Dry Heat dmm-3

by Jon Talton

  Out in the house, I heard Billy Bragg’s “California Stars” on the stereo. I let the guitars and wanderlust harmonica stoke my melancholy. I was now approaching the age that Milton was when I arrived on his doorstep as a twentysomething Ph.D. candidate. It made me feel strange, caught in time’s riptide and unable to see the shore.

  He was hard on his students because the ones who made it were his great legacy. They went on to become noted professors, cutting-edge scholars, influential authors, in-demand advisers to secretaries of state, and national security aides-and me, I came back home to Phoenix and took a job at the sheriff’s office again.

  I read to Dan Milton as he lay dying from stomach cancer. He had long ago moved to Portland, a wonderfully civilized city for a man who prized civilization. Writing a pair of bestsellers-one book won the Parkman Prize-had supplemented his family money, so the high cost of living was no object. His condo overlooked downtown and the river, Mount Hood in the far distance. Its rooms were occupied by books, modernist paintings, and a young woman with honey-colored hair named Kathleen. Milton always had a Kathleen or a Heather or a Pamela, intellectual young women who ran through his life, each for a few years, and amused him. He favored Smith graduates. He was as much auteur as scholar.

  Finally, a hospital bed was added. And a part-time nurse. He dismissed the entreaties of his grown children to go to a nursing home.

  I visited almost every day, and read to him from Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography, Master of the Senate. Milton was often groggy and sometimes in terrible pain, but he had lost nothing of his incisive mind. He made me see the book in new ways, made me see Caro’s shortcomings as well as triumph, even as I watched my professor slide into darkness.

  “He never forgave me for leaving teaching, for not making something of myself as a scholar,” I said aloud. “He never said so, but I know…”

  Lindsey laid her head on my chest, letting her dark hair sweep against my skin. I went on, “Milton wants me to take a lecturer job at Portland State.” I corrected myself, “Wanted me. He talked to the dean and recommended me. It’s a two-year appointment, in American history. It’s some kind of interdisciplinary deal with the criminal justice program. Milton said it was tailor-made for me, and the class load is light enough to do research and writing, too.”

  “Do you want to do that?” Lindsey asked, not facing me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking into the murk of the ceiling, listening to the wind. “All the politics and political correctness drove me nuts before. But I didn’t have you before. Oh, it’s probably silly to even consider it. You wouldn’t like the rain…”

  “Oh, History Shamus,” Lindsey stroked my head. “You’re tired. You’re grieving.” She held me close, and her body heat was a wonderful force field against a cold world.

  Finally, she said, “You can do anything you want, Dave. Even as an old guy.”

  She smiled at me, and sipped the last of her drink. “I know what will cheer you up. I got takeout at the Fry Bread House. Let’s eat Indian tacos, drink cerveza, and screw all night.” She sat astride me, and my body quickly responded.

  “I’ll make some history with you, Professor.”

  Chapter Four

  “Can you help me out? Some change to get something to eat?”

  I shook my head like a heartless bastard and walked into Starbucks. The man lingered for a moment, staring at the big Oldsmobile. Then he walked toward Safeway, slipping into a forlorn limp as he approached a woman getting out of her car. She hurried into the store and he resumed a normal walk, wandering across McDowell Road into the park.

  It was Friday morning, a day after the body was found in the Maryvale pool. The storm’s aftermath was a yard littered with downed palm fronds, and the neighbors anxiously cleaning their pools, but the day dawned clear and mild. My apocalyptic environmental visions of the previous day were replaced by fond, familiar appreciation for my hometown. At the foot of the broad streets, mountains glowed vivid purple and brown. The ascending morning sun turned wispy clouds from pink to alabaster. Even the last remnants of citrus blossoms were lingering in the seventy-degree air. So I put the top down on the Olds, slid in an Ellington CD, and got to work.

