by Jon Talton
As we walked, Kimbrough talked about his family. One child, a boy, was six now, and another was on the way in June. His wife had left the County Attorney’s Office-they met when she was a prosecutor-and she was going to set up her own family law practice. This was Kimbrough’s fifteenth year with the Sheriff’s Office. He was five years younger than me, and came here from the Drug Enforcement Administration when the former sheriff, also a DEA man, won election.
“Now I know why I like you,” I said. “You’re an outsider in this department like me.”
“That and we have great taste in clothes.” He laughed.
We walked up a well prepared trail, but it was still work. The hard desert ground was defined by loose rocks, sand, and outcroppings of jumping cactus. I felt every foot of elevation in my knees and calves. But as we kept walking, the pain lessened, as did the immediate memory of the gunshot that made me dive for the sidewalk just a few hours before.
“Luckily the snakes are hibernating in winter,” I said.
“Great,” Kimbrough said.
“’Course it’s been a warm winter, Dave,” Lindsey said.
As we neared the summit and left the trail, the ugliness of the day became evident. A weather inversion had clamped the smog down hard on the city, just like the lid on a bowl. Only Phoenix’s bowl was the purple and brown necklace of mountains that surrounded it. From where we stood, we should have been able to see the soaring blue towers of the Sierra Estrella to the south and the sheer expanse of the White Tanks to the west. Both were gone, replaced by a yellow-brown haze that spread out across the desert floor. Even Squaw Peak and Camelback, much closer, were barely visible. To the south, the Sunnyslope section of the city fell away in a series of rooftops, palm trees, and billboards until it, too, disappeared in the muck. The line of skyscrapers on the Central Corridor shimmered and faded. To the north, Moon Valley and Deer Valley, newer parts of Phoenix, sprawled around Lookout Mountain, itself cloaked in brown air.
“Yuck,” Lindsey said. We were all winded from the climb, and the sight of the air didn’t make breathing easier.
“I remember when the sky here was the bluest blue in the world,” I said, working my way up a slick boulder. “But I’m sounding like an old fogey.”
Lindsey grabbed my hand and pulled herself up on the next level of rock. “You’re a young fogey,” she said, “like me.”
We paused and studied the map. Sure enough, a slab of concrete was set into a cluster of boulders, marked off by signs that warned “Danger. Abandoned Mine.”
“I didn’t realize there was mining in the Valley,” Lindsey said, kindly teasing my eternal pedagogic sensibility.
“Yeah, my wife thinks these mountains just look like giant slag heaps,” Kimbrough said. “But she’s from Pennsylvania.”
“Well, these mountains were really not much. The mining districts east of here, around Globe, or north in the Bradshaw Mountains actually had some gold and silver.” I restrained myself. “Anyway, there were a few mines around Phoenix. Squaw Peak had some quicksilver mines. A German POW hid in one for awhile when he escaped, back in World War II.”
I could go on all day, and Lindsey said my history talks were wildly romantic. But we fell silent as we studied Nixon’s instructions. Northeast corner of the concrete slab, right by the fence pole. I stuck the shovel in the hard, dry dirt and started digging.
After several cuts at the ground, I was about to let Kimbrough take his turn digging. Then the blade of the shovel struck metal.
“That’s it,” I said. I changed the angle of the shovel and soon outlined what looked like an old metal ammunition box, just the size of a bread box, its olive green paint suddenly peeking out of the blond and gray desert soil.
“Whatever it was,” Lindsey said, “Nixon didn’t want it at his trailer. But he didn’t want it that far away, either.”
I grasped the handle of the box and pulled it out of the ground. “Well, we’re about to find out.”
I put latex gloves back on and released the metal catch on the ammo box. The top swung open, releasing sand and rocks. Inside it was empty.
“I don’t believe it,” Kimbrough said. “This is like when Geraldo opened Al Capone’s vault.”
