by Jon Talton
Chapter Eight
Phoenix is less a city than a 1,500-square-mile collection of real estate ventures connected by city streets that have been widened into highways. When people say Phoenix has no soul, they’re really referring to this incoherent sprawlburg. From the mid-1950s until the bubble burst in the great real estate crash of 1990, the developers built skyscrapers along a five-mile length of Central Avenue. All this speculation took place a mile north of the city’s old downtown core, so some projects were called “midtown” and others farther north became “uptown.” The city finally sought to put a sheen of bureaucratic respectability on the mess and called the entire area the Central Corridor.
Take all the skyscrapers and concentrate them, and Phoenix would have as impressive a skyline as any American city outside New York or Chicago. But Phoenix was built by land speculators, not great city planners. So it ended up with a narrow strand of tall buildings running for miles north to south along Central. After 1990, the real estate boys abandoned the corridor for fresh speculative baubles in North Scottsdale and the East Valley. The result was that the heart of the city, after business hours Monday through Friday, became one of the quietest places in the urban West.
There’s a coral-colored, High Modernism condo tower that sits right in the middle of the corridor. Del Webb built it in the mid-1950s, when he was just a small-town Phoenix builder, and for decades it sat quietly as the city grew up around it. The tower flares off in an X-shaped floor plan with balconies and Bauhaus-inspired slab overhangs. It’s right at the foot of Cypress Street, not two blocks from our house. And that’s where Peralta stashed us, on the eighth floor. The place was expensively furnished, with large colorful abstract paintings on the wall. “A friend of the sheriff lets us use this place when he’s in Europe,” Kimbrough had said, Must be nice to have such friends. So after a weekend of deputies bringing over some necessities from home, Lindsey and I had done our best to settle into this odd “safe house.” Other deputies, officers with training in special weapons and tactics, had replaced the retired gentlemen who acted as concierges at the entrance to the building downstairs.
I felt uncomfortable sleeping in a stranger’s bed. Lindsey had bad dreams, She would wake up sure she was hearing the fighter jets that had protected the city in the days after September 11th I couldn’t hear them. Lindsey was a walking array of high-charged senses. After I settled her down and felt her breathing become regular with sleep, I would swing out of bed and pad over to the huge windows I would watch the sparse traffic on Central, the little blocks of lights in the skyscrapers as the cleaning crews worked. Police choppers darted through the metropolitan sky like large fireflies. On clear nights, I could see the jagged black outline of the Sierra Estrella, for the bedroom faced southwest. For days, a hot wind came up in the late afternoon and forced the smog out.
Rachel Pearson had died beside a suburban freeway, out amid the endless red-tile-roof tract houses and shopping strips of Tuscan-themed fakery. The detectives figured she had come out of a vehicle that was doing at least one hundred miles per hour. By the time we got there, she was covered with a yellow tarp. But I couldn’t avoid seeing what looked like skid marks of blood and tissue left as the body hurtled down the oily, ribbed concrete, Smashed wire eyeglasses sat another seventy-five feet south, against a noise wall. Evidence technicians methodically marked everything with small red flags. The shoulder of the freeway was a poppy field of small red flags. Lindsey was convinced that Rachel had jumped. “She fought them,” Lindsey had said. “She knew she didn’t have a chance if she stayed in the car.”
Law officers came from around the state for Rachel’s funeral. Lindsey wasn’t allowed to leave the condo.
***
Peralta demanded that I work. I dreaded leaving Lindsey alone. But she kept her Glock on her belt, and an M-4 carbine, checked out from the sheriff’s armory, just inside the front door. So on Monday I began my new routine, one I repeated every morning and evening. I drove a commandeered white Crown Vic from the condo tower’s underground parking garage to the new Roosevelt Square apartments near downtown. They had a big parking garage, so I could wind my way to the top floor and swap the Vic for my yellow drug dealer’s Oldsmobile. The entire trip was made in curlicues and backtracks on the charming streets and alleys of Willo and the Roosevelt and Story historic districts. No one appeared to be following me.
Peralta had forbidden me to drive by the house on Cypress, but of course I did, first thing Monday morning. The trumpet vines and oleanders were starting to bloom and soon the palm trees would need trimming. There was a contractor’s van in the driveway that I knew held several well-armed deputies.
Finally, at my high-ceilinged office on the fourth floor of the old county courthouse, I had set to work on the case of FBI Special Agent John Pilgrim.
My mind was still on Friday night, on the dangers of the here and now. My desktop reinforced it, with an Arizona Republic sitting faceup, the lead headline shouting, COPS AMBUSHED, and, on a smaller deck, COMPUTER SLEUTHS TARGETED BY RUSSIAN MOB. The Scottsdale shooting had pushed aside the usual Phoenix menu of hit-and-runs, child drowning, dysfunctional state government, and real estate news.
