Dry Heat dmm-3

by Jon Talton

  I stood, a bit unsteady. “What will Eric Pham have to say about that?”

  “Leave him to me.”

  I didn’t pick up the ticket.

  “Lindsey is going to be fine,” he said, “And you’ll be climbing the walls.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “About Lindsey? You must really think I am a bastard.”

  “You are a bastard,” I said, draining my martini and setting down the glass. “But I mean the Pilgrim case, George Weed in the swimming pool. Why do you care?”

  Peralta said nothing. The skin on his face hardened until, in the meager light reflected from city sky, he seemed to take on the countenance of a stone idol. Waiting for worship or sacrifice, I thought unkindly. I said, “You go to San Francisco. You can see Sharon.”

  “Not my kind of place,” Peralta said. “Can’t you just trust me for once? We go back, remember? Old partners?”

  “Old partners are straight with each other.”

  “Thanks for the drinks, Mapstone.” He ambled down to the street, his earlier limp gone, and a black Crown Victoria slid up to the curb.

  He gave me a little wave with his big hand and disappeared inside.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The force of jet engines pushed me into the fabric and cushion of my seat. It was just enough G-force to keep my back from hurting. After several hours of looking at the airline tickets, I had decided to get out of town. Less than twenty-four hours after being taken down like any other scumbag fleeing from the cops, I had a diverse menu of aches and pains. For some strange reason, I was less nervous than usual about flying. Maybe after two weeks of keeping anxiety like an unwanted boarder I had become accustomed to being afraid all the time.

  Out the window, the city fell away rapidly and spread out. It looked like a 1,500-square-mile semiconductor chip surrounded by dun and gray mountains. Down below, spring was almost gone. April had been a succession of days with above average temperatures. The sweet season that begins in October would be burned away by May, followed by the hellish summer. All the rich people fled to Coronado or Del Mar or the San Juan Islands. The rest of us suffered.

  The jetliner climbed and turned northwest. Out the window, the urban organism that was Phoenix ate up the fields and citrus groves that had once separated the city from the desert. Farming was the oldest human activity in the Salt River Valley, dating back to the prehistoric Indians who dug the first canals. Now it was almost all gone. Home looks different from 15,000 feet.

  I was on the airplane after spending one of those nights of the damned that produces artists or serial killers. Sleep brought nightmares of violence and loss. Waking brought its own anxieties. Every noise in the old house assumed a sinister tone. Closing and locking the bedroom door provided no security to my imagination. Nor did keeping on every light. So I lay down, turned from side to side, got up, prowled, came back to bed, over and over. I swore I could smell Lindsey in the sheets. That and lying on her side of the bed provided my only comfort. So I walked the floors, checking doors and windows, setting traps, finally turning off all the lights so I could watch the street. Pasternak, the old tomcat, watched me from Grandfather’s grand old leather chair. The Russian mafia didn’t come, but sometime after 4 A.M. I was lost in yet another nightmare, vivid and horrible. The clock said I had been asleep for all of fifteen minutes.

  I was really hurting by that time. So I downed too many Advils and took up station in the study. There was nothing to do but try to work, so I put my mind on the world of John Pilgrim. In 1948, World War II had been barely over for three years but the Cold War was coming together. Harry Truman had won a surprise victory for another term as president. But a freshman Republican Senator named Joe McCarthy was accusing the administration of being riddled with communist agents. The Russians were about to acquire the A-bomb. It was a time of fear.

  John Pilgrim would have arrived in a small farm town called Phoenix. It was an entirely different dimension, a different state of matter, from the sprawling city I was leaving, with its golf courses, world class resorts, endless subdivisions, and urban problems. Phoenix in 1948 consisted of about seventeen square miles. Those who weren’t farming worked in the produce warehouses, the farm implement businesses, and the feedlots and slaughterhouses of the world’s largest stockyards. The good jobs were on the railroads, or in the banks and offices that a small city could support. One of those offices was my grandfather’s dental practice downtown on Washington Street.

