Camelback Falls

by Jon Talton

  “What were the River Hogs, Jack?”

  “Bunch of idiots drinkin’,” he said, no hesitation. “When they’d get off duty, they’d drive down into some deserted spot in the riverbed, drink and party all night.”

  “Did you ever go with them?”

  His mouth puckered and he shook his head. “I know you’re tryin’ to get the old white guy. I’m not ‘with it’ in this department. I don’t read the same books as you. I’m not politically correct. But I’m sure as hell not a dirty cop.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “I supported you for acting sheriff.”

  Thanks, I guess, I thought.

  Suddenly, he calmed down. “OK, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll get moving on those prisoner transfers. That oughta help. We wouldn’t want a jail riot your first week in office.” He added, “You looked good on television Wednesday. We need somebody like you, clever.”

  He clapped me on the arm and walked away.

  “Jack,” I called, and he turned to face me, all belly and jowls. “What about it? You ever go out with the River Hogs?”

  He just gave me a little smile, raised a fat finger to his lips—shhhhhhh—then turned and walked on.

  There was a disturbance off to my left, and my involuntary muscles sent my hand reaching for the Python under my coat. But it was just some domestic thing, woman and man and their lawyers arguing. A pair of burly young deputies intervened. The male deputies like their hair cut close these days. When I was a young deputy, the fashion was just the opposite: The old guys like Abernathy had crew cuts and the young cops tried to get away with hair as long as possible. I had lived long enough to see a cycle.

  So I jaywalked and caught up with Lindsey.

  “What did he want?” she asked.

  “I guess to tell me I’m clever.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Friday afternoon skulked by, passed in difficult meetings. The most difficult of all I postponed a day. After I left Abernathy, I drove out to the capitol and went into the mud-colored modern tower that looks very much like the Madison Street Jail. Inside, however, are offices for the governor, attorney general, and other high honchos. The thing looms like a bad hangover behind the lovely little capitol building, built in celebration of statehood in 1912 and crowned with a dome of copper.

  I was there to meet the attorney general, and she saw me alone in a small conference room lined with new lawbooks and smelling of copy-machine toner. The AG was a popular Democrat in a Republican state, and she listened intently as I briefed her on the Nixon logbook. She wanted to have her office enter the investigation at once, of course. I should have expected that. These were dirty cops, not some garden-variety Arizona real estate scam. And if my theory was true, they were dirty cops who had murdered Dean Nixon and attempted to murder Peralta. I was more surprised by my reaction: defensive, testy—as if I’d been a bureaucrat in the Sheriff’s Office for years, as if I were Abernathy.

  If I were still in the history business, I could write a grand and impenetrable paper on the way organizational cultures write themselves upon the individuals in charge. But I’ve always been a believer in individuals as movers of history, something that got me into trouble with the gasbags of conventional wisdom at the faculty club. No, I was protecting Peralta, plain and simple. That’s why I wanted to keep this mess in the Sheriff’s Office until we were sure what it was. But I was running out of time—she agreed to give me a week before her investigators intervened.

  My meetings with the county attorney, county commissioners, and Chief Wilson of the Phoenix Police were just as stressful. I’m sure they were full of nuance and comedy. But I wasn’t really paying attention. I was going through the motions, carrying information. And I was still trying to understand what the discoveries of the past few days really meant. How the hell had Abernathy learned about the logbook? Why was Peralta so concerned with reports from the Guadalupe shooting? What did O’Keefe mean when he said Peralta was shot because “they can’t let any of this come out”? Was that why Nixon was murdered, too, and why someone took a crack at me? Who were “they”?

  A week ago, I occupied a sweet little sinecure. Now, what a mess.