“Wait a minute.” I put my hand on the bottom and it gave way. A piece of dark metal, cut to create a false bottom. I pulled out the metal plate and beneath it was some kind of book, wrapped in plastic. I pulled it out and shook it off, being paranoid about scorpions and other desert creepy-crawlies. But inside it was clean and dry, a red, hardcover journal. It was the kind of logbook you might have seen in any small business a generation ago.
“Hmmmm,” Kimbrough said, reacting to the cover. It was a vivid cartoon of two pigs in police uniforms, having sex while riding a Harley. Beneath it was inscribed, “MCSD RIVER HOGS.”
“That dates it,” I said. “Back in the seventies, it was the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, MCSD, when we were trying to prove how big-city we were.”
“What were the River Hogs?” Lindsey asked.
I shook my head, looking over at Kimbrough.
“Before my time,” he said. “But I never heard the phrase before.”
“When did Nixon’s ex get that envelope?” I asked.
“She didn’t recall exactly,” he said. “They divorced in 1991, and she moved to Tempe. She knows Nixon gave her the envelope to hang onto after they divorced. She said she hadn’t even seen Nixon since 1995.”
“Dave’s ex gave him a BMW,” Lindsey said, poking my ribs.
“So he was anticipating somebody killing him for at least five years, maybe longer?” I said.
“Maybe,” Kimbrough said. “But he was a drunk and a washout as a law enforcement officer. Maybe he was just paranoid.” I held out the book again and opened the cover. Beyond some blank initial sheets, the pages turned dense with columns. Pages and pages of numbers and columns. I flipped through. Nothing but numbers and columns. One column appeared to be dates, starting in 1977. On the last page, the date was 12/31/80. Another column was clearly about money: Each page saw that column set off with a precisely-drawn dollar sign-and the same person appeared to have written all the entries. The sums weren’t small, $1,000 being a common amount, and some lines showing as high as $15,000.
“What’s that?” Kimbrough indicated another column, with four-digit numbers.
I shook my head. “Some kind of code, maybe.” I scanned the pages, and the four-digit numbers frequently repeated themselves. A few appeared quite regularly, every week.
“Like a book-making operation?” Lindsey asked. I shook my head, feeling suddenly like something cold had wrapped itself around my neck.
“Or payoffs,” I said. “Bribes to cops. Nixon left nothing in this case except this book. He obviously thought it was self-evident, and that the information was explosive. We’re not talking about records of poker games, here.”
“That’s why he wrote the thing about taking it to the U.S. Attorney,” Kimbrough said.
“So what is the code?” Lindsey asked. “Maybe there’s a key somewhere in the book.”
Kimbrough’s star and gun hanging on his belt caught my eye, and it was clear. “They’re badge numbers,” I said.
Lindsey drew closer. “Jeez, Dave, are you in there?”
“What was Nixon’s badge number?” I asked. Kimbrough shook his head.
“Hang on,” Lindsey said, pulling out her Palm Pilot.
“I guess I have to get one of those,” I said.
“This one’s old,” she said, using a stylus to make some marks on the little screen. “It takes a long time to beam into the mainframe down on Madison Street.”
I looked out, past the blown-apart, burned boulders, over the brown haze obscuring the city. Badge numbers. So this was what Nixon wanted someone to see in the event of his death. Leo O’Keefe? No, Dean Nixon had been fearing something for a very long time, and it had to do with badge numbers.
“Got it,” Lindsey said,
reading out Nixon’s number from the central computer. And, sure enough, Nixon was a regular in the book. In just one month, he accounted for $8,500, and that was 1979 money.
Lindsey drew close to me and began scanning the pages herself. Suddenly, she drew in a sharp breath. “Oh!”
I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to. But there it was. And it reappeared. Again and again, on page after page.
“That can’t be,” I said.
“What the hell are you guys talking about,” Kimbrough demanded. But then his eyes picked up the four digits, too.
“Oh, my God,” he said.
