Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

  “Arizona’s a small world, even now,” I said. He hadn’t exactly put me at ease, but he didn’t seem like a total silver spoon, either. I found myself liking him.

  “As I said on the phone, I wanted to thank you for what you did to help us understand what might have happened to Rebecca,” he said. “There have been a lot of questions all these years.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “I don’t have much memory of her,” he said. “I was about six when she disappeared. She was kind to me. What I mainly remember is how it changed things for our family. For about a year, Mother wouldn’t let me or my sisters play outside in the yard. I don’t think there was any danger, but Rebecca’s killing was…well, nothing was ever the same for us. That violence was always with us.

  “As for Rebecca, I remember she liked to sit with me and help me play with my little trucks.” He smiled slightly and shook his head. “That made her seem okay to me. But I didn’t really understand what had happened when she disappeared and was murdered. We children weren’t told much. And Mother and Dad never really wanted to talk about it. They felt guilty, I think. She had come here from her family in Chicago, and Dad wanted to look out for her, help her where he could. He and his brother, my uncle James, weren’t especially close. But Dad really cared about Rebecca, I think, as if she had been his daughter rather than his niece. He got her the job at Larkin, Reading and Page.”

  “The law firm, right?”

  “Yes, she was Sam Larkin’s secretary.”

  “The Sam Larkin who was your father’s political ally? I didn’t realize Rebecca was his secretary.”

  “They called him ‘the Kingmaker,’” McConnico said. “You have studied your Arizona history.”

  “He was a legend.”

  “And he deserved that label.” McConnico said.

  The waitress brought the drinks and we both sipped in silence. I was a little surprised that Rebecca had worked for Sam Larkin. I imagined his secretary would have been a severe middle-aged keeper of secrets, and young Rebecca a pretty face in the typing pool. But she was the niece of an important ally. I guess it made some sense.

  We talked for maybe an hour, through a so-so meal of “south-western cuisine.” He seemed genuinely curious about how I had put together the threads, missed clues, and hunches involving Rebecca’s case. So I gave him the whole drill, from the first trip up to the attic of the old courthouse to my computer work with Lindsey. At the end, his cell phone rang and he had a terse conversation, called for the check, and pulled out his gold card.

  “You know, crime is a terrible thing today,” McConnico said, setting down his napkin. “What I hear most from my constituents is that they don’t feel safe. When we were kids, the only real crime to speak of was the Mafia down in Tucson. Today, we can’t keep track of the gangs-Crips, Bloods, that little bastard Bobby Hamid.” His voice was suddenly taut with emotion. “When Rebecca was killed, it was a crime that seemed virtually without precedence in Phoenix. Today, it wouldn’t even warrant mention on the evening news. Look at how those killings out in the Harquahala Desert seem almost routine now.” He shook his head. “My God.”

  I didn’t know if he was trying out a stump speech on me or if he was really speaking from the heart. Considering what had happened to his cousin, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  I got back home just before the long afternoon rush hour started to clot the Valley’s streets and freeways. The phone was ringing when I walked in the door; on the other end was a man who said he was Greg Townsend.

  Phaedra’s lover.

  “I, uh, I’m a friend of Phaedra Riding, and I’ve been trying to find her, and her sister would only tell me that I had to talk to you.” He had a well-modulated frat boy’s voice.

  “When did you last see Phaedra, Mr. Townsend?”

  “It would have been in the spring. April, I guess.”

  “And you haven’t seen or spoken to her since then?”

  “No,” he said. “She needed her space. I wanted to give her that. But we agreed that we’d talk again by the end of June-only she never called.”

  I tried to decide if I believed him. I told him that a missing person’s report had been filed on Phaedra.

  “Isn’t it unusual for the police to investigate these things unless they suspect foul play?” That struck me as an odd response to being told that his girlfriend had disappeared, but I let it pass.

