Dry Heat

by Jon Talton

  A monstrous wind came down the alley, but it was at my back. I crossed Seventieth Street, saw the oleanders sway as if a small hurricane was coming through. Palm tree husks flew crazily through the air. Dust clouds swirled in orange and purple phantoms high above. Ahead of me, the man jogged west, toward Goldwater Boulevard. Then I put on another burst. My shoes pounded on the asphalt, but the wind absorbed all sound. Back walls and dumpsters became my markers in the race. Deeper spaces opened in my lungs, and my heart settled into its long forgotten runner’s rhythm.

  There was no time. He got to Goldwater and started to look back. I closed to maybe fifteen feet. There was no cover. Not too damned smart. But maybe this wasn’t the Russian at all. Maybe it was just a citizen. I drew the Python and dropped into a combat stance.

  “Stop!” I yelled through a mouth thick with dust and suppressed panic.

  The man stood on the sidewalk, his back to me. He was a big man, about my size. Even in the oppressive heat he wore a dark sweatshirt. He didn’t move.

  I swallowed and called up a tiny bit of saliva. “Deputy sheriff! Drop your weapon!”

  I danced a little to the side, keeping his torso in the aligned twin sights of the Python. The gun’s stainless steel body glittered weirdly in the dusty light. Everything around us was brown. Streetlights came on in the murk, even though beyond the storm the sun was up. I tried to see what he had in his hands. He wouldn’t face me.

  “Drop it now!” I yelled, starting to put pressure on the trigger.

  Something black and metallic clattered to the ground. He was not just a citizen.

  “Get on the ground, hands out from your body!” Where the fuck is the cavalry?!

  He slowly lowered himself to his knees. He was still facing away. But I moved to the curb and could see the side of his face. No sensitive eyes or goatee from my dreams. He was clean-shaven. I couldn’t make out much more. I eased up closer.

  “On your belly!” I commanded. “Lie down! Face down, hands out!”

  The thought seeped in: What if he can’t understand enough English to know what I want? My heart was hammering now, the worry point just below my sternum turned into a hot poker.

  I only realized I had come too close when he lunged at me. It was a stupid rookie mistake. Somebody his size shouldn’t have been able to spring up and close the distance between us so fast. But he did. Somebody on his knees should have been vulnerable to the standing officer pushing him to the pavement. But he wasn’t.

  We crashed together to the ground. He was momentarily on top, but I clubbed him in the forehead with the Python. He fell backwards and we faced each other, both sitting on the ground. But I had the gun.

  “You’re her husband,” he said, his eyes widening. There was barely an accent. Blood trickled out of his forehead like a stigmata. He was handsome in a hard-featured way.

  “Husband.” He said the word like “open sewer.” He shook his head. “Her husband, David.”

  He smiled at me predatorily. His teeth were yellow. “This Lindsey.” He said her name again, stretching it out obscenely. “Lindsey. She is what I want. Her little helper, Rachel, was just the start. But when I get this Lindsey, I will do things to her that will cut you up inside. You’ll never be safe. This will never be over…”

  Just then the wind died, and something dark and fast cracked against his temple. His eyes went back in his head and he collapsed.

  Peralta stood over us, cradling the shotgun. He kicked Yuri over and handcuffed him. He held his head up by the hair and the Russian came to, gurgling in pain. Peralta spoke in his ear in a low voice.

  “It’s over, scumbag.”

  Chapter Thirty

  A summer afternoon in Phoenix. Outside, the temperature is 114, and if I walk over to the large windows of my office I can check the horizon beyond the mountains, to see if the billowing monsoon clouds have arrived from the Sea of Cortez. But I sit in my old wooden swivel chair. Lindsey sits facing me, on the desk, wearing a short black skirt. Lindsey is blessed with fine knees. I am blessed with Lindsey’s fine knees. I am thinking about this but I am stroking her long, slender wrist. Wrists can be such sensual places, given the right circumstances. As I run a light finger along her skin, Lindsey smiles and sighs. Up on the wall, Sheriff Hayden’s expression doesn’t change. Or do I catch just a twinkle in his eyes? I am sleeping without nightmares now.

