Camelback Falls

by Jon Talton

  I waited at least a minute, listening to the microwave stations buzz, thinking. Finally, “The two guys in the Crown Vic looked like cops. I guess I don’t feel safe in my own department right now.”

  “I’ve always believed we had rogue cops involved…” he started.

  “Up to two days ago you thought it was Leo O’Keefe,” I challenged him.

  “OK, OK,” he said. “Tell me where you are. I’ll send a team of handpicked detectives to guard you.”

  I ignored him. “How’s Peralta?” I asked.

  My stomach tightened when he hesitated. He said, “Not good. There’s fluid in his right lung. They’re worried about pneumonia. He’s not responding to antibiotics. I just got back from the hospital.”

  “There’s got to be something that can be done,” I said.

  “There’s something else you should know, Sheriff,” he said. “We got back the ballistics report on Nixon. He was murdered with a nine-millimeter pistol.”

  “So?”

  “I asked Mrs. Peralta’s permission to test Sheriff Peralta’s service weapon.”

  I almost made an angry bite through my lip. “Did you get a warrant, Captain?”

  “I didn’t need one,” he said simply.

  “Even the sheriff is entitled to due process,” I snarled. Underneath, I thought about the other pistol in Peralta’s desk drawer. Had it been fired? What did I really know? Who did I really trust? Lisa Cardiff was talking in my ear. She wouldn’t shut up. Peralta’s friend Dean Nixon. What the hell was that? I never knew they were friends.

  Kimbrough went on. “We also got the report on the bullets fired at Peralta, and at you the other night at Kenilworth. They are both fifty-caliber rounds, fired by the same weapon. That’s heavy-duty sniper stuff. It looks like a hand-load, the shooter going for more power. Lucky for Peralta, the extra powder in the round may have caused the bullet to fragment before it hit him.”

  “I don’t know how lucky he is,” I said quietly. My leg muscles burned from exhaustion. But I couldn’t sleep.

  “Sheriff,” Kimbrough said. “Let’s talk in person.”

  “Not now,” I said. “I’m going to take a couple of days off, just to have some time to myself.”

  “This is crazy, Sheriff,” he shouted. “What are you doing? Where the hell are you?”

  “I’ll contact you again,” I said. “Find out about the gunshot reports. And find out if there’s a Deputy Stevens in communications.”

  Kimbrough was talking, but I carefully set the receiver back into the cold metal cradle of the pay phone.

  He was a long way off. I was on the other side of the time zone, the other side of the mountains. I stood up from the cramped airport phone corral and looked out the huge plateglass of the airport terminal. The towers of downtown Denver glittered gold and silver in the distance, backed by the Front Range of the Rockies. The mountains were a shock to the plains, a great wall of purple rising up out of the land, filling the horizon. Fingers of winter mist reaching down the dark canyons toward the city. It must be hard to be an atheist here.

  I found a seat and tried to distract myself with Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War. It’s a brilliant thesis of counterfactual history: What if Britain had stayed out of World War I? We would have had a European Union eight decades early, no world wars, and Britain would still be a world power. I was too tired to wrestle down its flaws. So I allowed myself a bit of envy. My ambition had been to write books such as this. Instead, I was the acting sheriff, running out of time. I thought about Lindsey, my constant preoccupation. “I’m not an intellectual, Dave,” she had told me. And it was true, in a healthy way. I became close to physically ill over such profanity as post-structuralism and political correctness. Lindsey stayed above those hedgerows, despite her fine mind and incisive ability to detect and cut through bullshit. It was my good fortune that she wanted to spend her life with me.

  “History Shamus.” Lindsey appeared, carrying bagels and coffee, a mocha for me. “I’d let you give me a backrub but I’d fall asleep right here.”

  It was Sunday morning, and the airport was subdued. Or maybe it was the sleepless haze I was moving in. I heard flight announcements, but nobody seemed in a hurry. I let the mocha burn my tongue. The coldness evident out the huge windows made me shiver involuntarily.

  “You OK?” she said, running her hand up and down my back. I nodded and sipped more scalding liquid.