There was only one badge number that was so familiar in the Sheriff’s Office that everyone knew it by sight.
Chapter Twelve
As acting sheriff of Maricopa County, I could tell you a lot about what we do. We have 1,500 sworn deputies, and a volunteer posse of 3,200 reserve deputies. We police a county spread over 9,200 square miles, a larger area than some states. On the side of our patrol cars is the motto: “Protect and serve.”
The Sheriff’s Office is organized into nine bureaus. Patrol and detective operations are handled in four districts, dividing up the county. We have expensive and showy helicopters, heavily armed SWAT teams, and even a tank. We have a low-rider to win friends in the barrio.
Detaining prisoners is a big part of what we do. They’re kept in six different jails, including the former sheriff’s fabled Tent City jail, where the inmates live in tents, wear pink underwear, and eat green baloney. They seem to enjoy it.
Fifteen deputies have been killed in the line of duty, starting in 1922.
But that’s all numbers and organization, gadgets and background material off the sheriff’s web site. I know. I helped write it. But it doesn’t get at the heart and character of the organization. Even college faculties have heart and character. At the MCSO, even under the former sheriff’s showbiz years, those traits were best expressed, and embodied, in a man named Peralta.
I knew all his bad sides. He was stubborn. He could be relentless. He was the very antithesis of the teary-communicative, huggy-therapeutic postmodern man. But I had been blessed by his brave heart and manly charity more times than I could count. Not just the night in Guadalupe when he saved my life, but in the aftermath of the shooting when he made sure I was assigned to easy duty. He would have been insulted if I had thanked him. To his mind, I had done my duty, and that wrapped me forever in his web of mutual obligation. That’s why he stayed in touch all those years when we had nothing in common but a shared past. And it’s why he gave me a job when nobody else would, and kept the Jack Abernathys of the department off my back until I had time to prove myself. That was Peralta.
But right then he lay before me unseeing, unhearing, a machine doing his breathing. We were alone in the room. I sat deeply in a chair with slick vinyl sides, watching his chest rise. I was in quite a state. But no one would know. Only Lindsey would, but she had gone with Kimbrough to log in the evidence we found in Dean Nixon’s ammo box. They figured I would be OK alone here, guarded by a phalanx of deputies in jumpsuits and flak jackets patrolling the hospital halls.
“Log the evidence in quietly for now,” I’d instructed Kimbrough. He’d looked at me pointedly. “What are you asking me to do, Sheriff?”
I said, “I am asking you to do just what I said. That’s all.”
And then I came to Good Sam to sit with the man whose badge number appeared repeatedly in Dean Nixon’s logbook next to large amounts of cash.
I’m a good man to have in a crisis. The high-functioning child who grew up around old people, “man child” Grandmother called me. The multitalented adult who could do all sorts of different things well, but could never quite succeed at any of them. The cop who was too smart for law enforcement. The professor not smart enough to get tenure, or conform to the new political conventions of the academy, or even write popular history books that would sell.
And now, through a strange collision of events, all these destinies had been placed in my hands. Right that moment, my hands shook. My heart clubbed my ribcage. The point of pain between the belly and my heart had grown into a persistent ache.
“What have we gotten into?” I said to the mountain in the bed before me.
Only the mechanical wheeze of the respirator responded.
My voice was a dull monotone in a dim room. “Why is your badge number on those pages?”
I was suddenly so tired and angry with him, for putting me in this situation, for getting hurt, for abandoning us-it wasn’t rational, but, as I say, I was in a state. Just as quickly, I filled with remorse. But finally, I came back around to Dean Nixon’s record book, and the terrible history it gave. Could it possibly be true?
It would all have to go to Internal Affairs, of course. And to the feds. And to the media.
I had a lot of complaints and crotchets about the Sheriff’s Office over the years. But I never, even at my most discontent, thought we were corrupt.
Maybe this was all some kind of put-on.
But if so, why did my stomach hurt so damned much?
