Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

  “That’s what I thought when she showed up at my door last night.”

  “I ran into her a couple of weeks ago, and she asked about you,” Peralta said. “She’s still a fox. I never understood how you lucked into that.”

  “She left me, as I recall.”

  Peralta grunted and went back to the report. I looked around his office; the walls always held some new award or photograph. Peralta with Goldwater. Peralta on horseback with the sheriff. Peralta in SWAT uniform during the killings at the Buddhist temple years before. Peralta in a tux with the business muckety-mucks of the Phoenix 40. Peralta with the Suns at the Western Conference Championships.

  “Weird name,” he said finally. “How do you say it?”

  “Feed-ra or Fade-ra,” I said, pronouncing it. “Like Phoenix.”

  “Weird,” he said. “Sounds like some made-up hippie bullshit name.”

  “Phaedra was the daughter of Minos,” I started to explain but his eyes immediately glazed. “Greek mythology…” God, I had been out of the cop world too long.

  “Sounds like a head case to me,” he said finally. “Artsy-fartsy little rich girl head case. She’ll turn up. Probably schtupping some new guy.”

  “No Jane Does who fit this description turn up lately?” I asked.

  “You’re a deputy sheriff,” he said. “Go do some police work. You remember how? Or did all those years trying to pick up college trim ruin your brain?”

  “Fuck you,” I said. It was our repartee, harmless for now. “I’m a part-time contract employee, a researcher, and if I get some information on old murder cases, it’s all gravy to you and the sheriff. You know if I go to Missing Persons, I’ll get a whole different reception than if you call the commanding officer and make an inquiry.”

  Peralta sighed and picked up the phone. “Dominguez? Peralta. Remember my old partner Dave Mapstone? Yeah, the professor. He’s back in town, working for us part-time. He’s interested in nine nine-two oh one three four five, Phaedra Riding? Ph, yeah, like Phoenix. Anything new? What’d we do?…Yeah, yeah, I know you’ve got people pulled in to work the Harquahala thing.…Okay.”

  He turned to me. “They don’t know shit. You know how these missing persons cases go. She’s an adult. No evidence of a crime. We have no reason to suspect foul play. Does Julie suspect foul play?” I shook my head. “What about her car?”

  “Blue Nissan,” I said. “I checked the impound lists, the hot sheets, nothing.”

  “So it sits,” Peralta said. “She’ll turn up.”

  “So you don’t mind if I do some checking?”

  “Not as long as you do your work for me first. And you don’t get in some jurisdictional cluster fuck with Phoenix PD. What? You trying to score some points with Julie, rekindle the flame?”

  “We’ve both moved on,” I said, standing up to leave. “I’m just helping an old friend.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said, crumpling the diet Coke can and tossing it through a Phoenix Suns basketball hoop into the trash can. “Sharon is on my back to have you over for dinner, y’know.”

  “I will,” I said. Mike and his wife had invited me over a month ago.

  “Then make it this Friday,” he said, and turned his head toward his paperwork. I started out.

  “You know who she’s related to?”

  I stopped and turned back to him. “Phaedra?”

  “No, no, Stokes, Rebecca Stokes. She was the niece of John Henry McConnico.”

  “The former governor?” I said. He nodded. “So that would have made her-what, a first cousin to Brent McConnico?”

  “The majority leader of the Arizona Senate,” Peralta said. “He’s seen as the next governor.”

  Peralta was always working the angles.

  Chapter Three

  I crossed Jefferson Street against the light and made my way through Cesar Chavez Plaza, deserted in the early-afternoon heat. It was one of those big sky-beautiful days in Phoenix, when the bare desert mountains in every direction were sharply defined by the intense light of the unencumbered sun. That same sun felt like a radiation gun on every exposed pore-the temperature was supposed to top 105 degrees today. A lone ragpicker started to hit me up for money but did a quick retreat when he saw my Sheriff’s Office ID. I took the thing off and stuffed it into my pocket.

