Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  Chapter Four

  I climbed into the BMW, slid in Coltrane’s Blue Train CD and took Seventh Avenue downtown. Dammit, I liked the car. Somewhere, the cold autumn wind was whipping leaves down streets scented with chimney smoke: the genuine fall of our movie-and-TV-seeded collective memory. But in Phoenix, it was seventy-five degrees and intensely sunny. The desert did change with the seasons, but the transformation was very gradual: autumn was a sweet mildness in the late afternoon, a change in the quality of light, a wistful abbreviation of the day. You had to pay attention.

  When I hit Indian School, the cell phone rang.

  “So, David,” a woman’s voice said, “I hear you got into some trouble last night.”

  “I didn’t think Pulitzer Prize winners got up this early,” I said to Lorie Pope of the Arizona Republic.

  She laughed without humor. “Yeah, well, the fad-du-jour over here is re-engineering the newsroom into ‘teams,’ where we all get to rotate into the cops beat. It’s supposed to make everyone feel equal. I feel like I’m twenty-one years old again.”

  “I remember when you were twenty-one.”

  “And I remember you, my love,” she sighed in her husky alto. “But I digress. So what about it? A robbery downtown last night? The heroic Chief Peralta saving the distressed damsels in a dramatic showdown. Then something about a chase and a couple of skeletons being found? A certain history-professor-turned-deputy involved. Something tells me it isn’t just another body drop here in sunny Phoenix. Tell me something I can put in the paper.”

  Idling at a red light, I flipped down the sun visor and used the mirror to check the damage to my face. Not too bad: a cut on my left cheek, ugly bruise under my left eye, a little swelling. Hurt like hell. The light changed and I said, “You know how Peralta is. Go through the public information officer.”

  “They’d just send me to that damned sheriff’s Web site for a press release.”

  “Or buy me a drink off the record.”

  “That interesting, huh?” she said. “So how about tonight? Or do you have plans with that X-er girlfriend, whatshername, Ashley?”

  “Lindsey.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You ever hear about the Yarnell kidnapping?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “You’re the historian, David. Weren’t they grandsons of Hayden Yarnell? Twin brothers, right? I think a guy was finally caught.”

  “Jack Talbott,” I said. “He was a handyman, who did work at the Yarnell place. He was arrested for some minor thing down on the border and they found some of the ransom money on him. But he never admitted to the kidnapping and they never found either the bulk of the ransom money or the twins.”

  “So, why are you telling me this?”

  “I am preparing your mind,” I said. “I’ll call later.”

  Ten minutes later, I parked outside Phoenix Police Headquarters, a sterile monstrosity of the 1970s that uglies up the corner of Seventh Avenue and Washington Street. On the Washington side, about thirty protesters walked in a long circle, carrying signs: “Stop killing us!” and “NO Police War on Minorities.” In a vacant lot off Van Buren Street last night a sixteen-year-old Hispanic kid decided to get in a gun battle with the cops. Nobody knew why. The newspaper said he was hit by sixteen bullets. Sixteen years and sixteen bullets. I limped around the corner, feeling the Advil I had taken for my ankle wear off, took the side entrance and checked in with the desk cop.

  Half an hour passed before I was given a visitor’s badge and sent up to the investigations division. It took up most of a floor, but with its cubicles, computers, and neutral-tone decor, it looked more like an insurance office than a police station. A receptionist sent me back to a glass office where a man sat staring at a messy desk. All I could see was the top of his head: dark, straight, dry hair, parted on one side. The name-card on the door said, lt. augustus hawkins. He sure as hell didn’t look like a Roman emperor.

  I rapped on the doorjamb and stepped inside. “David Mapstone, MCSO.”

  “I know who you are,” the lowered head spoke.

  The bullshit cop hazing was well under way. The long wait downstairs. Now he would let me stand awkwardly while he balanced his checkbook or wrote to his girlfriend, or whatever. It was like dealing with a tenure committee and I was really bad at it.

