Camelback Falls

by Jon Talton

  “This is your son, Judge! Give me something that can help him.”

  He didn’t speak for a long time, just seemed to shrink more into the big leather chair. I finally rose and prepared to go.

  “I knew your grandfather Philip, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “He was a good man,” the judge said. “He took patients from the barrio when Anglo Phoenix still treated us like dogs. He respected Mexican Americans, understood the dilemma, assimilation versus identity. He always struck me as the epitome of cultivated manliness.”

  He sighed. “Cultivated manliness, our age doesn’t even know what that means.” The fireplace glowed yellow-blue, suddenly orange. I half expected to hear a log fall and crackle, but the room was dark silent. “I see some of him in you. David. So I think the best and only help for my son is you.”

  I retreated. “Thank you, Judge Peralta.”

  He said, “Do you have the courage to face the truth you find, David?” But he didn’t want an answer. In the dimness, I could see he had picked up a book and started reading, his breathing a steady squeezebox wheeze. I quietly let myself out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I had begun to tell Lindsey about my talk with Judge Peralta when the cell phone rang and the communications center sent us twenty miles away to a hostage situation near Queen Creek. A former boyfriend was holed up in a double-wide trailer with a woman and her two children. Did I just imagine that the deputies on the scene looked at me differently, with fear and suspicion in their eyes? Did I count too many TV camera crews for just another crime story in the Valley? Bill Davidson was there, too, with a flak vest and a tall cup of Circle K coffee. But if he knew about Nixon’s logbook, he didn’t let on. He told me it was good to see the sheriff out with the deputies on a Saturday. For a moment, I felt better.

  I was milling around the back of the SWAT command post, trying not to get in the way, when the cell phone rang again with another blast from the past.

  “David Mapstone?” It was a man’s voice, baritone, brisk and impatient. “This is Hector Gutierrez, with Briscoe, Hayne and Douglas.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m making this call as an officer of the court,” the voice wobbled over the wireless stations.

  “Why is that, Mr. Gutierrez?”

  “You’re the acting sheriff,” he said. “I don’t know anything about you.” The verdict was final. “You probably don’t realize that I used to be in the public defender’s office. Years ago, I defended a man named Leo O’Keefe.”

  “What about O’Keefe?” I cut him off.

  “I saw the news. This is the man you think shot Sheriff Peralta.”

  “What about O’Keefe?”

  “He contacted me this afternoon,” Gutierrez said.

  “How?”

  “In the parking garage at my office,” he said. “I stopped in for some files, and he was there. He looked like hell. Of course, I told him I couldn’t help him, that as an officer of the court I was required to contact the police.”

  “Did you offer to help him turn himself in?”

  There was a long empty buzz on the phone. Finally, “I don’t really do pro bono work now, Mapstone.”

  I couldn’t resist, “Is this the same ‘Red Hector’ who was fighting for the oppressed?”

  “To hell with you, Mapstone. I’m doing you a favor. O’Keefe is on the run. I told him to go to the police. But he’s afraid. He’s convinced they’re out to kill him. He’s convinced they did everything they could to get him from the day he was found with two dead deputies and that girl in Guadalupe.”

  “That true?”

  “That was a long time ago,” Gutierrez said. “You do what you can when you’re defending some guy who has every deck stacked against him.”

  A blast of radio traffic came through the command post. I stepped outside onto the road, facing an alfalfa field and San Tan Mountain, faded in a yellow haze.

  “Did he get a fair trial?”

  “In my opinion, no. But with two dead cops, nobody was in a hurry to help this kid. Jesus, even his name, Leo-O. Sounds funny.”

  “What does that mean? Was the case prosecuted kosher?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I did the best I could. See, people get lost in the system. It’s like this giant threshing machine, and when it gets hold of you everything just kind of goes along automatically.”

  “Why can’t I find his statement in the case file?” I asked. “Was that entered in the defense?”

  “That sounds like a Sheriff’s Office screwup. Imagine that.” He chuckled humorlessly. “He claimed he was set up. That something was going on between the deputies who got killed, and the two fine, upstanding prison escapees who shot them.”