  ***

  The western sky was putting on its nightly show—tonight narrow bands of clouds were inventing new colors, somewhere on the spectrum between purple and pink—as we crossed through the saguaro-spiked arroyos and hills of Dreamy Draw and dropped down into the Paradise Valley section of Phoenix. This had been desert when I was a kid. Now, the white lights of suburban safety stretched north and east for miles until they jammed up and faded into the base of the McDowell Mountains. At the Cactus Road exit, I wheeled the car off the freeway, then passed a couple of miles of identical strip shopping centers until Lindsey spotted the sports bar. Inside, just as she had promised, was a woman wearing a blowsy long dress and a red sweater with a needlepoint cat design.

  Life is complicated, as Sharon said. Lisa Cardiff—it was Lisa Cardiff Sommers now—had readily agreed to meet us anywhere but her home. I would have preferred a place like Tarbell’s down on Camelback Road, or even Tom’s Tavern downtown. But it quickly became clear that Lisa, like many north Phoenicians, rarely came down into the “old” part of the city. Anyway, we were on duty and, with my new job, I had a damned example to set. Now, at the entrance to the sports bar and dressed to blend in with chinos and sweatshirts, we greeted her and discreetly showed our IDs, which she studied at some length. After we were shown to a table, we absurdly ordered coffees and Diet Cokes while SportsCenter blared on half a dozen TVs.

  Franklin Roosevelt had a mistress, despite his heavy leg braces and a world war to run. So did LBJ, and Kennedy and Clinton had racked up impressive body counts. Before us, if Sharon was to be believed, was a woman who had been involved with Peralta. It was a side of him that had utterly hidden itself from me for a quarter century.

  Lisa Cardiff Sommers hardly looked like a saucy home-wrecker. But the journey from nineteen years old to the edge of forty was unpredictable. Lisa was shorter than Lindsey, and comfortably filled out, though not fat. She wore flat shoes with ill-fitting footlets. Her brown hair was short. Her face, tanned and pleasant in an unremarkable way, looked like it was comfortable smiling and laughing. Which she wasn’t doing now.

  “I hope you understand how impossible this is for me,” she started out. “Whatever happened when I was a kid is so far in the past. I’m married and have two children, and there’s no way I should even be talking to you.”

  My Diet Coke was flat and I was bone-tired. I said, “Do you understand Sheriff Peralta is in a coma and his assailant is loose? We don’t have time to ass around. We could have just shown up at your front door.”

  “Screw you,” she said with vehemence, her lips suddenly draining of any color. “I don’t even have to talk to you!”

  She started to rise, but Lindsey lightly touched her hand. “Please, Lisa, we need your help.”

  Maybe it was classic good cop, bad cop, or maybe it was the way Lindsey could disarm and soothe people. Lisa Cardiff Sommers sat back down and took a long swig of coffee. I could have calmed her down with a martini at Tarbell’s.

  She said, “Deputy, I can’t imagine anything I could tell you—”

  “Call me Lindsey.”

  “That’s my daughter’s name!” She softened, melted. I felt like such a heel. Lisa said, “It’s spelled L-y-n-n-s-y.”

  “That’s nice,” Lindsey said warmly, although I knew she would hate the spelling.

  Lisa ignored me and went on. “Lynnsy just turned six, and her brother Chance is eight. Do you have children, Lindsey? No? Oh, but I see you’re engaged.” Lindsey gave her a warm, single-family-detached-home smile. Lisa looked back at me and said, in a tone of motherly correction, “I hope she picked someone more sensitive and empathetic than you.”

  “He’s a great guy,” I said. “I hate him.”

  Lindsey tried to steer Lisa back on course, but she just starte
d crying and talking, like some cheaply constructed dam had given way under pressure of a sudden storm.

  “I love my husband and he’s a good man. Jim’s the southwest regional sales manager for Qwest Wireless. We have a good life. He’s a wonderful provider. But Jim couldn’t handle knowing about this. He just couldn’t. And I’m entitled to my privacy.” She sipped coffee and wiped her eyes with a paper napkin.

  My God, I thought, she must think we’re here on some morals charge. But nobody thinks straight when the subject of old lovers comes up.

  “I was nineteen years old when we became involved,” she said, a croupy whisper. “I was a kid, for God’s sake. I was just having fun. Didn’t you do things like that, Lindsey?”

