Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  “Another beautiful day in Phoenix,” Carl said, examining the doorjamb for who-knows-what. “God, I hate days like this. It’ll only make those damned people from the Midwest want to move out here for good. Then they’ll bring all their problems. Then they’ll enact a slew of new laws and make things just like what they wanted to get away from in Minnesota or Illinois.”

  “I know.” It was an old discussion, among Arizonans and between Carl and me.

  He moved into the office and leaned against the edge of the desk.

  “I see you found the Yarnell twins Monday night.”

  He pointed to the copy of the Republic sitting on my desk. Lorie Pope had a Page One story on the discovery of the skeletons. It included photos of Peralta and me, as well as historic shots of young Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell, looking premonitorily unhappily at the camera. I didn’t feel guilty about giving the story to her—we had been helping each other for twenty years, since she was a cub reporter and I was a rookie deputy thrown together on a long-ago crime scene.

  “It was a hell of a case,” Carl said. “I was here when it happened.”

  “You would have been…?”

  “I was born the same year they finished this building,” he said firmly. “That was 1929. I was 11 years old when the kidnapping happened. Nothing like that had ever happened in Phoenix. Those two poor little boys…”

  I politely motioned for him to sit down, but he ignored me and kept standing. “It was all my parents talked about at the time,” he said. “The Lindbergh kidnapping was still fresh in people’s minds, you know. And everybody also felt so sorry for the kids’ grandfather, Old Man Yarnell. The kidnapping just killed him. Died of a broken heart, they said.”

  “I know he died in 1942,” I said. “Did you ever run across him?”

  “Oh, my goodness yes,” Carl said. “A living legend, that’s what he was. Phoenix was a nice little city, but we still had some cowboys and Indians. Real ones. The West wasn’t completely gone.” The words sent a little stab of melancholy through me.

  “And Hayden Yarnell…” Carl went on to recount the gunfight at Gila City. Then he told of a scary confrontation that he, Carl, had near there as a young highway patrolman in Eloy back in the 1950s. I tried to steer him back to Hayden Yarnell.

  “I knew the man!” Carl said. I sat up a little. “Not personally, I mean, but I worked a summer as a bellhop at the Westward Ho, and Mr. Yarnell kept a room there and would give me dollar tips—a lot of money in the Depression.”

  “Wait, Carl. I thought Yarnell had a mansion of some kind. He was living in a hotel?”

  “He did have a grand house. Sat on a bluff down by South Mountain. Burned in the early forties, as I recall. But he kept a suite at the Ho. Most of the big shots in Phoenix did.”

  Carl went off on a story about young Barry Goldwater. I let him talk himself out, and after a while he went away. The tragedy of lonely retired cops. I told myself again I wouldn’t end up that way.

  ***

  I wrote a list of people to interview, made a couple of calls, and had started a timeline on the kidnapping when I heard footsteps coming back down the hall. Some days the only way to disengage from Carl was to feign a meeting over at Madison Street.

  But it wasn’t Carl. It was a cowgirl.

  She looked to be in her early thirties, with reddish-brown hair flowing out from the brim of her hat. Large, brown eyes were set nicely atop high cheekbones in a Midwestern pretty face. Her mouth was wide and dug dimples as she smiled. Her light-blue denim shirt and jeans fit her well enough for me to indulge in several introspective lustful moments. She leaned against the door like we were old friends. Then she crossed the room with a confident stride and shook my hand, a firm shake. I was standing now, and noticed she was tall, maybe five-ten, maybe more.

  “I’m Gretchen,” she said, her voice holding the unaccented tones of the West Coast. “Gretchen Goodheart. I’m with the city archaeologist’s office. I’m fresh out of business cards.”

  I invited her to sit. “There is such a thing as a city archaeologist’s office?”

  “Yes there is,” she said, running a hand across the stack of history books on my desk. “You read books.”

  “And I’m housebroken.”

