Dry Heat

by Jon Talton

  I couldn’t argue the point. After a moment, I prompted, “Tell me more about Weed.”

  “Did he have his jacket?” she asked suddenly.

  I nodded.

  “I always thought he might get robbed and killed for that jacket.”

  I asked her why.

  “He had something sewn inside it,” she said, her eyes wide and gray. “I never knew what the hell it was, but he was sure protective, and secretive. He wore that jacket every day, even when it was the hottest day in August. One time, I felt something in there. Something sewn into the lining. When he caught me, he just went crazy. Slapped me down.”

  “What do you think was in it?” I asked.

  “Maybe jewelry,” she said. She added, “From his old life maybe.”

  “Which was?”

  She shook her head. “He never said. I never asked.” She rubbed her eyes. “Shit,” she said. “Poor Weed. I hadn’t seen him in days, and when I heard you were looking for him…”

  “Did he ever mention the name John Pilgrim?”

  She shook her head.

  “What’s your last name?” I asked.

  “I’m Karen. I told you.”

  “Just Karen.”

  “Yeah,” she said, suddenly sullen. She turned and walked away.

  “Karen,” I called. “What if we need to talk to you again?”

  “You don’t need me,” she said. “When I came to find you, I thought maybe if I told you about Weed, you might help me, too. Maybe you could talk to the caseworker and let me see my daughter.”

  “Maybe I can,” I said, feeling uncomfortable, like a cop in the middle of a family dispute.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “Weed is dead. Life is fucked up. I can’t get off the streets. You don’t care.”

  I let her go. Whatever had impelled her to seek me out was now evaporated.

  I called to her as she walked: “How can I talk to social services if I don’t know your last name, or your daughter’s name?”

  No answer.

  I watched her become a shadow against the streetlights. But then I heard her voice.

  “The Reverend knew Weed,” she called. “You should talk to the Reverend.”

  “Who is the Reverend?” I yelled. “Where can I find him?” She yelled back an address. It wasn’t in the nice part of town.

  Chapter Ten

  The next day, Wednesday, I locked the car and walked across an empty lot strewn with glass. The angle of the sun made the ground appear covered with diamonds or something precious. The glass crunched softly and dust stirred by my step covered the toes of my shoes. As I got closer to the bleached, one-story block building, I could see less an entrance than a void. In the middle of the white wall was a dark square where double doors might close. But there were no doors. I could only see the darkness of whatever lay beyond the bright sunshine of the outside. I pulled off my sunglasses and stepped inside. Under my feet, the dirt was replaced by concrete.

  I stopped maybe five feet inside and let my eyes adjust. The space around me felt large and smelled of dust and sweat. A persistent breeze came from a large fan built into a far wall. The fan went to another room, or to the outside, and provided the only light source, a far moon with fan blades turning slowly. It created a foul-smelling breeze. As my vision extended, I realized the room was very large and people were all around me.

  They lined the walls, and sat in clusters out on the floor of what was once some kind of warehouse. My cop side kicked in and I counted: five, ten, at least twenty people I could see, probably more. They stared at me with faces ruined by the sun and streets. Or they paid no attention. The room was very quiet. I spoke to the person nearest to me, an old woman sitting in a muddy wheelchair, her fat encased like sausage in a Phoenix Suns T-shirt.

  “I’m looking for the Reverend,” I said.

  She ignored me.

  I looked around for anyone in charge. Any structure to the room. I only felt eyes. On me.

  I remembered from my patrol deputy days how to roust someone. I remembered from my professor days how to reach a bored class of students. Neither seemed worth a damn in this place. I walked deeper into the room, asking again. Nobody answered me. They didn’t seem to acknowledge I was there. The people were Anglos, Hispanic, Indian, black, mostly older, mostly dressed in dirty thrift store castoffs.

  Then I felt a rough bump from behind. When I turned I was facing an anachronism.