I had to force my mind back to ancient history, the previous Thursday, when a homeless man had been found in a green pool in Maryvale, and sewn in his jacket had been the FBI badge of dead agent Pilgrim. A case that happily was ignored by the local news media.
I set up some basics that would help me tell the history of John Pilgrim, interpret it, maybe understand it. I wheeled over the large combination bulletin board and chalkboard to stand by my desk. On the bulletin board, I posted an index card for each player in the case-for now, John Pilgrim and the homeless John Doe. One part of my task would be to increase those cards, On the blackboard, I started a timeline with November 10, 1948, the day Pilgrim’s body was found. I ended the timeline on April 1, 2004, the day the body was found in the pool. Another task was to fill in the dates between. Maybe they were silly tasks. I needed tasks.
Monday was a records day. From the county’s deep-storage archives, I checked out or copied everything I could get my hands on regarding the Pilgrim case, and crime in general in 1948. There was actually a sizable Pilgrim file because the body had been found in what was then county jurisdiction. It was all joyous, tactile paper. Files made decades before databases, web browsers, and personal computers. But I noted numerous blank file spacers where reports should have been, a black-ink stamp saying simply “removed by FBI.” Other reports contained pages that had been blacked out, “redacted” in the legal language.
Then I braced myself for a confrontation with Kate Vare and went to Phoenix PD records. Kate was not in her cubicle in the Criminal Investigation Division, so my day got better. The PD records clerk was cooperative and friendly, and my rucksack of records grew.
Back at my office, armed with a Starbucks mocha, I began to read and make notes. By the end of the day, here were some of the things I knew:
John Pilgrim was thirty-eight years old. He had been an FBI agent for twelve years. He hadn’t served in the war. A photo of him showed a rather round-faced man with thin lips and dark hair. An earnest, serious face. A delicate long nose. I posted the photo on the bulletin board. Pilgrim had been born in Lexington, Kentucky, and had a law degree from the University of Kentucky. He would have been one of the new breed of professional, degreed agents around which J. Edgar Hoover built the FBI somewhere in the 1930s. Pilgrim was posted to Phoenix in the spring of 1947.
Pilgrim was found floating in an irrigation canal in the late afternoon of Nov. 10, 1948. A farm worker there to let water into some lettuce fields found the body. I posted a city map on the bulletin board and marked where the body was found: near the present-day intersection of Fifty-first Avenue and Thomas. It was half a mile from where the homeless man would fall into the pool half a century later. What the hell did that mean? The landscape had changed from farms to suburbia to the new melting pot. I made a note to find a ma
p of the old canal system.
I read the narrative of the lead county detective, typed on flimsy paper with a cockeyed “T” key. Pilgrim’s body was wearing a suit and tie. He artfully declined to mention the badge, or the gun, for that matter. The condition of the body made the investigators believe it had floated quite a distance. Pilgrim was last seen alive two days before, November 8, by his partner, Agent Renzetti. Pilgrim told Renzetti he was going to work late that night, running down a lead. The report didn’t mention the nature of the lead.
I paged through the detective’s notebooks, handwriting in blue ink, and set them aside for later. The dust from the old files made me sneeze.
The coroner’s report, a Photostat with white type blaring out of black background, said Pilgrim had one gunshot wound to the heart. He was dead when his body went into the water. The bullet was a.38 caliber. This report was heavily censored, whole paragraphs wiped out like a landscape in a snowstorm. But they hadn’t removed the last page. I held it in my fingers for at least a full minute. I can’t tell you if I was breathing or not. For at the bottom of the coroner’s report was the signature, Philip Mapstone.
My grandfather.
My grandfather had been a dentist, and he had died in 1977. And as to what his signature was doing on a line that said “coroner,” I had not a clue. When I talked to Peralta on Tuesday, he said it probably didn’t mean anything. The old coroner system, which predated the science and professionalism of medical examiners, was very informal, and a coroner’s jury might be led by a lawyer, an ordinary citizen, a medical doctor, even a dentist. Whatever the reason, the Pilgrim case suddenly grew personal. I didn’t like it.
On Tuesday I received a gift. The medical examiner’s office reported that the homeless man had died of apparently natural causes. Kate Vare sent me a suspiciously friendly e-mail that morning, saying she was taking herself off the case. I wasn’t sure she could just do that. She was a cold case expert and this was not just cold but freezing. But I wasn’t going to argue. She was needed on the case of the missing teenage girl. The abduction had several disturbing similarities to cases in the 1980s, and Kate said she would be working on analyzing those links. In the ’80s, two girls in their young teens were taken from their parents’ houses in well-to-do north Phoenix neighborhoods. They were raped and murdered, and the cases were never solved. Now another girl was missing. The media were going berserk. I overcame my mistrust of Kate’s sharp features, and wished her well.