  I asked him what was going on.

  “It was a long time ago. Some dirty cop thing. It was in his statement.” I could almost hear him impatiently looking at his Rolex. “Look, he didn’t have any family, didn’t have any money. He was a long way from home and he hooked up with some bad people.”

  “What about Marybeth?”

  “Oh, the girl? She had a moneybags daddy in the oil business. He hired a big-time lawyer out of Tulsa. They cut her off from Leo so damned fast. Made it sound like she was a kidnap victim—and let me tell you, she had the devil in her. But Leo was seen as the bad guy.”

  “Was he the bad guy?”

  “How the hell should I know, Mapstone? Do you know how much this conversation would cost if you were one of my clients?”

  “Consider this a public service, counselor.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “No, I thought the kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and everybody abandoned him.”

  “Including you?”

  “Hey, screw you, acting sheriff,” he snarled through the digital circuits. “I did my part. This is your problem now.”

  ***

  The hostage-taker came out before the evening news. A crew of deputies dressed like Robocop wrestled him into the dust, and Lindsey and I carried out two scared little kids. The public affairs officer said it would make a great photo-op. I was just trying to be useful on a scene. Or maybe I was trying to get ahead of the news cycle, before the shitstorm hit over the logbook and the badge numbers.

  We got back in the Prelude and headed to the Superstition Freeway, then turned west into the pink remains of the sunset, headed downtown. Leo O’Keefe was still out there, alive as of this afternoon and still carrying his secrets. I was at a loss as to how to get to him, if he thought the cops were the bad guys. By the time we reached Good Sam to check on Peralta, the cell phone rang again. The battery was nearly dead, and I half expected it was Gutierrez demanding to know where he could send a $1,000-an-hour bill.

  “It’s Deputy Stevens in the communications center, Sheriff. Captain Kimbrough left word that he needs to meet you tonight. Do you have something to write with?” Lindsey passed me a notepad. I was amazed she actually had old-fashioned paper in the car. “He needs to see you at the Crown Plaza Hotel downtown at nine P.M. tonight.”

  “And he wants me to meet him there?” Lindsey’s blue eyes followed my writing on the notepad. She raised her eyebrows.

  “He said it’s important, sir. Said you’d know what it was concerning. He didn’t give me any further details. He said to meet him in the parking garage on the fourth floor, by the elevator.”

  Then the phone died.

  We walked across 12th Street to the hospital, me musing about our enslavement to technology, how we couldn’t get by without gadgets that a few years ago seemed like frills. Suddenly I felt something rushing toward us. Surprise and panic jolted through me. I pushed Lindsey back toward the curb, reached for the Python. It was a Mercedes-Benz the size of a starship, black with black-tinted windows. One of the windows came down with a soft electronic whisper and Bobby Hamid’s handsome face peered out.

  “You seem tense, Dr. Mapstone.”

  I muttered something obscene and took my hand off the
revolver. I looked around to see how many county supervisors and investigative reporters were there to witness our exchange. But the street was empty in the crisp air of the gathering January night. Bobby opened the door, slid over. Lindsey and I exchanged glances, then we climbed in. What the hell.

  “You looked quite heroic on television,” he said, turned out in a three-button black coat, jeans, and gray silk T-shirt. “Saving the children in prime time. I do believe the sheriff’s hat is growing on you.”

  “Come on, Bobby,” I said, settling into the soft leather of the seats. “You don’t want to be my agent.”

  He regarded me with his amused, feline eyes. Bach was quietly coming out of the car speakers. “How is your little mystery coming along? The River Hogs and all that nostalgia for the disco era?”

  “I’m feeling less nostalgic.”

  “Oh, come, come,” he said. “‘Disco Inferno,’ ‘Love to Love You Baby,’ K.C. and the Sunshine Band.”

  “I was more a Springsteen-Eagles-Linda Ronstadt fan,” I said, letting Bobby play his game.

  “Yes, Linda. ‘Love is a Rose.’ You know her brother was the Tucson police chief?” Suddenly his eyes went completely opaque, like the windows of the Benz rolling up. “David, someone wants to kill you.”

