

  “Good boomer name,” Julie said. “All those fathers in lust with P
atti Page. Kids?”

  “No.”

  “And you’ve been divorced about a year?”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “I can tell it in your voice,” she said. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. I looked out the window at the garden courtyard, where a palm tree was dancing slowly in the wind. We weren’t going to get any rain. Julie Riding in my kitchen, talking about my divorce. “Tell me about you.”

  “What’s to tell?” She smiled. “Life goes on. I’m divorced. My daughter’s fourteen, and she just made cheerleader. I’m in marketing at the Phoenician resort, and I work all the time.” She made it sound like a neat package.

  Finally, she asked, “Do you remember my little sister? Phaedra.”

  Now we were down to the “wanting something” part of the evening.

  I said I remembered an eight-year-old kid.

  Truth was, I barely remembered her sister at all. A skinny kid with red hair who played the cello and had an odd name. She was in the background one night when Julie took me home to meet her parents, and they all had a big fight. Mostly, I remembered her name, Phaedra. Not a popular boomer name.

  “She’s twenty-eight now, David,” Julie said. “And she’s missing.”

  “Have you been to the cops?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they took a report. What does that mean? They told me she was an adult and that unless there was some indication of foul play, there wasn’t much they could do.”

  “So what can I do?”

  “I know you have friends in the Sheriff’s Office. Even if you’re just a consultant. Maybe you could ask around?” The blue eyes implored. “It’s been two weeks since she was supposed to come over for dinner. I haven’t had a call, nothing. Her apartment hasn’t been slept in.”

  “New boyfriend?”

  “That’s never made her drop off the face of the earth.”

  “What about her job?”

  She shook her head. “Phaedra was kind of in between careers. She was working at a photo studio. She had a lot of gifts, but she never did well playing the game at work, you know what I mean?”

  As a matter of fact, I did. I asked, “Do you have any reason to suspect something bad has happened to her?”

  Julie paused and the tip of her cigarette glowed contemplatively. “This is a very dangerous city, and she’s a pretty young woman. What more do you need?”

  I promised to ask some questions around the Sheriff’s Office. Julie smashed out the cigarette, and it was time to leave. I walked her out to her car. The storm had blown through, and the night was dusty, hot, and expectant.

  “You’re back in time for the monsoon season,” she said, aiming her key chain at a silver Lexus, which beeped attentively.

  “You’re down in the barrio now,” she said.

  “I guess. I haven’t lived in this house for a long time.”

  “It’s all coming back down here,” she said, starting up the car. “Close-in city living.”

  I watched her drive her car to the end of the block and disappear around the corner. I didn’t care about Julie Riding, and I didn’t want to start.

  Chapter Two

  Maricopa County Chief Deputy Mike Peralta, all six feet six inches and 250 pounds of him, bulled his way through the corridor, trailing reporters like a contrail behind a big jet. “No,” he was saying. “You’ll have to talk to the sheriff.…He’ll issue a statement.…He’ll be available for interviews.” Half a dozen voices made demands that he ignored.

  “Mapstone.” He zeroed in on me, and, wrapping a massive arm around my shoulders, turned me around and pushed me through the private side door into his office suite. I could feel the 9-mm Glock semiautomatic in the shoulder rig under his suit.

  “Goddamn media jackals,” he said distastefully.

  “When have you ever met publicity you didn’t like?” I said.

  He looked at me sourly. “All they want to talk about is the chain gang or the tent jail or the latest goat fuck with some politician, and the sheriff’s the one who speaks for the department on that.”

  “That’s what happens when you work for ‘America’s toughest sheriff.’”

  Peralta ignored me, dropped into his big desk chair, leaned back, and settled his feet on an otherwise-immaculate desktop. He wore a tan summer suit atop nicely tooled black lizard boots. When it suited his mood, he also wore an expensive Stetson. His face was a bit broader and darker than when I’d first met him, but otherwise, he had hardly aged in the twenty years I’d known him.

  He pointed toward a thick folder on the table behind me. He didn’t offer a chair. I sat anyway and hefted the folder onto my lap.

  “You’ll like this one,” he said, rubbing an imaginary beard. “Rebecca Stokes. Twenty-one years old, comes home on the train, takes a taxi to her apartment, pays the driver, and is never seen alive again.”

  “I’ve heard of this one. My grandparents talked about it when I was growing up.”

  “It was 1959,” he said. The year I was born. “She turned up in the desert two weeks later, body dump. That was the strange thing about those old murders in Phoenix: No matter where they got dumped in the desert-and this was a small town surrounded by hundreds of miles of nothing-somebody always found them.