  The first twenty-four hours are critical in a homicide investigation. But in my line, the first fifty-six years are critical, at least for a body carrying an FBI badge that disappeared in 1948. From the quiet of my office in the old county courthouse, under high ceilings, big windows, and the gaze of Sheriff Carl Hayden from his 1901 photograph, I imagined my battle plan. Its basics had evolved as I had learned the job, invented it really, over the past several years since Peralta had taken pity on my untenured, unemployed state and given me an old case to research. I would need a timeline, a gallery of the major players in the case, lists of key evidence, plus all the case records and newspaper clippings. My job was to find connections as a historian and researcher, bringing something to an investigation that the regular detectives might miss, or so I told myself.

  But as I sipped a mocha, my legs went up to the desktop and laziness set in. I didn’t look forward to falling all over the feds, and I sure as hell didn’t want to deal with Kate Vare. I picked up the phone, eager for a shortcut.

  As it happened, my friend Lorie Pope was in the newsroom over at the Republic. She was yelling even before I finished the first sentence.

  “John Pilgrim!” she exclaimed. “Do I know about John Pilgrim? Jesus Christ, David, this case has been driving me crazy for my whole career!”

  She had a big voice, one that had gotten raspy with years and too many cigarettes since the first day I met her, back in the ’70s when she was a cub reporter and I was a rookie deputy. I moved the receiver closer to my ear again and continued.

  “Why driving you crazy?” I asked.

  “Because the whole thing is…Wait a minute, David. Why? Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m just naturally curious.” I could already imagine the explosion from Peralta if the story of the found badge appeared on the front page of the local newspaper.

  “Bullshit,” she said, glee in her voice. “David, you were a lousy liar when you were my boyfriend…”

  “Was I your boyfriend? I recall there were several of us.”

  “What can I say,” she said. “I’m loveable. But I guess you’re happier now with Leslie.”

  “Lindsey,” I said.

  “Don’t try to change the subject. You’ve got something new on Pilgrim.”

  Now it was my turn to be obstinate. “’Bye, Lorie.”

  I held the phone out just enough to hear her hollering. “Stop! Don’t hang up!”

  I said, “So give me the short version of why this case matters to you, and I’ll try to help you, too.”

  “Bastard,” she said, not without affection. “OK, it’s the only unsolved murder of an FBI agent in Arizona history. John Pilgrim was found floating in an irrigation canal on November 10th, 1948. He had a single gunshot to his heart. The locals and the FBI interviewed more than a thousand people, and they never made an arrest in the case.”

  I asked her why.

  “That’s what always drove me nuts. I was assigned to do a story on the Pilgrim case years ago, just a historical feature on famous local cases that had never been solved. I’d never even heard of the case before. But I didn’t get anywhere with the FBI. Even some of my good sources wouldn’t talk. And I’m like, what’s the deal? This is a case that happened decades ago. Why do they give a shit? Well, let me tell you, David, they do. I came back five years ago and filed a FOIA, Freedom of Information Act request, for the Pilgrim files. Guess what? They blocked it.”

  I sipped the mocha, trying to square Lorie’s information with Eric Pham’s willingness to share the case with the local cops.

  “What about the county files?”

  “The assholes tried to block that, too. The paper took them to court. I got this very redacted version. Lots of reports were missing. This was all before
you came back to Phoenix, David.”

  “So why do they care so much?” I asked.

  “I’d like to tell you it’s the great Phoenix murder mystery, that’s it’s got sex, betrayal, a dead body and somehow ties the FBI into the Kennedy assassination. But my theory is that Pilgrim killed himself, and that would have been an embarrassment to the FBI. But who the hell knows. Not everybody would agree.”

  “Who is not everybody?” I asked.

  “There was someone I spent some time with who was one of these amateur crime buffs. A.C. Hardin-how could I ever forget. A.C. was convinced that Pilgrim was killed by gangsters.”

  “Where can I find Hardin?”

  “Used to live down in Tubac. Hang on…” I heard her banging through drawers, and then she came back on with a phone number. I thanked her.

  “Yeah, well, A.C.’s a nut,” she said. “So now it’s your turn, Deputy-Professor-Ex-Boyfriend. Talk.”

  I saw a shadow at the pebbled glass of my door. “Later,” I said, and hung up. I could hear her cursing as the phone sank to its cradle.