The homeless man had died of natural causes and then some. Although he suffered a massive heart attack before falling into the pool, he was also dying of lung cancer, congestive heart failure, and untreated diabetes. The medical examiner speculated the man had “coded out” on the edge of the pool and tumbled in headfirst. It wasn’t a homicide. It was just very damned strange. And whether he was murdered or not, my case was still alive because of the FBI badge sewn into his jacket. When I briefed Peralta and Eric Pham, they agreed I should continue on the case alone. I reminded Pham that the bureau still owed me access to the Pilgrim records, and he said he’d make another call to his bosses to get me clearance.
For now, the Pilgrim case was mine.
Chapter Nine
That evening, I walked on a sidewalk laid down in 1948. I had walked on it a hundred times, going from my office in the old court-house to the county lot where I parked. But this time I noticed the date chiseled into the concrete block I wondered if Special Agent John Pilgrim had walked this sidewalk when it was new. I thought about the world of John Pilgrim in Phoenix in 1948. Men wore suits, ties, and hats, even when not at work. Women were rare in offices and factories, even though the war had added to their numbers. The diversity we take for granted in any American city and town in the early twenty-first century was not found in Pilgrim’s Phoenix. It was an overwhelmingly Anglo place, with the blacks and Mexicans “kept in their place.” Society was similarly fixed, men worked, women raised children, everyone married, and roles were clear. Authority still meant something, ruling with a combination of respect and fear. For entertainment, people went to movies and listened to radio; only a few well-off families could afford the new televisions. A middle-class family owned one car, not three or four. But the mode of travel preferred by most Americans was still the train, with the new streamliners promising more luxury than ever. And Phoenix-it was little more than a big town, instead of America’s fifth largest city. John Pilgrim’s world, America a mere half century ago, seemed more foreign than some distant historical epoch.
Those were the musings that took me to the parking lot, to the back of the Oldsmobile.
I sensed movement behind me. Even though I had been carrying the Colt Python in a nylon holster on my belt, I felt nauseatingly vulnerable. I’m sure I visibly jumped.
“I’m not going to hurt you, mister.”
“I know,” I said, pride quickly replacing terror. The Russian mafia had not fallen on such hard times that they had sent a bag lady to kill the husband of their nemesis, the brilliant Lindsey Faith Mapstone.
The woman must have been concealed by some of the vans and SUVs nearby. I leaned against the car door and took her in: straight, dirty blond hair; broad, sunburned face; a stocky, medium-height body Throw her in a shower, dress her differently, and put her in a minivan in Chandler, and she might be mistaken for a soccer mom. If you didn’t look too closely. Someone had knocked one of her teeth out. Her tan was raw and uneven. The collar of her T-shirt was filthy.
I don’t have any money,” I said, and started to get in the car.
“I don’t go hitting up cops,” she said. But she didn’t move on. She just stood there, watching me.
She said, “You were looking for Weed.”
I stopped, gently reclosed the door, and faced her.
“They said at the shelter you were looking for Weed,” the woman said. “Two cops, a woman and a man. They said the man was tall and looked like a schoolteacher, and he drove this big yellow Olds 442.”
David Mapstone, the master of concealment.
“You know Weed?” I asked.
She folded her arms tightly around her breasts, causing them to balloon out beneath the faded purple T-shirt. “I hang out with him sometimes.”
“Around here?”
“He liked the deck park,” she said. Margaret Hance Park, which sat above the freeway a mile north of us, and was home to festivals, joggers, sunbathers, and drug dealers. “We’d sit there by the library. I like to read books.”
“Was Weed a nickname?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was just his name. What’s your name?”
“David,” I said. “David Mapstone.”
“I’m Karen,” she said. “You’re a cop, right?”
“I’m a deputy.” I asked her what she could tell me about him.
“He was nice to me. I’ve been on the streets four years now. He helped me find food, a place to sleep that was safe. He’d share cigarettes. We’d talk.”
“Any idea where he was from? How long he’d been living on the streets?”
“He had family in California, I think. Somebody told me he had been in the Navy. He never said much about himself.” She kept her arms clasped tightly and tilted slowly from side to side. She asked, “What are you looking for him for?”
I looked behind her into the blue-black of the western sky. We had been deprived of spectacular fiery sunsets for months. Even so, the sky seemed supernaturally large over our heads, the dry air conducting light intensely but with none of the velvety intimacy of the sky back east. Over Karen’s shoulder, the downtown towers still glowed from the last of the sun.
“Weed is dead,” I said. “He died last week. We’re trying to find next of kin, or anybody who knew him.”
Her eyes widened for several seconds. “Shit!” she whispered, stamping the gravel. “You got a smoke”
I shook my head.
Her shoulders suddenly sagged. She stared at the ground.
“H
e never hurt anybody.” She licked her chapped lips. “Somebody finally killed him.”
“What makes you think somebody killed him?” I asked.
“What, you live on the streets and you expect to die a natural death? I don’t think so. Not in this town. I’ve been in county hospital so many times, beaten up, robbed, raped, anything they think they can do to me. You cops figure I got it coming to me because I’m homeless. People in this town will kill you for five dollars.”
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.”
