Camelback Falls

by Jon Talton

  Irritation was wired all through his body language. I poured coffee, trying not to let a defensive little tremor show in my hand.

  “I had some hunches, that’s all.”

  “Well, let me give you another interpretation,” he said. “Peralta’s dirty.”

  “What?” Lindsey jerked her shoulders back.

  Kimbrough knotted his brow and plowed ahead. “I know the man is lying in a coma, and I care about him, too. But I can’t just wish away his badge number in that log book, entered next to sizable amounts of money. And we’re running out of time.”

  He sampled the coffee, then sipped deeper. “Maybe Nixon was blackmailing Peralta? Maybe Nixon raised the stakes too high and Peralta killed him, I got the lab work back yesterday, and Nixon was dead at least twelve hours before Peralta was shot.”

  I felt blood rushing into my face. “This is nuts.”

  “David, we found one of Peralta’s new business cards there in Nixon’s trailer. One of the cards with him as sheriff, not chief deputy. I checked and those were only delivered two weeks ago. So within the past two weeks, Peralta and Nixon have had contact.”

  “Well, if Peralta was going to kill Nixon, would he leave a damned business card?”

  “Maybe it didn’t start out that way,” Kimbrough said. “Maybe they had an initial meeting and just talked. Something went wrong. Nixon tried to put the squeeze on Peralta, whatever.” Kimbrough made a gun barrel out of his finger. “Bam, end of problem. But maybe he’s interrupted before he can clean up the evidence.”

  “It sounds to me like Peralta was investigating this case himself!” I heard my voice echo angrily off the wall.

  “Hear me out, if you’re going to play Lone Ranger,” Kimbrough said through gritted teeth. “Think of the pressure Peralta could have been under. He’s about to be sworn in as sheriff, and here’s this scumbag Nixon blackmailing him.”

  Lindsey said, “So then Peralta finds a way to shoot himself on the day of his swearing in? Just to make it look good?”

  “No.” Kimbrough’s eyes were large and earnest, incapable of irony. “There was obviously some kind of double-cross. Maybe Peralta had threatened to implicate the other dirty cops, those other badge numbers. And one of them had to take him out. David, I have seen the list of badge numbers in the logbook. There are nine current Sheriff’s Office employees among them. Nine. Including Peralta. There are fourteen former deputies, including Matson and Bullock.”

  “Damn it,” I said, “none of this is proven yet. I didn’t even want to know that information before Internal Affairs completes its investigation. These deputies deserve due process.”

  “The point is,” Kimbrough said, “who knows what kind of shit these cops were into twenty years ago? Maybe they were still in it this year. Those kind of people would go to any lengths to keep it covered up.”

  I poured myself some orange juice and put some salmon spread on a bagel. My stomach hurt.

  “There’s just one problem,” I said. “Yesterday’s prime suspect, Leo O’Keefe.”

  “He’s probably involved somehow,” Kimbrough said. “Maybe O’Keefe is the tie-in at this Camelback Falls thing. But in the real world, we have to go for the quickest path that’s going to break a case. Who has the bigger motive for murder here, some convict or some dirty cops who could lose everything if their past comes out?”

  My anger boiled back up again. “One of them shot at me. So I am presumed dirty, too? How the hell did they even know I was going out at three in the morning to meet O’Keefe?”

  Kimbrough said, “You do keep public company with Bobby Hamid.”

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “Didn’t you have dinner at Durant’s with Hamid?”

  I held out my hands. “Put the cuffs on me. You got me, copper.”

  Kimbrough slapped the tabletop. “Damn it, Sheriff. How do you explain Peralta’s badge number in that book?”

  “I can’t,” I shouted. “Yet. How can you believe this man, who we have both worked with for years, is dirty? Not only that, but that he is in so deep that he’s willing to order a murder? Then the other dirty cops could shoot him in retaliation?”

  Kimbrough silently studied the table. “I don’t know what I believe,” he said. “I’m just telling you what the feds are talking themselves into.”

  “You sounded like a believer.”