  “Julie and I are old friends. I’m checking into this as a favor to her.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll let me know if I can help in any way,” he said. “I’ll give you my phone number; it’s a Sedona number.”

  My gut told me I needed to do more to shake something, anything, loose.

  “Actually, I’d like to stop by and see you in the next few days, if you can spare a little time?”

  “Well,” he said. “Is anything wrong? What’s going on?”

  “I really don’t know more than what I’ve already told you, Mr. Townsend. But if you two were close, you might be able to give me some information that would be helpful. Her family is very concerned.”

  “Well, sure. Come up tomorrow. Can you be here by nine A.M.?” And then he gave me the address.

  Chapter Nine

  Early the next morning, I grabbed a bagel and diet Coke and got on the road to Sedona. I’ve spent my life in coffee-swilling professions, but I’ve never caught that addiction. Patty, whose bone-jolting French roast I would brew every morning when we lived together, said I was missing one of life’s most sublime pleasures. Maybe it will be like golf: something I’ll take up at that ever-receding point in my life called “older.” Bagels were something I had discovered, and even if you couldn’t find a “real” bagel in Phoenix, I munched contentedly on one as I headed the Blazer north on Black Canyon Freeway, Interstate 17.

  Sharon Peralta was on the radio, always “Dr. Sharon” to her listeners (why hadn’t I gotten my Ph.D. in psychology?), giving brisk advice to a man who didn’t know how to keep his career and meet his obligations to his seven children; a woman who didn’t understand why her lovers kept leaving her; and another woman who had seduced her brother-in-law. Dr. Sharon handled every caller deftly. She was funny. She was sexy. She had the answers. She was promoting her newsletter and her new book. Hard to believe it was the mousy Sharon Peralta I first met twenty years ago.

  It was a good summer day for a drive, provided you were headed in the right direction. In the southbound lanes, the traffic headed toward downtown was a gridlocked disaster. I drove for miles through the new city sprawl, ever spreading-an acre an hour-out into the desert floor and around stark, barren mountains that once stood in splendid isolation. After passing Carefree Highway, the interstate started to climb. Over the next hundred miles, it would vault nearly six thousand feet into the Arizona high country and Flagstaff. My destination was not quite that far, but no matter how many times I drove this route, I was struck by the dramatic changes in the land.

  You can drive all the way from the Mississippi River to Denver without encountering more than the undulating sameness of the plains. In the West, the country changes from pines to deserts and mountains to flatlands with amazing suddenness. So the flat cactus-covered desert gave way to sage- and chaparral-covered slopes, ravines and crevices, all pushing upward toward the high peaks to the north. In a few minutes, the massive blue emptiness of the Bradshaw Mountains appeared off my left. This had been mining country a hundred years before, with lots of abandoned shafts to stick a body in. I felt an involuntary uneasiness and checked the mirrors, checked the.357 in the glove compartment.

  In about an hour, I took the highway that splits off north into Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona. Another ten miles and the country changed again from the three-thousand-foot high desert to a landscape from another planet, an idealized Mars of exalted red-stone buttes rising above scrub pines and intricate, blown-apart rock formations, all encased by a gigantic, endless cobalt sky. Here was the next Santa F
e or Taos. Sedona, which had not been much more than an isolated artists’ colony when my grandparents would bring me up here as a little boy, had become as rich and exclusive an oasis as you can find in the country. There was now a traffic light below Cathedral Rock and expensive houses sprinkled into the foothills. It all made me vaguely sad.

  I stopped at a convenience store where a sign told me Sedona was the home of the annual Jazz on the Rocks Festival, and also that it was at the center of four “vortexes” that provide mysterious, healing energy. I had a vague recollection of a “harmonic convergence” of New Agers here a few years before, when I was still in San Diego and Patty’s wicked wit insulated me from inanities. I asked about the address Townsend had given me, and the clerk pointed me down the highway to a turnoff.

