Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

  He climbed in his Ford, slammed the door, and gunned the engine, disappearing around the corner of the rat’s maze, trailing exhaust fumes and dust.

  Where was Dr. Sharon when I needed her?

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  “I have to warn you, Peralta, this is the most egregious case of police harassment I’ve seen in all my years of practicing law. What you have here isn’t a case. It’s a fantasy.”

  For an hour, we were crammed into a Spartan white-walled interrogation room: Peralta and me, Bobby Hamid and his lawyer. More detectives were listening behind the one-way glass. The man speaking was the lawyer, Bruton Hennessey, an intense, short, florid-faced easterner who had migrated to Arizona two decades ago and made a name defending high-paying dirtbags.

  While Hennessey and Peralta jousted, I was watching Bobby Hamid. He was about my height but more slender, wrapped in a gray suit of the texture and cut that doesn’t even start below a thousand dollars, all set off by a subtle blue Hermes tie. He was the epitome of swarthy meets money: his darkness offset by delicate features, brooding, feminine eyes, and an expensive haircut and manicure. He had walked into the room, shaken our hands-to Peralta’s visible distress-and let lawyer Hennessey do the talking.

  “I mean, really, Peralta, do you have nothing better to do than try to hang the flimsiest charges on my client, a businessman responsible for no small amount of taxes in this county?…”

  Peralta snarled, “Cut the shit, Hennessey. This ain’t Boston. If I had a dollar for every illegal activity the Ayatollah here was involved with, I’d be a rich man.”

  “Chief Peralta,” Bobby Hamid said. “There is no need for your anti-Persian bigotry. Anyway, I am an Episcopalian; we have no ayatollahs.”

  Peralta stood and leaned over Bobby Hamid’s chair. I imagined what he’d do if the lawyer wasn’t there. Instead, he said, “Greg Townsend. He was a business associate of yours, I believe?”

  “I don’t know the name,” Bobby Hamid said.

  “Townsend was a pilot and his phone records show repeated calls during the month of June from his Sedona home to Tiffany’s, a topless bar on Van Buren where you are known to receive business calls,” I said. Lindsey had come through again.

  “He was flying in cocaine,” Peralta said. “And now he’s dead and tied to a million dollars left in the back of a car. Somebody used a twelve-gauge shotgun to paint the walls of his bedroom. Meanwhile, his girlfriend turned up in the desert, raped and strangled. It’s murder, and it’s got your name all over it, Bobby.”

  Hennessey said, “Mr. Hamid doesn’t have to answer any of this, Peralta. If you have a case, charge him. I’ll have him out in two hours.”

  “Bruton, please.” Bobby Hamid put a manicured hand on the lawyer’s arm. “I have nothing to hide. I was in Aspen during the time you say this Townsend fellow and his girlfriend were killed, and Bruton here can produce the documentation and witnesses. I honestly didn’t know them. I’m sorry they’re dead, truly I am. But I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  He smiled at Peralta. “You know, the illegal drug business is very dangerous, I hear.”

  “We found a million dollars in the trunk of a car in Glendale,” Peralta said. “If somebody stole a million dollars from me, I’d be tempted to use a twelve-gauge on him. I wouldn’t want to get a reputation in the drug business as somebody you could rip off with impunity.”

  “That’s because you are a brutal man, Chief Peralta.” Hamid smiled.

  “The phone calls?” Peralta demanded.

  “Come, come, Chief. That club is a little tax write-off for me, one of three dozen enterprises I own. Are you really expecting me to know who calls every business? That would be a little like expecting Bill Gates to know every call that comes into Microsoft, no?”

  “If Microsoft sold cocaine,” Peralta muttered.

  Bobby Hamid continued: “Why, your pilot was probably calling because he had a crush on one of the girls.” He laughed, and so did Hennessey. Peralta looked at me. We had shot our wad, and it wasn’t much.

  “Do you remember a young woman named Phaedra?” I asked.