  “Sure,” Lindsey said. “It’s OK.” She held Lisa’s hand.

  “How do you think it’s been since he became chief deputy and such a celebrity…,” She never said the words “Mike Peralta,” as if they had dangerous conjuring power. “People don’t usually get to be reminded on TV and in the newspapers about their youthful indiscretions. And that wife of his, on the radio!” She sniffled again. “Of course, I was sick when I heard he had been shot.” She looked at me, and drew herself up straighter. “But I just feel so dirty and violated that you’ve come here. I had to lie to my husband, tell him I had a girlfriend that was having trouble.”

  Lindsey said, “Lisa, we’re not here to invade your privacy. We really just need your help remembering. It may be that some things going on in Sheriff Peralta’s life twenty years ago have something to do with the shooting.”

  Lisa’s face softened again and she blew her nose loudly. She had green eyes that seemed speckled with other colors.

  “Of course, I’ll try to help,” she said.

  Lindsey tiptoed in. “Did Peralta ever seem like he was having trouble, back when you knew him? Anything at all?”

  Lisa stared into the half-empty coffee cup. She gave a little smile. “He was very driven, very intense. I really got that danger charge out of being with him.” In a different voice, she said, “He wasn’t happy in his marriage. But what happened between us wasn’t his fault. I met him when he came to my apartment after there had been a break-in. Later, I found a reason to see him again. He was very shy and awkward, but in this very wonderful adult way. I picked him up. Threw myself at him, is more like it.”

  I felt a queasy voyeuristic thrill, like listening to people make love loudly in the next room. I drank the flat Coke as penance.

  “When did you guys break up?” Lindsey asked.

  “January of 1979,” she said. “It was on a Sunday night. He said he had to stop seeing me. His wife…”

  “And you didn’t see him again?”

  “Once, years later, I saw him at a distance in Fry’s one night. I didn’t try to say hello.”

  That ruled her out of any direct memory of Peralta after the Guadalupe shooting.

  “What else was going on in his life?” Lindsey prodded. “Did he ever talk about work?”

  “He had…” Lisa laughed out loud. “He had this partner who was, like, trying to become a college professor. He sounded pretty full of himself, this partner, with his big words and books. I don’t remember his name.” Lindsey kicked me under the table. Lisa said, “Mike was very down-to-earth.” She spoke the name tenderly.

  “Now that I look back, it was a weird time,” she continued. “I was born in 1959, so I was too young to be with the real boomers. They had the sixties. Mike served in Vietnam. My sister, she got maced by the Chicago police at the Democratic Convention, and she lived in a commune for awhile. She was at Altamonte when the Rolling Stones played and there was the big riot. Kids her age had such a bond, I guess. My age, we got, like, the BeeGees…”

  “Did you meet any people Peralta worked with?” Lindsey asked.

  She shook her head. “We had lots of cops come to the coffee shop where I worked, but usually not deputies. I worked in Scottsdale. It was kind of cool, because he was my secret.” She suddenly sounded nineteen again.

  Lindsey said, “Please don’t be angry if I ask this, but I assume you guys exchanged gifts?”

  “He never gave me diamonds and pearls, if that’s what you mean.”

  I felt the muscles in my back relax a bit.

  “He gave me a mermaid, a little china thing you could have picked up at Los Arcos mall for ten dollars. I was going through a mermaid phase. I thought it was sweet of him.”

  “Did he have any other friends?” I ventured softly. “Other than this stuffed-shirt partner?”

  She thought about it and cocked her head in a wry smile. “I do remember one,” she said. “Because he had such a name. Nixon, like the president.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “No,” she shook her head. “He told me Nixon was a crazy dude, and I needed to stay away from cops anyway. I always wanted to meet his friends, to have him take me out with the boys, show me off, maybe. I was very fearless and stupid. But it sounded like they’d have fun. Get off duty and go down to the riverbed with a keg of beer. It wasn’t like there was a lot to do in Phoenix back then. They even had this cute name for their parties. The River Hogs.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Driving home, Lindsey and I had a short, sharp fight about the ’70s. I found myself in that worst of debating positions, defending an argument I didn’t really believe. Resolved: The decade of the 1970s was a pretty good time, after all.

