Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

  I turned down Fourth Avenue and drove past the charming Spanish mission-style Union Station, which sat dark and abandoned. Rebecca Stokes had stepped off a train here in 1959, when the building was the center of the city’s life. I could imagine the stainless-steel passenger cars and the rush of people under the lamps of the station platform. Catch a cab home and…

  “What happened to you, Rebecca?” I asked aloud. “Whom did you go meet? You must have been thinking about him as the train pulled in.”

  Now the trains were gone from Union Station. Nobody home. All alone in the desert. All alone in the world. I thought momentarily of Patty. Two Phoenix PD units sat across from the new City Hall, distracted by a traffic stop, happily unaware of me. I had come within a heartbeat, a moment’s judgment, of killing a man tonight. I had come within a mechanical malfunction of being dead myself. Basie was done. I continued north in silence, over the underground freeway, past my old grade school, slowly driving toward home. The rearview mirror was dark and empty.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The newsroom of the Arizona Republic, on the ninth floor of the paper’s brand-new downtown tower, looked more like an insurance company office than a scene out of The Front Page. No stogie-chomping city editor. No screaming eccentrics in green eyeshades. No clattering typewriters, jangling phones, or reporters in fedoras yelling, “Get me rewrite, sweetheart.” Just decorator-driven corporate blandness against picture-window views of the mountains. The subdued background sound of computer keystrokes was the only noise. Men in beards and women in sensible shoes walked briskly past me with notebooks in their hands and sour looks on their faces. I gave my name to a receptionist who looked about twelve years old and waited for Lorie Pope.

  The first time I saw her was on a murder scene in 1980, when I was a green deputy standing watch out in the heat and she was a young reporter intern, just arrived from Jersey, who couldn’t get past the police line. Maybe we were both rookies kept on the outside and maybe she just took pity on me, but, with eighties female assertiveness, she asked for my phone number. I was on the rebound from Julie, so Lorie and I ended up dating for a few months. After that, we remained friends, and after I moved away, I tried to look her up when I came back to visit. I knew she’d been in and out of two marriages, converted in turn to Buddhism and Judaism, and wrote an award-winning book on organized crime (I even got a brief mention in the acknowledgments). She left Arizona to work at newspapers in Seattle and L.A., then came back to the Republic as the head of its investigations team.

  “David! My God!”

  We hugged, a long, genuine hug. Lorie Pope was lean, tall, and tan, with dark hair cut fashionably short. Although she had changed over the years-grown into her face, is that the expression? — she looked at least ten years younger than I knew she was. And her laugh was just as I remembered it: uninhibited, infectious, wonderful.

  She patted the holster on my belt. “Things have gotten tougher in the classroom, no?”

  “I could have used it there, actually.” I laughed, and she led me out of the building, walking her brisk, purposeful walk.

  “You’re quite the hero,” she said. “Uncovering information about a forty-year-old murder case, and one involving a relative of the next governor no less.”

  “Is that the prediction for Brent McConnico?” I asked.

  “If not this next election, then the one after.”

  “He took me to lunch,” I said. “Seemed nice enough, for a politician.”

  “I think he’s slimy,” Lorie said.

  The heat of the sidewalk was burning my feet. I asked her why she didn’t like McConnico.

  “When you want an afternoon’s primer on Arizona politics, and if you’re making the martinis, I’ll tell you. For one thing, he’s married and he’s tried on more than one occasion to pick me up.”

  Five minutes through the midday hell and we were in a cool, dark booth in a restaurant at Arizona Center. She ordered a Bloody Mary. Wearing badge and gun, I settled for a diet Coke.

  “So you’re really back at the SO?”

  “I don’t know where I am,” I said. “I thought I was picking up a little consulting work from Mike Peralta while I tried to find a new teaching job. But universities aren’t exactly clamoring to hire me. I got a letter from a dean at Arizona State last month, and he actually said I wrote too clearly to be taken seriously as an historian today.”

