Camelback Falls

by Jon Talton

  “We had a fairly busy night,” Sergeant Greene went on. “We had an unauthorized prisoner release from the Durango Street Jail.”

  “What?”

  “An inmate was released who shouldn’t have been. He was down the railroad tracks before they even realized it. He’s in for rape, a six-time loser.”

  “Good lord,” I said.

  “I know, sir. We’ve issued the standard statement to the media.”

  “We lose prisoners so often there’s a standard statement’?”

  “It’s just procedure, sir. And there was a shooting overnight in District One, in Queen Creek. A six-year-old girl, she was supposed to testify in a murder trial today against a gang member.”

  “You’re just a beam of sunshine, Sergeant Greene,” I said. Lindsey looked at me quizzically and pulled the sheets over herself.

  “Just the job, sir,” Greene said. “No other county homicides last night. Phoenix had two, and Mesa had one, a drive-by. One chase involving DPS. Highway patrolman attempted to stop a vehicle at 2300 last night outside Buckeye. He initiated pursuit when the vehicle failed to stop. Other agencies joined in, and the suspect finally ran off the Stack as it headed into downtown Phoenix.”

  “Jesus,” I said, imagining the tall freeway interchange near down-town where Interstates 10 and 17 came together. “How far down?”

  “He fell seventy-five feet, and was unhurt. We have him in Madison Street Jail, sir.”

  “Don’t let him go,” I said.

  “No, sir,” she said. No humor in Sergeant Greene. “Shall we send your car and driver, Sheriff?”

  “What?” Sheriff. The word suddenly sounded so strange. It came from old England. The “shire reeve,” in old England a local government official, not really a law enforcement officer. The Sheriff of Nottingham. Rhode Island counties still called theirs “high sheriffs.” Sergeant Robin Greene waited on the line.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll take my own car.”

  ***

  It was nearly 1:30 that afternoon before I could return to the haven of my office in the old courthouse. Past the retired highway patrolman who was the security guard in the lobby, up the four flights of circular stairway, my feet adding to the wear on the polished 1929 Spanish tile. Past the mostly empty floors, still richly appointed with dark woodwork and deco lighting fixtures. Somehow Phoenix had forgotten to tear down this wonderful old building. At the top of the stairway, I checked my watch again: 1:33. I would wait until two to check on Peralta.

  Finally I turned my key, turned on the lights, and was alone in the high-ceilinged room with my books and old cases, just like my life used to be. A black-and-white portrait of Sheriff Carl Hayden, circa 1906, greeted me from the far wall. His hat-brim was straight, like his long, slender lips and his eyes fixed on some long-dead photographer. Phoenix’s population was about 10,000 then. I gave Sheriff Hayden a little salute and stepped in, locking the door behind me. I needed some time alone.

  “You did this job and you turned out OK,” I said to the photo. “But I don’t think I’ll get to serve forty-two years in the Senate the way you did.”

  I hung up my dark blue suit coat and loosened the red Ferragamo tie Lindsey gave me for Christmas, sartorial armor for my first day as acting sheriff. Sinking into the ancient wooden desk chair, I propped up my feet and nursed the vente skim no-whip mocha I had carried over from Starbucks. Out the high windows I could hear the clatter and hum of downtown. I made myself breathe slower, deeper. It was an effort.

  On the desk before me was the Arizona Republic, right where I left it that morning. Two-thirds of the front page was devoted to the Peralta shooting, including a sidebar on me, and the photo of Lindsey and me leaving the hospital wrapped around each other like eighth-graders. Only the expressions on our faces gave away the grimness of what we had come from. My face looked unfamiliar and tired. The story got things about half right, which was typical of the hometown press unless my friend Lorie Pope was doing the reporting. But none of the bylines were familiar. Maybe Lorie was on leave to write a book, an exposé of the bullshit of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

  I hated the cop bureaucracy that was represented by the crowded sheriff’s administration building a block south. Only the smell of paper overcame the persistent odor of human beings in trouble and the human beings that dealt with them. Now I was in charge of the damned thing. The morning had gone by with a march of meetings, about next year’s departmental budget, about the new HMO for department personnel, about the court-mandated sensitivity training classes for all deputies, about the lawsuit over last year’s patrol car purchase. No wonder we just let prisoners walk away from the jail. We were in meetings all the time. I didn’t say much. Nobody seemed to mind. The low expectations people had for me were obvious.

