by Jon Talton
“Maricopa County?” the baritone boomed. He held his garden shears as if he might use them on me. “What’s your business here, deputy sheriff?”
“I’m investigating the John Pilgrim case.”
“John Pilgrim?”
“I understand he was your partner, when you worked in Phoenix in the 1940s.”
“That’s an FBI matter,” he said. His lips barely moved when he talked. It was more a gentle bobbing of the jutting square jaw. “I can’t talk to local law enforcement about that.”
He handed back the badge case and turned back to his work, the comic book hero body kneeling down to a flower bed.
“Agent Renzetti, we found his badge.”
He stopped, then the bony hands resumed their snipping, picking up each dead stalk as he worked. “What are you talking about?”
“The missing badge. We found it a few weeks ago, on a homeless man who had died. I was hoping you could give me some insight into what Agent Pilgrim was working on when he died.”
“How the hell did you find me?”
I told him about Pilgrim’s son.
He turned his head toward me. The eyes studied me with disinterested hostility.
“What’s your name again?”
I gave it to him.
“Badge number?”
“I’ve been working with the Phoenix FBI.”
“Then you won’t mind giving me your badge number.”
I gave it to him. I was wasting my time in this pleasant little neighborhood a long way from home.
The hero turned back to his flowerbed. He just let me stand there. I watched a hummingbird, just over his shoulder, levitate amid some yellow trumpet-shaped blossoms.
“Good day, deputy.”
“Let me give you my card, with the number where I’m staying in San Francisco.” I pulled a card out of my blazer pocket and dropped it on a nearby potting bench.
As I walked away, I heard, “Please don’t bother me again.”
When I got back to the hotel there was a message from Eric Pham. Please call. I thought about calling-maybe it was about Lindsey. But I knew it was about Renzetti, as in, what the hell was I doing? If there were trouble with Lindsey, Peralta would call. I could count on that, couldn’t I? I ignored the message and called Sharon Peralta. We agreed to meet for dinner.
We met at Tadich Grille, a walk down a hill from the hotel on busy city streets. After a long enough wait in the noisy bar for me to finish a martini and for Sharon to sip a cosmopolitan, we were shown to a secluded booth in the back. Sharon was turned out elegantly, as always, in a black pantsuit with a simple turquoise pendent dangling from her neck. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon. Those huge, lovely dark eyes looked as they had when she was twenty-five. I hadn’t seen her for months, since she began commuting to San Francisco.
“So how is Mike?” she wanted to know. It was an odd question coming from his wife of, what, twenty-nine years? But, as she had said before, I had been his partner on the streets, and partners sometimes knew more than spouses did.
I settled for, “OK, I guess.” I wasn’t going to engage in special pleading with the sheriff’s wife, even if we had known each other for what seemed like forever. I had known her when she was my partner’s shy young wife. But her gradual transformation hadn’t surprised me. From persisting in getting her degrees, to establishing her practice in Scottsdale, to her debut on radio and writing the self-help book that was to become her first best-seller-I’d like to say I always knew it would happen. Sharon had grit.
“I know it must be frustrating for you, not being with Lindsey,” she said, reading me pretty well, as always.
“I don’t understand his obsession with this case,” I said.
“He’s not comprehensible by us mere mortals, David. You know that. I’m still waiting for him to mourn his father’s death. Not Mr. Tough. Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve put up with his moods for the past five years.”
“You wanted me to come home to Phoenix as much as he did,” I said.
“I know,” she said, her huge liquid black eyes studying me. “But I’ve come to hate Phoenix. They’ve ruined it, David. We natives remember when it was wonderful. But now Phoenix has all the problems of a big city, and none of the culture, none of the edge. The politics are insane. There’s no economy. The heat is worse and worse.”
“But it’s a dry heat…”
She grimaced. “Oh, God. No I had to leave, David. That’s one reason I’m here.”
“Here is nice.”