  “You’re equal opportunity-challenged in these politically correct times, my love,” she said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s no better in the news business; plus, we’re run by these profit-driven corporate dickheads with their focus groups and readership surveys. We keep making stories shorter and dumber, and we wonder why nobody wants to read newspapers today. At least you know there will always be crime.”

  We ordered fish tacos, and I asked Lorie about Bobby Hamid.

  “You tell me,” she said. “Surely the Sheriff’s Office intelligence files are piled high with Bobby Hamid information.”

  “You can give me a different perspective, as an award-winning reporter writing about organized crime.”

  “Yeah, shit,” she snorted, then added, “He’s a major, diversified scumbag. Tied in with new organized crime.”

  “Old organized crime-the Mafia-played by a code of sorts. For instance, they wouldn’t murder cops or reporters. New organized crime-the Colombians, the Dominicans, the Samoans, the Russians, guys like Bobby Hamid-they’d just as soon kill you as look at you.” Lorie spoke fast, talked with her hands. She was in her element now.

  “Bobby has all sorts of alliances, keeps his hands in different products. Like he’s tied in with the Aryan Brotherhood, distributing drugs in the Arizona State Prison. He uses the Mexican Mafia to terrorize competitors to his porno bookstores. I’ve heard he has his hands in reservation casinos, maybe through the old mob. He’s an operator.”

  “Is he tied into flying drugs in from Mexico?”

  “If he’s not, somebody close to him is,” Lorie said. “Bobby Hamid is like a Harvard Business School case study. He’s a genius in maximizing the value of different enterprises-only these are illegal enterprises.”

  “So why has nobody ever shut him down?”

  “Who knows? Another thing about the new organized crime is how diffuse it is. The system is overwhelmed. I know your buddy Peralta has had a hard-on for Bobby for years, but…yeah, as I recall, the county attorney screwed the pooch a couple of years ago on a prosecution and Bobby walked. Had a very high-priced lawyer.”

  “Well,” I said, “Bobby Hamid seems to keep turning up on the edges of my life.”

  She arched one eyebrow. “Is that why you ended up in a gunfight at Metrocenter last night?”

  “You don’t miss a thing, Ms. Pope.”

  “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Deputy Mapstone.” It was one of our old routines from years ago.

  I filled Lorie in from the beginning. I needed someone to talk to, someone I trusted. When I was done, she shook her head slowly and said, “I should have known Julie Riding was involved in this somehow.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “Ironic my ass,” Lorie said, munching on a taco. “So let me get this straight: You go looking for your old girlfriend’s missing sister, who ends up murdered in the desert, a dump arranged to look like the 1959 homicide you’ve been investigating. Little sister-Phaedra? That’s a name-has a drug-mule boyfriend who also gets dead. Now you find out Phaedra was on the run for a month. And somebody with a large gun doesn’t want you to find out why.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “I don’t like it, David,” Lorie said. “Something stinks.”

  I asked her what.

  “Julie, for one thing,” she said. “Your major source of information is addicted to blow, and now she’s disappeared.”

  “I know she’s all screwed up.”

  “In my business,” Lorie Pope said, “we say, ‘If
your mother says she loves you, check it out.’”

  “In my business, too,” I said, and thought about what Harrison Wolfe had said about never confusing your prejudices with your instincts.

  Lorie shook her head. “You’re living quite the historical psycho-drama, aren’t you, Professor?” she asked. “Deputy in the old West-a paladin, if you will-fights for former lady love’s honor.”

  “That’s not it,” I replied a bit too testily.

  We finished our food in silence, surrounded by the din of the business-lunch crowd talking deals, sports, and gossip. At the next table, a trim middle-aged man was holding forth on the new roster for the Suns, how things had never been right since they traded Barkley. He said he’d played golf with Charles only yesterday. At another table, three women were talking about a shooting in one of their neighborhoods. Then Lorie picked up the tab and we walked back slowly, drifting past the tourist shops-flags, hot peppers, t-shirts, Indian art, Arizona Highways-staying in the shade.