  “Phaedra.” Bobby Hamid studied his cuticle. “In Greek mythology, she was the daughter of Minos. Met a bad end, as I recall.”

  “Hey, raghead!” Peralta shouted, “this ain’t Western Civ one oh one. Do you know a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Phaedra Riding? Red hair, pretty.”

  Something flickered in his eyes. He smiled sadly at Peralta. “I don’t know any Phaedra Riley.”

  Shut up in his office, Peralta was momentarily serene.

  “Bobby’s one of the many things that have changed about the Valley since you left,” he said, sitting behind his desk, twirling in his chair, mashing a stressball in his massive hand. “Changed for the worse. At least we put Charlie Keating in prison for awhile.”

  “Bobby knows about Townsend,” I said.

  Peralta nodded. “The sheer size of the cash we found points to a major player like Bobby. And the CI report on Townsend makes it even more likely. But I don’t have enough to take to the county attorney. It would be a waste of the taxpayers’ money. Someday, Bobby will get careless, and when that happens, I’m gonna see they lock him up for the next thousand years.”

  I asked about Phaedra’s car, and he pointed to a file folder on the corner of his desktop. I opened it and read.

  “Dirt and cholla spines on the carpet on the driver’s side,” I said aloud. “Consistent with the soil and vegetation of the murder scene?”

  Peralta nodded.

  “The ministorage lease is in the name of Jamie Johnson. Three nine seven seven East Bethany Home Road?”

  “It’s a fake name and fake address. The clerk who rented it left the company, and we can’t find him to ask what the person looked like, or even whether they were female or male.”

  I was reading on. “Prints.”

  “Lots of Phaedra’s,” Peralta said. “Electrostatic gear picked up some others. But it could be weeks before we get anywhere on that. It could be never.”

  “So, we think the car might have been driven out to the desert, maybe to do the body drop. But otherwise, we’re basically nowhere.”

  “Not necessarily,” Peralta said. “Where is Julie?”

  I sat down in front of the desk and shrugged. “We checked her apartment, her ex-husband. Nothing so far.”

  “Has she called you again?”

  “Not for a few days, not since the last call I told you about.”

  “She’ll call,” Peralta said. This was the cool, shrewd Peralta. All the anger from the day before was gone. I wondered if he even remembered it.

  “Do you really believe Julie is involved in this?”

  “You believe it, too,” he said simply. “I don’t know exactly how. But she knows a hell of a lot more than she’s told us so far.”

  “I can’t believe Julie would murder her own sister.”

  Peralta exhaled heavily. “My mother and her oldest sister didn’t speak for thirty years. I can believe it. But she sure as hell didn’t rape Phaedra. If Julie’s involved, someone else is, too. A guy.”

  He stood up and put on his Stetson. “We’re raiding a militia training ground up by Saguaro Lake. Want to come? You haven’t been shot at in at least two days.”

  I reached across his desk, opened his humidor, and took a couple of cigars. “No thanks. I’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The vast west side of Phoenix has none of the glamour of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley. It lacks even the natural beauty of Camelback and the other mountains to the east. It’s as flat as Nebraska. Not too may years ago, it was just miles and miles of fields: cotton, lettuce, cabbage, alfalfa. Open irrigation ditches shaded by cottonwood trees ran on either side of two-lane farm roads, marking every mile like a precise checkerboard. Only Grand Avenue sliced crosswise through the checkerboard, heading northwest through a little railroad town called Glendale, where Mexican men in straw hats ic
ed the refrigerator cars to carry Arizona produce east.

  Now, it’s all houses and strip shopping and malls. The ditches and cottonwoods are gone, and the former farm roads can’t be widened fast enough: six lanes, eight lanes. Glendale is a city in its own right-population 200,000-and the tiny farm hamlets like Peoria, Youngtown and El Mirage are full-blown suburbs. And Sun City, with its lazy, curving wide streets and golf courses and neat desert-landscaped haciendas baking in the sun.

