Dry Heat

by Jon Talton

  Then we were speeding along the freeways and surface streets, heading north. The jacaranda and palo verde trees were blooming, but the cityscape was unavoidably Phoenix, all seven-lane streets, suburban setbacks, and soulless commercial buildings. Big-box drugstores and gas stations seemingly on every corner. The signs of our strange local economy: check cashing outlets, bankruptcy lawyers, used cars and mortgage refinance companies, in English and Spanish. Piestewa Peak angled out of the smog, a dark mass in the brownish air. The sun radiated heat through the windows, and soon I was covered with a sheen of sweat. We weren’t going downtown, and I felt a jolt of unease, as if Yuri’s mobsters had forged those complicated Bureau credentials and the agents in the front seat were really Ivan and Ludmilla instead of Biff and Muffy. But the real estate became steadily nicer, and then we were winding into the lush preserve of the Arizona Biltmore. It was too pricey a joint to use for killing one history professor.

  Five minutes later, they deposited me in a large suite with an expansive view of the golf course and the red-rock head of Camelback Mountain. But to get that view, I had to look past the crowd of feds seated and standing as if they were a theater tableau frozen by my entrance. Unlike well-suited Biff and Muffy, this bunch was outfitted in a kind of overdone resort casual, as if they had all suddenly been ordered to serve search warrants at Tommy Bahama. Of course they looked utterly conformist, decidedly un-casual. They were all looking at me. Eric Pham gave me a prim, sad shake of the head.

  I said, “I’m glad to see my tax dollars at work.”

  “Shut up, Mapstone.” This from a female voice. The woman attached to it was somewhere around fifty, with a round face and frosted short hair. She introduced herself as Assistant Director Davies, beckoned me to sit, and for maybe a minute we all just watched each other. The feds’ faces eyed me like junkyard dogs ready to pounce on a cat burglar. We were in one of the new suites, heavy on Indian art and Southwest colors. But it still had the deco touches of the old hotel, the creation of a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple and for decades the province of visiting bigs. Go down in the lobby, and you can see the photos of the Biltmore when it was alone in the pristine desert, miles from the city and nestled against untouched mountains. Now it was about in the center of the metropolitan area. I was pretty well gone in this reverie when they started firing questions, semiautomatic.

  “What were you doing in California?”

  “Who authorized you to contact Pilgrim’s son?”

  “Why did you talk to Vincent Renzetti?”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “…a detailed report on your actions…”

  I let them run down and finally said, “But I thought ‘alliances are the way to get things done in the New Economy.’”

  “What is he talking about?” Davies demanded. Pham stared into the deep piles of the cream-colored carpeting.

  “I’m talking about the naïve idea we’re on the same side here,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to your agent.”

  “That’s the problem,” said a sausage-faced man who stood behind the assistant director. “You have no authorization.”

  The words dropped into the room as if Robespierre had sentenced me to the guillotine. All that was missing was a basket to receive my severed head. But the crowd nearly gasped.

  All the attention made me alternately frightened and amused. I tried to go with the latter feeling. “You guys…” I shook my head. “You’re still trying to cover your asses.”

  “Hey!” A man’s voice. Assistant Director Davies held up a hand.

  “This is serious, Mapstone,” Davies said. “What did Renzetti tell you?”

  “Not a damned thing,” I lied. “He’s a lonely old man. You ought to invite him to a retirees party every now and then.”

  “He’s talked to us,” Davies said.

  “So.” I said, “you know he didn’t tell me anything. He’s a stand-up guy.” Stand-up enough to keep my confidences, I hoped.

  The Feds looked at each other.

  I asked, “What are you afraid he’d tell me?” They easily ignored this foolish civilian entreaty.

  Another Fed: “Special Agent Maddox said you went to Renzetti’s house twice. That’s a lot of trips for nothing.”

  “That happens sometimes in law enforcement,” I said. My career had been built on lots of trips for nothing.

  “And the son?”

  “He was a kid when his father died,” I said. “He doesn’t know anything.”