  Kate Vare opened the door without knocking. “We’ve got to canvass the shelters, find out who this guy was,” she muttered.

  “Can’t the detectives do that?” I asked.

  “We are the detectives, Mapstone,” she said. “Didn’t you see TV this morning? A fourteen-year-old girl kidnapped at gunpoint from her parents’ house. Everybody in my shop is busy on that. Not that we didn’t have enough to do already.”

  She looked around my office. “How do you rate so much room? And this furniture?”

  “This was just a storeroom when I cleaned it up,” I said. “Actually, it was the sheriff’s personal office when the courthouse was built in 1929, but it had been forgotten all these years…”

  I wasn’t even going to get into how I found the 1930s hardwood chairs and bench, and the leather sofa, in county storage. Her eyes were blurry with boredom.

  “I didn’t hear about the kidnapping,” I said. I was just making conversation. My stomach hurt, the ache of unpleasant people. My stomach said, Be somewhere else.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said, giving me a small, sad smile. “You read books.”

  “Or the newspaper.”

  “Who has time.”

  She fished in her tote and held out two handfuls. “We have some photos of the guy, and his jacket in a bag. Maybe someone will remember dealing with him.”

  I stayed at my desk. “Kate, I have a wonderful idea. You check out the homeless guy, and I’ll work things from the Pilgrim angle. That way we’ll stay out of each other’s way.”

  “No way,” she barked, and squared her shoulders against me. “I’m not taking the shitwork while you play professor.”

  “This isn’t-”

  “I’ve dealt with sexism my whole career, Mapstone. So don’t think you can pat me on the head, tell me I have pretty legs, and send me on my way.”

  “I-”

  She drilled an index finger my way. “If you want to be part of this case, you have to step up and do the real work, just like me.”

  She stalked off toward the elevator, pausing to toss her head at the door into the great sexist’s office. She said, “Coming?”

  Chapter Five

  I followed her down the curving, Spanish tile staircase, feeling more amused than annoyed. Amused in a lethargic way. I was still wrung out from my time in Portland, and this case just didn’t make me feel territorial about who would discover the connection between a homeless man and a missing FBI badge. Maybe it was diminishing testosterone-I sure didn’t feel that in other ways. Maybe I was growing a little bored playing cop, as Dan Milton had wondered about me before he died.

  My task with Kate that morning seemed like a fool’s errand, but that was why I had never made it in the law enforcement bureaucracy. I didn’t understand the importance of process. Of appearing to do something. Maybe I would get credit as a good team player, “handling” Kate Vare, as Peralta put it. I would try it for a while, at least. But it seemed like a lousy way to make progress. We didn’t have a good photo of the dead man-the morgue shots definitely didn’t make him look “so lifelike, so at peace.” A bloated corpse face stared out at us. As for the jacket, it was standard-issue Levi’s, very faded and authentically “distressed.” Even beneath the heavy clear plastic of the evidence bag, the jacket felt vermin-infested.

  “We can take my car,” Vare said.

  “My legs won’t fold into those Cavaliers,” I said. “Let’s take mine.”

  Across the front seat of the big Oldsmobile, Kate was halfway into the next county. So there was no need to force small talk as we made the rounds of the beleaguered shelters and social service agencies that clustered in unwanted, homely buildings on the fringes of downtown. A plan to build a multimillion-dollar campus for the homeless had been discussed for years but nothing ever seemed to happen. Pearl Buck wrote that the test of a civilization was the way it cared for its most helpless members. Phoenix didn’t read Pearl Buck.

  The social workers either got along with cops or they didn’t. The cynical and jaded ones did. But cops were part of their daily landscape. There to stop a fight. There to find a suspect. We were just two more cops wanting something. The whitewashed walls, government-issue furniture, and unpleasant smells took me back to the few years in the ’70s when I worked as a patrol deputy. Not much seemed to have changed. We were all just factory workers in the giant human meat grinder where society’s front line intersected with a big city’s underclass.

  “Do you know how many people come through here every day?” demanded a male social worker with a ponytail and a pharaoh beard. “We’ve been over capacity for something like twenty years. Nobody gives a shit.”

