Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

  “I’m okay. It was over pretty quickly.”

  “I know,” she said, and the line was silent. Over the airconditioning, I could actually hear a train whistle from down at the Santa Fe yards.

  “Oh, Lindsey,” I began. I thought, How I wish you were in my arms on this lonely, desolate night. Silence again.

  “I think I may have found something you’ll be interested in,” she said finally, her voice different. “Something relating to Rebecca Stokes.”

  “That’s great, Lindsey. What have you got?”

  “Come by on Monday and I’ll show you.”

  “Okay. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Dave. Get some rest.”

  I started to call her right back, but the phone rang.

  “Lindsey?”

  “You’ve replaced me already, my love?”

  I sat up uneasily. “Where are you, Julie?”

  “I’m around, David. I can’t tell you right now. Soon we’ll be together.”

  “Julie, we need to talk,” I said.

  “I suppose Peralta is threatening to arrest me.”

  “I don’t really know,” I said sharply. “I’d rather know why you met Phaedra down at a coffee place on Mill Avenue the night before she was found dead.”

  “David, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen Phaedra for almost two months.”

  “Why this game, Julie? Who are you running from?”

  “Maybe the same man as you, judging from the story in the Republic this morning.” She was in the state at least, if she’d read the story today in the newspaper.

  Julie said, “Haven’t you thought about what I said to you, David? I’m really in love with you.”

  I said nothing. The line buzzed emptily.

  “Don’t you think we could try to make something happen here?” she said. “I mean, finally make something go right in our lives?”

  “Does the name Bobby Hamid mean anything to you?”

  “No, David. You don’t understand. In time, I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “Why can’t you tell me now, Julie?”

  “I just can’t.” The line went dead.

  I slammed the phone down and cursed the walls.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  “Rebecca Stokes was pregnant when she was murdered.”

  “What are you talking about?” I was standing in Lindsey’s cubicle in the Central Records Division. I sat down. She was all in black: black T-shirt, black jeans, black boots. Even her lipstick was dark.

  I’d spent a restless weekend, correcting papers and mulling over what I knew and didn’t know. Then early Monday morning, I’d headed downtown to see Lindsey.

  “There was an autopsy,” she said, visibly pleased with herself. “The record was preserved.”

  “How? There was nothing like that in the case file. I assumed the autopsy report had been lost.”

  “You have to think outside the box, Dave.” She adjusted her oval glasses, punched up several menus on her computer screen, and pointed.

  “This was a research project in 1985 at the University of Arizona Medical School. A history of forensic pathology in Arizona in the 1950s, gleaned from autopsy records. And lo and behold, the autopsy of Rebecca Marie Stokes.”

  “You are amazing.”

  “It’s all in the fingers.” She opened a file, and we read silently together.

  “‘A fetus, approximately eight weeks old, found in the womb,’” she read.

  “Jesus Christ.” I sat back.

  “She was pregnant, Dave. That changes everything.”

  “Motive.”

  “Exactly. Killed by somebody she knew, like Harrison Wolfe said.”

  “So the lover was married and got his girlfriend, Rebecca, pregnant,” I said.

  “She refuses to have a back-alley abortion. He refuses to leave his wife,” Lindsey said. “They argue. They fight. He kills her.”

  “If that’s the real scenario,” I said.

  “You know it is, Dave,” Lindsey put her hands on my knees, smiling widely. “She was a single middle-class woman living in 1959, and she was pregnant,” Lindsey went on. “We know from Opal Harvey that she had a lover and he was a mystery man.”

  “So then,” I said, “the question becomes, who was he?”

  I scrolled through the autopsy report, Lindsey leaning on my shoulder. It went into some detail about the crushing of the cricoid in her neck. The forensic serology report showed she’d had semen in her vagina.

  “What about your friend Brent McConnico? Would he know who her lover was?” Lindsey asked.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “He was just a kid at the time. I guess it’s worth asking, although I’m sure it won’t make his day.” I looked back at Lindsey. She was somewhere else.

  “Do you think there’s good and evil?” she said at last.

  “I do,” I said. “It’s not very fashionable, I guess. The Holocaust and the gulag taught us there is radical evil.”

  “But is there good?”

  “Of course,” I said. “The soldiers who defeated the Nazis and liberated the death camps were good. A historian named Robert Conquest documented the millions of deaths in the Soviet Union, when most Western experts wanted to look the other way. I call that good.” I stroked her wrist. “We’re the good guys, aren’t we?”

  Lindsey looked at me with something like fondness. “I used to think, people don’t even think these thoughts I do.…But you do.”

  I almost leaned over and kissed her. I said, “You are my hero, Lindsey. This really changes everything. Even if it blows my theory of a serial killer all to hell.”

  “There was a serial killer, Dave. He probably just wasn’t involved in the Stokes murder.”

  “Right,” I said. I felt awkward and silly. “You want to do something this week? Maybe see a movie?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  ***

  Back at home, I placed a call to Brent McConnico, left a message with his secretary, and settled into the big leather chair with a large Bloody Mary and my notes and files from the library. Phaedra was still in the center of my mind, but Lindsey’s find on the Stokes case had fired me up. I was still going to earn my thousand dollars from Peralta, and even do some honest scholarship to boot.