  I sat back in the seat. Bobby had sources in law enforcement, don’t ask me where. Somehow he had found out about the shots at Kenilworth School. I said, “It’s not clear who those shots were directed at.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “You are obviously giving me credit for knowing about some recent adventure of yours. I am talking of something different.”

  “Quit screwing around,” Lindsey said, her fair skin flushing with anger. “What are you talking about?”

  “What they call ‘the word on the street,’” Bobby said, momentarily surprised to have been challenged out of his circuitous conversational ways. “The word on the street is that Sheriff Mapstone is a dead man.”

  “Why?” Lindsey demanded.

  “It seems to be something to do with your River Hogs,” he said. “It seems that you are into something very dangerous. A man named Nixon, a former deputy sheriff, was murdered, no? And the shooting of Chief Peralta. My sources tell me this is not the work of this escapee, O’Keefe, as your press conference said. As a good citizen, and a friend, I felt I should pass this information along.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Lindsey said. “Good citizen, my ass.”

  Bobby’s perfect posture took subtle offense. “Yes, Miss Lindsey. A good citizen and a friend. This isn’t a game. These are killers.”

  “Who are these people?” I asked. “Cops? Deputies?”

  “Contrary to Sheriff Peralta’s tiresome obsession, I am not plugged in to the underworld.”

  “But obviously you hear things.”

  He faced out, staring at the street, content to let us stew in Bach. I looked at Lindsey. Her hair glowed blackly in the reflection of the streetlights. Her eyes looked tired.

  “Professor Mapstone,” he said, “What was this affair in Guadalupe, in May 1979?”

  I studied his face, suspicion in me like a high fever. “It was a shooting. Two old deputies stopped a car with two prison escapees. They killed the deputies. Peralta showed up and killed the escapees.”

  “I thought you were there?”

  “I was. How do you know that?”

  “Everyone seems to know,” he said. “That word on the street again. Do you really remember what happened there? Twenty years is a long time.”

  “I remember it all.”

  He nodded his head slightly. “What happened after the shooting?”

  “It was a cop shooting,” I said. “Lots of paperwork, lots of Internal Affairs.” I felt like I was stuck in an essay test I hadn’t studied for. What the hell was he getting at? I knew if I pushed him too far, I’d end up with nothing.

  “Why were those two deputies in Guadalupe?” he asked, his voice soft, contemplative.

  “It was a traffic stop gone bad. That was obvious when Peralta and I rolled up.”

  “Really?” he said. “Obvious. Well, eyewitnesses can be unreliable, can’t they? That’s why we need historians who can sift the evidence with more detachment. Quite an irony for you, Professor Mapstone.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I give up, Bobby. If this is your help, it’s not much.”

  “You give me too much credit,” he said, stroking his fine jawline. “I don’t know all the answers. Only some of the questions to ask. That ought to be enough.”

  Lindsey popped the door handle and stepped out. But Bobby gently took my shoulder. “I know this much: You have the trusting nature of the reflective man, the man who wants to live the life of the mind.” He looked hard at me, his eyes empty of humanity. “Your department is not what it seems, Sheriff. Remember the Roman emperors who trusted the Praetorian Guard. Trusting will get you killed.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The Crown Plaza Hotel sat at Adams and Central, a big, tan box with half-moon windows, another homely remnant from Phoenix’s 1970s building boom. When the Hotel Adams sat on this block, it was a lovely Spanish Mediterranean landmark where the state legislature met informally in the coffee shop, and its awnings shaded Central Avenue from the summer heat. It was built after the first Hotel Adams burned in 1910, the most famous blaze of frontier Phoenix. When I was a little boy—this was 1964—I sat in a car with Grandmother and watched a bank robber chased down by the cops in the alley right beside the hotel. But by the early 1970s, the old Adams was a fleabag, its rooftop neon sign struggling in red letters to say HOT ADA S. It sounded like a whorehouse. The block had history.