  When I was twenty years old, that ID card and gold star had been my most prized possessions. They represented the law, the public trust-that was what Peralta said the first day I met him. It took four hard years to get it through my head that law enforcement wasn’t for me. And yet, here I was. I could call this part-time, temporary, research, whatever. But I was carrying a badge again-and working for Mike Peralta.

  The millions of dollars in computers at the main Sheriff’s Administration Building were little help with a forty-year-old murder case, so I headed over to the old City Hall-County Courthouse, where forgotten records were stored in the attic. When Rebecca Stokes was murdered, this five-story burnt-brown building was where justice was dispensed in Maricopa County. When Rebecca Stokes was murdered, Eisenhower was president, trains still arrived at Union Station, and a small police force rarely had to deal with homicide.

  Carl, the security guard, had spent thirty-five years with the Arizona Highway Patrol. But his perfect posture and fluffy, snow-white mustache reminded me of a retired British army officer. He spent fifteen minutes talking about how an arsonist was at work in his neighborhood, and how the easterners and Californians were ruining Phoenix. He showed me an article that said Phoenix was growing so fast that an acre of desert every hour was being swallowed up by the city. It was written by an old friend of mine, Lorie Pope at the Republic. The city had changed, gotten bigger, dirtier, and more dangerous. I didn’t know whom to blame. Then Carl went away and left me alone in the musty, high-ceilinged clutter.

  Sometimes, I feel like I’ve spent half my life in libraries, but this place was something else again. Historians dream of coming across old diaries from the Civil War in some attic, and this was my attic of treasures: fifty or sixty years of records from the city and county. I doubted if ten people even knew they were up here. It was like an overgrown vacant lot that, instead of being littered with old tires and washing machines, had accumulated decades of cast-off files as the old building went from its original use as a combined city-county building to being Phoenix Police Headquarters to finally housing a mishmash of government offices. There was no order to any of the hundreds of dusty cartons, rusty green and gray file cabinets, and rotting ledgers. But after a few trips, I had begun to find a few caches I might need someday.

  I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but whatever it was would begin to fill in some of the pieces about Rebecca Stokes. My ex-wife, Patty, told me that every woman has her secrets. My time in law enforcement had taught me that every case contains threads that nobody has the time or inclination to pull. I would be satisfied to find just one of them.

  Peralta had some of the finest evidence technicians and detectives in the country to help him with a state-of-the art homicide investigation. I was here to “think outside the box,” as he put it-he read too many business magazines. So I spent an hour reading the case file. Then I opened my old Mac PowerBook and began to make some notes.

  What did I know? A twenty-one-year-old woman gets off a train at midnight and takes a cab home. Then she disappears and turns up dead. The file Peralta had given me said the body was in fairly good shape when it was found by a power-line crew. But the forensic techniques of 1959 were fairly primitive. The autopsy report had disappeared, but I did have a letter from the medical examiner, saying Rebecca died of strangulation, and noting that some residual bruises around the genitals and the presence of semen indicated sexual assault. She was naked except for a bra, and there were no fibers or hairs found on the body, nothing but the dust and burrs from the desert. No tire tracks, either.

  The obvious suspect was the cabdriver. But the report and the attached news clippings said he w
as a decorated Phoenix cop who was working a second job driving a taxi. He voluntarily took a polygraph and passed. And that was it. No suspects were ever even questioned in the case.

  Rebecca was what was called in the fifties a “career girl,” well liked by her coworkers, no steady boyfriend. She’d come to Arizona to study at the state college-now Arizona State University-and took a job as a secretary in the law office of Larkin, Reading and Page. Now I also knew she was the niece of the governor-something the police reports and newspapers had omitted.

  I found a carton with old radio logs from the late 1950s and paged through them. I wanted to know what else was going on in Phoenix when Stokes disappeared. An hour later, I didn’t have much more than an appreciation for what a difference a mere four decades can make. The Phoenix of 1959 was less than a quarter of the size it is today-in many ways, it was just an overgrown farm town, although the postwar growth was at full throttle-and the police calls reflected it. It was a city with clear demarcations between “good” and “bad” parts of town. There were fights and disturbances in the Deuce-the old skid row, leveled years later to make room for the Civic Plaza and America West Arena-and the poor Mexican-American neighborhoods, where I’m sure the police administered their own rough justice. But around Rebecca Stokes’s apartment near the Phoenix Country Club on Thomas Road, life had seemed almost surreally safe. I thought of my own neighborhood at that time, neat and dull, where the night held only the fragrance of citrus blossoms and the sound of train whistles.