  “I was going to ask you how your love life is going,” Lorie said finally, “but I guess I have my answer.”

  “I’m not sleeping with Julie,” I said. Technically true. Haven’t slept with her for a week. Why was I covering up? “I don’t even know where she is.” Too true.

  “Mmm.”

  “I have a friend,” I volunteered. “Kind of a work friend. We’re not even dating, really. But it feels nice to be with her.”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “And you?”

  She paused by a shop window and studied us reflected in the glass. “Oh, I don’t know.” She walked on. “We never really know anybody. And our expectations for forever are so out of place. I mean, when humans needed the family unit to survive and only lived to be forty, monogamy made sense.”

  “You’ve drunk deep at the social science well,” I said.

  She smiled. “I’ve been in love so many times, or at least I thought I was in love. Next time, I’d like to find a friend, maybe, before I get all obsessive and self-destructive. Remember how that is?” She laughed.

  I thought about that and said, “I guess I have love vertigo. Ever since my marriage ended. If I get too high up, I just get dizzy.”

  “Why did Patty leave you?” Lorie asked. “Sorry. Asking uncomfortable questions at the most inopportune time is an occupational hazard.”

  We were at the door to the Republic.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “My occupational hazard is getting shot at. I don’t know why. Maybe she fell in love with her boss. He owned a sailboat. Maybe the thought of being married to me for the rest of her life was too boring to contemplate. Now she’s living with a twenty-two-year-old tennis pro. She never gave me an explanation. She was a millionaire’s daughter, and I was just me.”

  “I guess that’s the way it was for me with Richard,” she said. Husband number two. “I never knew why. I eventually made myself realize I’ll never know why. And I know I’ve probably done as bad or worse to my lovers. We live in an age of so much disconnection.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Here I am, one of the killers and one of the dead.”

  “I don’t want to grieve for Patty,” I said earnestly. “I wouldn’t want the falseness of that life again.” Lorie looked at me. “But,” I said, “she had a way of getting under my skin that I miss, that I still seek elsewhere.”

  “So you don’t want nice girls?”

  “I was always a nice guy.”

  “Yes, you were.” Lorie gave me a hug and said, “I’ll do some sniff work on this, David, and call you in a couple of days. But Phaedra is the key to your mystery. You’ve got to get into her last days. Her recent history, you know? Not what Julie says happened. But what really happened.”

  Then she pushed through the door and was gone.

  Chapter Twenty

  After sundown, I drove back to Tempe, where Susan Knightly’s studio was still locked and dark. Most of the afternoon, I’d sat at home in the cool dimness of Grandfather’s office, listening to Charlie Parker and listlessly grading badly written essays, waiting in vain for the phone to ring. Now I was antsy and needed to walk, even in the heat. In the lobby of the building that housed the studio, two security guards were talking as I walked past. I caught only the end of their conversation: “That’s what love means!” one said. I stepped out and walked down Mill Avenue. Just a tall dark-haired man, officially unemployed, too near middle age and carrying a large revolver.

  The street is the main drag through the old part of Tempe, near the university, but it had been rebuilt since I went to school. Pricey new office buildings, tourist boutiques, a multiplex theater, and exotic restaurants sat along what had once been a quintessential college-town street. Sidewalk cafes were cooled by elaborate systems that shot jets of mist into the superheated desert air. Even in the heat, Mill Avenue was crowded with people, mostly young and female, achingly sexy, wearing as little as possible. The sexual flux was so real, you could feel it. Tall, long-legged, tan goddesses who said something about the value of American nutrition in the last part of the twentieth century. Sweet young objects of desire. They never studied history in college voluntarily. They paid me no mind. This would have been part of Phaedra’s world, at least when she got off work every day at the photo studio.