  Tonight it was so deserted it was as if everyone in the city had silently evacuated, that only Lindsey and I hadn’t gotten the word. Spending time in the hospital only added to the sense of oppressive isolation. The doctors were worried about Peralta’s lungs. It didn’t take a medical degree to know that being flat on your back with a machine doing your breathing was not exactly the way the human body was built to run. Tests showed the beginning of pneumonia in one lung. We sat with Sharon while three doctors gave her a grim catechism of the limitations they were up against with Peralta in a coma. She didn’t cry anymore. Her face had taken on the quality of a latex mask atop dangerous emotions. She didn’t need to know what I knew. I didn’t even know what I knew, if Bobby Hamid was to be believed.

  After the hospital, we drove home, drank martinis with olives, and ate baked potatoes with cheese and salsa while we talked about the day. Lindsey wondered about Peralta and his father, how hard it must have been to measure up to a father of such accomplishment and yet such exacting expectations. I wondered about the Peralta stubbornness and fear of showing emotion, keeping both men apart for years I really wanted to go to bed and have her read to me; then I would read to her. But we locked up the house at 8:45, switched to the BMW—I needed to fill up at the 24-hour gas station down on Roosevelt—and drove slowly back downtown.

  We drove around the block taking stock of our paranoia.

  “I don’t want to be afraid to show my face,” I said. “I won’t do that.”

  Lindsey scanned the empty sidewalk on Central. “Dave, somebody tried to kill you the other night. You just heard from Bobby Hamid that your life is in danger. Now we’re just going to walk into a creepy parking garage at night? And you haven’t been able to reach Kimbrough.”

  It was true. I had tried Kimbrough’s cell phone twice since we left the hospital, just to be sure I got the message right about the meeting. But each time I was routed directly to voice mail.

  “But what if he needs us?” I said. “He left the message and said it was important. I think the risk is manageable.”

  “Manageable,” she said, her voice flat, assessing not really resisting.

  “It’s a big hotel right in the middle of the city, video cameras, guards.” The light at Adams was red, so I turned in my seat to face her, took her hand. “Lindsey, if I just hide, the bad
guys succeed. I didn’t want to take this job, but now I’ve got to do it. Whatever this thing is—they’ve tried to kill Peralta and now me—it thrives because nobody wanted to touch it, nobody wanted to go there.” She just looked at me, her eyes huge and nearly violet. The light turned and I added, “We can always flag down a couple of Phoenix cops on the bike patrol and ask them to escort us.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “OK, you win.” She patted her backpack absently. It looked reassuringly bulky.

  I rolled slowly around the block. The old art deco Valley Bank tower on Monroe was still vacant, an embarrassing eyesore for the umpteenth downtown revitalization attempt. A street person sat in the shadows of the dingy entrance, his shopping cart overflowing with black plastic bags, and dingy comforters. I thought again about Leo O’Keefe, about what Gutierrez said about being caught in the thresher.

  At the parking garage entrance, I took a ticket and watched the yellow arm of the gate pop up obediently. A white-haired man watched us impassively from the parking attendant’s booth. The BMW climbed up the ramp into the bowels of the building, the engine noise echoing off the colorless prefab concrete walls. Then we leveled out in the long, low garage. The floor had been restriped so many times it was difficult to find the right way to go up. The ceiling was more concrete—too cramped to even allow a minivan beneath it. The decorative half-moon arches facing outside had long ago been fenced off with what looked like wooden pickets painted brown. And even though the streets were deserted, the garage was full of vehicles, parked tightly together, even bumper-to-bumper.

  The sardine feeling let up a bit as we wound up to level four, which looked about half full. I scanned the space for any sign of life. Nothing. I swung around the length of the floor, patrolling slowly past empty cars. Then I pointed the BMW back in the direction of the down ramp, just to be safe.

  The brightly lit area by the elevators was empty, too. I held my foot on the brake and rolled down the window, listening. The soft, precise timing of the BMW. A low moaning intake fan somewhere. A siren far away, fading. My mind slipped back to Peralta’s office, the man’s voice: “Did you find it?” What was “it”? Peralta had been looking at the evidence logged in after the Guadalupe shooting. Bobby Hamid had asked, “What happened after the shooting?” How was Jonathan Ledger, the world-famous sex therapist, involved with the girl who was arrested at that shooting?