Dry Heat dmm-3

by Jon Talton

  The deputy, sitting behind the lobby desk and pretending to be concierge, made eye contact with me. I signaled nothing. I didn’t know what the hell to do. If I made a fuss, Bobby might become suspicious, and where the hell might that lead? I said, “I’m visiting a friend.”

  “As am I, Dr. Mapstone,” he said. He walked over to the elevator that went up to the condos and pushed the button. “Maybe we’re visiting the same friend?”

  I tried to ignore him. He said, “Isn’t this a magnificent building? A bit of Bauhaus, a touch of le Corbusier, right here in central Phoenix. I must say, I don’t care for the balconies.”

  The elevator arrived with a whoosh and I let him step in first.

  Then I stepped in and the door closed. I felt my palms sweating.

  “Floor?” he prompted, smiling like Torquemada on the verge of uncovering a heretic.

  “Seven,” I lied. I sure as hell wasn’t going to lead him to Lindsey on the eighth floor. How did I know he was visiting a friend? Whatever he was doing, the seventh floor was now his destination, too.

  The machine did its work, rising slowly up the shaft.

  “I was sorry to hear about that unpleasantness in Scottsdale,” he said, arms gracefully crossed, eyes watching the lights mark each floor we passed. “And that poor young deputy who died.”

  “It’s a dangerous world,” I mumbled, wondering what were the signs of a person becoming a claustrophobic.

  “It is, indeed,” he said. A pause, then, “I do hope Miss Lindsey is taking good care.”

  I stared hard at him. He appraised me with cool predator eyes. “These Russians are very frightening, Dr. Mapstone. They have no respect for any civilized convention.”

  And you would know this how? I wanted to ask it. My mouth felt like a dry lake bed. Then the elevator slid to a gentle stop and the doors opened. I held out my hand: After you. Bobby bowed and stepped out. I followed him, not knowing what the hell I was going to do. The halls were short affairs, with only four condos on each floor. Bobby stood there looking at me, an amused expression crossing his handsome features.

  Inspiration. “Damn,” I said, pointing to his wine bottle. “I left my gift down in the car.” I turned back to the elevator and hit the call button, too hard.

  “Dr. Mapstone,” he said, insisting on shaking hands. “Good evening.”

  As I stepped in the elevator and waited for it to depart, I listened for the sound of Bobby’s knock on a door, the door opening with a cheerful greeting, maybe the sound of party laughter beyond. All I heard was the hum of the building’s hidden electronic nerve endings.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Eric Pham looked perturbed. The slightest wrinkle, an underlined W of skin, pulled at the middle of his smooth forehead.

  “You’re sure that Kate didn’t invite you to the press briefing? She said you were busy and couldn’t make it.” He waited for a response. I kept quiet. He added, “I’m genuinely sorry if you felt excluded, Dave.”

  We were all on first-name basis now. It is an aggressively casual age, more obnoxious in its way than the Victorian married couples that called each other “Mr. Smith” and “Mrs. Smith” in public. And you can’t really screw someone over without calling him by his first name. Maybe I was being unfair to the head fed. Beneath his regulation gray suit, Pham seemed pleasantly oblivious to how much his press stunt had put me in a mess with the sheriff. Would it be wise to curse out an FBI man, much less the special agent in charge? Probably not. Was it possible to do my job without a knife in the back from Kate Vare? No way. All these thoughts were fighting to get out, but I shut up and picked at my salmon Caesar salad.

  We sat by the window at Kincaid’s, a medium-fancy expense-account joint on the second floor of the Collier Center downtown. Over Pham’s shoulder, I could see the bulk of Bank One Ballpark. It was Monday, and three days had passed since Peralta’s “within a week” bullshit ultimatum. I had used the time to put in requests at a dozen federal and state agencies for information on George Weed. The bureaucratic wheels grinned at me: “You want it when?” But I was not without weapons of my own. After Kate’s press conference, I leveraged some of my own media events, gathered in my short career as a curiosity, a history professor who carries a badge. Two TV stations interviewed me on the discovery of the old badge and what it might mean. Lorie Pope wrote a story for the Republic-after giving me requisite hell for failing to tell her about the badge. But she quoted me prominently and ignored Kate Vare.