  Back when I was a patrol deputy—now I sound like a geezer—crime scenes were fairly simple affairs. Nowadays, they were major productions. So for hours after Yuri Sergiovich Popov had been shackled, stuffed into an armored FBI van, and whisked away to the terrorist resort at Guantanamo, I idled inside a corral of yellow tape in Old Scottsdale. Entire blocks were cordoned off, for reasons I didn’t understand. It must have killed a few struggling businesses, of which Arizona always has an abundance. Peralta did most of the talking to cops and agents, about our wild ride down Scottsdale Road.

  I was left to sit on the curb and contemplate the sunset. With the dust storm gone, sundown was a big-sky show of lurid pinks, crimsons, oranges, colors with no names. A coppery borealis emerged for five minutes directly overhead. Even the cops paused to look up and marvel. And just as the color retreated into the deep blue of twilight, a sheriff’s cruiser pulled up and a door opened. Lindsey stepped out, waved to the driver, and came my way. After everything of the past few weeks, she still walked with that subtle strut that only I appreciated. Her skin was pale fire. She is the kind of woman who doesn’t know how beautiful she is, which, of course, only adds to her appeal.

  Repressed, hell.

  In seconds, we fell into each other’s arms—lightly at first, as if our hands wanted to make sure it was real, and then a tight, life-affirming embrace. Then we both were talking at once, stopping at once, laughing, starting again, and each still hearing every word from the other. I wasn’t doing a lot of thinking right then. But I felt another presence, crazy as it sounds in the telling. For just a moment, bathed in the Arizona twilight and sheltered by my lover’s arms, I sensed a lost friend. But the cycle of life seemed benign.

  Dan Milton had lived a full life of good fights and passionate loves. He embodied Oscar Wilde’s tenet that anybody can make history, but only a great man can write it. He was and he did. Dan Milton knew that the losses and dangers of mortality were burrowing tunnels under each of us, silently, year by year, and someday the ground would give way. He lived deep and wide, to have no regrets. I think he found grace that was joyous and not just awful. He was never afraid. Rest in peace, my friend. Twilight was gone. Lindsey took my hand, and I took her home.

  Now, in the courthouse, my contemplation had gone from her wrist back to her knees. My darling had been born in the Summer of Love. She had been blessed with fine knees. Something against county regulations would undoubtedly have transpired on that blotter—it had before—if the door hadn’t swung open to reveal Peralta.

  “Hear those hammers, Mapstone?”

  Actually, I had been distracted.

  “They’re rehabbing the floor below. They’ll be up here by the fall. We’ll have to find you a new place.”

  “You can’t kick Dave out of his office,” Lindsey said. She slid around the desk and sat demurely in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs.

  “Blame the county supervisors,” Peralta said. “I’m sure we can find you something over on Madison Street.”

  “Like a cell.” I said.

  “You’re dreaming,” Peralta said. “We’re so overcrowded that you’d have to kill somebody to get that kind of office space.” He didn’t smile. “Anyway.” He crossed in his long stride to the other chair and fell into it. The wood moaned. “Anyway, that commie SOB Yuri is out of the way. You two lovebirds are reunited…”

  “It’s nice,” I said.

  “Well, don’t be too damned self-satisfied,” he said. “All you did was prove to be an adequate pursuit driver and a fair arresting officer. Otherwise…”

  Lindsey smiled slyly at m
e, her blue eyes keeping me calm.

  “We’ll just never know about that FBI badge,” Peralta continued.

  “I turned in my report.”

  “Oh, right,” Peralta said. “The Chicago Outfit murdered Pilgrim. Even though there’s no evidence.”

  “It’s what the best evidence shows.”

  “How much did the taxpayers of Maricopa County pay to send you to the Bay Area?” He folded his arms across his big chest and glowered at me. With Peralta you never knew where the theater ended and the real-life asskicking would begin.

  “Admit it, Mapstone. You couldn’t solve this case.”

  “I did my best.”