  I started at one end of the street and worked my way south, hitting the bars and restaurants, showing the photograph of the redhaired woman with the intense stare. The bartenders, managers, and maitre d’s were all amazingly friendly and wanted to be helpful. One woman behind the bar of a seafood place wanted to know if this would be on America’s Most Wanted. They all seemed to be from somewhere else and were eager to tell you about how much they loved the Valley. There was just one problem: None remembered Phaedra. As one older woman said, “There are too many beautiful women in Phoenix. Who can keep track?”

  Until I got to a coffee place across from the Gilbert Ortega Indian art store. There, a brooding young man with a goatee and three earrings in one ear nodded slowly when I showed him the photo.

  “She’d come in for an iced grande mocha,” he said deliberately.

  “You’re sure it’s her?”

  “I remember. I have a thing for redheads.” He smiled vaguely and stared out at the street. “There’s something mystical about redheads. And I thought she had a cool name. It’d be a great name for a band.”

  “You ever ask her out?”

  He shook his head. “Didn’t have the guts. She seemed too intense for me. A real bagful of emotions, you know? A little voice in me said, You don’t want to go there.”

  I asked him if she always came in alone. He rubbed his stubbled chin. “Once she came in with another red-haired woman. She was older. Had a bunch of photo equipment on her shoulder. Seemed like they were friends.”

  He cleaned some metal canisters. “Then a couple of weeks ago, she met somebody here.”

  “Phaedra came in with somebody?”

  “No,” he said. “Phaedra came in alone and ordered. This woman came in after her and they talked at a table for a few minutes.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Not bad-looking, if she hadn’t had such a hard look in her eyes. Older. Kinda light brown hair, straight, but pulled back.” He thought about it for a moment. “She called her Julie. Phaedra did.”

  I felt a little sizzle at the back of my neck.

  “You’re sure this was two weeks ago?” I asked. “Not a month ago, maybe?”

  “It would have been the Monday before last,” he said. “I remembered how upset she seemed.”

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fine. What was Phaedra like? Glad to see the woman?”

  “No, man. She seemed really agitated, now that I think about it. Spilled part of her coffee. They sat back there”-he pointed to a table-“for maybe five minutes. They were really into it. Phaedra was waving her hands, pushing back her hair-you know, the way pretty long-haired women do? Rubbing her eyes. Whatever this other
chick was saying was upsetting her.”

  “What happened next?”

  “They left.”

  “Together?”

  He nodded.

  “You have a good memory,” I said.

  “I’m in criminology at ASU,” he said. “I want to get into the FBI. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

  Lose the stubble and earrings, I thought. Or maybe not. The world keeps changing.

  “You want to know who she was seeing? The redhead? My buddy Noah did ask her out, and I guess they hit it off. I didn’t know if I should tell you, but you seem okay.” I wrote down Noah’s address and phone number.

  “I hope she’s not in trouble,” he said as I turned to go.

  I walked out into the hot evening and finally had the “Oh shit!” moment I had been working up to for several days, since Julie first disappeared. I realized that, divorced from my sentimental feelings about her, I didn’t know Julie Riding very well at all. She’d told me she had joint custody of her daughter, but in reality, she had lost custody. She’d told me cocaine was in her past, but now I knew it was part of her present. She’d told me she hadn’t seen her sister for a month before Phaedra turned up murdered, but a witness had just placed Julie with Phaedra the night before the body was found. I had argued with Peralta to protect Julie-because I know her-but it occurred to me with sudden, awful clarity that I didn’t know her, not really. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

  Oh shit.

  Noah wasn’t home, so I headed back to my house empty-handed. I was already out of sorts when the phone rang a little after 10:00 P.M.

  “I didn’t know if I should just leave you alone or not,” said Lindsey.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have called.” It was a cliche. And there was an edge in my voice.

  “No,” she said. “No reason for you to worry about that. But I heard about what happened last night.…”