  If it was just a media contest, I had faltered in the first lap but then pulled ahead. But it wasn’t.

  I did use the TV segments and the article to ask the public for information about George Weed: Call the Sheriff’s Office’s tip line at this 800 number. Aside from the usual psychos and conspiracy nuts, the line yielded nothing. But I did get a call from Eric Pham, promising me lunch.

  Across from me, Pham ate the turkey and tomato slices from the shell of a club sandwich-“My wife is making us do the Atkins diet,” he explained-and I tried to figure out my next move. My life had too many moving parts. It seemed like madness not to gather up Lindsey and flee until the threat to her ended. Two weeks were passing and we still couldn’t go home. But what if the threat never went away? And our protector, Peralta, insisted I work on this damned Pilgrim case. Lindsey did, too, sensing I needed something more to do than nervously prowl through the rooms of a stranger’s condo. At least she had found new work, helping the feds track down terrorist bank accounts. A Secret Service type had delivered some kind of super-duper laptop computer, making Lindsey sign for it on multiple forms. So now she sat cross-legged on a big sectional sofa and spied on the secrets of banks in Zurich or Bermuda. Meanwhile, Bobby Hamid in the hallway. Coincidence or something sinister? If we told Peralta, he would send us to the middle of nowhere, maybe just send Lindsey. Too many moving parts.

  Pham wrapped his voice in the timbre of calm diplomacy. “Dave, I asked you here today to tell you that things have changed. I have to tell you that we won’t be needing your help on the case after all.”

  “I get it,” I said, not unkindly. “If you tell the media the case has been solved, then it really has been. Image becomes reality.”

  “It’s not solved,” Pham said, his voice dropping an insistent octave. “Look, this whole thing sucks, OK?”

  He stared at me. All the win-win consultant lingo fled from his voice. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him.

  “When the badge was found, I had no idea what I was getting into,” he said. “I acted in good faith bringing you in. I wanted this case solved. I’d never heard of it before. But I absolutely wanted to run it down. I knew you’d help us do that.”

  He paused and stared at me. I stared back, and after a few beats he continued, his lips barely moving.

  “As it turns out, the John Pilgrim case is still a sensitive matter in Washington. My bosses didn’t like the press conference any more than you did. And now they want the whole thing to go away.”

  I thought about what Lorie Pope had told me of sealed records and stone walls, even though the case was more than fifty years old. I said, “There’s a chance to solve the murder of an FBI agent, and they just want it to go away?”

  Pham nodded slowly.

  I asked why.

  Pham leaned in as if he were going to share a confidence. It was the kind of body language that makes the listener lean forward, too.

  “Phoenix is a strange place, isn’t it?”

  There were too many lines to read between. I said, “It’s an acquired taste, Eric.”

  “I came here a year ago from Seattle,” he said. “The real estate people said the only place to be is North Scottsdale. So I live behind a wall-‘gated community,’ they call it-and I don’t know any of my neighbors. The homeowners association is like the Soviet Union, watching every aspect of how you landscape or roll out the recycling. The whole front of the house is taken up by a garage door-and this isn’t a cheap house. It’s all strange.
”

  “I live a mile from here,” I said, “on a real street, with front porches and neighbors who know each other and look out for each other. That’s the side of Phoenix I prefer.”

  “I know,” he said, setting his silverware with military precision on the plate. “You live in the same house where you grew up. Although you haven’t been home for two weeks…”

  I felt the illogical rush of the paranoid. It must have shown in my face.

  “I wanted to check you out, Dave. To know that I could trust you.”

  I just looked him over. I had always liked Lindsey’s use of “Dave”; somehow it foreshadowed greater intimacy to come, something I had greatly desired with her. With others, I had never cared for “Dave.” I was not a “Dave.” except with Lindsey.

  Pham said, “John Pilgrim killed himself.”

  I shifted my weight in the chair. My eyes wandered to other tables. Jerry Colangelo, the owner of the Diamondbacks, was in a hushed conversation with a very tall, expensively dressed black man. The president of Bank One walked by, followed by her pin-striped assistants. China rattled back in the kitchen.