  “You failed. I bet a rookie in patrol could have gotten further than you. All that book learning and you still failed.”

  “He didn’t fail,” Lindsey said.

  There was a slight tapping on the door.

  “Come!” Peralta said. Every office was Peralta’s office.

  A gaunt lined face appeared around the doorjamb. A.C. Hardin. Wearing a sun dress and bangles on her wrists.

  “I said I’d come by for my file. Is this a good time?”

  I motioned her in and made introductions. She sensed the plume of anger hanging in the room and was eager to leave. But Peralta held her with his presence, although his bulk remained folded in thirds in his seat like a deck chair.

  “So you studied this case?”

  She nodded, then said, “Yes,” as if more reinforcement was needed.

  “What do you think happened to Pilgrim?” Peralta asked.

  Hardin looked uneasily at me. I just raised my eyebrows and smiled. I was daydreaming about Lindsey. My fingers were still happy from stroking her hand, her wrist…How could something as ordinary as a wrist tell so much?

  Hardin was saying, “Like I told your deputy here, it was the mob out of Chicago, and the FBI covered it up.” Peralta gave a noncommittal, “Umm.” Then he stood and started out. Hardin came closer to my desk, her hand out for the folder. It was like guests leaving the party. I pulled out the papers she had lent me—none too helpful, frankly—and reached across the desk. She reached her slim, young-girl arm, to take it. And her bangles slid up on her forearm.

  And I noticed.

  It made me sit back in my chair. Hardin swiveled and walked toward the door. She was wearing high-heeled sandals that clacked against the dark wood of the floor. Peralta held the door for her. Lindsey was standing, too, closer to the bulletin board. She was watching me.

  I said, too loudly, “Amelia!”

  Hardin stopped in the doorway, turned, and looked at me curiously.

  “Stay just a sec,” I said, rising and quickly crossing to the bookshelves. “I just want to ask one last question.”

  My finger raced across frayed book spines. There: a 1948 Phoenix city directory. I thumbed it. Found the page. And damned if the name wasn’t there.

  Hardin had stepped back in the door. The hundred lines in her face seemed to deepen. I closed the book, with my finger keeping the place. I was afraid to move.

  “Didn’t you tell me that you grew up here?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “That’s a lot of what I paint. What I remember about this place, before they ruined it.”

  “On Verde Lane, right? 2320 West Verde Lane?”

  She nodded. “Before it was even in the city limits.” Then she gave a little drunken lean against the doorjamb, looked at me, and started out. But Peralta was there. The top of her head came up to the midpoint of his necktie.

  “I need to go,” she said, trying to push past him. “I have to…” He gently herded her into the room.

  “It’s funny you say that because the city directory lists an Aimee Weed at that address. And that’s the mother of the man we found carrying Pilgrim’s badge.”

  Hardin’s mouth tightened, but she said nothing, refusing to look at me. Peralta said, “Let’s sit down for a minute,” and he guided her to a chair.

  “Am I under arrest?” she asked quietly.

  “We’re just talking,” Lindsey said, sitting on the edge of the desk. “You can go if you like.”

  Hardin folded her arms tightly across her chest.

  “Amelia,” I said. “I can get your birth certificate.”

  “I always hated that name,” she said.

  Big rooms hold quiet strangely. Sometimes it’s as if the quiet of decades ago still lives in the highest pockets of the high ceilings.

  “I had a brother named George,” she said at last.

  “Why did he have the badge?” Lindsey asked, her voice diamond-cutter gentle.

  “My mother was a very stupid woman,” Hardin said. “After dad died, she had to go to work. She became a secretary in the federal building. That would have been 1947? I can’t believe how long I’ve lived.”

  Then silence. Finally Lindsey said, “That doesn’t sound stupid. She did what she could, I’m sure.”

  “She was stupid to fall for John Pilgrim.”

  “They were lovers?” Lindsey asked.

  “He promised her he’d leave his wife and marry her,” Hardin said in a louder voice. “And Georgie and I would have a new daddy.”