  She sat in one of the straight-back chairs, instantly making it a more interesting piece of furniture. She took off her cowboy hat and let her hair fall freely. Not a trace of hat hair. “This city is built on top of its history, as you well know,” she said. “Rose from its ashes. We work with the Indian sites, the ruins and the canals. But we’re also interested in the city’s early years after modern settlement. We’ve found lots of artifacts during the building of the ballpark.” She gestured toward the window. “It’s being built where the city’s old Chinatown stood.”

  “So how can I help Gretchen Goodheart of the city’s archaeologist’s office?”

  “It’s how can we help you,” she said. “Sounds like you had quite an adventure the other night. That must really hurt.” She indicated my black eye, touching her cheek with an elegant finger. Then she frowned for a moment and the dimples went away; her face was wonderfully expressive. “Didn’t Lieutenant Hawkins call you?”

  “Nope,” I said. “But sometimes it takes a while for word to get from the PD to the sheriff’s office.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “He said it would be all right if I offered our help.”

  “We’re pretty lonely up here on the fourth floor, ma’am,” I said. “And happy for help from an archaeologist.”

  “Actually,” she crossed a long, denim-encased leg, “my undergraduate minor was in history. I was a junkie about the Old West. I’ve got every book on the subject I can find. I even read your book, Rock Hard Times: The Great Depression in the Rocky Mountain West.”

  “Good God, who made you do that?”

  “It was a good book.”

  “Sold in the dozens. I have a garage full if you want a few more copies.”

  I was way too pleased. I hoped it didn’t show.

  Chapter Seven

  I fetched a flashlight out of the desk, and let Gretchen drive me down to the warehouse where the skeletons had been discovered. It was only a few blocks away, but my ankle was feeling all fifteen feet of that drop into the elevator shaft. She drove a white Ford Explorer that dwarfed the police evidence technician’s van sitting outside the old building.

  It was anything but forbidding in daylight. It was four stories tall, with a blond brick shell and aging wooden doors and windows painted dark green. The wall at the roofline had an ornamental curve, attempting to mimic the arches of Union Station across the street, I supposed. On one wall, fading white paint announced “AAA Storage” and a phone number with the old “ALpine” exchange for the first two numbers, two-five. A relic from the time when men wore hats and rode trains. It was surrounded by lots of nothing, something downtown Phoenix had in abundance.

  Downtown’s decline began in the late fifties, when Park Central mall opened a couple of miles north and the Rosenzweig brothers got the city’s permission to develop skyscrapers on nearby land they owned, the first of the “uptown” towers that march north on Central Avenue for five miles from the old city center. But in the years I was gone, the eighties and most of the nineties, the decline had turned worse as the city and landowners had cleared block after block of old buildings, including some lovely territorial-era apartments near the Capitol, hundreds of historic bungalows just south of my neighborhood, and much of the old warehouse district around the train station. Now downtown Phoenix was an odd assortment of new buildings—each year’s fresh attempt at revival—sitting alone amid emptiness. It made me ache for all that was lost.

  Gretchen seemed to read my thoughts. “Not much here,” she said.

  “Not now. Want to go in?”

  “Is that all right for a civilian?” An officious sign proclaimed the building a crime scene and offered various punishments for trespassing.

  “If
the techs are about done, it should be fine. I would leave your hat. Clearance is pretty low in there.”

  I pushed open a door and flashed my star at an evidence technician, a platinum-haired butterball in a dark blue jumpsuit who called me “honey” three times in three sentences. Her partner was a large black woman. I don’t know how the two got into the smallest of those passages. They were clearing out. I could lock up. I signed a form with name and badge number.

  “I’ll tell you this, honey,” she said. “You got enough bones for two skeletons. I have been doing this for twenty-five years and I know it before the medical examiner even gets into it. And they looked like children’s bones.”

  I asked her for copies of the crime-scene photos, including a snap of the pocket watch with the Yarnell brand. She promised to send them over in the morning.

