Camelback Falls dmm-2

by Jon Talton

  Beth sat down on a bench. “Joyride,” she said. “Stupid kid joyride. My boyfriend and I hooked up with some bad people. We didn’t know they were escaped from prison. Then those officers stopped us…”

  “Why did they stop you?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “I was high.”

  “Are you sure they stopped the car you were riding in?” I went on.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We were stopped. The guys started shooting. They just shot those officers…”

  I went back again. “So you hooked up with these two guys and went riding. What were you doing before you were stopped?”

  She didn’t answer at first, just stared at the hardwood floors with the closed-in expression of her daughter. All those hidden codes and customs in our genes, whether we wanted them there or not.

  “I was high,” she repeated. “I don’t remember much.” Then she stood, reared on me, her face suddenly flushed. “Jesus. It has been twenty-one years! I have tried to forget it! I was a kid!”

  “What about Leo?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “When was the last time you had contact with him?”

  Her lower lip tightened just a millimeter. “Not for years. He was like a high school boyfriend, for God’s sake. Do you stay in touch with your high school girlfriends? He went to prison.” She sighed. “My dad made it so I couldn’t even talk to him, after we were arrested. Dad never liked Leo. And then life went on…”

  “You haven’t heard from him lately?” Lindsey asked.

  “No.” This said with firm shakes of the head. “Of course not”

  “Do you know he escaped from prison recently?”

  “No,” she said, louder. “I didn’t know that.”

  Lindsey said, “Tell us about Camelback Falls?”

  “What?” Beth said, a seamless conversationalist.

  “Camelback Falls,” Lindsey said. “Dr. Jonathan Ledger and his house on the mountain?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Beth said.

  I fished out a card and handed it to her. “You can leave a message on the voice mail if you think of anything,” I said. “We’re at the Hyatt up the street, and we’ll be here a few days. If you remember anything.”

  “I’m sure I won’t,” she said. “Would you like to take the cheese and fruit with you?” Sweetness returned. We demurred.

  As she let us out into the cold, Lindsey said, “So you’ve never been on any of the prison pen pal Internet sites, in touch with Leo O’Keefe?”

  The winter light cut a harsher profile of Beth. She stared at Lindsey and whispered, “No.”

  I started down the two steps to the street, but Lindsey held back. She said, “By the way, your daughter said to tell you she misses you, and wishes you’d come home early tonight.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Monday morning. It was two hours later in Boston, and my call caught Lorie Pope just as she was going out the door. I asked her if she could talk.

  “If you’ll give me about thirty minutes to get all these coats off me,” she grumped. “Every time I start to miss the East and think I want to live back here, I remember how cold it is in January. What’s the temperature in Phoenix now?”

  “Probably 75,” I said. “But I’m in Denver right now, so I feel your pain. Actually, I kind of like the cold. I just don’t have a good coat.”

  “Well, you’re a native Zonie,” she said. “You probably thought snow was fallout the first time you saw it.”

  It was true. I asked her what she was doing on the East Coast. It had only taken several days to find out where she was.

  “I’m at Harvard, a Neiman Fellowship.” She paused. “It’s a journalism thing.”

  “Sounds like an honor,” I said.

  “It gets me out of the newsroom for a few months,” she said.

  “And that keeps me from pissing off the bosses with my daily rebellions.”

  I told her about my daily rebellions, and she let out a squeal of delight. I could just see her tossing her hair back out of her eyes, smiling that wide white smile and lighting up a Marlboro. “You’re the sheriff! I don’t believe it! I’ve been skiing the past week in New Hampshire and I haven’t even read the paper online. God, I wish I were there to write that story!” Then she knocked her voice down. “I’m sorry about Peralta. I know he’s your friend.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But as usual, I need your help.”

  “Anything for my old boyfriend the sheriff.”

  “Remember that big shootout in Guadalupe in 1979? The two deputies?”

  “I covered it, David,” she admonished. “Remember, we met when I was covering the police beat?”

  “I remember everything,” I said “So, what about that case never made the papers?”

  “Oh, David, now the bargaining side of my personality is coming out. It’s not my best side. Why do you want to know, my love, and what’s in it for me?”

  “A well-made martini when you get back to Phoenix,” I said. “Anyway, you’re on a junket.”

  I knew from the expectant silence that it wouldn’t fly. So I told her my story as economically as possible.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Are you safe?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “Well, the thing that never got in the paper was the degree of influence exerted by the girl’s father, Bill Watson. He was loaded with oil money. And I’m convinced some heavy campaign contributions came to the judge and the county attorney in exchange for the light sentence for Marybeth.”

  “But she was just a kid, and the record indicates she wasn’t directly involved.”

  “Mmmmm,” Lorie said. “So how do you explain the prison sentence for her boyfriend?”

  “Daddy’s money?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what do you know about Camelback Falls?” I asked.

  She let out a little whistle. “I haven’t heard that name in years. It was Jonathan Ledger’s house. You know, the sex guy?”

  “Did you ever go up there?”

  She laughed. “Oh, I had an adventurous youth, but not that adventurous. I did get an invitation to a party there once, but I was busy or had to work or something. It was apparently quite the swinger’s place back then.”