  Sausage Face demanded, “Why did you remain in San Francisco four additional days after you assaulted Special Agent Maddox? You were gone an entire week, Mapstone.”

  “I assaulted him? Jesus!” I wished I were facing toward the window. As it was, all I could see were hostile faces in golfing shirts. “You assholes decided to have him tail me—how smart is that?”

  “Answer the question, please.”

  “I was sightseeing,” I said. “Am I under arrest?”

  Silence. Bureaucratic brains processed. I was sure if I tried, I could hear the clanking. Assistant Director Davies’ makeup looked odd, with rough meeting points for base and rouge. Hell, I was no expert. I stood and walked to a window. The gigantic pools were stocked with beautiful people and not so beautiful people with fat bankbooks. Others meandered on the putting green and bowling lawn. They were loving the ninety-nine-degree weather—back home it was probably forty-five degrees and the sun hadn’t shined for a month. If you could spring for several hundred dollars a night, you could live better than a Roman emperor.

  I tried again, “What are you guys afraid of? That I’ve found photos of J. Edgar Hoover in a dress plotting the Kennedy assassination?”

  That set them all off.

  “…highly sensitive…”

  “Who have you told about this case?”

  “…national security…”

  “…court order to check your hard drive…”

  “OK,” Davies said. “Let’s hear it from the top. From the moment you last met Eric. Everything you’ve done. Including your meeting at the park with the retired Phoenix detective, Wolfe.”

  I gave them a sanitized version, but even so it took about an hour with their questions. I left out some of Wolfe’s conversation and lots from Renzetti. I didn’t tell them my sightseeing was across the Bay, to the University of California library’s special collections. One of the archivists was another protégé of Milton. It was a valuable connection. When I was finished telling the story, it didn’t seem as if I’d accomplished much at all. They seemed to agree, if you could judge by the bored faces in the room. All except Pham, who looked as if he had been constipated for a month.

  But Davies wasn’t done.

  “Weren’t you once involved romantically with a newspaper reporter?” she demanded.

  “Yes, about twenty-five years ago,” I said. “Is that the best you can do? What the hell are you so afraid of?” My worry instincts told me these folks could use some new antiterrorism statute to toss me in jail forever. I pushed past them and said, “I thought the Bureau was convinced that John Pilgrim was a suicide.”

  “That’s correct,” Davies said, a note of discomfort creeping into her voice.

  I continued, “So I’m just looking for the way his badge ended up on a homeless guy in Maricopa County. And right now I’m not making any progress.”

  Davies gave a chilly smile. “I don’t know if there’s progress to be made, Dr. Mapstone.”

  “I could make more progress if I could get Bureau help in tracking down records on Pilgrim’s death.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes we just have to live with mysteries.” Then she nodded toward Biff and Muffy, who put hands on my shoulders. “These agents will drive you home, Dr. Mapstone. Thank you for your time.”

  ***

  I had just lugged my bags inside the house on Cypress Street when there was a banging on the front door. I clipped the holstered Python on my belt and walked quietly in the direct
ion of the banging.

  It was Peralta in full dress uniform, his star gleaming in the sun.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” I was tired and annoyed.

  He was already halfway to the street, where his familiar black Crown Victoria was idling.

  “So what’d you do to piss off the FBI?” he asked, once we were rolling. After I told him a Reader’s Digest version of the past week, he said the Feds were demanding I be taken off the case. He was smiling.

  “I thought you said not to worry about Eric Pham.”

  “They’re pretty mad,” Peralta said. “You can make people mad, Mapstone.”

  “I just have an inquiring mind. John Adams said an inquiring mind is God’s greatest gift.”

  Peralta grunted.

  In thirty minutes, we were on the far west side of the city, past the old suburb of Maryvale and into the new sprawl of Avondale and Goodyear, heading toward the White Tank Mountains.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Are you ready to offer a theory?” he demanded.

  “Not yet. Where are we going?” The sun sent heat waves off the freeway, the mirages of the auto age. Late April and the newspaper said every day of the month had been above normal temperatures. I angled some air conditioner vents on me and finally started to cool off.