  Gretchen and I stepped into the big room as I narrated the events of Monday night. A couple of bare bulbs in the ceiling gave a murky view of the cartons, pallets, and nameless junk that lay scattered around. Crime-scene tape was draped across the opening to the freight elevator shaft, and two feet of a ladder extended above the floor.

  “No way would I have come in here,” Gretchen said.

  “I have aggressive friends.”

  We started down the ladder. “And they are? Your friends.”

  “Mike Peralta, he’s chief deputy now but once upon a time we were partners. It’s a long story. And Lindsey Adams. She’s a deputy, really a computer specialist. We met a few months ago on another case.”

  “You like her.”

  I was at the bottom and helped Gretchen step off onto the broken concrete. The dusty smell of the first floor changed to something more moist and earthy. “How can you tell that?”

  “The way you say her name.” She smiled and the dimples came back.

  “Watch your head.” We went down the narrow steps into the passage. My cop’s black, three-cell flashlight provided the only illumination, and the corridor felt even more claustrophobic than Monday night.

  “Look at this.” I ran my hand against the rough wall. “How old the brickwork seems. Doesn’t even seem part of the warehouse building.”

  “It’s probably not,” Gretchen said. The dark corridor didn’t echo. It swallowed up sound, making words stand out starkly for a moment before they disappeared.

  She went on, “When they cleared the buildings for Patriots Square back in the 1970s, they found this little underground city of tunnels and chambers.”

  “I remember,” I said. “There were old saloons and brothels and opium dens.”

  “They dated from the 1880s, when there was no air conditioning and it was cooler underground. And as the town grew, the new buildings were just built on top of the old basements, then they were gradually sealed off and forgotten.”

  I let out a breath, just to remind myself I could. The passage was amazingly close. People were smaller a hundred years ago.

  We followed it down one direction, maybe fifteen feet, where it made a hard turn into a larger room, another step down. Here, the brick was mingled with what looked like adobe and the floor was dirt. Ancient wooden citrus crates were stacked precariously in one corner; I could make out the words “Arizona Pride” on one label and an illustration of a Gibson Girl-like redhead holding out a bounteous tray of oranges and grapefruits. Spider webs were everywhere, so we didn’t venture far. There didn’t appear to be any other way out.

  Gretchen followed me as we tracked back the way we came, then turned again and followed the passage to where the skeletons were found. Now it was just a hole in the wall: bones, fabric, bricks, dirt—everything had been photographed, diagrammed and hauled away for more tests. The crime lab could do things today we didn’t even dream of when I went through the academy in the mid-1970s.

  “This is where they were found?” Gretchen asked.

  It jarred me a little, this reminder that those bones were a “they.” They once had eyes that saw and cried. They had parents, and a grandfather, who grieved for them. I nodded and played the flashlight around in the little compartment inside the wall. The space inside was maybe a foot deep and three feet wide and high, no larger. It really looked like a careless bit of workmanship: the far wall inside appeared to be dirt. Whoever built the basement didn’t extend the brick all the way into the hard soil.

  “Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell,” Gretchen said softly. “They were four years old when they were kidnapped. Taken from their grandfather’s house. Never found alive again. And all this time, they were right here.”

  The light bounced heavily off the brick. Winston Churchill did brick masonry to relax, but I didn’t know beans about it. The bricks in this wall looked a little newer than the ones down the passage. Maybe. The mortar was crumbling. It would make sense: Jack Talbott walled them in and re-laid the bricks hastily.

  “Do you think they were alive when he put them in there?” Gretchen asked.

  “It’s hard to know.” I hesitated telling more to a civilian. Talbott had been found with the twins’ pajamas. So maybe they were murdered immediately and the ransom demand was a ploy. That was almost a comforting scenario, considering the scraps of rope and leather that had been found. Those might mean the little boys had been tied up and walled in while still alive, without even a blanket against the cold desert night underground. I kept it to myself.