  “I never got those kind of invitations,” I said.

  “You were too ponderous, my love. All those books and big thoughts.”

  “So what kind of people went up there?”

  “My invitation came from a doctor, a sports medicine guy I was dating. I think I was dating about five men at once then. No, you weren’t one of them. Anyway, I got the sense it was a crowd with a lot of money and not much sense. You know, it was the seventies. Anything goes. Ledger kept a salon of beautiful people, and they had legendary parties. That was the rep.”

  “So no lowlifes, or prison escapees? Or runaways from Tulsa?”

  She paused. “David, this is getting way too interesting. Maybe I’d better get on the next plane back.”

  “What if I told you I’d seen a photo of Marybeth and Jonathan Ledger, and they weren’t posing at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.”

  “I’d say that’s news,” she said.

  I asked, “What were the River Hogs?”

  “This is memory lane. The Hogs were cops, deputies. They were bad news.”

  “Bad news, how?”

  “I’ll tell you what I heard, and then I’ll tell you what I saw. Remember, I was a twenty-two-year-old kid reporter. If the cops were friendly, they usually just wanted to try to get me into bed. Usually, they were outright hostile. Not only was I the press, but I was a woman.”

  She went on. “What I heard was that this group of deputies was a kind of force above the law. They looked the other way on things like drugs and prostitution in exchange for protection money. They had the reputation of tough guys, and there was talk they were somehow tied into the Vegas mob. Real muscle. You didn’t want to mess with them. You never kne
w exactly who they were. That added to the mystique.”

  “They were the River Hogs?”

  “Yes and no. The River Hogs were a joke at first. A bunch of guys would get off duty, buy a few cases of beer and go drink themselves silly down in the riverbed. Big time in the city, huh? When the department brass got wind of it, they tried to shut it down, but the drinking parties always just moved somewhere else. I heard they got really out of hand sometimes, drunken target shooting, bringing along prostitutes and cop groupies, that kind of thing. But there was also this kind of understanding that the way into this shadow group of dirty cops was through these parties. So were they one and the same? I never found out.”

  “Why didn’t I ever know any of this?”

  “Oh, David,” she said. “You were always in your own world. It was endearing.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling not so endearing. “You said you also saw something.”

  “Yes,” she said. “There was this nasty strip of bars down between Tempe and Scottsdale. You remember? Bobby Hamid got his start there. Lots of other sterling citizens. There was one place called Lacey’s Lounge. It was totally scummy, but no more so than any other place there. Then one night, just after closing, the deputies raided the place. They shot and killed the owner, a guy named, uh, Jimmy Nance. They said he pulled a gun on them after they identified themselves. And they found a bunch of pot and cocaine.”

  “So?”

  “So, I had done a story on those topless bars a few months before, and I spent some time with this Nance. He was totally neurotic, about guns. Said he’d never own one because he was afraid it would be used on him. David, they planted that gun on him to make the shooting look righteous. He must have backed out on paying his protection money. It’s not like the other places got raided. And they got away with it! My editors had zip interest in my pursuing the story.”

  “So who were the bad cops?” I felt my gut tighten involuntarily.

  “I never knew, David.”

  “Come on, Lorie,” I pressed. “There must have been talk. Somebody I know? Somebody I worked with?”

  “I swear to God, I don’t know.”

  “What about the two deputies in Guadalupe?”

  “Heroes killed in the line of duty,” she said. “They were close to retirement. Left behind families. It was the hook for the story for weeks.”

  “Was it true?”

  “David.” Her voice tightened with irritation. “I generally try to write the truth.”

  I said, “Did you know one of them had a failing business on the side? He was really strapped for money when the shooting happened.”

  She didn’t say anything, so I went on. “And did you know those same photos from Camelback Falls show another East County deputy involved in an orgy? That’s the same deputy who was murdered last week.”

  “No, I didn’t know any of that,” she said. “You’re making me feel like an idiot here.”

  “Welcome to the club,” I said.

  I finished up on the phone, then showered and locked up the hotel room. Lindsey had already gone to the public library in search of a T-1 line. We had slept nearly nine hours, snuggled like spoons against the cold world just out the window, interrupted around 3 A.M. for a fierce and satisfying lovemaking. When we woke up, there were six inches of dry powder snow on the ground.

  “How did you know Beth had been in touch with Leo via the Internet?” I asked as she dressed and I read the Rocky Mountain News in bed.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “It was a bluff. And she fell for it.”

  Beth had given away something, amid a conversation that seemed to be leavened with lies, shadings. If she wouldn’t cooperate, we were stuck. I could go to the Denver cops and begin the process of wrapping her up as a material witness. But there was no time. There was a time deficit. I was a time debtor, and foreclosure was imminent. A week had gone by since Peralta’s shooting. It seemed like a year.

  I had my own errand. I drove the three miles through plowed streets to Cherry Creek, where the self-help and sexuality section of the Tattered Cover bookstore held several paperback copies of The Sex Instructions and More Sex Instructions, by Jonathan Ledger. I sat on a bench and leafed through with only mild embarrassment. Hey, I was a kid of the ’70s, I had no inhibitions.