  “I don’t know who to trust,” he said. “The whole department is just crazy with talk and paranoia about this logbook. You saw it yourself with Abernathy. How the hell did he find out? None of it makes any damned sense. I wish O’Keefe would contact you again.”

  “That’s not likely with your guys always on my tail,” I said.

  “What?”

  Lindsey said, “White Crown Vic. It’s been tailing us for a couple of days. We assumed it was you or Phoenix PD.”

  Kimbrough fell suddenly silent, studying his hands. “David,” he finally said. “We haven’t had any units following you. The most we’ve done is ask for extra PD patrols past the house here. Phoenix detectives don’t even have Crown Vics now. They make ’em drive Chevy Cavaliers.” He sighed. “Jesus Christ, what is going on?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “The next damned time you see that car, I want you to call backup. It may be the feds, or it may be connected to whoever took a shot at you the other night. Call for help.”

  I nodded and tried to eat. The bagel was warm and flavorful, but my insides felt cold and vulnerable. I instinctively stepped away from the kitchen window.

  “Shit,” Lindsey said. “If it’s not the good guys following us…”

  “There’s something else,” Kimbrough said, tapping the folder he had placed on the kitchen table. He traced invisible horizontal lines on the top of the folder. “Look, it takes a lot to make me blush, get it? But we found this stuff with all the trash and wine bottles inside Nixon’s trailer. It’s pretty heavy duty.”

  I took the orange juice and pulled up a chair. Kimbrough pushed the folder at me. “I figured since you knew Nixon way back when, maybe this might mean something.”

  I opened the cover and a half dozen color photos were inside, eight-and-a-half by eleven, lots of skin. Kimbrough was right. The images were extremely explicit. Full frontal nudity and penetration were just the beginning. Check your imaginations at the door for all will be revealed.

  “Tryouts for the gymnastics team?” Lindsey said, looking over my shoulder.

  It was an orgy. The top photo showed several couples in various copulatory positions. I hadn’t been a porn aficionado since we had the secret stack of Penthouse at the substation when I was a twenty-year-old deputy. Spectator sports were not my thing. But these photos stood out as, well, real. They had none of the retouched bodies and professional lighting of sex industry images. The people looked average, the moments carried the edge and flaws of the spontaneous.

  The scene wasn’t some sleazy motel room with a pizza-colored bedspread and velvet Elvis on the walls, either. Take out the writhing bodies and the room could have been in Architectural Digest. White marble stairs and levels flowed out of a roomy conversation pit, which contained expensive-looking sectional sofas and spare, modern tables. African sculptures, with stone erections to match the flesh ones of the orgy, stood on one set of shelves. A large abstract painting, hot colors and geometry, dominated one wall, and another wall was all glass. The real eye-catcher, though, was what looked like an indoor waterfall, cascading down from a second level into a pond in the center of the room. But this, too, was not quite a “done” room—you could see the reefers, pills, and cocaine scattered around various tables.

  The second photo stopped me. It centered on a man with Mark Spitz hair, naked except for dirty white socks. He was upright, on his knees, connected doggy-style to a curvy brunette who had matted hair and wore a black merry widow. Her face was buried in a cushion. The man had turned his head to face the cameraman, giving a goofy-drunk grin and looking so young I didn’t recognize him at first.


  “That’s Nixon,” I said.

  “Holy shit,” Kimbrough said. “So much for stereotypes about the relative physical endowments of white men.”

  “That’s how he got his nickname,” I said. “He was very popular with women.”

  “Oh, please,” Lindsey said. “Men with giant cocks are bad lovers. They think they don’t have to do anything else but show up.”

  How did she know that? A tremor of insecurity swept through me. But turning back to the picture, I felt the same dizzy, intrusive feeling as when we talked to Lisa the night before. We weren’t meant to see these photos. They were Dean’s trophies, from when he was virile and desirable and the world existed in a happy teacup of youth and promise.