  Phoenix is a magnet for rough-hewn faces. Misfits, losers, con artists, ex-cons, desperate Okies and Oaxacans, second-chance Johnnies—they all end up here, as if the city is the last fence line catching the unattached debris of a windy world. I often imagine faces from the streets of Phoenix transported into primitive black-and-white photography of the Old West. You couldn’t tell the difference. Only the clothes give away their place in time.

  The man who stepped out of the gloom was about my height, but he wore a tall, sweat-stained cowboy hat. He had a lean, lined face harnessed in a waxed, black handlebar moustache. To complete the daguerreotype effect, his shirt, jeans, and even skin were all lighter and darker tones of sepia. Turn back the calendar a century and a half and he just stepped out of a cattle drive. The pleasing little historical anomaly was spoiled by his eyes. They were unnaturally blue, unsettlingly bright, wide spaced. The kind of eyes you imagined in nightmares, the last pair of eyes you saw before a violent death, O pioneers. Turn back the calendar and he just stepped out of a gunfight.

  “You don’t belong here,” he intoned in an accentless voice.

  My heart started hammering against my ribcage, but I lowered my voice and asked again for the Reverend.

  He started to advance on me. I noticed his knuckles were bloody and deformed. Suddenly this errand seemed like a lousy idea. I took a step back and then another. I dropped back into a T position, my left foot pointed toward him, my right foot behind me turned at a right angle, my weight well balanced against any attempt to push me down. I felt the reassuring weight of the Python on my belt, and hoped I wouldn’t have to start my day with a shooting.

  “That’s enough, Bill.”

  The big man halted and stared at me. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him, but I glanced quickly in the direction of this new voice. It was coming from the darkened far end of the room.

  “I’m looking for the Reverend,” I called in that direction.

  “Who the hell are you?” the voice demanded.

  “I’m David Mapstone. I was hoping the Reverend could help me.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “I’m a sheriff’s deputy,” I said.

  The room congealed again into silence. I could barely hear the fan turning. Then the voice told me to come to the back of the room. Bill made sure I found my way. Finally, I was presented before a broad-chested man wearing a white, open-collared shirt. A rough, dark cross hung around his neck with a leather strap. He was sitting at a folding card table lined up with white Styrofoam cups. The man shook a cup at me, put it in my hand.

  “Ice,” he said. “Ice is important.”

  His eyes were gigantic, and buttressed with deep sockets and soaring brows, high arched cheeks and strong nose, as if cathedral builders had constructed his face. Above a generous forehead, he combed lead-colored hair straight back. His skin was the color and texture of cordovan leather.

  “Bill is right,” he said. “You don’t belong here. And I wonder if you’re telling me the truth. You don’t have cop’s eyes.”

  I held out my ID and star, and he squinted at them across the rows of white cups.

  “You look like a professor,” he said.

  “In another life,” I said. “I’m looking for someone called the Reverend.”

  He stuck his large hands in his pockets and regarded me. “I was a pastor in another life,” he said. “So for shorthand, they call me the Reverend. You can call me Quanah Card.”

  “You’re Comanche?”

  “No,” he said. “Tohono O’odham. But m
y mother, she was a reader. She loved the stories of heroic Indians. And when I came along, she was reading about Quanah Parker.”

  “I’m looking for somebody, Reverend Card.” I pulled out my Polaroid and a computer-generated sketch of the homeless man, perhaps nicknamed Weed. But Card looked at my cup of ice. He picked up another cup and handed it to Bill. Then he took a third cup and held it up to his full lips. He and Bill ate the ice, as if showing a primitive tribesman that it was safe to consume. I sucked on the ice. It felt like everything that room was not: cool, clean, and fresh.

  “They would not give Jesus water on the cross, much less ice,” Card said, a dreamy look in his eyes. “So you are a very blessed man, Deputy.” Then he fixed them on me again. “How did you find this place?”

  “A woman on the street,” I said. “She said her name was Karen.”

  “Karen…” the Reverend said. “She’s got a crack problem. On top of mental illness. She won’t take her medicine.”