  One thing did catch my eye. A week before Rebecca Stokes disappeared, PPD responded to a prowler call from a house two blocks away from her apartment. It wasn’t much, but I needed a place to start. I made note of the officer’s names. Maybe they were still alive, which was probably more than I could hope for the detective who had led the Stokes investigation.

  I replaced the radio logs and crossed the room to a shelf containing old city directories and phone books. The 1959 city directory was missing, but I found 1960 and turned to the section that showed residents by address. I made note of the families and individuals living along her block and the street immediately to the south. All the lives, reduced to lines on old sheets of paper. I also checked the listings for the railroad, just to see if they listed a station agent or anybody in charge at Union Station, but I came up with nothing. But it gave me another idea, and I went back to the logs. Sure enough, a handful of police calls to Union Station yielded a complainant’s name, J. T. Smith of the Southern Pacific.

  I asked Carl if I could borrow his telephone and phone book. It was all a long shot, but I was motivated and wanted to have something to show Peralta, whose impatience was legendary. I checked the names from the city directory against the new phone book, a fool’s errand in a city of transients. Sure enough, name after name led me nowhere. Forty years was ample time to die, move, or remarry. I made note of a J. T. Smith in Sun City, but odds were he wasn’t my railroad man. Of all the leads it had to be a “Smith,” I muttered to myself. Then I hit one: There was still a George Harvey listed on Twelfth Street, just around the corner from Rebecca Stokes’s old apartment.

  ***

  The area around the old North Phoenix High School had been one of the nicest in town back in the fifties. Now it was part of miles of declining east side neighborhoods marked by the stately palm trees of better times and the hieroglyphic gang graffiti of now. But the Harvey address belonged to a pleasant prewar home surrounded by lush oleanders and flowers. After the third knock, a small woman with uncombed white hair and a purple housedress pulled open the door and peered out at me. The house seemed totally dark behind her. I showed her my star and MCSO identification. She placed a wandlike object against her throat and invited me inside in a mechanical voice. “You don’t have a cigarette, do you, honey?” She walked ahead of me into a sitting room. “Ruined my larynx, but I can’t quit. I bum ’em from neighbors, and my granddaughter takes ’em away. Why the hell is it worth living? I always told George he’d survive me because he didn’t smoke. But this is God’s revenge. Been without my George for ten years now.” She sounded like the voice of a computer from an old sci-fi movie.

  I told her I didn’t smoke, and she sighed, waving me to a dusty overstuffed sofa.

  “I’m looking into a very old homicide case,” I began.

  “It’s that girl,” she said matter-of-factly. “Rebecca.”

  “What makes you say that?” I fell automatically into cop mode.

  She blinked at me. “Well, it is, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”

  “That’s true, Mrs. Harvey. I’m just a little surprised you would know that.”

  “I have a better memory than anyone you’ll ever meet, honey. Anyway, I knew they’d never let it rest.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  She looked around the dim room and then looked back at me. “A lot of people thought it was the Creeper that got her,” intoned the metallic monotone. I wanted to laugh, but a chill ran up the back of my neck.

  “The what?”

  “That’s what they called him. ‘The Creeper.’ All that summer, he was out there. At first, the cops didn’t want to believe it. Then when they couldn’t solve Rebecca’s killing, and the other killings happened, they didn’t want to talk about it, because they never could catch him. My God, George bought a gun. We never left the doors unlocked after that summer.”

  She saw my expression, and her watery eyes brightened.

  “My God, honey, didn’t they tell you about him?”

  “There was nothing in any of the reports-” I began.