  I spent an hour with the heads of the nine bureaus that made up the Sheriff’s Office, and about all I could do was tell them I expected all to carry on with the same professionalism and commitment that Sheriff Peralta would demand. Go win one for the Gipper, who’s still in critical condition. Kimbrough came in to update us on the investigation of the shooting. He had twenty-five detectives working on the case. Phoenix PD had offered another thirty cops if we wanted them. The FBI was pressing to be invited in. Nobody knew anything. The brass beat up Kimbrough pretty badly, especially Jack Abernathy, who was going rapidly from “indifferent” to “dislike” on my people meter. I made peace. They all looked at me with ambitious contempt.

  I finished the mocha and hit the trash can with the first try. I thought maybe Lindsey and I could go to a Suns game tonight, just to unwind. I became nostalgic for my old life, which had existed until yesterday. The life where Lindsey and I were reading Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon to each other. Where I was going on my own through Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, daydreaming that I could still write a controversial but wildly popular work of history just like that. Either way, I was happy in my work in the old cases, where nobody cared except Peralta. I missed that life already.

  Then I became aware of my heart, a metronome beating fast and heavy beneath my shirt. My heart pounded faster, insistently, self-consciously. In short order, it was making my hands tremble. My breathing came shorter, and that spot just south of the breastbone was pushing at me painfully. Maybe this was how a heart attack started.

  When I heard the hand on the door, I jerked so hard I almost fell out of the chair.

  I stood up hopefully. I could have used a long embrace from Lindsey right then, or even a repeat of the same old conversations with the security guard. But as I neared the door, the hand was still trying the lock. Now the jerking had some force behind it. The metal clacked back harshly. I could see a body, darkly dressed, leaning against the frosted glass of the door. But the old Jazz Age wood and hardware refused to give. Then the dark shape on the other side of the frosted glass faded.

  I jerked the door open and the hallway before me was empty. I jogged down to the center of the building, where the stairs curved up, but there was no one. Down the other hallway was darkness, a little light reflecting off the glass of the old hanging lamps. Thirty feet down the hall all I could see was a green exit sign. Then a bright rectangle opened beneath the sign and a darkly dressed figure slipped through into the fire stairs.

  Chapter Five

  The city spreads across 1,400 square miles of the Salt River Valley. Fourteen hundred square miles of asphalt and manicured lawns. Fourteen hundred square miles of shopping malls, freeways, dusty barrios, and exclusive gated communities that tear into the sides of the surrounding mountains. At night, it becomes a breath-taking vision, billions of earth-born stars running out to the horizon. In the daytime, if the smog is light, the perpetual green of palm trees and golf courses and the craggy purple bare buttes give it an otherworldly look, especially to newcomers and Easterners. And that is nearly everybody. To me it is just home, all I knew until I was a teenager. Sometimes I think it is a great city, and I am filled wi
th pride. Other times I am sickened by how much has been lost to the growth machine.

  The city is an anti-city. It was built in opposition to the confined, shoulder-rubbing cities of the East, and in opposition to its bastard forebear, Los Angeles, in the West. It was built in opposition to reality—far from any crossroads, seaport, or reliable water source. Dams and canals and air-conditioning changed reality. So Phoenix grew up from a little farm town before World War II into a megalopolis of three million people.

  As befits an anti-city. Phoenix’s streets are wide and straight and predictable, running like a checkerboard atop the memories of alfalfa and cotton fields and citrus groves, and, before that, the irrigation canals of a vanished Indian nation. Today it’s warehouses and ranch houses, poolside apartments and single-family detached houses with red tile roofs. It’s single-story and spread out. A personal piece of the West for every family from Ohio and Indiana and New York. Up in the foothills and mountainsides, you find the faux adobe mansions that start at $3 million. But by that time, the streets get curvy and illogical.