  Like the other sexuality books of the time, Ledger’s books used the trappings of science and liberation to tear down bourgeois hangups and have a grand old time talking about screwing. More than most, however, his books were notable for their frankness and explicit photographs. These were good-looking models in clinical settings, though, not the drugged, flawed, fleshy convivialists at Camelback Falls. Written before the age of AIDS, Ledger’s books were evangelical tomes for promiscuity-one chapter was entitled “The Pathology of Faithfulness”-and doing what felt good.

  I snapped shut the book as a little girl skipped by. On the back was a photo of Ledger, cropped so you could see only his dramatic black brows and sharply chiseled face rather than the wispy white hair hanging on around his bald pate. “Jonathan Ledger was a researcher, teacher, and lecturer on human sexuality,” the type read. “He was born in Utah into a large Mormon family, but broke away from the church as a teenager. Ledger received his Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton, where he conducted pioneering research on female sexuality. As an author, his books spent a total of 87 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. He died in 1984.”

  I opened the book again and flipped through the photos. Three sets of lovers, attractive sexual artists, demonstrating various positions and flavors. I noticed that the couples didn’t stay together. To get Ledger’s deeper point of pleasure across, the men and women played musical chairs in different pictures. It would have all been very naughty and forbidden in 1975. Now, it just seemed banal. When I thought of the photos from Camelback Falls-more pioneering research? — it seemed kind of pathetic.

  Now I didn’t feel deprived. When I was living through those years, I felt like I was missing the greatest party in the history of the world. I could hear my neighbors screwing on the other side of the walls. I could get the sex stories from my friends, male and female. I was so out of it. Now, I didn’t miss that past. Now I reveled in the positions and flavors with Lindsey, a woman who loved with enough freshness and sometimes awkwardness that I didn’t feel as if she had practiced on dozens of men before me, with the burnout and scars to go along with it. Maybe that was naive on my part. But whether we made love or just fucked, sex with Lindsey always felt new, and always felt like home.

  I looked at the photo of Ledger again. “Tell me something, Jonathan,” I said aloud, oblivious to the people around me. Ledger stared at me like a backwoods preacher out to save my soul.

  I opened the front pages. A list of his other works. No dedication page. I flipped forward, where it would tell me the copyright dates, the printing history, the ISBN number. The business of publishing. The stuff nobody ever reads.

  Then I saw it.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  It was full dark by 5 P.M. If you looked west, you could see the snowy peaks of the Front Range shimmering in the fading sunlight that had finally broken through the cloudbanks. But in downtown Denver, the snow was churned brown and gray by the traffic, and the streetlights sparkled like dream crystal.

  Lindsey was moored to her laptop, so I walked along the 16th Street Mall, all the way down to Larimer Square. The office crowd lingered in warm bars, and snugly dressed young couples shopped and strolled. In a taphouse near Coors Field, I fortified myself with a MacCallen, neat. The jukebox played Sinatra, “One for My Baby.” I found myself missing Lindsey, even though she was only half a mile away. And missing Peralta: his capricious temper, his impossible demands, his quirkiness, but all somehow wrapped up in a package that made us feel safe and centered. There was one for Dr. Sharon to expound on.

  Safe and centered. In the honest darkness of the bar, I recalled Lindsey’s words that morning.

  “I thought we were
the good guys.”

  She had said it with a simple sadness as she played with my chest hair, molded against me and warm in the rumpled bedclothes.

  “Every cop I ever knew wanted to do good,” she had said. “Why else would you put up with the bullshit? The same group of hopeless cases you deal with over and over, when you’re on patrol. The harassment from the lawyers and the politicians. I always thought, no matter what, at least we’re the good guys.”

  I had said something forgettable and she had laid her head on my chest, listening to my heart. After a long time, she had said, “I got a call the other day from Yahoo. Can you believe it? They wanted me to talk to them about consulting on security.” Then she had gone back to monitoring my heart. Finally: “I would have said no. But this time-Dave, don’t hate me-I said I wanted to think about it.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she had said. Quietly: “We wouldn’t have to move. Unless you wanted to live in San Francisco. Maybe go back to teaching and writing. Be safe.”

  That’s where we had left it. When the last precious drops of single malt were gone from the glass, I walked three blocks to the red brick warehouse that held Beth Proudfoot’s gallery.

  I was mortally afraid of falling on ice. It’s not like you got ice balance growing up in Arizona, and I never gained it in the years I lived in cold places. I had already had two near spills, which were almost worse than just going ahead and falling on my ass. So I walked down Blake Street like a little old man, listening like a Minnesota ice fisherman to the ground crunching under my shoes. The giving texture of the snow made a welcome echo. The hard surface of ice was a single note snap that made me wary. My slow pace made it easy for me to gaze into the broad, clean windows of the bright gallery and see the stocky man standing just outside.

  He was all arm muscles and thick neck, warmed only by a light black windbreaker. He had a low center of gravity, but stood lightly, bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking at nothing in particular. Beyond him, the gallery was deserted. A purple neon sign glowed in the window in signature script: “Beth Proudfoot.” I felt my abdomen tighten.