  His deep set, lively black eyes looked me over, then returned to the road. He said, “Patience.” That was to my question. He had none. “How does all this connect with your homeless guy?”

  I said, “Patience.”

  He shifted his bulk in his seat. “We don’t have a lot of time, Mapstone…”

  “What?” I said. “My wife is being chased by the Russian mafia and I can’t even see her. I don’t have a clue how our life is going to be from now on. That’s urgency I can understand. This fifty-year-old murder case is—”

  “Important,” he said.

  Then we were at the gate of Luke Air Force Base, where heavily armed Air Police in camouflage fatigues waved us through the maze of concrete barriers.

  “I’ve had my fill of feds today,” I said. Peralta ignored me as we passed the main administration buildings, then anonymous brick maintenance and barracks buildings. Luke was the largest fighter training base in the world—but the subdivisions kept creeping closer, and soon it would be forced to shut down. We eased the car past more guards, barriers, and concertina. Peralta stopped the car and we both were ordered out for a search. As an airman used a mirror on wheels to check the underside of Peralta’s cruiser, we handed over our firearms and signed on a clipboard. The Air Police were young, superbly fit, and unsmiling. Then we were loaded into an olive Humvee—not the luxury civilian kind that had chased me. An Air Police officer in back slid a hood over my head.

  “What the hell?” My heart rate shot up instantly.

  “Just relax, sir. Please leave the hood in place for security reasons.”

  “I’m not relaxed.”

  “C’mon, Mapstone.” I heard Peralta’s voice. “Do yourself a favor.”

  I felt movement, air coming through the open windows, the distant blast of F-16 jet engines. The fabric of the hood was rough against my face, and it was hot. Things were getting too strange. What secret history had I stumbled onto in the embalmed living room of Vince Renzetti, in the archives at Cal-Berkeley? What unlucky amulet was the lost badge of John Pilgrim? Somehow it fit together: the Russian agent in dusty old Phoenix; the Chicago Outfit, consolidating their crime empire; the young FBI man with a love of trouble and women, who nevertheless was very good at his job. A single shot beside an irrigation canal. A missing badge. And then five decades…

  Lindsey would help me make sense of this. Lindsey would shield me from my dark moods and my night fears and the consequences of my inquiring mind. I needed Lindsey right then, right that second.

  And when the Humvee stopped and they pulled off the hood, she was there.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  My federally arranged conjugal visit lasted a little less than sixteen hours. Too soon, I was in a sheriff’s cruiser, piloted by a quiet young deputy, headed back to the center city. I used the silence of the ride to think about how welcome Lindsey’s flesh had been against mine. I noticed how thin and even frail she seemed to feel in my arms, how the hours let things shift back and forth between us, who was strong, who was scared. She felt guilty over Rachel Pearson, that she was somehow responsible. She dreamed about Rachel’s death.

  Clouds had come in from the west overnight, and little hints of rain floated into the windshield. It would be the first trace we’d gotten all year. For a few hours, everything seemed a little better. When the deputy deposited me back on Cypress Street, I went inside and showered reluctantly, wishing I could keep the physical evidence of her on my skin and in my hair for the days to come. I had no idea when I might see her again.

  But it was a workaday Tuesday, if your workaday included a wife who had been kidnapped by the national security state, the threat of Russian mobsters, and the deepening mystery of John Pilgrim’s badge. It had been nearly a month since Weed’s body was found. At least it was raining. I took comfort from the drops hitting the convertible top as I drove down to the old courthouse. Inside, I walked past the new guard, a slight kid named Alfredo, who nodded and looked away. I took the winding stairs two at a time, feeling some wonderfully sore muscles in my legs and abdomen. I missed Lindsey already.