  The other exception in the street grid is Grand Avenue, which runs sideways through the checkerboard, straight out of downtown headed northwest. Before the interstate, it was the highway to L.A., four lanes of wanderlust set beside the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad. On Tuesday afternoon, it was six lanes of bumper-to-bumper as commuters headed out to their subdivisions in Glendale, Peoria, and points beyond. I was the new acting sheriff but that got me exactly 30 miles an hour if I was lucky. I didn’t care. I was in no hurry to get to a murder scene, but Kimbrough had demanded my presence. So much for going to the Suns game tonight. I turned up Sue Foley’s “Young Girl Blues” on the CD and poked along.

  An hour later, I turned off Grand, bumped across the Santa Fe tracks, and felt the gravel under my tires. Four brand-new sheriff’s Ford Crown Victorias were arrayed off to the side of the road, along with one sun-bleached unit from the city of El Mirage. We were so far from the opulent resorts of Scottsdale we might as well have been on another planet. This looked more like the Third World.

  It was a trailer park, if you dared use the latter word, sitting hard against the railroad tracks and hemmed in by the cinder block walls of a warehouse and a water pumping station. A dozen ancient house trailers sat on either side of a dirt-and-gravel cul-de-sac. Around them, as if blown there by innumerable dust storms, were rusting sheets of corrugated tin, unidentifiable hulks that maybe were automobiles once, refrigerator cartons stiffened by the sun, all manner of garbage. A little clot of brown-skinned children watched me warily as I parked.

  I was still in my dark suit, and I was driving the BMW 325 convertible that my ex-wife left with me years before. So no wonder a uniformed deputy stopped me with some perturbed “sirs” and “excuse me’s.” He looked about eighteen. But Kimbrough stuck his head out the door to one trailer. “It’s OK. This is Sheriff Mapstone.”

  I realized with a guilty jolt that I hadn’t called to check on Peralta’s condition this afternoon. I self-consciously hung my star over my jacket pocket and walked across broken beer bottles to the trailer.

  Perhaps it had once been silver with festive blue stripes—trailers for sale or rent?—but had long ago become a bent box of rusting metal and some fading turquoise flashing. The smell hit me halfway to the door: sour, bitter, bent on conquest of all the senses. The smell of a body. I’d smelled worse. You don’t work law enforcement four years in Arizona without getting a deep appreciation for what sun, heat, and confined spaces can do to human flesh. But it had been a long time.

  “You OK?” Kimbrough asked, looking maddeningly poised and youthful. He was still wearing the gray tweed suit and highly polished cap-toe dress shoes from this morning’s bureau heads’ meeting. But the suit draped effortlessly on him. with no memory of the tough questions by the brass. He was not much younger than me, but still looked like one of those ads for the United Negro College Fund.

  “I’m fine,” I said, trying to growl it, feeling foolish. “What have you got?”

  He motioned me to come in.

  I tried breathing through my mouth. It did no good. I coughed and fought my gag reflex like hell. Three years ago I had been a college professor, with cares like getting published, fighting the post-structuralisms, and deflecting, gallantly, the come-ons of Heather Jameson in the twentieth century American history seminar that met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Kimbrough said, “He’s in the room to your right, Sheriff.”

  The floor seemed to give a little with an awful linoleum stickiness as I stepped inside. The little room was cramped with too much dirty old furniture, stacks of yellowing newspapers, big plastic bags full of empty aluminum cans and wine jugs. There wasn’t enough space for the orange upholstered chair to overturn. So the chair sat at a cocky angle against a pile of newspapers, and a man was sprawled in it.

  He had a large, black hole in his chest.

  I looked back at Kimbrough.

  “Remember him?”

  I shook my head. Between rigor mortis, lividity, and impatient body gasses. the corpse didn’t have what we would consider a face. But even the ghastly fun house mask that stared straight at me held no memories.

  “That’s Dean Nixon,” Kimbrough said.

  I stood straight and nearly beamed myself on the low ceiling. Something was coming down the railroad track straight for me, and I didn’t have time to move.

  “You were a deputy with him, right?” Kimbrough said.