  “How can you be saying that?” Lindsey shot back, and not quietly. “Are you envious of Peralta for having a chick on the side?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “That’s not what we’re talking about. Infidelity has occurred in every decade.” Ah, the debater’s half-Nelson. It only made things worse.

  “That doesn’t make it right,” she said firmly. Then, “Dave, you’re making me sound like some kind of prude. That’s not fair.”

  “I just get tired of the X-ers blaming everything on the Boomers,” I said. “And ten years of complicated events and social forces can’t be reduced to one or two clichés.”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. Like all fights between people who love each other, this one was full of ciphers and code strings, and not at all about what it appeared to be. In a softer voice, she added, “You know, I had to raise myself because of all those good times and complicated social forces.”

  “I know.” It was all I could say. She spoke the truth. “I didn’t have much fun back then myself,” I said. “I could barely get a date. The young women didn’t seem interested in me. I never had the great lines that the personality boys have.”

  “Oh, you’re a personality boy, Dave,” Lindsey said. Out of my peripheral vision, I could see her luminous smile. “A thinking woman’s personality boy.” She put her hand on my neck and rubbed—oh, that felt good!

  “Now you’re flattering me. Don’t stop rubbing.”

  “And,” she said, “true personality boys don’t have lines. They have stories.”

  “That unmarked car is still behind us,” I said, as we exited to the Seventh Street ramp and paused at the light. Two homeless men, with clothes, beards, and skin the same color as a paper bag, stared at us from behind hand-lettered cardboard signs. Several car lengths back, the Ford had also taken the exit and now prepared to shepherd us home.

  “Kimbrough is nothing if not efficient,” Lindsey said. “I guess they don’t trust me to be your bodyguard.”

  “Should we stop at Good Sam?”

  She stroked my arm. “You know they won’t let us up at this hour, Dave.”

  “He’s the only one with the answers.”

  “I know,” she said, as the light turned green and the traffic surged onto Seventh. “I’ve started a database for you.”

  “You are so good to me.”

  “Seriously, personality boy.” She poked me gently in the ribs. “I took a month out of Nixon’s logbook, May 1979, when the Guadalupe shooting happened. I also scanned in the duty rosters and beat
lists for the East County patrol district for the same time period.”

  “So that we can see if any interesting patterns emerge when we compare everything?” I said.

  “Exactly. That may give you a few more answers, at least.”

  The stucco houses on Cypress Street gave off a happy, Friday night glow. I drove around the block once, just to make sure everything looked right at home. It did, and I was really ready for a drink, a book, Duke Ellington on the stereo, and a warm bed with my woman, who is definitely no prude.

  ***

  Kimbrough brought bagels and bad news to the doorstep next morning. We all migrated into the kitchen, which was bathed in sun before noon, where I fixed coffee for Kimbrough and Lindsey.

  “The Justice Department is on our backs,” he said, settling into one of the white straight-backed chairs at the kitchen table, and setting a file folder before him like a place mat. It was Saturday, but he was wearing a blue blazer, and a subdued burgundy tie with a crisp white shirt.

  “About?”

  “The logbook.”

  “So they won’t even give us time to complete our own Internal Affairs investigation?”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard from a friend at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  I opened up the Republic, half expecting to see giant headlines about a scandal in the Sheriff’s Office. But the front page was full of idiot consumer news. Plus a prominent smog story. The Phoenix Open promoters must be getting worried.

  “It’s obvious to me,” I said, “that Peralta was already looking into the Guadalupe shooting and whatever Nixon was involved with.” I told Kimbrough about Camelback Falls, the file in Peralta’s desk drawer, and the conversation with Lisa Cardiff Sommers.

  “Jesus,” he said. “You’re supposed to be holding together a department that’s about to come apart. Instead, you’re running your own little private investigation here.”