  The sense of newness and mastery of nature must have been overwhelming. The Valley had only been inhabited, in modern times, for eight decades. Before that, it was a vast wilderness, with the abandoned canals of the Hohokam sitting there for centuries as testimony that here was one of the most fertile river valleys in the world, provided you could add water. At the turn of the twentieth century, the federal government did add water, with the dams and lakes on the river east of town, and the desert bloomed. By the 1940s, the second miracle was coming into wide use: refrigerated air. A completely manmade environment became possible. Thousands of servicemen had trained in the Arizona desert during the war, and many had decided they wanted to return. So the sleepy farm town that John Pilgrim found was in the midst of big change.

  Pilgrim’s world would have been one of hopeless conformity to twenty-first-century eyes. If a man was lucky, he held one job all his life, a good union trade. And lucky was the word, for these people had been through a Great Depression when a quarter of the workforce was out of a job. In a little town like Phoenix, people lived conventional lives, went to church, knew their neighbors. This was the confining place John Pilgrim found.

  But none of that told me a damned thing about why John Pilgrim ended up dead, and lost his badge. And I was right on the edge of a profound thought when I slipped into a heavy nap 30,000 feet above California.

  ***

  I took the new BART line from the airport into San Francisco. The train was filled with all the characters that make a real city. A pair of Anglo men in their twenties held an intense huddled conversation about who really killed Tupac Shakur. A hulking dark-haired man carried a flamboyant tropical bird on his shoulder. Miniskirted coeds danced through the car, changing seats with arthritic old women. Street kids bummed change. But there was no mysterious blond man with the Slavic face, no one paying any attention to me. I felt anonymous and safe. By 4 P.M., I had checked into a little hotel on Grant Street, right at the gate of Chinatown. Lindsey and I had discovered it years ago. I didn’t stay long, changing into a navy suit with a blue Ben Silver tie, checking a street map, and heading out into the heart of the city. The air was cool and healing, with fog starting to congregate over Mount Sutro.

  Richard Pilgrim lived on Washington Street in Pacific Heights. It was one of those fabulous city neighborhoods with everything you could want in walking distance. There was nothing like it in the 1,500 square miles of Phoenix sprawl. The address went with a five-story Victorian job with big bay windows jutting over the street. Richard was on the fifth floor, and after explaining myself over the intercom, he pressed a buzzer and I went up.

  The man who met me at the elevator and studied my ID was nearly a head shorter than me, with a slight body and black forearm hair curling out of the cuffs of a simple but expensive-looking gray turtleneck. He had a clerk’s face, mild and unquestioning, with small brown eyes, a comb-over of thin straight black hair, and a mouth too broad for the too narrow lower part of his skull. His skin looked draped and unhealthy, like sun-bleached tent fabric.

  “This is a very unexpected visit,” he said, once we were seated opposite each other in a high-ceilinged living room. The room was large but cramped with too much furniture, upholstered in very loud reds and greens, and stacks of books and newspapers. I noted art books, science-physics and astronomy-investing primers, children’s books, coffee-table photography books. A polymath.

  “I didn’t know if the FBI had been in touch,” I explained. “A little more than two weeks
ago, your father’s badge was found in Phoenix. It had been missing since his death.” I was calm and measured, using my counsel-the-victims voice that had also been useful with neurotic graduate students back in my professor days. The small eyes watched me. They seemed permanently wet. I went on: “The badge was being carried by a homeless man who was found dead in a swimming pool. We don’t know why this man was carrying your father’s badge.”

  The broad mouth smiled. “Sounds like the perfect macabre Phoenix crime,” Richard Pilgrim said. “Is that all?”

  I looked him over. He sat across from me perfectly compact, folded in on himself as neat as a shirt back from the cleaners. “That’s all,” I said. “Except for a few questions.”