  I waited at least a minute before speaking. “Look, Hawkins, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be. But I’ve got orders, same as you do.”

  The dry, dark hair went back and a face rose up. A most ordinary, suburban face with thin, pale lips, and blotchy, pale skin. A face that would always be just a few hours ahead of needing a shave. Below the face was a wrinkled gray dress shirt and a goldish pattern tie with an enormous knot. The face regarded me and nodded grimly.

  “Yeah, well, right. Sit.”

  I did.

  “This is a city case.”

  “No!”

  “We have a cold-case squad.”

  “Seriously?”

  “We don’t need your help.”

  “I’m crushed.”

  “We don’t want your help.”

  “So call Chief Wilson and tell him that.”

  He sighed heavily from somewhere south of his lungs and went back to staring at his papers. He didn’t like eye contact. “My orders are to cooperate. I follow my orders. This is just a job. Not a crusade.” He signed a document and looked at me again, briefly.

  “And this is your lucky day,” he went on, “because I have way more homicides than I have detectives. We have three thousand open-unsolved cases, and they’re from five and ten years ago, with living loved ones who care about what happened. I sure as hell don’t have time for my guys to be mucking around with some bones from sixty years ago. So if you stay out of the way and write your little report, we’ll get along fine.”

  “Yessir,” I said. “Out of the way, little report, get along fine.”

  He looked up and his eyes narrowed down to slits. A pillbox face ready to resist invaders.

  “Look, what do you need to get this over with as fast as possible?”

  I told him: access to records, somebody to push through the testing of the crime scene and the skeletons, and time to interview the Yarnell family.

  He leaned back and expelled a breath. “You’re talking about one of the most prominent families in the state. What do you need to talk to them about?”

  “You know, we talk to family members in murder investigations. At least at the sheriff’s office we do.”

  He shook his head and his voice became whiny. “Jesus. It’s virtually a closed case. We just need to tie up loose ends. There’s no mystery here. We don’t need to make waves or piss people off.”

  “I can be quite charming,” I said. “Look how I’m winning you over.”

  He rubbed his neck. “You will wear your MCSO identification in the building at all times. There’s no smoking in here. No using our office supplies. You will gather evidence and take no action—none—without informing me first.”

  He smoothed the papers before him. “No cowboy tactics, no Peralta shoot-em-ups. This is a nine-to-five job, a professional, civil service job. I’m taking my kid to soccer practice tonight, right on time. I expect that from everyone on this floor.” He added: “We’ll get the lab work moving ahead.”

  I rose and started to leave.

  “You’re an outsider times two, Mapstone,” Hawkins said. “You’re not a Phoenix officer. And you’re not really even a deputy. You’re some kind of professor. Outsiders don’t do well in this department.”

  “There goes my self-esteem,” I said, and left him staring at his desktop.

  Chapter Five

  The cases were so old the files were kept in the city records warehouse over on Jefferson Street. At least, that’s what I hoped. I drove over, checked in with another civil servant at another desk, and, after some searching, went to work. I slipped the CD
of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall concert in my Walkman and spent the afternoon picking through records.

  The physical memory of the case was located in dusty folders inside a single cardboard file box: papers that had once been the center of somebody’s work, but now sat dusty and neglected. Lindsey was a master of search engines, databases, spreadsheets and the Internet. But most records older than ten years were still on paper, microfiche and microfilm, and research was done the way I had learned it in college. Suited me fine. There was something almost mystical about the tactile search through old records for historical truth—the idea of touching the same piece of paper that was touched by the man or woman who lived the event. But, as Peralta said, maybe I was just strange.

  The files were a mess, out of chronological order or their proper folder. It looked as if they had been tossed haphazardly into the box years ago and forgotten. The dust attested to that. I was sneezing and wishing I had taken a Sudafed. So I spent more than an hour sniffling, sneezing, and sorting the files into some kind of order. I separated them into piles: handwritten call logs from uniforms, typewritten accounts from the detectives, photostats of FBI forms, crumbling newspaper articles, fragments of court transcripts, a booking record with fading blue fingerprints, the judge’s execution order and black-and-white photos. Then I organized the reports chronologically—those with dates, at least. Ellington’s orchestra went smartly from “Take the A Train” through “Stardust” and “Ring Dem Bells.” The concert had been recorded in 1943, two years after the Yarnell kidnapping.