“I could see you here, David.” She gave a mischievous smile. “You’re cultivated and quirky. You are such a big-city person.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Your Little Miss Perfect would like it, too.”
“Lindsey,” I said.
“Mmmmm. OK, no cattiness, I know you’re worried. And I must admit she’s been good for you.”
We ordered, and I ate too much. Sharon told me how her old practice had dwindled in the years she was doing her radio show, so she felt free enough to work from San Francisco and commute to Phoenix twice a month. “I’m not sure, after twenty years of practice, that I was doing most of my patients any good,” she said. Here she could focus on her radio show-“I know it’s entertainment,” she said-and writing. She was teaching a class at San Francisco State.
Then she wanted to know more about me, and I told her about Dan Milton’s death and my own questions about whether I should go back to teaching, my growing discontent with my hometown.
“Maybe it’s my midlife crisis,” I said.
“You should go to Portland,” Sharon said. “You need to be around smart, stimulating people.”
I just listened.
“Do you still have panic attacks, David?”
I hunched deeper into my seat. It wasn’t something I was proud of, despite the New Age of nonjudgmentalism. I said, “Not so much now.”
“See, I told you Lindsey was good for you.” She patted my hand. “You’re a Renaissance man, David. One of the last. You needed to come back to Phoenix when you did-you found Lindsey there, didn’t you? Somehow you needed the adventure of the sheriff’s office. You’re a man of action and a man of the mind. A thinking woman’s deputy.” She laughed, her full crystal laugh that I realized I had missed. “But you were gone from Phoenix for years before you came back. You just outgrew Phoenix. I did, too, in my way. Whatever comes next will become clear soon enough. I’ve lived long enough to know every day is a gift. I’m damned if I’ll mortgage my happiness to the future a day longer. That’s another reason I’m here.”
“And what about the sheriff?” I ventured cautiously.
She shrugged and made a little face. “He’s got his dream,” she said quietly.
Unease descended over me. God knows they’d had trouble before. But Mike and Sharon had always been together. All my adult life, really. I started blathering about my case. Then the check came.
Outside, a misty rain had begun. I started to hail Sharon a cab, but she put a hand on my arm.
“David, you need to know.”
“I don’t, Sharon.”
“Yes, you do. I have someone here. Someone I’m in love with.” She studied my face. “Don’t hate me,” she said.
“You know I don’t,” I said. “I’m just listening. Does Mike…?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think he cares. He doesn’t want to be here. And he had a fling years ago. But this isn’t payback. I really want to be happy, David. Nobody knows this yet, but I’m going to end the radio show. Money isn’t an issue now. I just want to finally live my life. My daughters are here. And now I feel like I have a real shot at something good.”
Sharon’s black hair glistened in the misty rain, and I saw clearly how it was shot through with gray, how her face was now a scrimshaw of subtle wrinkles. We’d all gotten older together, me and Mike and Sharon. But the world was moving at a thousand miles a minute. I felt a wave of love and sadness. I pulled her
into me and hugged her. She cleaved close to me, and I could feel her tears on my neck.
“Time to get you out of the rain,” I said, holding my arm up. In a few seconds, a yellow cab pulled over.
***
I buttoned up my trench coat and walked, happy to be surrounded by the tall buildings and the lights. The detached scholar in me absorbed Sharon’s news with equanimity, while the edgy David was thrilled. A few couples walked by covered by umbrellas. Men and women. Women and women. Men and men. Better to muse on the many wonderful varieties of love in a beautiful city. The windows of an art gallery shimmered in the night, well-dressed patrons inside laughing and drinking wine. The narrow, crowded streets of Chinatown beckoned on one side. The towers of the financial district rose above me. Sharon was right, I could see myself here.
I turned onto a darker sidestreet and heard voices singing. Singing well. They seemed weirdly out of place on a deserted sidewalk. I recognized the grand nineteenth-century hymn, written before modernity and doubt: “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” A church hulked against the street, its stones black from age and soot. But a stained glass window was brilliantly lit, and it let out the voices of the choir practice inside. It took me a moment to realize that one of the voices was closer, coming from a darkened portal into the church. My eyes adjusted to a raggedy man standing against the sooty stones. He had a beautiful voice. “’Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all who breathe away,’” he sang to the street.