  “Anyway, see what you can give me on it by the time I have the regular press briefing this Thursday.” He popped a can of diet Coke and took a deep swig.

  “You’re enjoying this too damned much,” I said.

  “What? It took you three days to turn up the new evidence that nailed the Samuels case. Fifteen-year-old case and it takes you three days.”

  “That was lucky-connect the dots.”

  “That was a week’s worth of headlines for the department.” Peralta smiled. “And a nice thousand bucks for you. You know the drill-dig up something I can use and you get paid as a private contractor, and you act as a volunteer posse deputy. If I can’t get you back into the department one way, I can try another way.”

  “I’m grateful for the work, Mike, but it’s all temporary,” I said. “I don’t even know if I’m going to stay in Phoenix.”

  “Forget that college shit,” Peralta said. “No way they’re going to give tenure to a middle-aged white male former cop-who’s from Barry Goldwater’s home state no less.”

  “I’m not middle-aged. And actually, the tenure committee said I was ‘unwilling to abandon my Western intellectual outlook’ and become more sensitive to ‘nonlinearity.’”

  “Fuck me blind and call me Susie,” Peralta said. “I knew you’d never fit in with those Commies. Teaching rich kids to hate their country, God, and their parents.”

  “I’m teaching still,” I said halfheartedly.

  “One course in American history for some morons and blue-hairs at the junior college,” he snorted. “Hell, maybe I’ll sign up. Let you teach me something.”

  “That would be a first,” I said.

  The phone rang and he grabbed it harshly, saying “Peralta” before the receiver reached his head. It was his habit, strange to listen to when you were calling. His heavy brow darkened by several degrees-I had seen his mood shift this suddenly many times when Peralta and I were partners years before, and it never ceased to make me uneasy. “Yeah.…Shit.…” I heard his end of the conversation. “Bullshit!..That’s the county supervisors’ problem, not ours.…Goddamned right-they made the mess, not us. Bullshit, we’re buying the Jimmys. Do it.” He slammed the phone back into its cradle.

  “I’ve got six prostitutes dead over the past three months.” He thumped a set of files on his desk. “I’ve got half the Lake Pleasant substation called in sick next shift. Fucking titty-bar owner Bobby Hamid’s one step ahead of a court order. Crips terrorizing the white folks in Litchfield Park. A million-dollar burglary out in Cave Creek-and what do I get to deal with? The goddamned departmental budget. The goddamned county supervisors! Seventh-largest county in the United States, and they run it like some little town in Alabama.”

  The first ti
me I ever saw Mike Peralta, he was teaching martial arts at the Sheriff’s Academy, and I was a twenty-year-old cadet. I wanted to save the world with a badge. But I also thought I was pretty damned smart, with my new B.A. degree in history. He took me down so hard, my head rang for two days. Soon after, he was the five-year veteran who broke me in as a rookie when we were patrolling the no-man’s-land between Scottsdale and Tempe. We worked apart for two years while he was trying out jail administration and I was getting my master’s degree. Then we partnered again in the east county as it became clear I was going to be a teacher, not a cop. Now here he was in the big office, the number-two guy in the department. I wish I could truthfully say I knew him.

  He sighed, leaned back in his big chair, and really saw me for the first time. I was wearing a loose white cotton shirt and chinos-“goddamned J. Crew preppy shit,” Peralta had called it.

  “Put on your ID card,” he ordered. “It’s policy. You may be ashamed of being here, but you’re a sworn deputy like every other swinging dick on Madison Street, and we all have to wear our ID cards.” I pulled it out and clipped it on my shirt. “Deputy Sheriff,” it said, and there I was in a picture, looking not too different from the way I did on my old faculty identification card, with one difference-my beard was gone. The picture would show you I have large, gentle brown eyes and wavy dark hair that women sometimes like, and roundish, undefined facial bones that they don’t.

  The picture wouldn’t show you that I’m a little over six foot one-short in the NBA-and I have the broad shoulders and wide stride that helped me cool off tough guys when I was a cop.

  “So what do you want?” Peralta demanded.

  I told him about Phaedra Riding as he swung his chair back and forth in a slow arc. It was maddening if you didn’t know him, but it was just Peralta. “You pull the incident report?”

  I slid it across the desk, and he studied it.

  “Julie Riding,” he mumbled. “Where do I know that name? Hey, this is Julie, your Julie,” he said, brightening. “I mean she’s the complainant-it’s her sister. Jeez.”