by Jon Talton
I said something about putting down the gun and talking, or maybe something about me being happy to turn around, walk back to my car, and drive away. I forget exactly. Shotguns have that effect on me.
“I don’t want any more Maricopa County, Phoenix, bullshit!”
And who wouldn’t agree with that? Maricopa County, Phoenix, bullshit had led me to the doorstep of a crazy woman with a shotgun. She didn’t know the half of it.
“Don’t you know there’s been a break in the Pilgrim case?” I said hurriedly.
The shotgun came down. She stared at me. Then she turned and walked into the little adobe house. I heard her say, “I don’t care about that.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t see it on the TV.” I walked slowly toward the house.
Her small face crinkled. “I gave up TV, especially the Phoenix stations. Too depressing. Every night it’s three fatal wrecks, a child molestation, and a shooting. Every night.”
“Lorie Pope at the Republic says you were interested in the Pilgrim case for years,” I called into the doorway. I let my hand rest on the butt of the Python in its holster, just in case the shotgun urge hit again.
She said nothing and I called to her again. Arizona was full of eccentrics. Bikers, mountain men, cowboy wanna-bes. The state with freaks of all flavors. Young misfits without the energy or originality to get to Seattle or New York. Old grudge-holders who rolled West until there was nothing left but California, and the money ran out. Californians who were too weird for the Golden State. Street-corner mumblers. Neighborhood junk collectors. And, of course, crime buffs. They obsessed about police work. A few of them were professional confessors, who claimed to have committed any high-profile crime of the moment.
“I gave up on that,” she said. She reappeared in the doorway without the shotgun. She was a slight old woman wearing jeans and a long-sleeved Madras shirt. Her face had been plowed into a thousand furrows by the sun and the world, but she had naturally high cheekbones and large, pretty eyes. They were green eyes and provided the only color in her face. In fact, there was something oddly girlish about her, beginning with her hair, which was still long and straight, parted in the middle like a 19-year-old’s but turned to the color of a winter river.
“Pilgrim killed himself, right?” she said.
“Do you believe that?”
“Why not? That’s what the FBI always said.”
“We found Pilgrim’s badge,” I said, watching her eyes take the news in.
After a long pause, she said, “Then I guess you’d better come in.”
Chapter Twenty-five
“Nothing personal. I like my privacy out here. I lived in Phoenix for nearly forty years, and I was happy to get away from it. My grandparents were pioneers. They farmed down by Seventh Avenue and Broadway. The pioneer stock is gone now. Down here, I feel safe. Until they pave this over, too. God willing, I’ll be dead by then. I know who you are. You’re the history guy. I’ve seen you on TV. Guess it makes sense you’d be the one to find Pilgrim’s badge. Makes sense. He floated ten miles in the Grand Canal, then got sucked into a lateral. You know what a lateral is, right? The small ditches that flow out of the big canals, take the water to the fields. Water does strange things to a body.”
The small woman sat across from me in a room with Navajo rugs on the floor, faded 1960s space age furniture covered with colorful drapings, and an aggressive clutter of newspapers, magazines, and clothing. A fat white cat watched me from a nearby chair. The woman’s voice tended to squeakiness, and on some vowel sounds her throat constricted as if saying the words hurt. When she laughed, she covered her mouth with her hand. Her shirtsleeves were too short. We both sipped iced tea from old jelly jars. Hardin was a talker now that the shotgun was back in the closet. Unlike Vince Renzetti, Hardin had no family photos displayed. Instead, the room was dominated by unframed paintings that crowded against each other on walls. Most of the canvases were watercolors, landscapes from familiar places in Arizona, the kind of sunsets and mountain views that sold well with the tourists in Tubac. I am no art critic-the work seemed competent enough illustration, but only slightly above what you might find on the walls of a motel in the Southwest.
“The canals looked like that.” She pointed to a large canvas showing a reedy, tree-shaded waterway, with a blurred dark cluster of picnickers on a bank in the distance ahead of a stormy sky.