At his feet was an upturned hat. I pulled out a bill and dropped it in. I walked on slowly, letting the rain mend my desert skin, hearing the voices fade.
When I got to the lobby, the desk clerk handed me a message. It was from Vince Renzetti.
Chapter Nineteen
What is it about old photographs? Did they always look old? On a shelf at home, my grandmother and grandfather look out at me from a sepia print. He wears a thin tie and suit coat, she a simple, light-colored blouse. He is blond, with a wide, sensual mouth. She is black Irish, her eyes brooding and intelligent. Both wear serious expressions-the style of the day, and, as Grandfather told me much later, a style that helped conceal the dental problems that were rampant then. Those days were 1910, and Grandmother and Grandfather were newlyweds, twenty and twenty-four years old respectively. And of course that photo was the leading edge of technology of that day. They didn’t sit for the photographer in dusty territorial Arizona knowing that many decades later they would look like a museum piece to their grandson, who lived with everyday miracles such as jet travel, air-conditioning, biotechnology, and computers.
I reminded myself of this as I sat in Vince Renzetti’s parlor and took in a lifetime of old photos that sat on tables, shelves, and walls-everywhere that didn’t house a plant. He was one of those men who were told “You haven’t changed a bit!” at reunions. So he was instantly recognizable in the Army Air Corps officer’s uniform of World War II. Same in the photo with J. Edgar Hoover, both men wearing double-breasted suits and expressions of straight-mouthed seriousness. And another picture showing him with a young man who had a thin nose and an earnest Kentucky face: John Pilgrim. They were walking with their hands on the arms of a fleshy-faced guy who tried to look away from the camera.
“That was just after we were assigned to Phoenix, in 1947,” Renzetti said, noticing me noticing the photo. “Everybody wore suits, ties, and hats back then. Even the bad guys.”
He sat in a straight-backed chair opposite me, drinking green tea. This day he wore a blue blazer and red and white rep tie. Outside a screen door the weather was chill and rainy. Inside, it was uncomfortably warm and smelled vaguely of dill and Williams LectricShave.
“I’ve checked you out, Mapstone,” he said in the booming master-of-ceremonies voice. “You worked as a sheriff’s deputy when you were young. Then you got your Ph.D. in history and taught for fifteen years. When you failed to gain tenure, you went back home to Phoenix. You got a job from your old partner, who was the chief deputy.”
“Now he’s the sheriff,” I interposed.
“You use the historian’s techniques to solve old cases,” he went on. “Very innovative.”
Renzetti’s eyes never left me. His hands didn’t move from the teacup he held in his lap-no gesticulating Italian-American stereotype in Vincent Renzetti. His posture was relaxed and businesslike. Only his sentences, short, chopped, conveyed any sense of energy or agitation.
“You were raised by your paternal grandparents,” he said. “Why?”
“My parents died,” I said, trying to force down a feeling that we were playing a game of personal manipulation, maybe just as he played it as a G-man. “They were in a small plane.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and a little warmth took his voice down a few decibels. “My wife and child are dead, too.” He motioned to a shelf of family photos, a black-and-white of a fair-haired woman with merry eyes and a wide, glistening forehead, and a color photo of what seemed like her clone in long hippy hair-a daughter. But he offered no explanation.
“I gave my life to the Bureau,” he said. “I don’t regret it. Most of the time.”
And he told his story. He was a kid from San Francisco, North Beach, born in 1919. His parents came over from Naples before the Great War. His father, who couldn’t read or write, delivered milk with a horse-drawn wagon. But young Vincent was forced to stay in school. He went on to Cal-Berkeley. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Air Corps, and flew P-51 Mustang fighters in Europe. He didn’t say it, but I noticed a Silver Star pinned on the uniform of the young officer in the photo. After the war, he went to law school and then joined the FBI. He was a rookie when he came to Phoenix.