  I set it face-down. The next photos showed a pretty young girl fellating an older man. He sat Buddha-like on an Eames chair with the girl on her knees. His skin was leathery brown, but he had an old man’s spidery stretch lines around his stomach. They were in the same room, but closer to the waterfall, the spray sluicing off white marble behind the two lovers. A display of red, black, and orange pills was splayed across a nearby tabletop. Next to that was a hand mirror with neat lines of what might have been baking soda, but wasn’t.

  The girl was truly beautiful, with a heart-shaped face, flaxen hair parted in the middle, and an exquisite young body, lightly tanned. She looked languidly at the camera.

  Something kicked my memory. I knew her.

  “What?” Lindsey said.

  “That’s Marybeth,” I said. “Marybeth Watson. The girl who was with Leo that night in Guadalupe. She was his girlfriend.”

  “Not when this picture was taken,” Lindsey said. “You know who this is with her?”

  I studied the man’s face. He wasn’t looking right at the camera. Something about his wispy white rim of hair contrasted with dramatic black eyebrows looked familiar. But I had to shake my head.

  “That,” said Lindsey, “is Jonathan Ledger, the author of The Sex Instructions.”

  I sat back in the chair and pointed at the photos. “So this must be Camelback Falls.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Draw me a map of the human heart. Show me the roads in and out. Where does Eros take the turnoff from love, darkness from passion? Destiny, fate. Nixon, Peralta, and me, we were all just cops together. Men with easily pierced skin and breakable bones. Men with hearts. But all along we were connected by invisible strands that ran to right now: Nixon dead, Peralta in a coma, Mapstone the sheriff. Badge numbers in the logbook. Photographs on my breakfast table.

  Draw me a map of the human heart. The back roads of jealousy and rage. It is no coincidence that cops get killed during family fights. At the point of conjugal connection the mask of civilization is always shaky, our mastery of nature most personally at risk. Love and lust are dangerous things, and every civilization tries to control them, whether through ancient commandments or the latest dating code on campus. Nature is always ready to slip the leash, go mad again. We Phoenicians should know this most of all, living in our artificial city with the desert seemingly subdued for our pleasure and recreation. But beneath us are the ruins of the Hohokam city that preceded us. They were men with hearts, too, who dug the canals, unlocked the rich soil, vanished. The desert is really in control, merely biding its time.

  These thoughts tried to find purchase inside my head as we drove the speed limit through the pleasant streets of northeast Phoenix two hours later. Lindsey was lost in her own thoughts and we didn’t talk much. We were in her Honda Prelude, with its bumper sticker that read, “Keep honking, I’m reloading.” But the message was lost on our tail from the previous night—no cars appeared to be following us. I was on an errand I most dreaded.

  Judge Carlos Peralta lived in a rambling ranch house off Lafayette Boulevard in the city’s Arcadia district. The houses had been built in the 1950s where citrus groves stood. The judge’s house was guarded by lush grapefruit and orange trees, oleanders and desert honeysuckle. Down the freshly cut front lawn was a magnificent view of Camelback Mountain. Lindsey parked in the driveway and kept on her seatbelt.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “Dave, this is definitely an interview that should be one-on-one.” She patted my hand.

  So I walked up a long sidewalk framed by ornamental lights and flowerbeds. The walk was enchanting at night, like the Thanksgiving five years ago when we all came over. The judge had been a widower here for ten years, but he refused Mike and Sharon’s yearly suggestions that he move to a condo. He had been the first Mexican-American on the state appeals court, and the first to move to Arcadia. This house also held his memories and his books. I understood that much.

  His housekeeper, Mrs. Sanchez, a large woman with happy black eyes, greeted me and showed me into his study. The room was dark in the way that comforts the old or the grieving. It was a vast repository of books: on the walls, on tables, on the desk that looked out-of-place modern, even in stacks on the thick cream carpet. Amid a table full of family photos was a large picture of his son as an Army Ranger. Another showed him as chief deputy, his expression barely changed across three decades. Gas logs glowed in a fireplace. It was about 70 degrees outside, so they had to run the air conditioning to have the illusion of winter inside. And at the far end of the room, swallowed up in a leather armchair, was the frail figure of the judge.

  “Come in, David.” I could hear his wheezing across the room.