  “Her name is Beth Proudfoot now,” Lindsey said.

  “Marybeth?”

  “She legally changed it in 1989. Unknown if she got Proudfoot from marriage or the phone book.” Lindsey lapsed into a cop monotone. “She moved to Denver in 1982. She received a Colorado driver’s license in 1983. She applied for a passport in 1989, after her probation lapsed. She visited France and Italy.”

  “Jeez,” I said. “I’m never going to try to hide from you.”

  She bunched up her mouth in the sexy way that drove me crazy. “You’d better not hide. But when somebody has been through the criminal justice system, it’s easier to find them. All I need is that Social Security number, and all databases are mine.”

  She beamed, unguarded. She looked luminous, in a gray sweater and jeans the color of the cold sky out our airplane window. If she was exhausted it didn’t show. I thought about the soft, warm touch of the bottoms of her feet against the small of my back, about that gasp she made when she was close to coming. I wished we were in Denver on vacation, like normal people. I’d love her up in a Jacuzzi overlooking the mountains. But I didn’t ski. I had a sheriff’s star in my pocket.

  “Well,” I said, “Let’s go get reacquainted with Beth Proudfoot.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The airport seemed halfway to Kansas, it was so far from downtown Denver. When I spent a happy summer here years ago teaching twentieth century American history at the University of Denver, the city’s airport had been Stapleton International, a five-minute drive from downtown. Now it took five minutes just to get from the car rental garage to Interstate 70.

  It was definitely not summer in Denver. Inside our cramped, ugly rental Chevy, the heater struggled against the 10-degree High Plains blast. Lindsey and I both wore sweaters and leather jackets, an unheard-of combination for Phoenix in January, but barely adequate for Denver. As we hit the freeway and sped west, Lindsey asked me if I’d ever been in an orgy. That was easy. I told the truth and said no. Then she asked if I’d ever wanted to be in one. And I could be a guy and still be truthful to the woman I loved. I said, “Not now.” Maybe I’m too clever.

  “I’m not sharing you,” Lindsey said decisively. “Do you think Marybeth—I’d better start calling her Beth—was a willing participant?”

  I didn’t answer right away, because I was really thinking: Should I ask Lindsey if she’s ever been in an orgy? I tamped down my primal male insecurities, which could be concealed underneath my urbane academic bullshit exterior. I said, “Why not?”

  She was driving, and didn’t turn her head as she talked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Jonathan Ledger looks so creepy in that photo. So damned self-satisfied.” She whipped to the fast lane to avoid the sudden braking of a minivan. “The girl looks…”

  “Coerced?”

  “Oh, no,” Lindsey said. “She looks more lucid than some of the others. Nixon looks bombed out of his mind. But she has this look that’s very cold, very nonsensual. And yet very much aware. Way adult for, what was she, eighteen?”

  “I guess the prosecutors thought she looked innocent enough, if they let her skip out on a cop killing with just probation.”

  I remembered the terrified young woman with the cheerleader looks, begging me not to shoot her and Leo as they crawled out of the backseat that night in Guadalupe.

  “That smells like daddy’s money,” Lindsey said. “But how does she go from sucking off Jonathan Ledger in a Kodak moment to being in the middle of a gunfight between two prison escapees and the Sheriff’s Office? I know one of
the escapees was Leo’s cousin, but Leo’s not in any of those photos. There’s no connection between Leo and Camelback Falls.”

  Denver suddenly embraced us with warehouse rooftops and a massive traffic jam. I said, “Hell, how did she get to Camelback Falls from her safe little upper-class life as a Tulsa teenager?”

  ***

  The trail to Beth Proudfoot led us into the old neighborhood north of the Denver Country Club and the booming Cherry Creek shopping district. Mamie Eisenhower grew up in the neighborhood, which still boasted neat bungalows built before the First World War. They had been gentrified into the half-million-dollar range by Denver’s ascent into the New Economy. Unlike Phoenix, the landscape here was a winter palette of bare, black tree limbs, livened by the occasional evergreen. No snow was on the ground, but the gutters were full of brown leaves and everything had the stiff countenance of winter. Denver and Phoenix had different histories, too. Denver was a city when Phoenix was still a dusty farm village. Now Phoenix had long since outgrown Denver, but Denver still had more of the feel of a city. I liked it.