“You know, children used to swim in the canals in the Valley. The laterals were all open, not covered with streets and concrete like now. They had trees and grass along the banks. It was very beautiful. People had boats. When I was in high school, my buddies would drive their cars along the banks and pull us on water skis. I read that Pilgrim’s hat floated all the way with the body. Isn’t that strange…”
“Do you collect art?” I asked.
“I paint it,” she said. “It’s not much. It calms me. I sell a few. Anyway, you remember 1948, the year he was killed? Of course you can’t. You’re too young. They were having UFO scares then. I saw a girl in a bikini for the first time. It looked very scandalous. The FBI must not like you. Looking into their precious closed case.” She made this segue without any change of expression. “How’d you pull that off, Mapstone? They fought me for every scrap of paper. I bet they didn’t give a damn about John Pilgrim when he was alive. But dead, he was their property. His murder was egg on their faces…”
“Ms. Hardin…” I tried to break in.
“Have you ever shot anyone, Mapstone?” she asked.
“Let’s talk about the Pilgrim case,” I said.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “You’re asking the questions here.” Laugh. Cover her mouth. She folded her small hands under her arms. “You sound like them.”
“Them?”
“The FBI.”
I asked her why she used the word murder. “The FBI says that Pilgrim killed himself.”
“I thought you’d seen the files, Mapstone,” she said. “The cops didn’t find any evidence of suicide. No note. No powder burns or flash debris on the face. Who shoots himself and then falls into a canal? And then drives his car back to downtown Phoenix. Did you know the FBI sent two hundred agents to Phoenix after John Pilgrim was murdered? And they stayed for three months?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s a lot of manpower for a suicide. It was murder. And they always knew it was murder. That’s why they covered it up for fifty years.”
“I don’t understand.”
The small old face seemed all expressive eyes. “The Outfit killed John Pilgrim. The Chicago mob. It’s obvious.”
“Why would the FBI cover that up?”
“Hoover never wanted to go after the Mafia. What kind of historian are you? Hoover denied there was a Mafia. And no wonder, they knew he was a homosexual. They knew his lover was the deputy director. This was a different time. Nobody called them ‘gay.’ He was queer, and if the public had found out, Hoover would have been ruined. So they made an accommodation, Hoover and the mobsters. He went after communists, and left the Mafioso alone. They even paid for Hoover and his boyfriend to go gambling at Del Mar. It was a cozy little setup.”
“Until Pilgrim upset the balance…”
“Something like that. He didn’t have clean hands, either. But Pilgrim didn’t play the game. The Outfit was moving in, taking over the rackets from the old boys who ran Phoenix. Maybe Pilgrim allied himself with the old boys, the city commissioner Duke Simms. Duke ran the prostitution racket on the south side. Do you know a cop killed another one, right in the police station? It was all about money from the rackets.”
That police station had been in my courthouse.
Hardin continued, “Pilgrim was a long way from Washington, making his own rules. It was a corrupt little town. Maybe he wanted a cut of the action. Maybe he was doing his duty. You know he was warned-that’s the way the mob operates. Anyway, somehow Pilgrim got crosswise with the Outfit, and they killed him. I can imagine how it happened. They lured him somewhere, out
in the farmland by the canal. They probably made him think he was going to meet a witness who could help him. Then when he shows up, he gets a carload of goons instead. They shoot him and toss him into the canal. End of problem.”
“And Hoover wanted it covered up, because they were blackmailing him?”
My face must have held a skeptical expression. She said, “You probably think Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman.”
I looked around the small room. It didn’t look like the home of a conspiracy nut. I’m not sure what I would have expected: black curtains on the windows, autopsy photos on the walls? Instead, benign paintings for the tourists, if anyone bought one. What was I buying? Everybody had a theory about John Pilgrim. For the feds, and for Harrison Wolfe, it was a suicide. Richard Pilgrim suspected that his father’s vices did him in. Renzetti was convinced that the Soviet agent Dimitri killed Pilgrim. Why was A.C. Hardin’s theory any worse than the others? Lack of sleep was catching up with me, and my back hurt from the mushy old sofa I was sitting in. Hardin’s cat watched me mistrustfully. I let Hardin talk, squeaking out her vowels.