  The old courthouse was slowly being restored, floor by floor. Four years earlier, when I had taken that “temporary” job for Peralta, the imposing brown masonry building had been nearly empty. The marriage license bureau was in the basement. And I set up my history shop on the fourth floor, in an office that had once held the sheriff. In the 1940s, the building was also home to Duke Simms and the corrupt commissioners investigated by John Pilgrim. A floor above me was the old jail, which shut down in the 1960s. When I worked late, I tried not to conjure the ghosts of prisoners and jailers. Now, the county wanted the old building back, and was slowly refurbishing each floor. Soon, I suspected, I would be forced to find a new office. But while the county suffered through a fiscal crisis, the restoration had stalled on the third floor. And the fourth floor was my private sanctuary.

  I reached the top of the staircase and crossed the polished tiles of the atrium, then turned down the hallway that led to my office. But even at the head of the hallway, I could see my door was ajar. I instinctively moved to the wall and stopped to listen. Now the feeling in my legs was sudden fear, a rubbery sickness in the muscles. The dryness in my mouth was unrelieved by the tapping of rain on the big windows behind me. Nothing moved in the dimly lit hallway. No sound came from beyond the glass of my office door, and the only light came from the windows beyond. But the door stood open maybe two feet. I edged down the marble floor, past the dark glossy wood frames of other doors and transoms. I always locked my door. The courthouse janitorial staff, alas, never made it to four unless I called them for a special trip.

  I paused ten feet from the office door and slid the Python into my hand. Then I took a handful of quiet steps and settled against the wall of my office. DEPUTY DAVID MAPSTONE, SHERIFF’S OFFICE HISTORIAN, the sign said. No sounds came from beyond the open door. Looking in, I could see changes. Someone had been in there. Gripping the magnum in both hands I went through the door and swept the big room with the barrel. I had no doubt that I looked vaguely ridiculous.

  The office was clear of danger, but it had been visited. Turning on the lights, I saw the extent of it. Drawers weren’t quite closed. Files were lightly tousled. The Pilgrim case bulletin board was moved several feet from where I left it. Whoever had been here made little effort to conceal their visit. Then I heard footsteps and wheeled, sighting down the barrel at the guard.

  “Take it easy!” he said.

  “Somebody broke in,” I said, holstering the gun.

  “I had to let them in, sir.”

  I stared at him.

  “It was the FBI. Thre
e of them. They showed me their IDs.”

  “When?”

  “They were here about an hour ago.”

  I eased myself down into the wooden swivel chair.

  “FBI?” I asked. He nodded. “And they just walked into a county office? Wait until Peralta hears that.”

  Alfredo coughed softly. “The sheriff was here. He told me to let them in.”

  I felt a heaviness in my feet and let him say it again.

  “Who else was here?”

  “Well, a woman detective was with them, too,” Alfredo said.

  “Kate Vare?”

  “They all seemed in a hurry. I thought they were just waiting for you. I didn’t think…”

  I just glowered at him.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” he said. “What does it mean?”

  I said softly, “I wish I knew.”

  When I didn’t say anything more, he disappeared out the door and I heard his footsteps in the empty hallway. I was left alone with my paranoia. Outside the expansive arched windows, rain bathed the bland skyscrapers of downtown. The raindrops made a soft roar in my ears. I picked up the phone and called Peralta’s office. His secretary said he had gone out on a raid. I took down the location, thought for a few moments, then turned out the lights, locked the door, and walked loudly back toward the staircase.

  Forty-five minutes later, I pulled off Interstate 17 and followed the directions Peralta’s secretary gave me. They led to a trailer off in the high desert northeast of New River. But this was no wilderness idyll. The place was littered with junk cars, old refrigerators, and anonymous castoffs from the machine age. Trash sat in six-foot piles, and dangled from the branches of palo verde trees. Now it was also cluttered with sheriff’s vehicles. I showed my badge and a deputy in a yellow slicker waved me through the perimeter. It was slightly nastier than the usual meth bust. Another deputy told me that in addition to the illegal substances, the bust had yielded a half dozen starved horses, a goat, twenty wild dogs, and six emaciated children. Let’s just say it was a piece of Arizona that the chamber of commerce didn’t want the tourists to see.