  When the first Sun City subdivisions were cut into the lettuce fields in the early 1960s, someone asked Grandmother if she would be moving out there. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to live around all those old people.” But tens of thousands of other folks weren’t like Grandmother-especially retirees from Cleveland and Rochester and Detroit who couldn’t bear the thought of another brutal winter-and now Sun City has a settled, almost crowded look that would have seemed impossible thirty years ago.

  But “the active lifestyle” was still for sale here: Golf carts piddled up and down the spotless streets. Every few blocks held some kind of activity center, promising summer painting classes, swimming lessons, and, for the adventurous, martial arts and rock climbing. A couple of hardy souls were speed walking in the 110-degree broiler, past a sign discreetly promoting the Sun City Symphony’s summer season. A Sheriff’s Office patrol car sped past me, going in the opposite direction: maybe to a heart attack, maybe to a murder.

  Dr. Sharon was on the radio-her show was addictive-lecturing some tremulous-voiced bag of emotions about “woulda, coulda, shoulda.” “Stop that!” she commanded in that voice that had attitude but somehow never made anybody mad. I thought, Shoulda known something was wrong with Julie; woulda worked harder to find Phaedra if I’d known she was in trouble; coulda seen the Stokes case would lead to trouble. Stop that, I said to myself. I turned off Del Webb Boulevard at 105th Avenue and parked in front of the single-story home of Avis Riding, Julie’s mother.

  I knocked four times on the aluminum screen door before I heard a little dog barking and sensed someone looking out through the peephole of the main door. I held up my ID card. More barking. Then: “Please go away. I’ve answered questions until I just can’t talk anymore.”

  “Mrs. Riding, it’s David Mapstone.”

  The dog started in again. I momentarily considered shooting the.357 Python through the door at dog level just to get some peace.

  “Julie and I dated when we were at ASU.”

  “I remember you.” She was there suddenly, the door opening quickly. She was smaller than I recalled, with hair the color of winter straw. She was wearing a white top and light blue shorts, and her skin was that leathery brown that comes from too many years in the Arizona sun. She regarded me with puffy eyes.

  “I thought you were some kind of a teacher now.”

  “I’m working with the Sheriff’s Office again,” I said over the barking. “I’m very sorry to bother you at a time like this, but it’s important.”

  “Wait.” She carried the little dog away, and I heard a door shut somewhere in the back of the house. She came back and invited me in. While she led me into a living room drowning in the smell of potpourri and wet dog, I went through the essentials, saying how sorry I was about Phaedra, how Julie had come to me, asking me to help find her sister, and how I now needed to find Julie.

  “Do you have children?” she asked in a voice that sounded like it hurt even to speak.

  I told her I didn’t.

  “Then you’ll never know,” she said. “You’ll never know what it’s like to lose your child, to outlive your child.” My eyes went to a large high school graduation photo of Phaedra on the wall.

  Mrs. Riding avoided it, staring out into the backyard, a sunny, narrow space with a neat Bermuda grass lawn and low hedges.

  “Julie and I aren’t close. We never have been, and we’ve hardly spoken the past three years. I don’t have any idea where she is. Why?”

  “I think she knows something about what happened to Phaedra.”

  I expected some reaction, but she continued in the same monotone. “I knew something like this would happen someday. I knew if Phaedra kept trying to help Julie, I’d end up losing both of them.”

  “Mrs. Riding, I got the impression it was the other way around, that Julie was trying to help Phaedra.”

  She snorted an unhappy laugh. “Julie was never sober enough to help anybody but herself, even if she would have been inclined. That’s what lost her her daughter. And it’s a good thing.”

  “And you have no idea where she might be?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Julie ran with a fast crowd,” she said. “Money, parties, powerful men. But it was all going to catch up with her. She couldn’t keep her looks forever.” She looked from the lawn to me. “She was so much like her father. She was her father’s daughter. Phaedra was my daughter.” Her voice skipped a bit, like a stone skimming water. “My hope.”

  “I thought Julie and her father didn’t get along.”