  “Oh hell,” she interrupted. “When is anything important written down? They didn’t want to write it down because they didn’t want to believe it. And if the papers started writing about Jack the Ripper in the desert, it might hurt tourism and discourage all the people coming here from back east-that was George’s theory. ‘Keep Arizona green: Bring money.’”

  “How did you know about this guy?”

  “Everybody knew,” she said, digging around the cushions of the sofa and finally coming up with a smoke. “People talked about it. Women alone at night talked about being followed. A woman over by Third and Cypress was attacked when she got out of her car one night. But her husband came out, and the Creeper ran.”

  It was about a block from my house.

  She lit her cigarette, smiled angelically, and went on. “Another time, a woman woke up, and he was standing over her. For some reason, he didn’t do anything. About a week after that, a girl was raped and beaten at Encanto Park. It went on all summer. Then poor Rebecca.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Harvey said, drawing hungrily on the cigarette. “I used to take her cookies on Sunday nights. She would run errands for me. She always seemed so alone. I mean, her uncle was the governor and all-they did tell you that, right?” I nodded. “But she seemed lonely. Not all that many girls were working then, and Rebecca seemed like such a sensitive soul. She loved poetry. Her favorite was T. S. Eliot, as I recall.”

  “How long before she disappeared did you see her?”

  “We took her to the train, when she went back east. We wanted to pick her up, but I guess she didn’t want to impose. She so wanted to be independent.” Then she added, “To get away from that damned family of hers.”

  “You mentioned other killings?”

  “He got a taste for it after Rebecca,” said the mechanical voice. “Every eight or nine months, a girl would turn up in the desert. This went on, oh, another three years. The police never admitted they were connected, but we knew. And they never got him.”

  I asked her if people knew who the Creeper was.

  “I always thought the cops knew who it was, but if you’re here asking me, maybe they didn’t. Who knows? That was when Phoenix changed. It wasn’t a little town anymore. People were coming in from everywhere. Some stayed only a few years and moved on. There were the ones who came to work construction. There wer
e the farmworkers. There were the snowbirds. Who knows?”

  Chapter Four

  Phoenix is the newest and oldest of cities. The canals that carry its water past new skyscrapers and freeways are built on the waterworks of ancient Indians. When their civilization vanished, all that was left were their canals and the name a later tribe gave the canal builders: Hohokam, “the vanished ones.” But the past is never past. We are living in their city. It is all connected.

  The Hohokam came to the Salt River Valley about the same time Charlemagne was forging a new Europe out of the chaos of Rome’s fall. In this isolated place, the Indians discovered one of the great fertile river valleys on earth. A thousand years later, a few Anglo settlers found it, too. They restored the Hohokam canals and built new ones. And with water, the Valley grew the vegetables and citrus and cotton that made families like the McConnicos wealthy. Everything is connected.

  I hoped I had hold of a connection that might lead us to who had murdered Rebecca Stokes. It didn’t seem like brain surgery. But I wasn’t going to doubt my worth to Peralta right now. I needed that thousand-dollar fee. And God knows, I’d watched lots of my former colleagues in the ivory tower parlay the obvious into prestigious fellowships and acclaimed books. Anyway, I was intrigued by this murder. Some of the cases Peralta sent my way were as boring as an accounting exam. This one was different. This was a real mystery. I could almost feel the safe, cool desert night Rebecca stepped into from the train; feel the sinister chill that her disappearance cast over a small city.

  Cops are conditioned to disbelieve almost everything they are told, but Opal Harvey’s story was making more and more sense. I went back downtown, spent the afternoon reading old homicide records. Sure enough, there was a loose string of body dumps in the desert in the late 1950s and early 1960s that were never solved. Five young women, strangled and sexually assaulted, naked except for their bras, purses nearby with IDs and money, the killers never found. Two of the bodies were discovered east of town, near Superstition Mountain, and the others, including Rebecca, were found in the desolate Harquahala Desert, west of the White Tank Mountains. Most of the cases seemed to have languished in the Phoenix PD’s Criminal Investigation Bureau under a detective named Harrison Wolfe, who disappeared in the early 1970s.