Dry Heat dmm-3

by Jon Talton

  It was May now, and every day broiled above a hundred degrees. I surrendered to casual clothes-even then the fabric stuck to my sweat-soaked skin. Palo verde blossoms covered the sidewalks in a yellow-green dust. Overhead misters spewed their smoky-looking balm at restaurant patios. The glare off the cars made it appear that they were firing futuristic pulse weapons at each other. The newspaper and TV broadcasts settled into their summer staples of forest fires, children drowned in swimming pools, and migrants suffocated in the locked tractor-trailer rigs of smugglers. In the Republic, Lorie Pope wrote a story about a subdivision of 80,000 houses planned for west of the White Tank Mountains. “Master planned community” they called it. I wondered if their master plan included water. A brush fire closed Interstate 17 to the north, trapping well-off Phoenicians from their weekend escape to cabins in the High Country. The fire made its contribution to the soup that obscured the mountains.

  I was in danger of spending too much time between my ears, as a friend once put it. But every day I was reminded of George Weed’s world, whether by the transient sweeping through Starbucks trying to grab somebody else’s coffee from the bar, or by the sight of trash-filled shopping carts lined up outside the central library like cars at a drive-in. Homeless children wandered Van Buren. Some homeless adults burned a Victorian house awaiting restoration. A woman attending a convention was attacked-a homeless man was blamed. Bedraggled men with skin corrugated by the sun huddled in little shade spots. Everybody had a theory. Nobody knew what to do. It’s a shame. It’s an alternative lifestyle, and who are we to judge? One day I went to the carwash on Van Buren and Grand, where a tall young guy was bumming change. He wore a filthy do-rag and looked as if he hadn’t bathed in a month. When he came to me, I just shook my head. Then he approached a dark-skinned Latino man who wore a sweat-stained shirt emblazoned with a landscaping company logo. The Latino rebuffed the transient, too. As the guy walked away, the landscaper looked at me and shrugged. It was a look that said, there will always be two kinds of people, those who work and those who don’t.

  I found no comfort in my usual hangouts. They seemed to conjure strange signs and premonitions, if even in absurdities. Drinking in a dark corner of Durant’s, I overheard a conversation. It was typical guy talk. But the phrases gradually drew my attention: “You know that’s got to be so damned sweet,” “Yeah, my son had the hots for her,” and “cheerleader legs,” a familiar name, and “What a waste she married that professor guy. Maybe she’s repressed…” I eased my head around to see who was talking, and it was a couple of old career guys from the sheriff’s office. Talking about Lindsey. They couldn’t see me, and I resisted any Frank Sinatra-like impulses to walk over and defend my wife’s honor.

  I felt more of a melancholy detachment than a jealous zeal. My only contact from Lindsey that week came one day when I was on the Internet. A console suddenly popped up on the screen of my Mac, and there in the console was a high-resolution color photo of Lindsey smiling, blowing me a kiss. Then the console disappeared, with no trail left on the history directory of my browser. The horny old deputies would never know how beautiful Lindsey looked when she was hot and sweaty, working in her garden, her brown-black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Or her native kindness, whether in caring for the old tomcat or in reading every article I wrote in my history professor days and pronouncing them brilliant. And as for their observation about being repressed, Lindsey would say, “Repressed is the word people use when they mean ‘not like me.’” I would say the reality of Lindsey is beyond any old man’s fantasy. Ah, I was spending too much time in my own head, not a good thing.

  On a Thursday, I came back to my office to find the door open and Kate Vare sitting primly at my desk. I was hot, sweating, feet aching, and shouting at her as I crossed the threshold into the room.

  “What the hell are you doing in here? Who the hell do you think you are?”

  She came up out of my chair as if she was launching herself as a missile with overdone shoulder pads.

  “Mapstone, you son of a bitch! You arrogant, lying bastard!”

  “You ought to know about lying, Kate. Breaking into somebody’s office.”

  “Break in, you asshole, you’re lucky I’m not here with an arrest warrant!”