  The Blazer’s odometer turned over 2.4 miles as the asphalt road turned to red gravel and finally to dirt, climbing up into Bear Hollow, a narrow upland canyon overlooking Sedona. Greg Townsend’s place was completely concealed in pines and rocks, a modern adobe with the kind of rustic look that can only be had for a lot of money. I parked inside a gate, just behind a silver Porsche 911 turbo. I wondered about strapping on the Python, then decided against it and stepped out onto the pinecones and rocky ground.

  “You don’t look like a cop,” came a disembodied voice from a distance. Then, coming closer, he said, “You look more like a college professor.”

  Greg Townsend stepped out from behind a boulder and extended his hand. He was tall and lanky, my height, but skinnier, with a full head of graying hair, wire-frame glasses, khaki shorts, and hiking boots. His skin was a golden tan, darker than the color of his shorts. He regarded me with an easy nonchalance in his blue eyes. I pulled out my badge case with my left hand-the nongun hand-and showed it to him.

  “I read about you in the Republic,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

  “Nothing to be impressed about,” I replied, looking him over and imagining him as Phaedra’s lover. I didn’t like him.

  “I went to Brown, but I never much took to the classroom thing,” he said. I didn’t respond. “So you’re a history professor? I trust you have left behind the prison of linear narrative and the Western conceit that there is such a thing as truth?”

  Jesus, I thought, is this how he picked up Phaedra? “I think historical questions have historical answers,” I said. “The conceit that everything is relative has led to most of the mass murder of this century.”

  “Mmm,” he said. “How did you ever get tenure?”

  He extended his arm and we walked.

  “Phaedra loved it up here,” he was saying as he led me around the place, from one spectacular view of the canyon below to another. “She was a restless soul. You could see that aura about her. Amazingly creative. Anyway, somehow this place calmed her a bit.”

  “When was the last time you talked to her, Mr. Townsend?” I asked. We settled onto a large futon in the main room; it faced a wall of glass and another fabulous view. Around us were photos of Townsend climbing, cycling, and skydiving with various young women. I didn’t immediately see a photo of Phaedra.

  “I told you on the phone, it was April, when she moved out.”

  “You two had a fight? That was why she moved out?”

  His blue eyes flashed for just a moment, and his face became red. “You know,” he said, “I didn’t want to invite you up here, and now you’re asking things that are really not any of your business.”

  I thought about playing a tough guy, but I just let it sit for a minute. I could hear a siren down in the canyon.

  “You didn’t know Phaedra,” Townsend said. “The negativity just grew in her. She was very difficult, very tumultuous. Of course, she was very bright and talented. They all go together. Such a tortured soul.

  “Yes, we fought before she left. But that didn’t seem unusual, because we fought a lot. That was just Phaedra. But the next morning, she was just gone. She never gave me an explanation.”

  “Why do you think she left?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe she was ready for a change. She lived a very episodic life, Deputy Mapstone. She would go through phases in her clothes: hats and loose skirts one month, tight Armani cocktail dresses the next. People came and went, too, men especially. She never had trouble turning the page.”

  “What did her state of mind seem to be?”

  “Moody. Sometimes she seemed happy, but lonely, too.”

  “And other times?”

  “She never reached a oneness with herself. That wonderful state of being I tried to teach her. Why should I know why?” He sounded whiny, like he must have sounded in fifth grade.

  “Oh, just because you lived with her,” I said dryly.

  “Yeah,” he said, staring past me out the window. “There were times she sounded really down. She could have the blackest moods. And that sister…”

  “Julie.”

  He looked at me strangely and said, “Very bad news.”

  “Did you ever have any sense she might be in trouble?”

  He shook his head. We watched as a hawk hunted in a lonely arc down the canyon.

  I asked him about how he’d met Phaedra.

  “The personals, Deputy Mapstone. Or is it Dr. Mapstone? Professor? Haven’t you tried the nineties way of meeting people?”

  “I answered a couple of ads in San Diego a few years ago. I can’t say I met anybody like Phaedra, at least if her photos don’t lie.”