  I said, “If that’s true, why did the records indicate this was an open homicide investigation?”

  “In J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the special agent was supposed to be a superman,” Pham said. “His integrity, above reproach. His steadiness, unquestioned. In reality, John Pilgrim was a problem. He was a drunk and a disciplinary nightmare who was sent to Phoenix to clean up his act. He had symptoms of what we’d call depression. He’d threatened to kill himself before.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “It’s what my bosses told me,” he said. “Get it? Pilgrim was bad for the FBI’s image. They wanted this case forgotten as quick as possible in 1948, and nothing’s changed.”

  “That’s nuts,” I said. “That was fifty years ago. The FBI’s had a few problems since then that are worse than an agent killing himself. Why is this such a big secret?”

  “Because it’s a family secret,” Pham said. “And you’re not family. No offense. But you’re not only local law enforcement, you’re unorthodox, and an outsider. I find that appealing. But this wasn’t my call to make.”

  “So Pilgrim stands in front of a canal, shoots himself, and falls in?”

  Pham shrugged. He had his orders.

  “And the badge just floated away,” I said. “Somebody picks it up, and it begins this wondrous journey around the pawn shops, junk drawers, and secondhand jackets of Phoenix.”

  “That could be just what happened,” Pham said.

  “Don’t you think that if the average person found an FBI badge, he would call the police and report it?”

  “Maybe he thought it was a toy,” Pham said, unconvincingly. “Anyway, Kate says the homeless man might not have even known the badge was in his jacket. Kate says he probably got the jacket second- or thirdhand.”

  Ah, yes. Kate. Bonnie Kate. I said, “The homeless men I notice are very aware of any fungible wealth they might come into contact with They check every pay phone coin return. And they’re not going to feel something sewn into a Levi’s jacket? The detectives found it first thing when they examined the body in Maryvale. Maybe George Weed had carried that badge around for years. Maybe Weed somehow came in contact with John Pilgrim. He would have been ten years old when Pilgrim was shot.”

  “Look.” Pham said. “I don’t like this any more than you do. That’s why I said it sucks.”

  I let the waiter take my plate away. “Fine,” I said. “End of story. Maybe Pilgrim doesn’t even have family left, anybody who would care what happened.”

  “There is still family,” Pham said.

  “Maybe I can talk to them,” I said.

  “Impossible.”

  “What about his partner, Renzetti?”

  “No way, Mapstone,” Pham said. I had lost first-name status.

  “So Renzetti is alive?”

  Pham’s eyes widened when he was exasperated. “You don’t know when to quit,” he said quickly.

  “Let’s just say I have a very demanding boss. He’s not going to care that the Bureau has changed its mind about me being on this case. Pilgrim and George Weed were both found dead in Maricopa County. I think he’d say that you don’t have a say in my involvement.” David Mapstone, doing his part for interdepartmental relations.

  “Eric,” I said, forcing a slower, easier tone in my voice. “I don’t want to cause you trouble. But you won’t let me see the FBI files on the case. You don’t want me on the case. What harm would be done if you called retired Agent Renzetti and asked if he might speak to me?”

  Pham said nothing. He faced his plate and absentmindedly ate the bread from the remains of his club sandwich.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The carousel at Encanto Park was empty. But, at the command of a maintenance crew, it spun around to calliope music, dispensing old-time joy for a PlayStation and DVD world. This was another part of Phoenix that up-and-comer professionals like Eric Pham never saw: the lovely old city park nestled into the Palmcroft neighborhood about half a mile from my house. What did it say about me that I preferred a habitat from the jazz age rather than the sprawl age?

  On Tuesday afternoon, the park was nearly empty. Instead of families picnicking under the stately old trees, lovers lingering on the foot-bridges or kids fishing the lagoon, a few homeless men lounged on the grass. I lingered at the locked gates of Enchanted Island, watching the workmen at the carousel, remembering a ten-year-old’s memories in this park. Then, the little train ran every day, the lagoon was stocked with fish, and no one seemed afraid.