I could not accept that this man before me was a dirty cop. I could not. I owed him my life, on more than one occasion. But a voice inside me, a voice trained by an unfaithful wife and a career ruined by betrayal, said, How well do we really know anyone, especially the people we love? And the voice of a trained historian, who knew to look beneath the surface, to view institutions skeptically, to distrust one’s preconceptions…well, that voice told me I was in too deep.
“David?”
It was Sharon. She had come in silently and now stood behind me. I stood and gave her a quick hug.
“Have you been crying?” she asked.
It was a slander. It was the smog. I said, “You went back to the radio show?”
“I had to find a routine,” she said. “Better to deal with other people’s problems than mine.” She was wearing expensive-looking cream slacks and a black blouse. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, bringing out her high cheekbones. She sat in the other chair and took my hand.
“He won’t wake up, David,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve read whole books and web sites on head trauma and comas, but it’s shocking how little they know, even today. So much of it seems out of our hands.”
She stood and worked her way around his bed, inspecting gauges, connections, fluids, contraptions. “We’ve been taking shifts, the girls and I. We try to have someone with him every moment they’ll let us.”
Peralta’s color looked all wrong. His broad, expressive face-the turbulent synthesis of Aztecs and conquistadors-was several shades lighter than I had ever seen it. The crinkles around his eyes seemed etched in pink blood.
“David, how is the hunt going for this convict?”
“Badly,” I said. “But I don’t think he’s our suspect anyway.” I told her of the events of the past few hours, cleaning it up for civilian sensibilities, leaving out the part about the gunshot aimed at my head.
She shook her head with increasing agitation. “I can’t believe someone can try to kill the sheriff of one of the largest counties in America, and you people are so helpless!”
“It’s not that,” I said quietly, feeling pretty damned helpless. “We’re making progress. But it’s taking us in a different direction.”
“But David, you have a note pointing to this…”
“Leo O’Keefe.”
“What a name,” she said. “No wonder he’s deranged. I’m going to write a book someday about what parents do to their children with rotten names.”
“I’m not saying he’s not involved. I’m just saying I don’t think he pulled the trigger.” I let silence fill in the room again. I had to talk to her. I just didn’t know how.
“How is Lindsey? That is a pretty name.”
“She’s OK,” I said. “She’s concerned.”
“Sometimes,” Sharon said, “she reminds me of a young Susan Sontag, all that dark hair, a
nd that poetic watchfulness she has.”
“Different politics,” I said. But I liked the phrase “poetic watchfulness.” I added, “And she doesn’t consider herself an intellectual. She’s quite stubborn about that. But she is a great mind and soul.”
“I like Lindsey,” Sharon said, turning aside my idealistic parry. “I’ve come to like her. She’s knocked off a lot of her rough edges the past couple of years.”
“She’s knocked off some of mine, too.”
“I suppose so,” Sharon said. “You certainly seem happy around her. I don’t know if that’s a reason to get married. Who said a second marriage is ‘the triumph of hope over experience’?”
“Dr. Johnson,” I said.
She patted my hand. “David, the Renaissance man. I hope she gets that about you.”
“She does,” I said. “She reads. We read to each other. That’s a big deal today.” I felt uncomfortable, as if I were defending Lindsey from a subtle, professionally engineered attack.
“You know,” she said, “the day he was shot, I was wrapping up an article about women and marriage.”
“Oh, yeah?” I was relieved for a slight change of subject.
“The headline, I guess, is that marriage is bad for women’s growth. That’s the way I see it.” She sighed heavily. “I was trying to figure out how I was going to tell him about this without setting him off. How screwed up is that?”
“It sounds pretty bleak,” I said. “About marriage.”
“Oh, there are always exceptions, I guess. But in my line, love gone wrong is the biggest source of people’s unhappiness. On the radio show, I could take nothing but lovelorn calls. I have the screener keep a better balance with other pathologies, just so I don’t get bored.”