  This was not like the case files of a modern police agency. There were no pre-printed incident reports for the beat cops to fill in, or any lab or forensics reports. Trace evidence beyond a detective’s sense of smell would have been a science fiction dream. I looked in vain for a chronology of the victims before the kidnapping. Even for a crime from 1941, this one seemed to have generated little paperwork, much less the kind of files that would go with what one newspaper labeled it: “Arizona’s Crime of the Century.” But my brief time back at the sheriff’s office had taught me how case files became misplaced, lost, and picked apart as time went on. The files were obviously incomplete. I made a note to check for files at the county courts and in historical archives. Then I got down to reading what I had.

  On December 4, 1941, a radio car was called to the home of Hayden Yarnell. The officers were told that a kidnapping had occurred and they immediately summoned detectives. Yarnell’s twin grandsons, Woodrow and Andrew, had gone missing the previous Thursday, Thanksgiving. They were four years old and wearing matching cowboy outfits, but there was no mention of a pocket watch.

  I skimmed through a detective’s report typed on a machine with a crooked r key, looking for a reason why it had taken the family so long to call police. The boys’ father, Morgan Yarnell, said he had put the twins to bed Thanksgiving night around eight o’clock. When his wife checked on them after midnight, they were gone. The grounds of the Yarnell house were searched, as were the adjoining citrus groves. At seven the next morning, Friday, November 28, Morgan Yarnell received a phone call from a man who claimed he had taken the boys. He demanded a hundred thousand dollars, deposited in a locker in Union Station. Morgan Yarnell complied, but the boys were never returned.

  The reports yielded no good answer for the week’s delay. But several were signed by a detective named Joe Fisher. That was a name I had run across before. He was a legend in the Phoenix department, an investigator who had worked on all the big cases in the 1930s and 1940s. So it made sense he would pick up the Yarnell case. I unconsciously ran my fingers across the flimsy paper. Joe Fisher. This would require a trip to the Police Museum, to learn more about the man who came into the case with the impossible delay of a week.

  At the bottom of one typewritten sheet, dated December 5, were the words “see officer’s observations” but I couldn’t find those pages. Damn.

  Next I read the arrest report from the little border town of Douglas. It was dated December sixth. A Japanese fleet was taking its position to attack Pearl Harbor. Back in Arizona, a man named Jack Talbott was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in his Douglas hotel room. The cops found five hundred dollars on him in hundred-dollar bills, with serial numbers matching those in the bag that Morgan Yarnell had left at the train station. They also found what were described as “bloodstained children’s clothes.” A news clipping said the boys’ father identified the clothes as belonging to Woodrow and Andrew.

  Next I picked through the photos to find a mug shot from the corrections department. It showed a thin, sharp-featured young man with dark hair. He had mocking, merry eyes, not the look of zombie-like disorientation common to many who face the booking camera, whatever the era.

  Talbott wasn’t alone. A news story told of a young woman found with him, Frances Richie, age twenty-four. She was called his girlfriend, and charged as an accessory in the crime. She was pictured in a smart suit with a slouch fedora. Beneath the hat was a pretty face with delicate lips and large eyes. She didn’t look like Talbott’s type, but I had been wrong about that kind of thing before. After searching in vain for any police report on Richie, I set her photo next to his.

  The trial transcripts and the newspaper accounts were unanimous in portraying Jack Talbott as everything that would horrify stolid Depression-era America: young, male, rootless, with a penchant for liquor, gambling, loose women, and the company of petty Phoenix hoodlums. Nowadays, he’d just be living an alternative lifestyle. He grew up in an orphanage back East and did time as a teenager for burglary. Then he hopped a freight train for the desert.