  He finished his ice and handed the cup to Bill, who went away. “It’s a goddamned mess, this world.” Card said. “What did you profess, Professor?”

  “History.”

  “History,” he repeated. “Well, David Mapstone, what do you know about the history of homelessness in America?”

  I knew that if I let my natural impatience take over, I would get nowhere with the Rev. Quanah Card. So I said a little about hobos during the Depression, about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s, about how urban renewal tore down so much affordable housing. It was nothing brilliant, the kind of stuff I picked up from the Sunday New York Times. The homeless were without much of a voice in history, or so the faddish new historians would say. Dan Milton didn’t have much use for fads.

  “Very good, professor,” Card said. “But you make it sound so goddamned nice and academic. Look around you. What do you see? Addicts. The mentally ill. People with HIV. The disabled. The elderly. Young runaways. The ones who live paycheck to paycheck, and then the paycheck is cut off. Weather’s nice in Phoenix, so they come here. They hang out downtown, sleep behind billboards, camp down at the riverbed or beside the freeways. The kids go to Mill Avenue. The saddest of all come here.”

  As he talked, I pulled up a wobbly folding chair and sat at the table. He handed me another cup of ice, and I dutifully ate the crystals.

  “I give them ice,” he said. “It doesn’t make them want to work a nine-to-five job, or take away the years of abuse and neglect, or end the hallucinations. I do what I can.

  “They’re not really like you and me,” he went on. “That’s why it’s easier for society to abandon them. The homeless problem got worse under Reagan. Then it got worse again under Clinton. Here in Arizona, we refuse to fund social services, and the homeless haven’t gone away and gotten jobs. Nobody knows what to do.

  “And yet…” He swept his arm to take in the humanity seated and standing around us. “Christ is in them. ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’” He let his arm drop. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Professor. Bible quoting is an occupational hazard where I come from.”

  “So this is your church?” I asked.

  He laughed without humor, his huge eyes closing into slits of artificial mirth. “I was a United Methodist minister for thirty years,” he said. “For the first five years, I was a street preacher in the Deuce. You know what that was?”

  I nodded.

  “I didn’t feel like I did a damned bit of good. So I ended up pastoring rich, white churches—and they thought it was so goddamned exotic to have an Indian minister. ‘Native American.’ I could have been a bishop, but I couldn’t stand the politics. Every Sunday, I’d try to get them to care about people like this. But I couldn’t push too hard. That would have made people uncomfortable. Shit, thirty years. I felt like such a failure.

  “So,” he continued, “I took my savings and I bought this old warehouse. I open it every year from April through the end of October. It’s the worst time of year to be on the street. I lean on some rich old bastards who owe me a favor to give a little money to keep it going.”

  “No soul saving?” I asked, trying to avoid falling out of the barely serviceable chair.

  He narrowed his dark eyes, boring into me. “You believe in an unseen world, Mapstone?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  He snorted. “In my services, everybody prayed, ‘Thy will be done.’ But nobody wanted that. I want my damn will to be done. We don’t want God loose in the world…That would scare the shit out of us.”

  He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, loudly drawing in the smoke. “When I was ordained, I was twenty-five years old and it was the happiest day of my life. I felt called, Mapstone.” Card’s face was remade with emotion. Canyons cut their way into his cheeks. His eye sockets deepened further. “I would preach the forgiveness of my Savior and Lord to penitent sinners. I would comfort the heartbroken and the dying.”

  He studied the orange tip of the cigarette and added, “I didn’t know how perilous the borderlands would be…”

  “Borderlands?”

  He gave a sacramental wave of his Marlboro. “It’s where we all live, Mapstone.”

  I cautiously asked about Weed.

  “The old man with the Levi’s jacket,” he said, half to himself. “I haven’t seen him in awhile. He used to come by here. Said his teeth hurt too much to take ice.”

  “Did you know his real name?”