  “What the fuck are you screaming about?” I demanded. We were nose to nose across the desk, both armed. She opened her black leather City of Phoenix portfolio, pulled out a jail mugshot, and slammed it on the desktop.

  “This is what I’m screaming about, bastard! As if you didn’t know!”

  The photo was of the homeless woman from the parking lot, what seemed like months gone by. Her name was Karen, or so she said. She claimed she knew George Weed. She said she wanted help with visitation rights to her daughter.

  Kate studied my face. “Don’t you play dumb, you bastard. You know who this is.”

  “Of course I do. She came up to me one night, and asked about George Weed.”

  “What are you talking about? Who is George Weed?”

  “The guy in the pool, the guy with John Pilgrim’s FBI badge sewn into his coat.”

  “Lying bastard!” she shouted, exhaling so exuberantly I could feel her breath tousling my hair.

  I started to say something but she grabbed the photo and waved it in my face.

  “Heather Heffelberg!”

  “That’s her name? She said it was Karen.”

  “You stupid bastard, that’s the fourteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped out of her own bedroom in Paradise Valley six weeks ago. It’s only been the biggest case to hit this city in years. The media are on it. The brass are on our asses every day about it. The FBI has entered the case. This woman, whose name is Karen Barshevsky, was seen in that neighborhood the night before Heather disappeared. Karen is the common-law wife of Jake Roberts, aka Jake English, aka Randy English. Five years ago they kidnapped a teenage girl and raped her and held her captive for a month. Both of them walked on a technicality. Tell me this is really all news to you, bastard!”

  I sat in one of the straight-backed wooden courtroom chairs that faced my desk. I said, “It is news. And my name is not ‘bastard.’”

  Kate’s tense body looked as if it was ready to leap over the desk. She sputtered, “I can’t fucking believe this! This…You…The fucking sheriff’s office is more incompetent than I ever believed. You…you’re not even a real police officer!”

  “Kate, I’ve had nothing to do with your disappeared girl case.”

  She started to speak. But she just glared and fell into my desk chair with a heaviness that belied her slender frame.

  “So you were in here rummaging around with Peralta last week because you thought I was holding out on you?”

  “I’m still not sure you’re not holding out,” she said, although in a calmer voice. “You’re always trying to claim credit. You write a book report, and Peralta goes ‘ooh, ahhh’ and you’re on TV as this big crime buster.”

  “I never sought that out-”

  “Oh, spare me,” she said. “If you are telling the truth, and you’ve really been wasting your time with this dead vagrant.” She shook her head as if she were trying to dispense with a bad dream. “I just can’t believe it. Karen just walks up to you?”

  “In a parking lot, one night about a month ago.”

  “Every cop in town has been trying to find this woman.”

  “She found me,” I said.

  Kate’s usually tan pallor was now the color of a cranberry. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “Look at you. Look around you.” She swept her arm to take in my bookshelves and historic photos. She stood, walked over, and rapped her knuckles on the bulletin board that held photos from the Pilgrim case. “You live in this dream world. In the real world, I have to go on calls. I can’t just work one case because my friend is the sheriff. So earlier today, I went on a call. A woman had been dumped by her lover. So she went home and drowned her son and daughter, and then tried to kill herself. That’s the real wo
rld, Mapstone! Tell me what your history says about that.”

  “Oh, Kate,” I said, trying to be the calm one.

  She leaned over my desk and shouted, “Tell me! You can’t even see what’s in front of your face!”

  “I live in the same world.” I shrugged. “It sucks. But human nature is unchanging. I was reading a newspaper clipping from 1948 about a woman, right here in Phoenix, who tried to murder her children. It sounded like what you’re-”