  “So,” I said, “Pilgrim gave George the badge, maybe to hang on to for a few days?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “I didn’t know Georgie took it,” she said. “He was such a sweet little boy. The perfect little brother. I hate the world, the way it wads up people and throws them away…” She glanced at the photo of the dead homeless man on the bulletin board and quickly looked away.

  Peralta said, “So let me get this straight: the homeless man was your brother? And you and he were children when your mother was dating this FBI agent?”

  “That’s about right,” Hardin said, still facing Lindsey. Then, softer, “It doesn’t really matter now, does it? All these years? I still remember it like it just happened. It was a warm November, and Mom and Mr. P.—that’s what we were told to call him—took us for a picnic. He drove us in his Buick. We drove out of town, and spread a blanket under the cottonwoods.”

  Peralta locked eyes with me, but I had no information to telegraph.

  “We ate these little sandwiches with thousand island dressing,” she continued. “And we played by the canal. Mom made me watch Georgie while they walked a ways down the bank. I don’t know when they started arguing. They argued a lot. That was nothing new. But I hated it. The voices. The things they said. I knew it upset Georgie, too.”

  “What happened next?” Lindsey asked.

  “Mr. P. hit her. He hit her so hard that she fell on the ground, and she cried. He was such a son of a bitch. Later, I realized that was the moment when he told her he wasn’t going to leave his wife. And that was it.”

  “You never saw Pilgrim again?”

  Her voice changed. “He had left his gun in the car’s glove compartment. His badge, too, I guess. After he was shot, he staggered a little, and fell into the canal. Mom got us back in the car and we drove back to town. Then we left the car and walked back home. And she cried a lot. I never knew what happened to his gun or badge.”

  “Your mother shot him,” Lindsey said.

  Hardin shook her head, her small mouth in something like a smile. “I was eight years old, and my daddy had taught me how to fire a gun. And that man never hurt my mother again.”

  Epilogue

  “Salud!” Peralta said. “Or vashe zdorovie! In honor of our Russian.”

  “I taught you that,” Lindsey said.

  Peralta bought celebratory drinks across the street, at Tom’s Tavern. It was the oldest political hangout in the state. But unlike mere mayors and governors, who might merit one photo on the wall, Peralta was the subject of three photos and a lush portrait. Lindsey called it “the shrine.” If he was self-conscious, he hid it well.

  “So how the hell did you know?” Peralta demanded, a quarter of an inch into his gibson. He nodded to Lindsey. “Did you know?”


  “History Shamus rocks!” Lindsey beamed, squeezing my hand. “But I don’t know how he did it.”

  “It was her wrist,” I said. “She had old scars on her wrists just like George Weed did.”

  “That was a hell of a roll of the dice,” Peralta said.

  “Not really. I just had to understand what I was seeing. I saw the scars when I went to her house in Tubac. I saw, but I didn’t pay attention. Has that ever happened to you?”

  Lindsey nodded. Peralta said, “No.”

  “But then I remembered a Phoenix Gazette newspaper clipping from Christmas 1948. It was about a mother who tried to kill her two children, and succeeded in killing herself. She slit their wrists.” Lindsey gasped and gulped her martini. I went on, “We think of these things as happening only today, and they probably do with more frequency. But this was 1948. The article didn’t name them. But it said the mother was despondent over a failed romance. I didn’t put it all together until she reached down for the report and I saw her wrist again.”

  “Not bad, Mapstone,” Peralta said.

  “Kate Vare taught me something after all,” I said.

  “What? Well, I knew you two could work together.”

  “What will happen to Amelia?” Lindsey asked.

  “I don’t know.” Peralta started tearing his napkin into tiny strips. “I’ll turn it over to the county attorney, and see what she wants to do. But Hardin was eight years old when the crime happened. She gave us a confession without being Mirandized. What a mess. Sounds like something for my wife to fix.”

  “You ought to visit her,” I said.” She misses you.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Yes, she does. You don’t know everything, as much as that might surprise you.”

  We drank two rounds each and then Peralta put down his credit card.

  “Well, you did OK. I’m proud of both of you. I think you should take a long weekend and get reacquainted.”