“My point is that I’ve decided to take a chance on you, Mapstone,” he said. “The Bureau was good to me. I’ve had a good career, and a good life. The only thing I regret is what happened to John Pilgrim.”
He sipped his tea and I watched, afraid even to breathe.
“Nowdays, I read these stories about a special agent who was passing secrets to the Russians. Another one who was selling information to the Mafia. Then the agents who warned about terrorists, and they were ignored. That hurts, personally. It makes me wonder why I stayed silent all those years.”
The room grew large with expectation. Outside the screen door, I could hear soft rain, and beyond that, a siren. I asked quietly, “Did Pilgrim kill himself?”
“No, hell no,” Renzetti said, his nostrils flaring. He set the teacup aside and shook his head in short, exasperated jerks. “That’s just nonsense. John loved life. He loved everything about it. Maybe too much.”
“So why…?”
“Why? Because John was a maverick. Because John made his bosses look bad when he solved cases his own way. Because they didn’t know what the hell happened, and saying he was a suicide tied a neat little ribbon around it. Even if that ribbon was only for internal consumption. Look, the Bureau probably told you John was a head case of some kind, that he was sent to Phoenix to get one last chance. That’s bullshit. He was a top agent. He was sent to Phoenix to trap a spy.” He sipped his tea and watched my reaction. “That’s right. The Soviets had moles at Los Alamos. People working on the nuclear program. All this has come out the past few years, Moscow releasing documents, American papers declassified…”
“The Venona documents.”
“Very good. So in the late forties, the Bureau moved against these spies, and it became too risky for them to meet their handlers in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. But Phoenix was a day’s train ride away for someone working at Los Alamos. It was big enough that you could go unnoticed. We got a tip that a Russian had set up shop in Phoenix, a guy named Dimitri. He spoke good English, and passed himself off as a hard-working immigrant. His real mission was to pass along atomic secrets.”
I eased back in my chair, trying to take it all in. My case of a homeless man carrying a missing badge had suddenly catapulted me into the dawn of the Cold War. The Red Scare.
“Ther
e were spies,” Renzetti said emphatically, fixing me with the yellow eyes. “It wasn’t like that cocksucker McCarthy told it. But Soviet agents had penetrated parts of the government. John was transferred from Los Angeles to Phoenix to shadow this Dimitri. And I was just some shavetail kid who was assigned to go with him.”
They had arrived in Phoenix in the summer of 1947, and soon found themselves handling more than the Russian. “It was a wide-open town,” Renzetti said. “Like the old West meets Tammany Hall. Phoenix was run by a city commission, and the commissioners were dirty. One of them was running prostitution and drugs on the south side of town. There were allegations that some of the local contractors who had built the training bases during the war had defrauded the government of huge amounts of money and material. There were problems on the Indian reservations. On top of that, the Mafia started to move in, buying land, selling protection. The Chicago Outfit set up a little satellite operation, and they started taking over the rackets from the locals. Lot of bloodshed. We had a six-man field office, and we could have used a hundred agents.”
“Sounds like Pilgrim could have made a lot of enemies,” I said.
“He did. Look, Pilgrim was no saint. He liked drink and he liked women. Hell, he loved women. It was a different kind of world then. But he was a damned good agent. We got an indictment against the one commissioner, Duke Simms. We sent some of the local cops to prison, and we slowed down the mobsters.”
I noted the name Duke-Pilgrim’s son had mentioned a Duke. I said, “What about Dimitri?”
“Disappeared. After John was shot.”
“And you don’t buy the suicide theory.”
“No.”
“His son seems to believe it. The Bureau definitely does.”
“They didn’t know him the way I did. Look, Pilgrim told me he was going to meet a guy. Somebody who had information about Dimitri. That was the last I saw him. He turned up dead two days later.”