  I tried to stand upright and almost knocked myself in the head. “The other thing I can’t get out of my head is this pocket watch we found. Why would it be there?”

  “Well, wristwatches didn’t come into widespread use until after World War I,” Gretchen said. “So there were probably lots of pocket watches still in use in 1941.”

  “Right, my grandfather loved his. His father gave it to him. And railroad men used them, too. But…” I stared out at the blackness of the passage. You would never find your way out without a flashlight. “But why would two four-year-olds have a pocket watch? Could they even tell time?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “And if this Jack Talbott, the kidnapper, was after a hundred grand of Yarnell money, why wouldn’t he have taken the watch, too? It looked gold.”

  She moved toward me and took my hand. “David, I need to get out of here. It’s creeping me out.”

  We went back out the way we came, Gretchen holding my hand tightly. I helped her back up the ladder and then started up myself. The rungs were slippery and cold. I felt an involuntary chill wrapping around my back, a sense of climbing out of a black place where murder had lived undisturbed for nearly sixty years, a sense of not wanting to look back down the ladder behind me. I stepped onto the hard concrete of the main room and had forgotten about the shooting pain in my ankle.

  “Sorry,” she said when we were out on the street again. She wiped each cheek. Her eyes were red. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry.” I patted her shoulder. “It’s pretty intense. I shouldn’t have taken a civilian down there.”

  No,” she said, a marked steeliness in her pleasant voice. “I wanted to see.”

  Chapter Eight

  I got back home late, feeling a little guilty about my appreciation of the way Gretchen Goodheart filled out her blue jeans, and a little edgy for reasons I couldn’t exactly define. I was working on a dull headache that I ascribed to too many hours spent reading old records about an open-and-shut case that was actually growing more complex with every scrap of paper that I accumulated.

  Central Avenue was a river of impatient lights headed out of downtown, but Cypress, my street, was dead. I crept along past the neat, darkened houses, the palm trees tall and soldierly in the narrow parking lawns between the sidewalks and the street. This was my old neighborhood. When I was a kid, I knew everybody on the block. There were the eccentric heirs to the railroad fortune on the corner; they moved away to the fancier Palmcroft district when I was ten. There was the old hound-dog in the backyard two houses down who barked if anything was wrong in the night. I knew a story for every
house, and every notch in a hedge or passage between fences held a memory. The city was smaller then.

  Now there were new neighbors to know. Most of the old owners had left or died in the years I had been away from Phoenix. Many of the houses had been restored beyond any former splendor, pools added, and all in all Willo was much more affluent than it had been. Yet the neighborhood had gained a self-conscious quality, too: It was a historic district, an urban homesteading success story. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. I felt a constant sense of familiarity and strangeness, and tonight the block just felt empty and sad.

  Lindsey’s old white Honda Prelude was parked in front of my house and Lindsey was sitting inside. She had a key to the house but didn’t use it. I parked and met her on the sidewalk, where she held her hand gently against my chest as if she were taking some internal reading, then she ran an index finger down my nose, across my lips, into my mouth. She wore baggy jeans and a gray sweater, and her pale skin glowed from the street light. Without a word she led me up the walk and we went inside.

  ***

  Later, we sat on opposite ends of the sofa, our bare feet resting on each other’s laps, easily naked together, sipping the Macallan from shot glasses. We were in the living room, the grandest room in an otherwise small house, with a twelve-foot ceiling and bookcases rising behind a wrought-iron staircase. Sometimes I could feel Grandfather and Grandmother in the room, not as ghosts but as missed beloveds. It was a room that put me in a mind to realize the fleeting preciousness of our connections.

  “How was your day, honey?” She arched an eyebrow in parody.

  “Oh, the usual, dear. Returning to the scene of the crime. Picking through old bones, serving the public trust. The Phoenix cops don’t like me, but they also don’t have much interest in old bones.”

  “I read today that in ancient China the historian held an honored place in the emperor’s court,” she said.