  “Always questions.” He sighed. “You’ll have to excuse me, Deputy, if I’m not playing the role correctly. My father was killed over half a century ago. I was ten years old. I have few memories of him, and those I have aren’t particularly…savory.” He was a man who chose his words. “You see, Deputy, there was a general once named Douglas MacArthur, and he had a son.”

  “Arthur,” I said, more from reflex than a desire to be a show-off.

  “One doesn’t expect a policeman to know such obscure knowledge,” Richard Pilgrim said.

  “I play a lot of trivia games,” I said. “Arthur disappeared as an adult, lived a life of obscurity. Very different from his father’s grandiose life.”

  “Exactly.” Richard said, tapping his slight knee. “In my small way, I was touched by that story. My father was a hero, so they said. A hero on a small scale. He was a tough guy. Loud. Athletic. I wanted none of that. In fact, I spent my entire life trying to get away from my father’s influence.’

  “And here I am, waking the dead.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Seems as if you succeeded,” I ventured. “In getting away. What exactly do you do for a living, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Live each day gratefully.” He smiled. “I’m a freelance editor. The book business is awful, but I’ve managed to make a good living. I never have to leave my flat if I don’t want to.”

  “That would be a pity, such a nice neighborhood.”

  “Yes, you’re from awful Phoenix, so I’m surprised you can appreciate it.”

  “I thought about what it would look like as a giant surface parking lot and Home Depot store.” He didn’t smile. Back to business. “Mr. Pilgrim, does the name George Weed mean anything to you?”

  He shook his head. I told him who Weed was.

  “Sounds like an alias,” the G-man’s son said.

  “I realize you were only a kid, but do you have much memory of the time when your father died?”

  “I remember everything,” he said simply. “They came to the door after we were asleep. Mother talked to them in the living room, I knew it was bad. We were living in a little duplex on…I think it was Culver Street. I’d been in four different schools by the fifth grade, he was transferred so much. I hated being in Phoenix. I hated the heat. They closed his coffin for the funeral, and I was afraid to touch it. They folded up a flag and gave it to my mother.”

  “You said some memories weren’t so good.”

  “I used the word ‘unsavory.’ My father had a drinking problem. He and Mother fought. He hit her. It’s not fun to see when you’re a little kid. He’d stay out, whoring around, I suppose. There were money problems. I remember once I followed him on my bike to one of his bars. Who knows what the hell I was thinking. Maybe that if I caught him everything could be made happy for us. The Pla-Mor Tap Room. I never forgot that name. When he realized I was behind him, he didn’t get mad, didn’t hit me-and believe me, he was capable of it. He took me in and bought me a beer, shot some pool, made me feel like a little man. I was ten years old. He was like that, too, could be fun as hell. Very charming. I didn’t know until years later it was classic drunk behavior.”

  “What was your mother like?”

  “She was small and pretty and kind,” he said, speaking rapidly. “She deserved better. After he was killed, she wanted to move us to Los Angeles, to live with her brother. But she took up with a man there in Phoenix, another version of my father.” He rubbed the loose face skin. “None of that matters to whatever investigation you’re pursuing.”

  “Do you have any siblings?” I looked around for family photos, found none.

  He shook his head, staring intently at the floor. “There was a lot beneath the surface. In his life. Don’t ask me what. Little kids pick up on these things, even if they lack the sophistication to know the specific details.”

  “Did he ever mention his work? Anything you might have overheard.”

  “Somebody named…Duke.” He raised his forefinger in a triumph of memory. I waited. “Duke somebody. I remember this terrible fight my parents had just before he walked out, for the last time. It must have been just before he was killed. They were yelling like furies, and this Duke person kept coming up.”

  “A friend? Somebody your father was investigating?”

  “I just don’t know,” he said, shaking his bony head, deflated.

  “What did they tell you happened to your father?”

  “He was killed in the line of duty,” Richard Pilgrim said. “And he was a hero. I never believed it. I thought he drank himself to death, or got into some kind of trouble. You need to believe me, Deputy, that I haven’t spent my life obsessing about this, like some low-rent Hamlet.”