  But she was gone. I was surprised that the glass in the door didn’t shatter when she slammed it.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The big Oldsmobile took me home through the streets of the historic neighborhoods north of downtown. I avoided the seven-lane speedways of Central or Seventh Avenue. Up comfortingly narrow Third Avenue, where the Roosevelt district had been lovingly restored. Stately bungalows and new city condos and apartments sat on streets lined by eighty-year-old Mexican fan palm trees. Margaret Hance Park had a few picnickers and walkers, even on a hot afternoon. You’d never know a freeway pulsed beneath the park. I took in the familiar mountains and skyscrapers that ornamented the park’s vista, and closer, old Kenilworth School with its classic columned entrance to the west and the new postmodern Burton Barr Library to the east. The Mission Revival Mormon Church had been saved from the freeway and now housed a puppet theater. A little farther north, Third crossed McDowell and entered Willo, with its trees and front porches baking sweetly in the 105-degree sun. This was my Phoenix, a lovely sanctuary that also held my personal history, even if the millions in their cookie-cutter subdivision pods never saw it and complained that Phoenix had no soul.

  I noticed the car in the rearview mirror, so close I couldn’t even see his front bumper. Then he switched lanes and roared next to me. My stomach tightened. Down came the passenger window, and I could see the face of a thirtyish man in a polo short.

  “Get out of the way, you asshole!” he screamed with a bucket-shaped mouth, his face suddenly crimson. Then he sped north on Third and soon disappeared. His back bumper held an American flag sticker with the words, POWER OF PRIDE.

  I used to like this town. Phoenix was a sunny, dull place with no culture or ambition, but it had a sweetness and a good heart. Now we’ve got malls stuffed with people from Iowa and Wisconsin, low-wage workers in the call centers and landscape outfits and service joints, Indian casinos, mass-produced subdivisions, bigger money than you could imagine in Paradise Valley and North Scottsdale, 250 golf courses. But it’s a big hardboiled place where ordinary guys carry around their rage like an overstuffed wallet and everybody calls someplace else home.

  I made it home with the horizon turning white and the wind picking up. A FedEx envelope was leaned up against the stucco wall. Lock the door behind me, feel the blessed air-conditioning, make a sweep of the house…back door locked, courtyard doors secure, closets clear, nobody hiding under Grandfather’s mahogany desk in the study. Out the picture window, the wind began slapping the palm trees insistently. I coughed instinctively, sat on the staircase with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and stared out at the familiar old neighborhood. The envelope showed a return address from the University of California at Berkeley.

  My old friend from grad school days had come through. The envelope contained five sheets of a typed report, from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1975. The pages were black with the now familiar war paint of redacted information. But the report was clear enough. In 1944, a Soviet agent named Georgi Antonov came to Phoenix and set up a cover life as a refugee from Poland. He took a job as a waiter in a local restaurant. His real work was to pass along secrets from the American atomic weapons program at Los Alamos, New Mexico. By 1947, Antonov, who used the code name “Dimitri,” was spying on the nuclear test site in Nevada, always returning to his haven in the small city of Phoenix. A year later, Dimitri was ordered to return to Moscow. He remained in the United States-defecting to an FBI agent in Phoenix. The agent’s name was lost in a horizontal black slash. Dimitri died in 1972, having run a hat shop in Cincinnati for many years.

  Dimitri didn’t kill Pilgrim. Dimitri defected to Pilgrim.

  I said out loud, “Fuck!”

  The wind responded with a loud moan, as if it were sweeping my theories down Cypress Street.

  Soon I was caressing the spines of the books, recalling forgotten volumes. Lindsey and I had been reading McCullough’s John Adams before our private civilization had been invaded by the Russians. I could pick a hundred flaws in the book, but I had no grudge against popular history, as my colleagues in the professoriat did. McCullough got rich while the rest of us published obscure, unreadable papers-or went to work for the sheriff’s office. My finger lingered on the spine of Middlemarch, one of Lindsey’s favorites. I found one of Dan Milton’s books misshelved-with the novels rather than history. It was his insightful look at social change in the 1920s, Coolidge Jazz, a book that made me realize how much everything is connected, how nothing happens in isolation. Soon this reverie propelled me into the kitchen, where I made a martini-using Lindsey’s favorite Plymouth gin instead of my Bombay Sapphire-and then I settled in the big leather chair before the picture window. The closest firearm was in another room. I let it be.