  “George was his first name,” Card said. “George Weed. Mapstone, you lapsed into the past tense. Has something happened to our brother Weed?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Now I was armed. Armed with a name. I could do the thing that had allowed me to make a living in the years after I quit being a history professor: bring in new information on the county’s most notorious unsolved cases. That history was written in names: Rebecca Stokes, my first big case, the woman who took a train home to Phoenix in 1959 and turned up dead in the desert. The Yarnell twins, the grandsons of a great rancher, kidnapped in the Great Depression and never found. Jonathan Ledger, the famous sex doctor who gave birth to the brave new world and ended up in a nasty drug deal and cop killing. In each case, I saw something the cops had missed, connected the dots in a different way, stumbled onto the fortunate clue. All from names that had found a bad end in Maricopa County.

  Now I had a new name: George Weed. And an age, if what he told Card could be trusted: sixty-six. The data went with a man who had been coming to the Reverend’s shelter for three summers. Sometimes he would sleep there three or four nights a week. Other times he might camp behind the rocks in the vacant land just outside the boundary of Hance Park. He didn’t talk much. He never took off his jacket. One of the few things he told Card had stayed in his memory. “He said he was a native Phoenician,” Card had told me. “There are so few of them, you almost never see that.”

  After I left Quanah Card, I drove to the sheriff’s headquarters on Madison Street. I avoided Peralta’s office until I had more to report. After the tension the week before in Scottsdale, it seemed better to avoid the sheriff for a while. My errand was to the computers, where I checked the local databases and the NCIC, the National Crime Information Computer. Even though the old vagrancy laws had been overturned in the ’60s, someone living the life of George Weed could still have found dozens of ways to become a violator. Public drunkenness, trespassing, sleeping in a park after sundown, soliciting. Shoplifting was a favorite. Any of those and sundry other offenses could land a name in the system, never to be forgotten. A different database gave me county social services clients, whether for food stamps, health care, or the paltry mental health and drug and alcohol rehab programs. But George Weed was not in any of the databases.

  Next I walked six blocks in the brilliant April sun to Phoenix Police Headquarters. Unmolested by Kate Vare, I spent two hours picking through other records, especially the field interroga
tion cards of the patrol officers. Here the information could be more haphazard, the continual budget shortfall cutting into the technology and clerical help necessary to make sense of hundreds of thousands of lower priority records. I found someone named Carlos Wong and a young man known only as Winston. But no George Weed. For someone who had been on the streets of Phoenix, who was carrying a stolen FBI badge, and was headed toward a bad end in an abandoned swimming pool, he had assiduously avoided the law.

  Was that possible? I heard Dan Milton’s voice in my head, warning against the limitations of governmental records, against the biases of observers. I was hearing his voice a lot. Back in Portland, toward the end, he had been so weak he couldn’t hold up his head. Am I reporting the truth or betraying my friend to say he was close to raving the days before he died? The pain was so intense, his sense so keen that time was running out. Outside his window, the Oregon spring was gorgeous, mocking us all. He refused drugs, not wanting to lose time in a haze of pain medication.

  I should have been wondering about the pain that brought George Weed to the abandoned pool in Maryvale. But my thoughts were too much still back in Portland. Anyone who expects the old to pass gently into that good night didn’t know Dan Milton. He was angry with Plato, furious with Rousseau. His age-old antipathy for Lenin had not abated at all. “Ideas with a body count!” he shouted. Other times his voice would calm and his eyes regain some of their old gleam. “I don’t want to go out a madman, like Wilson,” he laughed. His head was nearly all skull, covered by a tent of sickly skin and the rough whiskers that wouldn’t stop giving his face hope of fresh life. “It’s a new dark age,” he said at one point. “Nobody reads anymore. People are losing the ability to think. Television has destroyed us. I’m glad I won’t live to see the worst of it.”

  When it hurt the worst, he would whisper through gritted teeth. That last night, I heard him whisper, “Drop by drop upon the heart.” He had whispered it twice, from a pain-laced half drowse.