  He walked me to the door. “I’m sorry your trip was for nothing,” he said. “But maybe you’ll have better luck when you talk to Renzetti.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Didn’t they tell you? His old partner is retired in San Jose. Vince Renzetti. The old guy’s got to be ninety-five, but he’s still alive. Still wants to be the good FBI man, looking after the windows and orphans. I talked to him not more than a month ago.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Vince Renzetti, John Pilgrim’s old partner, lived in a comfortable vest pocket of a neighborhood just north of San Jose’s small downtown. On the train down the Peninsula from San Francisco, I got eyefuls of the squat flat-roofed, glass-skinned office parks from which Silicon Valley rules the world. But the center of San Jose seemed like the prosperous farm town that it would have been decades ago, when canning prunes meant more than thinking up software. At the least, the architecture was more appealing: a charming Spanish colonial railroad station, where I transferred to the light rail line; a handful of interesting old hotels and office buildings, well restored; an imposing old cathedral, and a sign that pointed to Peralta Adobe Historic Park. That last one brought me back to the business at hand.

  Renzetti had one of those “go to hell, telemarketer” devices on his phone, which required you to dial in your phone number in order to complete the call. When I did, he had no reason to know who was calling or why-so, not surprisingly, he didn’t pick up. So there I was on his street. The address went with a little gray Deco Moderne house, all Buck Rogers curves and streamlines, deep in the shade of hundred-year-old trees. It was about two blocks off the light rail line, and the walk felt fine in the warming morning air. I didn’t know whether I would like this town or not-I didn’t know the way to San Jose and had never been there before. But I liked the vistas, yellow-brown hills lifting up in the east, and in the west a brooding line of blue-green mountains. The map told me the ocean was on the other side. An airport must have been nearby, as a succession of jetliners, silver bellies close, swooped across the sky.

  I walked up a narrow brick sidewalk. You never know what you’ll find when you go calling on retired cops. The stereotype of the lawman who puts down the badge and ends up putting a gun in his mouth has more than a little truth to it. Cop work is a consuming calling, and some cops lose too much of themselves in a world that can be very insular and destructive. Sounded like universities, when you thought about it. Of course, there were happier outcomes. Two of the retired cops on my street had taken up art, one working in m
etal and the other in woodworking. Hell, they seemed healthier minded than me on a good day.

  Vince Renzetti’s mailbox told me I was probably dealing with a by-the-book guy. A prominent decal proclaimed “Retired Special Agents of the FBI-Gold Member.” On the door, a hand-lettered sign said, “In the garden, to your left.”

  Sure enough, another narrow brick sidewalk took me to the west side of the house, through a gate, and into a walled-in side yard. I stepped into an outdoor room: walls and ceiling of limbs and vines, wainscoting and floor of stalks, ferns and flowers, a vault of deep green, with splashes of purples, reds, and yellows. I don’t know much about gardening, aside from enjoying Lindsey’s handiwork back home. But it seemed as if this side yard could pass for a small city’s prized botanical garden. The rows of plantings and sandy pathways had a military precision that was very different from the cultivated wildness of Lindsey’s garden. I heard a loud snipping noise behind an extravagant stand of irises.

  “Agent Renzetti?” I said to the back of the man making the snipping noise.

  “That’s me.” The voice didn’t go with an old man. It was a powerful baritone. The man stood, unfolded himself, and looked me over.

  “You don’t look like the man who’s supposed to be delivering my dirt.”

  I held up my badge and ID card and told him who I was.

  The man who took my badge case certainly didn’t look in his nineties. He looked like one of those heroic comic characters come to life: muscular chest sprouting out of a tiny waistline, thick jaw, gray hair combed in a Brylcreem pompadour. Only his hands seemed old: mottled, bony, arthritic walnuts where the knuckles used to be. And where his upper arms disappeared into his T-shirt, pale crepey skin draped down. He was tall and stood with an officer’s bearing. His eyes were a strange yellow-green-was that called hazel? — and they didn’t like what they saw.