  “They hated each other,” she said, “because they were the same. Do you want something to drink?”

  I said a diet Coke would be nice, and she brought me one. She poured herself Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.

  “Both my daughters were very complicated, very smart young women. But Julie, Julie had something in her, something like what was in her father. It was something that you could never know, that made it possible for her to do things I could never do.”

  “I’ve decided we never really know the people we’re close to,” I ventured.

  “Maybe,” Avis Riding said. “Maybe so. I know that my husband-” She stopped herself. “That’s not the entire truth. I know we both did things that made life harder, more painful for the girls. Well, isn’t that what we’re supposed to believe? That whatever happened to Julie and Phaedra was ultimately the parents’ fault? That’s what all those women who call Dr. Sharon on the radio say.”

  “I don’t think Sharon agrees with them,” I said.

  “I don’t know what I think,” she said. “I know I was married to a cold, angry man with too many secrets, and it somehow seemed to bring out the worst in me, too.”

  “What was Phaedra’s relationship with Julie?”

  “Complicated. Phaedra was very strong, very independent. But she loved Julie unquestioningly, and so many times, Phaedra was there to get her out of a bad love affair, get her into detox for the cocaine.”

  “You stayed in touch with Phaedra?”

  She nodded.

  “What about the month before her death?”

  “She’d call. She seemed worried, didn’t want to talk. I told all this to those other men, the black detective and that annoying partner of his. I didn’t know she was in danger.”

  “Did Julie call you in the past month?”

  “Yes, she did,” she said. “It was probably the first time we’d even spoken in months.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “She wanted to know where Phaedra was.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her if she wasn’t at her apartment, she could call Phaedra’s new boyfriend. Noah was his name. Do you want the number?”

  “No,” I said a little too quietly, and then said I had to leave.

  “Wait,” she said. “I’m a little surprised you don’t have a family of your own by now. You seemed like a nice boy.”

  I smiled a little. “Life doesn’t work out like we expect.”

  “I don’t mean to go on like a lonely old woman. I just haven’t talked to a soul for days, except the police. And I know you are the police, but you’re also someone I know.”

  “I thought you never liked me.”

  She spread her hands. “Oh, those were hard times. I know Julie used to bring you over to dinner to keep the peace, knowing with an outsider we’d all behave ourselves.” She smiled just a little. “I knew. But you were the only boy Julie ever brought home who seemed to have some substance to him
. A little intimidating perhaps, but smart as a whip.”

  I mumbled some thanks.

  “I always loved to read, you know. That’s where I found Phaedra’s name. I always loved that name. I tried to instill that love of learning in my girls.” She looked me over for the first time. “You’re how old, David?”

  “I’m forty.”

  “I remember that time so well,” she said. “Everything will change for you now. I don’t mean you’ll buy a sports car and run off with a blonde. But over the next few years, things will change. I don’t know if it will be for the better. But maybe you can lose some of that anger and pain that’s inside you.”

  I started to say something, but she smiled again. “Once upon a time, I thought you might be my son-in-law. I didn’t know what the hell we’d talk about, but I knew you and Julie would make smart children. It’s so funny the way life turns out.”

  Outside, I thought of Avis Riding’s words: “It’s so funny the way life turns out.” I leaned against the side of the Blazer and cut and lighted one of Peralta’s cigars. So funny. I remembered the rages Julie would have about her father. I remembered the way she would cling to me in the night, when sleep took away her hatred and left her with nothing but fear. I am forty years old, I mused, and I honestly can’t say how I got to this point. My peers now have teenage children and careers and settled marriages and graying hair and maybe, maybe a sense of place, a truce with the dreams we have to give up, most of us anyway. I’m just me, here. The way things turn out. Funny.

  As I drew the tobacco across my palate and felt sorry for myself, a cruiser slowly crept down the street and stopped by me. The shift snapped into park. The window came down. “You have business on this block, sir?” the deputy asked, her hand obviously down at her holster.