  The men came in with amazing ease. They were in the room before I could even move out of the chair. Somebody gave a command in Russian, and a tall man with a goatee and sad eyes aimed a clunky yellow plastic gun at me. Panic locked my legs in place. I tried to turn and roll out of the chair but it was too late. The Taser darts hit me straight on. My legs, starting to stand, collapsed as if the bones were suddenly liquefied. My abdomen was consumed in a great spasm. Men’s faces studied me with curiosity. The tall man held a straight razor, the blade rusty and chipped. I felt a wave of bile coming up my throat, then the room closed around me, black.

  I usually know when I’m dreaming. Not this time. My eyes opened when the sweat from my forehead dropped into my lashes. The house was silent except for my panting and the soft whoosh of the air-conditioning.

  Suddenly three cars materialized on the street. Two sheriff’s cruisers and a shiny black Crown Victoria. It was no dream. I bolted up from the chair, even as a pounding came on the front door.

  “Let’s go,” Peralta ordered, looking cool in a cream-colored suit, the coat cut roomy to accommodate his Glock semiautomatic pistol. I stared at him for a long moment to make sure he was real. I started out the door but his meaty hand struck my chest.

  “Bring your gun, Mapstone. You’re on the job.”

  So I retreated back into the house, retrieved my Python and Speedloaders, locked up, and then followed him. He walked to the Oldsmobile.

  “You drive,” he said. “I want to make sure you’re taking good care of county property.”

  We sped over to the Piestewa Freeway and turned north, following the two sheriff’s cruisers. The speedometer needle was pushing against ninety, me driving and Peralta saying nothing. A quarter of a century ago, when we were partners, it was no problem to play the silent guy game and barely speak for an entire shift. But this time I was cranky after a few miles.

  “If we’re on the job, where are we going?”

  “DC Ranch.” One of the silver spoon developments in the McDowell Mountains. We sped on, climbing through Dreamy Draw and the North Phoenix Mountains and quickly reaching the 101 beltway. The big Olds engine seemed barely challenged; my foot had plenty of room between the accelerator pedal and the floor. I tried again.

  “And what’s at DC Ranch?”

  “Yuri.”

  I felt an involuntary shiver. I glanced at Peralta, who stared ahead.

  “If our intelligence is correct, we’ll find Yuri in the Page-Frellick House. Ever been there?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s a custom job that backs up to Thompson Peak. When they built it in ’98, it was priced for $3.7 million, and a retired executive from Canton, Ohio, bought it. I went there once for a Christmas party, bunch of Republica
n bigwigs. The fireplace was bigger than my first apartment. Anyway, it’s been vacant for a year or so. The economy, you know. So they rented it out…”

  “How did we find this out?”

  “Your wife, Mapstone. She gets results.”

  We got no closer than a command post just off Scottsdale Road. The parkway was blocked, and deputies and city cops were turning away homeowners in their Ferraris and Rolls Royces.

  Peralta walked over to a redone bus that held the sheriff’s mobile command center. Beside a large golden badge, lettering proclaimed MARICOPA COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, and in smaller letters below, MIKE PERALTA, SHERIFF. My old friend had done OK. I slid my badge onto my belt, borrowed a pair of binoculars, and wandered around. This had been empty desert even when I was an undergraduate. As a kid, I would come out here with Grandfather to hike and target shoot. I remembered the preternatural silence, where even a buzzing fly sounded loud. Now it was the province of the superrich, retired CEOs looking for anonymity and Lasik surgeons from Minneapolis looking for a winter home. The houses dotted the rocky hillsides and perched above dry washes and arroyos. Walls and gates reminded anyone who forgot that this was private property.

  For the moment, at least, the sheriff had suspended property rights. The air was full of screeching tires and revving engines as angry residents were turned away. It mixed in with the traffic sounds from Scottsdale Road and the occasional scream of Lear jets taking off from Scottsdale airport. My eye went to a group of men in black uniforms, Kevlar helmets, and vests. They were saddling up on all-terrain vehicles, with exotic-looking weapons slung over their shoulders. Emblems on their backs said FBI. In a moment, they drove single-file across an expanse of sand and rock, then disappeared down a bank into a wash. The ATVs were amazingly silent.