  I nodded. “Jesus. I haven’t seen him in twenty years.”

  I stepped back out of the trailer, feeling the stickiness clinging to my shoes. Kimbrough followed me. It was only about 5:30, but the daylight was nearly gone. The sky above the White Tank Mountains was washed with brilliant orange and rust. A single cloud to the north stood out like a pink-and-white cotton ball. If you painted the Arizona sky realistically nobody would believe it. We walked far enough away that the only smell was the familiar mixture of Phoenix smog and dust.

  Dean Nixon. He was a forgotten figure in my personal history. I had joined the Sheriff’s Office halfway through college, full of idealism and restlessness. Despite a lifelong attraction to books and ideas, I had wanted to be a doer, not some pasty egghead in an ivory tower. I think I had a vague plan of going on to get a law degree. But I also had a high school buddy who had become a deputy sheriff. He told me I’d be great at the job. His name was Dean Nixon.

  Somehow the department took me. I spent four years on the job, mostly as a patrol deputy. The jail held no fascination for me, and the administrative bullshit increasingly bored me. On the side, concealed from most of my colleagues, I finished my degree in history and went on to get a master’s. Then the Ph.D., and a chance to teach at a well-respected college in the Midwest. The world of ideas had me by the mind and the heart. I left law enforcement behind as a cherished youthful adventure. And although I stayed in touch with Peralta for the next twenty years, the connection with Dean Nixon had begun to lade even before I left the department.

  Imagine having the name Nixon in the mid-1970s. In fact, Dean was handsome and magnetic in a rough way, with dry, wheat-blond hair and a tall frame that muscled out in high school working summers on Texas oil rigs. Women would walk up to him and give him their phone numbers. I saw it happen more than once. He had the inevitable nickname “Dick Nixon,” but that held more irony than most people realized.

  “When did you last hear from him?” Kimbrough said.

  “Who knows?” I said. “Maybe 1980.”

  I realized with a pang of guilt that I hadn’t even thought to look for him at my high school reunion last fall. I never imagined I’d find him like this. Law enforcement is full of unhappy career endings. Retired cops who put the service revolver in their mouths. Dean never seemed like that. He played the guitar and laughed a lot. Last I heard he was dating a doctor. I imagined he’d retired to the happy life of a kept man.

  “He’s been gone from the department for years,” Kim
brough said. “He made ends meet as a bounty hunter and security guard.”

  I looked around us. “Not much making ends meet.”

  “No,” Kimbrough said. He licked his lips and adjusted his suit coat. “The guy had a service record with lots of brutality complaints. A tough guy. Didn’t get along with his bosses, either. Went through three marriages. Counseling for alcohol abuse. Looked like the wine department of Circle K in his refrigerator.”

  I said, “He was just a kid I knew in high school.”

  Kimbrough said, “You believe in destiny, Sheriff?”

  I kicked at the ground and ruined my loafers in the dust. I realized the frustration and anger that had been building in me. Yeah, and insecurity But it was too late. “What a joke. Sheriff.” I said. “I’m just the chump you guys decided on while Peralta’s down.”

  The glass crunched under our feet, opaque shards of beer bottles mashed into the timeless topsoil of the desert. “Is that what you think?”

  “You tell me. Captain Kimbrough.”

  He smiled unhappily. “Maybe that’s what some of them think. I don’t know. I think you’re a good cop, Mapstone. Maybe because you and I are the only people in Arizona law enforcement with good taste in clothes.”

  He made me laugh. It was true. “So what is it?”

  He shook his head. “They need a sheriff. The brass agreed on it. It’s the first time Abernathy and Davidson have agreed on anything in the fifteen years I’ve been in this department.”

  He faced me. We had walked as far as we could, and stood above a bleak ditch filled with garbage and standing water.

  “Just go with it, David,” he said. “Hell, fuck with ’em if you want. You’re the sheriff. The real deal. For now at least. Look at it this way: if Peralta recovers, you’re looking out for his interest.” He paused and all we heard was the deep growl of the trucks out on Grand Avenue. “If things don’t work out, well, you and I will both be looking for new jobs.”