She said the case had always interested her because her family had known the Pilgrim family, back in the 1940s. She grew up hearing about the death. After Lorie Pope wrote her first Pilgrim retrospective, in the late 1970s, Hardin began researching the mystery on her own. The county archives and newspaper accounts provided some information. She filed for the FBI report under the Freedom of Information Act, and was refused. That only stoked her interest, and caused her to study the Bureau, as well. She tracked down some of the original detectives who had investigated the case and none of them believed the suicide theory, either. These were the deputies and city officers whose names I recognized from the old reports. They convinced her of the Outfit theory. Unfortunately for me, those detectives had passed on long before. She became obsessed with the case, she said, and was a pest about it with Lorie Pope. “I had a lot of time on my hands, I guess,” she said. “The Pilgrim mystery became my hobby. I guess if I had been twenty years younger, I would have become a cop.”
“So why would Pilgrim’s badge end up on a homeless man?”
“Is that where you found it?” she asked.
I told her about George Weed, about the badge found sewn in the old jacket. I showed her a photo of Weed, and she slipped on a pair of gnarled wire-frame reading glasses to examine it. Oddly, the glasses brought out the girlishness of her face. If it were true that the Outfit murdered Pilgrim, would they have taken his credentials and badge? Did they fall into the canal? Did Pilgrim leave them in his car, to begin their decades-long journey to a swimming pool in Maryvale?
“Maybe the man just found it,” she said. “Sometimes things are that simple. I don’t know.”
Chapter Twenty-six
I drove back to Phoenix that afternoon, playing Debbie Davies’ Round Every Corner over and over, determined to write my report and move on. The girl-woman in the Madras shirt-after I left I realized she had it inside-out-was no help. Crime buffs rarely are. Some mysteries have no answers. Nobody knows why Napoleon lingered in Moscow until the Russian winter came to destroy the Grande Armee. It was completely out of character from his previous campaigns. But those were the facts. Nobody knew why. America was discovered by sailors looking for someplace else, and at first the New World seemed to have no value. History is chancy. So said Samuel Eliot Morrison, who knew a thing or two about history.
In my puny corner of history, no answer seemed to present itself as to why John Pilgrim’s badge had traveled five decades and landed in the jacket of a man named George Weed. All I could do was write what I knew and deliver it to Peralta. I borrowed A.C. Hardin’s file of Pilgrim clippings and police reports, which she surrendered reluctantly. She said she had to come to Phoenix next week anyway and would retrieve it then. So, feeling a lift of liberation, I stopped at Mi Nidito in Tucson for a President’s Plate. Passing Picacho Peak, site of Arizona’s only Civil War battle, the dust devils lulled me into history daydreams. A Union army from California and a Confederate Army from Texas clashed lethargically, then both retreated, no doubt wondering why the hell anybody would want to own what they saw as a godforsaken place of rattlesnakes and dry mountains.
An hour later the city had swallowed me up, its concrete tentacles seeming to have expanded outward just in the day I was away. This valley had lain empty for centuries, forgotten and sleeping, until the aftermath of the same Civil War loosed adventurers and land-hungry farmers on the West. The founding of Phoenix was in the living memory of old-timers in 1948. Now most Phoenicians didn’t even know where the water came from. The old pioneer stock was indeed nearly gone. I held on to my pioneer amulets in my mind, memories of Grandfather and Grandmother. Somehow the death of John Pilgrim was linked in the official archives to another name, Dr. Philip Mapstone. His signature on the coroner’s jury report. That knowledge focused the inchoate unease that I carried around like a layer of Sonoran Desert dust. What was Peralta keeping from me?
I wouldn’t find out soon. For the next week, I avoided the Sheriff’s Administration Building and Peralta. For whatever reason, he reciprocated. Not a nagging call or sarcastic e-mail. Instead, I haunted the Arizona Room at the Phoenix Public Library. It holds microfiche of Phoenix newspapers, as well as city directories, maps, and obscure history books. I even wrote one of them. The room had once been my sanctuary, before the teen room opened next door with a constant din of hip-hop music and chatter. “A new dark age,” I heard Dan Milton say in my ear. At the Hayden Library at Arizona State, I took too much of the staff’s time, gathering everything from National Security Agency Venona documents on Soviet espionage in the 1940s to student projects interviewing the homeless in Phoenix. An archivist with auburn hair named Amy was friendly and helpful. I was a good boy. I missed Lindsey. I was working to prove or disprove at least three different theories. I also spent hours at the state archives, the Phoenix Museum of History, and on the Internet from my courthouse office. Some mornings I brought my files to Susan’s Diner and worked while I ate breakfast. If I couldn’t solve the mystery, at least I would try to give the taxpayers their money’s worth. At night, in an empty bed, I dreamed about 1948, about men in hats and travel by train. But I awoke afraid.