  Going through the notes I’d made on Governor McConnico, I was struck by how the murder of his niece could be seen as a turning point in his career. He was only about fifty when she disappeared, and he was seen as a rising star in the Democratic party. Newspapers of the time talked about him seeking the Senate in 1958. Instead, McConnico retired and went into corporate law with his longtime adviser, Sam Larkin. It seemed an odd turn, even if, as Brent McConnico had said, they never felt safe after Rebecca was killed. Indeed, newspapers and historical accounts didn’t make the connection between Stokes and McConnico at all. Something else I didn’t realize: Governor McConnico had died by his own hand in 1968.

  I also looked through the Phoenix PD history, hoping for some insight into the department that had investigated Rebecca’s murder. Names and dates and innovations-the first motorcycle unit, first helicopter patrol-but little on major cases. Just a sleepy desert town in the 1950s. And nothing on a detective from Los Angeles named Harrison Wolfe. I guess we’d used up our ration of luck for one day.

  The phone rang at three o’clock, and I thought it might be Brent McConnico. Instead it was an impossibly young voice identifying himself as Noah Hunter. He sounded harried and apprehensive. When I asked about Phaedra, he was silent a long time. Then he said I could meet him on his work break that night at Planet Hollywood, where he was employed as a waiter.

  It must have been 115 degrees outside, but the sun had disappeared behind the White Tank Mountains and a long line had gathered outside Planet Hollywood. The restaurant sat at one end of the Biltmore Fashion Park, an outdoor shopping mall in tony northeast Phoenix. I bypassed the line and heard some grumbling. The blond goddess at the front
counter, backed by a life-size poster of Arnold, Bruce, and Demi, started to admonish me, but I discreetly showed my badge and asked for Noah Hunter. I was feeling too goddamned old to be waiting in lines in the heat when I didn’t even want to be there.

  In a moment, Noah Hunter appeared and steered me outside. We walked in silence toward a Coffee Plantation in the middle of the mall. He looked about twenty, tall and good-looking, with close-cropped light brown hair, a sensual mouth, and bad posture.

  “They’re gonna think I’m in trouble,” he said sulkily.

  “You can explain to them,” I said.

  We went inside and ordered iced mochas, then went back out to the sidewalk tables, which were cooled somewhat by the ever-present misters in the roof. He sprawled out across one of the chairs and casually regarded a young brunette walking past. She gave him a dazzling smile and tossed her head.

  “So what do you want?”

  “I want to talk about Phaedra Riding.”

  “It was that goddamned Josh, wasn’t it?” He shook his head. “Cop wanna-be. Jesus.”

  “Do you know where Phaedra is?”

  He looked me over and thought about copping an attitude. “No,” he said.

  “She’s dead,” I said, watching him carefully. “Murdered.”

  He sat up in a hurry. Then he rolled his head around violently. Tears welled up in his eyes. “What are you talking about, man? What are you talking about?”

  I gave him the details and watched his eyes while he ignored his coffee and absently rubbed his neck with a large tanned hand.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I asked. I should have read him his rights, but I knew he didn’t do it. I didn’t tell him that.

  “Shit, you think I killed her? Is that what you think?”

  “If I thought that, I’d be here with lots of help,” I said. “But your behavior is telling me I might have been wrong.”

  He stared at me.

  “I’m listening.”

  He sighed and slumped into his chair. “Phaedra.” He shook his head. “Such a cool, sexy name. She would come into this coffee place on Mill Avenue and just sit at the back and read. One day, I walk back there and she’s reading John Stuart Mill. How do you start a conversation based on that?”

  I could, I thought absently.

  “But I got her talking and we hit it off, you know? So I asked her out, and we had a good time.”

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. School was still in session. Maybe late April.”

  “So you dated?”

  He nodded.

  “She was way too smart for me. Read about a book a day, seemed like. She also played the cello. Not your typical party chick. But she wasn’t looking for anything heavy. I think she’d just come out of a relationship. We just had fun.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  He was silent and stared down at his hands.

  “I can’t believe she’s dead.” He shook his head. “She was such a sweet, gentle soul. Who would have killed her?”

  “You tell me.”

  He stared at his hands. It was quiet enough that I could hear the hiss of the misters overhead. Off on Camelback Road, the traffic gave off a low roar.

  “She came to me after school was over and asked if she could stay for a few weeks. I said sure.”

  “When was this?”

  “June. Around the end of the month.” He paused.

  “She was scared, man,” he said. “She was running from something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at me. “You’ve got to believe me. I really don’t know. When Phaedra didn’t want to talk about something, she could send you to Siberia, you know? But she was real emphatic about me not telling anybody she was staying with me.”

  He took a draw on the iced mocha. “Phaedra was a very passionate, very unhappy person,” he said. “Some people are just born disaffected. That was Phaedra. She was so damned deep, it was scary. And there was so much about her that was so wonderful-God, when she played her cello for me.” He shook his head. “But there was so much she wouldn’t talk about.”

  “Did you guys do drugs?”