  “There.” Lindsey spotted the numbers on the porch of a small but lovingly restored cottage, framed by cedars. She pulled past the house and parked. “That’s the most recent address we have. Should we make a courtesy call to the Denver Police?”

  “We should,” I said. “But I don’t particularly want anyone to know we’re here.”

  “Agreed,” she said. She reached into the backseat, pulled open her backpack, and retrieved her Glock. She snapped the holster onto the right side of her jeans. Then she slipped an extra magazine into her left pocket. Then she covered it all with her jacket. She said, “Is it better if I check alone while you wait here?”

  “You think she remembers me after all these years?” I asked.

  “I think you’re unforgettable.”

  “Pardon the unprofessional behavior,” I said, leaning over to kiss her. Her lips were warm. “I think I’ll go with you.” I opened the door to the cold street.

  Thirty paces up the sidewalk and five knocks on the door, and there she was. The young blond girl from Guadalupe, right down to her tie-dyed top and tight bell-bottoms. I just looked at her, feeling an odd, out-of-place disorientation.

  “We’re looking for Beth Proudfoot,” Lindsey said.

  The girl cocked her head and fixed a look on us with her fine, wholesome features. She said, “And who the fuck are you?”

  “Sheriff’s deputies,” Lindsey said in her hard voice, flashing her badge with a swing that made the girl involuntarily have to follow her hand.

  “You got a warrant?”

  “Do we need one?” I asked.

  The girl gave a heavy sigh and fell into bad posture.

  “She’s not here,” she said. “She’s never here.”

  “She’s your mom?” Lindsey asked. She received a semi-affirmative shrug.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She mumbled something that sounded like “Paige.” I looked past her into the house. It was fashionably spare, with a few colorful objets d’art, large plants, and a Navajo rug. A highly polished string bass sat against one wall, positioned with just the right savoir faire. No books.

  “When do you expect your mom to be back?” Lindsey asked.

  “How the fuck would I know that?” Paige said, with a heaviness as if we had asked why war is a constant of the human condition.

  “You and your mom don’t get along?” I asked. She looked at me with a contempt that only beautiful young women can bestow on the mortal world. She didn’t have to say anything. I was as vanquished as if I were a pimply seventeen-year-old asking for a date. I tried again, “Where does your mom work?”

  Paige looked down at the sidewalk. We were at a standstill and I was freezing. Finally, Lindsey handed her a business card. “Let her know we came by. We’ll be back.”

  We started down the sidewalk when we heard the girl’s voice again.

  “You’re from Phoenix. What’s in Phoenix?”

  “Your mom used to live there,” I said. She just stared at us and shook her head, an older person’s shake, sad and knowing, Then she closed the door.

  In the car, we ran the heater on high and didn’t speak. Lindsey stared back at the house. I ran the zipper of my leather jacket all the way up and still shivered. “What?” I asked finally.

  “She reminds me of me at that age,” Lindsey said, and she unconsciously gave the same shake of the head.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  We were just about to pull away from the curb, when the door to the cottage opened and Paige stepped out, now wearing a heavy forest green parka. She waved to us and walked deliberately to the street. She silently held out a card. I rolled down the window, froze anew, and took it. It read: “Beth Proudfoot…Artist” and gave an address I knew was in the Lower Downtown district.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Her eyes almost seemed to fill with tears. But maybe it was the cold. She said, “If she asks about me, tell her I went to stay with Aunt Amy. But she won’t ask about me.” Paige spun on the balls of her feet and walked north up the street, then she ran, her hair a bouncing flaxen halo against the fading afternoon light.