  “Please don’t stand, sir.” I crossed the room quickly and took his hand. I could feel bones barely covered with skin. His expression was concealed in the half shadow. The room smelled of Mentholatum. I felt like a nightstick had repeatedly been jabbed into my abdomen.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, Judge…”

  “Why don’t you call me Carlos?”

  “Carlos,” I said. But it was no good. “I can’t, Judge. It just goes against my grain. The way I was raised, I suppose.”

  “Understood,” he said. “When I was your age it was inconceivable that I would address an older person by his first name. Now every stranger talks to me like I am four years old.”

  “We’ve had a development in the case,” I said. He was silent, so I went on, speaking through the acid I could sense creeping up my throat. “A former deputy was found murdered, a man who used to work with me and Mike in the East County.” I watched his weathered face, but no expression registered. “We’re not sure if he was killed by the same person who shot Mike last Monday. But this man, whose name was Dean Nixon, left some evidence…”

  I just let it hang there for a minute as my eyes were drawn into the conjuring flame of the gas fireplace. I looked away, scanned some of his books. There was Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, several volumes of Plato and Locke. The judge said nothing.

  “The evidence is a logbook that may show payoffs to sheriff’s deputies from years ago, from the 1970s.”

  “Is my son among them?”

  The words were spoken with no emotion. I could imagine the cool litigator of a half-century ago. I said, “Yes, he appears to be. But we are very early in the invest—”

  “I didn’t want him to be a policeman, do you know that?”

  I shook my head.

  The judge inhaled loudly and said, “From the earliest, I wanted him to be a man of the law, a lawyer. I suppose that guaranteed he would rebel against me.”

  “I know he always revered you,” I blurted.

  “We didn’t speak for years,” the judge said. I didn’t know that either, although I had always sensed a distance between father and son, like magnets repelling. He went on. “I was severe. I had worked very hard to make it in the Anglo world, and here was my son making common cause with men who, in my memory, would stop and beat a Mexican-American for sport. I told him, ‘You will be nothing but the token beaner, the one they call spic behind your back.’ He never listened.”

  The judge raised himself up. It looked painful. But after all the effort,
his body seemed even deeper in the chair. “Don’t get me wrong,” he went on. “I detest today’s Balkanization and victim-mongering. My brother always says he is a Chicano. I am an American, of Mexican descent…” He looked toward a small side table, where his hand found a teacup.

  “Your evidence doesn’t surprise me,” he said, sipping from the cup. “Law enforcement always grows corruption.”

  I shivered a little in the sudden coolness of the room, amazed at the clinical tone of the man opposite me.

  “Judge, I’m not saying he was involved.”

  “When I was elected to the bench in 1965, Maricopa County Superior Court, it was common to see cops plant evidence that damned a suspect, suppress evidence that might exonerate him.”

  “Common?” I challenged, losing some of my fear of the man.

  He ignored me. “In the 1970s, drugs changed everything. The money just added to the opportunities for corruption. I presided over a dozen trials involving law enforcement that had stolen drugs or fallen in with dealers. And that was nothing compared with what the federal judges heard.” He smacked his lips loudly. “I always wondered, if these were the stupid ones getting caught, what must be going on that we never even knew?”

  My mouth had turned to a dry riverbed. “Are you telling me you suspect your son was involved in corruption?”

  “Who do you think shot my son, Sheriff?” he demanded. He didn’t wait for an answer. In a higher, softer voice he said, “Policemen make a lot of enemies. Good ones and bad ones. Just like lawyers. I know I did. And when all this comes out, they won’t hesitate to crucify my son, just like they tried to do me. Whatever the truth.”

  “What do you think the truth is, Judge?”

  His breathing fell back into a wheeze. He said evenly, “Lawyers and history professors, both wordsmiths. Both truth-seekers. When we’re young we think truth is something that can be bottled and preserved, like some specimen in biology. Now, they tell us everything is relative, that there is no truth, and that’s crazy. What do I think? I think a revolution happened in the 1970s, and if that’s where your evidence comes from, then all the rules were off.”