  “Shit no! You think I’m crazy? Yeah, I did a little ecstasy and pot when I was in high school. But not now. And you couldn’t even talk to Phaedra about drugs. She’d go nuts.”

  So why was she involved with a drug pilot? I thought.

  I asked, “How long did she stay?”

  “Almost a month. It was really nice to have her there. She left two weeks ago. She made a phone call one day and said she needed to meet somebody. She didn’t come back.”

  “You weren’t worried?”

  “I was worried,” he said. “But she said it would be okay, when she went out that night. Anyway, I always figured she would just up and leave me one day. I got the sense that was the way she operated with men, you know? I didn’t know anything was wrong.”

  “What about her car?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t have a car. That was one of the things that was odd about her. She was always on foot. She said she had to lend her car to her sister.”

  I thanked him, a little too curtly, and left a business card. I said other deputies would be in touch.

  He stared at me hard, like a young man challenged over his woman. And then his face changed, reddened, fell apart. I thought of the word shattered and where it must have come from, when the pain gets so great that it shatters. He cried like a little boy.

  “The night before she left, she said she wanted to run away.” He sobbed. “She asked me to go with her. I should have done it.…”

  I let him cry. I put a hand on his shoulder and felt a deep emptiness in my middle.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The next morning, I was standing in the little rotunda of the Arizona capitol, under the restored copper dome, waiting for Brent McConnico. The capitol was modest and charming, the best effort of a frontier state that probably had fifty-thousand people and not much money when it entered the union in 1912. It compared favorably with the “new” building attached to it, a monument to 1970s architectural ugliness.

  The night before, I’d typed up what I had learned so far about Phaedra. Soon I would have to take it in to Peralta. But I wasn’t ready yet. Something made me want to talk to Susan Knightly before Peralta’s detectives descended on the case.

  Behind me was a hubbub of voices as people spilled out of a conference room. Brent McConnico was walking slowly down the corridor, deep in conversation with another man, his arm around the man’s shoulders. He smiled toward me and raised a finger: Just a moment. Then he broke away and strode over, extending his hand.

  “David,” he said. “So good of you to work around my schedule. I have just about fifteen minutes; then I’m in appropriations hearing hell for the rest of the day.”

  He led me up a wide flight of stairs and into a deserted alcove overlooking the rotunda. “That was once the governor’s office,” he said pointing, “before they moved it into that monstrosity behind us.”

  “I remember coming up here with my Cub Scout troop,” I said. “I think Paul Fannin was governor then.”

  “Ah yes, good old Paul,” he said. “A great Arizonan.”

  I made some apologies and got to the point, explaining why his cousin’s murder might not be a closed case. His face changed subtly, and he listened intently.

  “Oh, come, come, David,” he said. “Surely you don’t believe this man, this retired detective? Sounds like he’s doing some overdue ass covering.”

  “I might think so, too, Senator, if it weren’t for some new evidence we’ve run across.”

  “Call me Brent,” he said quickly. “What evidence? What are you talking about?”

  “We’ve interviewed a neighbor who knew Rebecca, and she said Rebecca had a secret lover.”

  “A secret lover?” He laughed a little too loudly. “Where on earth did that c
ome from? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  I just looked at him earnestly.

  “And even if it were true,” he said, “what does that have to do with anything?”

  “The lover might have killed her. We know now her murder didn’t fit the Creeper pattern.”

  “Oh, David, that’s quite a stretch, I think. You’re a little obsessed with this, don’t you think?”

  “Brent, your cousin was about two months pregnant when she was murdered.”

  The blood ran out of his fine bronze tan. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. I shouldn’t have tried to tell him this in between meetings. He walked a couple of feet to a marble bench and sat, staring out into the rotunda. A babble of voices traveled upward.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it must be a shock.”

  He stood and walked away. “I can’t discuss this anymore today,” he said.

  “I just need to know-”

  He turned violently, his face red. “You need?” his voice was strident; then he lowered it. “You need?” he hissed. “You’ve caused my family quite enough pain with this…this ego-aggrandizing fishing expedition, Deputy!”

  He turned and strode angrily off. I guess we weren’t on first-name basis any longer.

  I walked the two blocks through the lushly landscaped capitol grounds to the visitors’ parking lot, wondering how I might have handled that better. The case wasn’t merely a historical inquiry; it was a real murder, with real family members left behind, people who’d been hurt. I climbed into the Blazer, took the sunshade out of the windshield and the towel off the steering wheel, and started the engine. That was when I saw a man in a charcoal gray suit walk quickly out of one of the side entrances and head toward a parking area. It was Brent McConnico.

  He climbed into a silver BMW convertible and sped out of the lot, a cellular phone stuck to his face. I was already moving, and I fell in behind him about half a block back. I can’t say why, but something in his movements wasn’t right. And a BMW was a strange place to be holding an appropriations committee meeting.

  He drove up Seventh Avenue to the on-ramp of the Papago Freeway, blowing past the homeless person selling papers at the light, heading east. I had to speed up to avoid losing him. He was moving, doing at least eighty. I closed the gap, so I was maybe six car lengths behind him in moderately heavy traffic. His Arizona personalized plate said YALE N 3.