Some days, needing human contact or fresh data, I came up from my quarry of records. Being a native had its advantages, even in a place where nine out of every ten people seemed to come from the Midwest. I knew people. An old high school buddy was a public relations official at the Salt River Project, the nation’s oldest and largest reclamation effort. He spent an afternoon teaching me about the 1,300 miles of canals and five reservoirs that allowed Phoenix to exist. I learned about flow rates of various canals, and the impediments that would cause a body to flow this way, not that. The reeds, trees, and swimming children were long gone. But the canals regularly were a dump for trash, evidence, a surprising number of shopping carts, and dead people.
Using 1948 maps, I tried to trace the route Pilgrim’s body might have taken. It wasn’t easy. Even when I was a boy, the city had been relatively compact. We could drive ten minutes and be in the citrus groves or cotton fields. Back then, streets quickly gave way to roads bracketed by irrigation ditches-laterals-and shaded by giant cottonwood trees. The land had been even more pastoral in 1948. But now, subdivisions, shopping strips, car dealerships, malls, and golf courses covered what was once one of the great farming valleys on the planet. The laterals were mostly underground now, as congested seven-lane streets conquered the charming farm roads. But I did what I could. I walked along the bank of the Arizona Canal, by Seventh Street, where the farmers heard the loud voices and the gunshot the night Pilgrim disappeared. I drove along Fifty-first Avenue, where the lateral once flowed that carried Pilgrim’s body until it could travel no more. What was once a lettuce field had become a decaying commercial strip in a transitional suburb. It was no more than two blocks from where George Weed’s body was found on April Fool’s Day.
Another friend had charge of the historical photo collection at Bank One, a little-known cache of downtown history. Through her, I found pictures of the Pla-Mor Tap Room, Pilgrim’s hangout on Central Avenue downtown. It looked suitably dark and seedy, and had been replaced by an office building in the 1950s.
One morning, before the heat became unbearable, I slipped on walking shoes and went downtown. Finally, the police reports, newspaper clippings, and black-and-white photos were not enough. I needed to walk where John Pilgrim had walked. For the moment, this was my Civil War battlefield, my Johnsonian London. I added my imagination to the reports, the stories conjured by Grandmother and Grandfather when I was a child, my own memories. In 1948, downtown held a handful of Art Deco towers, twelve movie houses, eleven hotels, five department stores, countless bars. The rooftops were festooned with radio towers and neon signs-Hotel Westward Ho, Hotel Adams, Valley National Bank. By comparison, downtown Fort Wayne or Akron would have seemed like Manhattan. But they were not surrounded by miles of orange groves, flower gardens, and green fields, all guarded by the ancient mountains and the vast Sonoran Desert.
I walked along deserted sidewalks on Central, my ears assaulted by passing cars playing rap. Cities all over America had enjoyed a downtown renaissance. Not my hometown. But in my mind the sidewalk was busy with people, alive with storefronts, as it had been even in my youth. That was before the real estate boys ran to the edges of the city and paved over the orange groves, the flower gardens, and the green fields.
The Pla-Mor Tap Room was just a block from the old federal building, where Pilgrim would have worked. It was easy to see why it was a hangout. Why did the place fascinate me? This old city would have heard the constant sound of train whistles. Union Station was the center of activity, of comings and goings. It now sat empty, fenced and always in danger of thoughtless demolition. But in 1948, it was a Soviet agent’s portal to mischief. What had Dimitri and Pilgrim talked about, the last time they met? Who was armed, and what happened next? I watched the dates stamped in the sidewalks: 1928…1936…1947.