  I gave Lindsey directions and we drove down Speer Boulevard into downtown. We went almost to Union Station, with its grand beaux arts front and neon roof sign inviting us to “Travel by Train.” Then we made a couple of turns and found the address on Beth’s business card. When I was teaching in Denver a decade before, these old four- and five-story brick warehouses and offices from the late nineteenth century were close to being torn down. Now LoDo, as it was called, was the hottest neighborhood in the city, a wonderful combination of nostalgia, yuppification, and the desire for dot-com office space. Two blocks away, the façade of Coors Field loomed over the street as if it had always been there. There was nothing like this neighborhood in Phoenix.

  We parked and walked across the original cobblestones and remnants of railroad tracks to Beth Proudfoot’s gallery. It was nearly four on a Sunday afternoon, but it was open. We stepped into a big, warm-smelling space with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and lots of light. A bell on the door tinkled. I could see a woman in the back—a flash of blond hair—helping a warmly dressed couple. We waited at a distance, grazing from a silver platter with cheeses and fruit, and milling around the sparse displays of what I presumed were artworks by Beth Proudfoot.

  My art tastes were eclectic, and if I had money I could really be dangerous. I would add to my tiny collection of Acoma and Santa Clara Indian pottery, start collecting the major impressionists, sprinkle in a few of the postwar moderns, and indulge a taste for Edward Hopper that a recent case had reawakened in me. I didn’t know anything. I knew what I liked.

  Beth’s art wouldn’t have worn well with me. A lot of wire, rope, and contractors’ flotsam glued to canvases, in crude wooden frames painted in bright primary colors. The frames were the highlight. Inside the frames, it was like high school vo-tech meets The Twilight Zone. But I was probably a philistine—cards on the wall announced that ownership of a Beth Proudfoot original began at $20,000. Any hope that her paintings illuminated what happened in Guadalupe twenty years ago, or what happened to Peralta a week ago, were beyond my critical skills.

  After a few minutes, the couple left and the woman approached us.

  “Welcome,” she said, fixing us full-on with one of those you-have-my-full-attention-and-I’m-delighted looks used by salesmen, politicians, and Junior Leaguers. She was tall and very slender, wearing one of those heavy, U-boat commander turtleneck sweaters and a short skirt, both in black. Still, she was shapely, and her movements suggested grace and agility. Her hair was two notches above the color of honey, natural-looking and cut in a rather severe page boy. For all that, the interest was in her face. She had good bones, as Grandmother would say. Atop those bones: no makeup, defiantly aging but still with flawless healthy skin, perfect mouth, and icy blue oval eyes topped by a thatch of vi
vid gold eyebrows.

  “You look like you’re from out of town,” she said, holding out her arms as if to embrace us. “I can just tell. Now”—she looked me up and down—“you look learned, like you have a tremendous power flowing through you. I would say, you are a writer or an academician, definitely a man of letters.” To Lindsey, she said, “And you, with that very dark hair and fair skin and that dangerous intensity in your eyes, you must be an artist-leader of some kind.” I felt like we were being conned, but I was sure there were people who got this treatment and were happy to plink down twenty grand for some wire glued to canvas.

  “Actually,” I said, “We’re looking for Beth Proudfoot or Marybeth Watson.”

  “Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office,” the artist-leader said, displaying her identification and star.

  The high-wattage smile blinked out like a suburban power outage, and something harder and self-aware crept into the woman’s face. I would have known that look anywhere. She was Marybeth, twenty years after Camelback Falls.

  We didn’t waste much more time with pleasantries. “You people never give up, do you?” she said.

  I hadn’t rehearsed anything. The answers we were after seemed so complicated. The questions we had were inadequate. I just talked. There had been a crime in Phoenix, I said, a shooting of the sheriff and murder of a former deputy. Both men had been on the scene more than two decades before in Guadalupe, when she had a different name and had been arrested after the killing of two cops. Both men had recently come back in contact with that old case.

  “What does that mean to me?” she said. “That was a long time ago. The court agreed I was not directly involved. I’ve had many lives since then. I’ve tried everything to put distance between that thing that happened and me.”

  “Is that why you changed your name?” Lindsey said.

  Her huge eyes blinked. She walked to the door and turned the lock. She turned the sign to “closed” and faced it to the street. She walked back to us, talking.