  My legs and middle were still giggly sore from loving Lindsey two hours before. Somehow all the uncertainties and worries of the past two weeks had made us hornier, and we were in the process of having sex in every room, and on every piece of furniture, of our unknown host’s elegant tree house. Pictures of memory kept rerunning deliciously in my head. I came into the living room to find her sitting in a big leather chair. She wore a black summer dress with a quiet flower print and dainty black shoulder straps. I’m sure it was a demure dress, until Lindsey wore it. She was drawn up in the chair reading, a paperback propped on her naked knees, the dress riding up on her thighs, falling just right in the front to show a hint of cleavage. I put down whatever forgotten work I was doing and knelt down in front of her. Then, my hands stroking the soft, warm, taut skin of her leg. Her giggles turning into soft moans. Sliding the fabric slowly up her thigh, kissing her perfect smooth knees, pulling off the black flip-flops, sucking her toes. Gently, slowly, removing one tiny strap from her pale shoulder, then the other. The exquisite construction of her shoulder blades, her collarbones, her breastbone, her slender form. Dark tresses of hair fell into her face as she looked down at me, one renegade black strand trying to get in the side of her sweet mouth. She was wearing very white cotton panties.

  “David Mapstone.” The voice was tough, metal on metal, familiar. I turned to shake hands with Harrison Wolfe. He was as tall as me, with a long ruddy face and thick white hair combed back from a sun-etched forehead. His unblinking cornflower blue eyes lacked any hint of warmth.

  “So what mess have you gotten yourself into?” he asked.

  You didn’t just call Harrison Wolfe to arrange a meeting. Since he had retired from the Phoenix Police back in the ’70s, he had done everything he could to stay away from the cop world. He was just another anonymous old man in a city park, if the man looked twenty years younger than his eighty-some years, and if he moved with a vague sense of coiled menace. You didn’t just make a phone call to a legend, the homicide detective who worked every major case in Phoenix from the 1950s to the 1970s. So I had left a message with a guy I knew at the Police Museum, and waited for Wolfe to call me.

  We walked to a quiet spot overlooking the lagoon while I laid out the Pilgrim case as I understood it. I started with the body found in Maryvale. Finding the badge. Identifying George Weed. I ended with w
hat I knew about dead FBI agent John Pilgrim. When I was done, Wolfe worked his lean jaw and stared out at the golf course, and across the trees at the Central Corridor skyline. Lindsey was in one of those buildings. Yuri could be riding the carousel at Encanto Park and the cops wouldn’t know it.

  “So the Bureau sent Pilgrim here to get him clean.” Wolfe said, and snorted without humor. “Fat chance. Phoenix brings out the worst in people.”

  He turned back to the lagoon, picked up a stone, and skipped it across the water-one, two, three, four skips before it gave up to gravity. “Pilgrim was ancient history when I joined the department in 1955,” he said. “Detective bureau didn’t consider it an active case.”

  I asked why.

  “You’ve been dealing with the Fucked-up Bureau of Instigation, so you know the answer to that. Mapstone. They don’t want local law enforcement sticking its nose in. Scuttlebutt was that Pilgrim shot himself. Yeah, it was the only unsolved killing of an FBI agent in Arizona history. But that’s just interesting for civilians. The cops know what really happened, and they move on to the next mayhem. What really happened was that Pilgrim shot himself.”

  “And nothing in your years in homicide made you doubt that?”

  “Never gave it a second thought,” he said. His eyes blinked rapidly, uncharacteristically. “But I never knew they hadn’t recovered his badge…”

  “There’s a lot not to know,” I said. “Somebody’s gone through the local files. They’ve removed the ballistics report, God knows what else.”

  “So ask your friends at the Bureau.”

  I said nothing. Wolfe said, “It’s always a one-way street, running to the feds’ benefit.”

  “They didn’t take everything,” I said. “I found a detective’s notebook, a guy named Dan Bird.” I watched Wolfe’s expression, but he knew he was being watched now and he just bored his eyes into me, waiting. I went on, “Bird’s notebook said Pilgrim didn’t have any gunpowder residue on his hands. That’s not consistent with a suicide. He had a single.38 slug in his heart. He was dead before he hit the water. He floated several miles in the canal.”