  “Oh my God, she looked much better in person,” Townsend said. “She was the kind of woman who, when you saw her walk past or in an elevator, could make your whole day if she gave you a smile.

  “I’ve known a woman or two like that,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen anyone who was vibrating as high as Phaedra. She was channeling unbelievable things…” He stopped and looked at me. “But I guess you don’t believe in such things, do you, Professor Mapstone?”

  “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” I said.

  “The Bible,” he said, and smiled.

  I thought, Shakespeare, you dolt. I said, “But I guess I don’t channel.”

  “You should. You have quite an aura about you. It would allow you to break free of all the repressiveness of Western civilization and Christianity, which, thank God, nobody believes in anymore.”

  “Yeah. The Sedona vortex is certainly more plausible than the Trinity.” He didn’t smile. “Phaedra,” I coaxed.

  “She didn’t like to climb. Heights scared her. She read books. Lots of history. You might have liked her.”

  He was needling me, but I let him. There was something wrong with Greg Townsend, but I couldn’t tell if it was that vague misfit neurosis that seems to migrate west or if it was something more, something to do with Phaedra.

  “I had a place down in the Valley,” he said. “So we started dating down there. It got serious, and we moved in together. Then we moved up here full-time.”

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Townsend?”

  “I’m a trust baby, Deputy.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Yes, it allows me to do the things I love. I climb at least a dozen fourteeners every year; I fly my own plane; I travel. And I can attract women like Phaedra Riding, to put a fine point on it.”

  He smiled a smile of perfect white teeth.

  “Did you care about her?”

  “Sure,” he said. “We had a lot of fun.”

  “I can see you’re broken up with worry about her disappearing,” I said.

  He looked hard at me for a long moment. The veins and tendons in his fine neck rippled minutely. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know you don’t seem too concerned.”

  He just stared and gave a little sigh. “I don’t have to justify myself to you,” he said. “She’s an adult, and one with her own mind, let me assure you. She liked being on her own. I have no reason to believe she won’t turn up.”

>   “Did Phaedra have a drug problem?”

  “Fuck you!” he said, rising and stalking to the end of the room. He walked over to a bar set into the wall and clinked some ice into a glass. It seemed out of character; I expected him to be swilling Evian. “I really didn’t have to let you in here, and I don’t have to let you pry into my life.”

  I stayed seated. “Well, that’s true, sir,” I said. “So I can call the Sedona sheriff’s substation and get a search warrant and really fuck up your afternoon. To put a fine point on it.”

  He downed his drink. I said, “Or we can keep having a friendly conversation.”

  “She hated drugs,” he said quietly, staring out the window again.

  I drove back to Phoenix in the full heat of the day, the sun burning into the Blazer despite the air-conditioning being on high. My sunglasses were pressed tightly against my face. I missed San Diego. I missed the Spanish stucco house a block from the Pacific in Ocean Beach. I missed the familiarity of lecture classes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and office hours Wednesday afternoons, and lunch with Patty in Mission Valley, where the air was cool and salty-smelling.

  Here, I had a missing woman who had a taste for rich men, couldn’t keep a job, and played the personal ads. She had red hair and a blue Nissan Sentra, and I didn’t have a clue where to find her. Who would have thought it would be easier to solve a four-decades-old murder case than to find my old girlfriend’s missing sister?

  I didn’t know what to think about Greg Townsend, aside from my visceral dislike of him. He was like so many middle-aged men you meet in the West, grown-up boys who have left behind the privileged Ivy League backgrounds, but not the perks. Men who try to fill up what is missing inside them with mountain biking, rock climbing, and New Age philosophy. They populated the resorts and the tennis ranches, looking like they’ve stepped out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad in Esquire magazine. They have a finely tuned sense of ironic scorn, but it’s impossible to say if they ever feel anything real. And what Townsend felt about Phaedra, I couldn’t say.