  Nobody seemed to recognize the person in the Polaroid. “This guy looks dead,” one shelter staffer observed. Because I read the newspaper, I knew the city’s hardcore homeless numbered 3,000, and some estimates were much higher. So identifying our corpse wasn’t going to be easy. But then we caught what might be a break. At a food bank on Third Avenue, someone remembered a middle-aged Anglo guy who always wore a Levi’s jacket, even on the hottest day. He was one of the local alcoholic indigents they called “the home guard.” Maybe the guy’s name was Weed.

  “That’s worse than nothing,” Kate said. “Just a nickname. All these transients have nicknames and aliases.”

  “Maybe it’s proper name,” I said.

  “That’s ridiculous.” she said.

  “Didn’t Patty Hearst date a guy named Weed when the SLA kidnapped-?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” she said. I noticed that, in dealing with me at least, she was speaking even before I finished my first sentence. I felt a fresh surge of annoyance, and was tempted to tell her about Thurlow Weed, the abolitionist political boss in New York in the mid nineteenth century.

  More silence took us to lunch. We stopped at a little taqueria on Jefferson and Seventh Avenue for burritos. We were only a block from police headquarters, but the little shack that promised “burritos y hamburgers” was a gathering spot for the woebegone neighborhood between downtown and the state capitol. We ate with the top down, and every time somebody hit us up for money, we showed the photo and asked them about a guy named Weed. Pretty soon word got around we were cops, and foot traffic dried up. Kate looked distinctly uncomfortable, and I took way too much pleasure in that.

  Then there was nothing left to do but cruise and ask questions. I drove across the Seventh Avenue overpass, made a right on Grant Street, and then turned back north on Ninth. Up through the 1970s, this had been the industrial heart of a much smaller city. The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads sliced through on their way to Union Station. The railroads also served scores of produce warehouses and other agricultural terminals. Old Phoenix was a farm town, where irrigated fields and groves yielded oranges, grapefruits, lemons, lettuce, and cotton for markets back east. Mile-long trains of refrigerator cars were made up here, sen
ding fresh Arizona citrus to the tables of families in Chicago and Dayton and Minneapolis. Now those families seem to have moved to Arizona, and the old produce district had been long abandoned.

  Could the man from the pool, the dead man without a name, maybe nicknamed Weed, have walked these streets? It was a long shot. Only a meal card told us he could.

  We were in sight of the nicest new investments downtown, the Dodge Theater, Bank One Ballpark, and America West Arena. But these streets held blocks of bleak single-story warehouses, some close to falling down. The produce businesses were gone. Almost everything was gone. One building held the Interfaith Cooperative Ministries. Another said it was the Joe Diaz Top-Level Boxing Gym (“There is no substitute for experience”). Concertina wire flashed menacingly off fences and rooftops. Vacant lots glistened with broken glass. A few early bungalows sat incongruously beside the industrial buildings-if you could have moved one to one of the historic districts and fixed it up, you could have sold it for half a million bucks.

  The streets were covered with the memory of pavement. Curbs and sidewalks were cracked, broken, or nonexistent. Long unused railroad tracks ran down the center of the cross streets, Jackson, Harrison, Madison, heading nowhere. As we drove slowly up Ninth Avenue, they appeared. Singles, pairs, and clusters of people. They stood or walked aimlessly up and down. Most were black, but there were also plenty of Anglos, a few Indians. On one corner a man huddled by an open water faucet, rinsing his face. An ancient-looking Anglo hobbled across railroad tracks using stainless steel crutches. Across the street, a black woman pulled what looked like a new wheeled suitcase and two small children.

  “Jesus Christ,” Kate Vare said quietly.

  “Don’t you remember the Deuce?” I asked. The old skid row in Phoenix had been centered around Second Street, hence its name.

  “No,” she said. “I moved out from Wisconsin in 1989.”

  “When the city proposed tearing the Deuce down to build Civic Plaza, a few people asked where the transients would go. Here’s where they went, as well as to every neighborhood park in the center city, behind big billboards, at camps down at the riverbed…”