  Talbott ended up doing odd jobs around the Yarnell house, sometimes filling in as chauffeur for the family. Meanwhile, he had gotten in over his head with gambling debts. To the county attorney, those things spelled opportunity and motive. In 1943, Talbott was executed at the state penitentiary in Florence. Richie received life in prison. Talbott’s last meal was a steak, which the authorities apparently fulfilled despite wartime rationing. He never confessed to the crime. He never told where the boys were buried.

  The files contained no mention of the old building where we found the skeletons. Nor was there a report of a missing pocket watch. Most of all, I wondered: Why had this powerful family waited a week to call the cops?

  I rubbed my eyes, nursed a paper cut, stood up and stretched, then sat back down to go through it all over again, this time making notes. By the time the clerk came by to tell me the warehouse was closing, I had several pages written and I was ready for a break. As Hawkins said, just a nine-to-five job.

  Chapter Six

  There weren’t many old buildings left in Phoenix, but I worked in one: the old city-county building at Washington and First Avenue. Finished in 1929 just before the stock market crashed, the five-story courthouse was a mélange of Jazz Age ambition and Hoover utility under a vast red-tile roof. On the city hall side, art deco Phoenix birds rose up grandly to bolster the brown sandstone. It must have been the most imposing building in Phoenix when this was a farm town with a population of 48,000. Later, it served as Phoenix police headquarters into the 1970s. Now, with nearly three million people spread across the Salt River Valley, the building sat like a museum piece surrounded by the monotonous glass and concrete boxes of downtown.

  It was Wednesday and my ankle hurt worse. The elevator was still out; with the building nearly empty except for the marriage license bureau in the basement, the county wasn’t in a hurry to fix it. I limped up the winding staircase, leaning on the wrought-iron railing as I climbed past the empty hallways of dark wooden doorframes, 1930s light fixtures and Spanish tile floors. I was on the fourth floor, which was mostly used as storage for who-knew-what old city and county records. Outside my office at the end of the hallway, a county maintenance crew had attached a new sign that said, Deputy David Mapstone, Sheriff’s Office Historian. It still looked strange to me.

  The office was big and airy, with large windows looking out on the arid Patriots
Square across the street, and the massive new ballpark several blocks east. Other walls were lined with law books and old records, long forgotten by the county. The furnishings were strictly courthouse castoffs: large desk, a couple of tables and straight-back chairs, all of dark, heavy wood. I had brought in a watercolor print by a Santa Fe artist. It reminded me of a trip to New Mexico a few years before, but it bugged Peralta, who had no taste for even the slightly abstract.

  I certainly didn’t need the office—I could work at home on the laptop or find a cubicle at the sheriff’s headquarters a block south—but I liked it. It had a wonderful dingy, 1940s quality. Years before it had been the sheriff’s private office before it was relegated to storage and then forgotten, until Peralta commandeered it for me. “It will give you structure,” he had said. But I also knew it would allow him to keep an eye on me but not have me close enough to make the regular deputies at Madison Street uncomfortable.

  I cleared off a scuffed wooden courtroom table as my Yarnell workspace. Lindsey was trying to teach me to use computerized spreadsheets and expert programs to organize my information. But I still found comfort in index cards, sheets of paper, a white board, and a cork bulletin board. If the stories about computers melting down on New Year’s Day 2000 were true, my old-fashioned tools might be best. Still, I used my Mac PowerBook for writing, e-mail, and surfing the Net, using about ten percent of its capabilities, Lindsey chided me. Whatever worked. I wanted to deliver a report to Hawkins and Peralta in two weeks at the most.

  “Hey-yo, Mapstone.”

  Carl, the building security guard, was standing at the door. Flush-faced and white-haired, with a thin British army officer mustache, Carl was retired from the Arizona Highway Patrol. He still carried himself with the bearing of a member of an elite law enforcement agency, but he was also very lonely and could talk the entire morning away.