Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  I smiled. “Born in the wrong time and place, I guess.”

  “History Shamus.” She stroked my leg. “What time and place would you be born in?”

  “Oh, I’m greedy. I’d want to see everything: Rome, the time of Christ and Mohammad, ancient China. I’d want to swap stories with Dr. Johnson and serve with George Washington. Live in the thirties and forties, ride the great old trains, see Arizona before we spoiled it.”

  “You could stop by and prevent the Yarnell kidnapping,” she said.

  “But I wouldn’t want to live in another time because I couldn’t be with you.”

  She smiled and looked away. “You’re a romantic, Dave. I like that.”

  “And I wouldn’t want to live in the past because I’d give up the benefit of modern dentistry.”

  She laughed out loud, a wonderful sound. “Spoken like the grandson of a dentist.”

  I told her what I had learned today about the kidnapping. Then we sat in silence, listening to the house breathe and, outside, sirens run down Seventh Avenue. I studied her face, a face so different from the battalions of fresh-eyed, tanned sun-bunnies that Phoenix seemed to produce like General Motors produced Chevys. Hers was a face of contrasts: dark lipsticked lips, full but set in an economical mouth; creamy skin and precise dark brows; cheek-bones appealingly wide; a classical tapering toward the chin; her dusk blue eyes too far apart to be considered conventionally beautiful. All this was framed by the stunning black hair parted in the middle and falling with the barest hint of a curl down to where her neck met her shoulders. And that gold stud in the left nostril—someday I would ask about that, if we had enough time together. The first time we met, I was a year out of my divorce. I watched that face as she did her computer magic for me. And then one day I found her watching me.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Important things,” I said. “How was your day?”

  “A new assignment, actually,” she said. “And I am so glad to get away from Y2K.”

  “If I had your skills, I’d be rich.”

  “You’re good looking.” She smiled. “You’re great in bed, on the floor, whatever.”

  God, she made me feel lucky. “All because of you,” I said.

  “It’s the Harquahala Strangler case,” she said, her voice half an octave lower. “El Jefe”—her secret nickname for Peralta—“has assigned me to help. I’ve been teamed up with Patrick Blair.”

  “Whoa, the alpha hunk detective of the sheriff’s office?”

  Lindsey smiled a passable Mona Lisa impersonation. “Are you jealous, Dave?”

  “No,” I lied. “Hell, I thought he and that partner of his—what’s his name? Tony Snyder—were gay. They both look like they stepped out of GQ. Remember they’re in that calendar the sheriff is selling? Beefcakes with Badges, or something like that.”

  “I thought it was cute,” Lindsey said. “Anyway, Tony has a nice wife and two babies in Peoria. He’s on leave to finish his master’s thesis. I think you’re jealous, Dave.”

  I felt a hotness moving across my face and knew I was busted. She gave a delighted giggle.

  “So why are they teaming you with Patrick Blair? He seems about as interested in database research as he’d be in studying history.”

  “They think this dirtbag gets his victims over the Internet.”

  “Serial killers keeping up with the times.”

  “If you tell Peralta I told you that, he’ll murder me. It’s the biggest clue we’ve held back from the media.” She gave me a mischievous smile. “And no leaking it to that old girlfriend of yours, Lauren.”

  “Lorie.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I think you’re jealous, Lindsey.”

  We made love again, a slow, wordless, carnal thing that was the basis of us, as much as the books and the dry humor and the cynicism that hid some shocking hopefulness. Like home: that’s how it felt.

  Then she was up and sliding back into her clothes, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. I was half asleep and reached out a hand.

  “Stay with me, Lindsey.”

  “I can’t, Dave,” she said. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “You always worked bankers’ hours.”

  “New job, new hours.”

  I stood and cinched up the robe. “Peralta’s degrading my quality of life. I can’t believe he’s making you do this.”

  “I volunteered, Dave.” She pulled me toward her for a kiss. “No lectures, History Shamus. I don’t want to just be seen as some propellerhead nerd girl doing computer systems.”

  “I think you proved that Monday night.”

  “Dave, don’t worry. I’m a deputy sheriff, too. And this murderer is out there, right now.”

  And then she was gone, the front door echoing hard after her.

  I wanted to say, “Please be careful.”

  ***

  I fell into a deep sleep, and I was hiking across huge grassy hills strewn here and there with piñon and scrub oak. A California landscape, not like Arizona. I was acutely aware of the carpet of rough grass beneath my feet and the nervous sense of height, the world falling off in every direction down hillside and arroyo. It was getting dark and a few lights were visible far down the valley, but I felt compelled to walk. I fell, grabbed a scrubby branch, pulled myself back up, set out again. I wasn’t afraid. Then there was a banging and jangling that didn’t go with the dream, and finally I realized it was the doorbell. I swung off the sofa, slipped on my old, dark-blue Nordstrom robe and walked unsteadily toward the door. I noticed it was two in the morning, and something made me go to the bedroom and get the Colt Python .357 magnum.

  I opened the little wrought-iron peephole in the door, saw Peralta, and wondered if I was still dreaming.

  “Mike?”

  “It’s not the fucking Girl Scouts.”

  I opened the heavy door and he walked in. He was wearing a rumpled suit and carrying a gym bag.

  I had seen Peralta in meetings and interrogations and even gun fights. But I had never seen him with the bare hint of vulnerability that surrounded him this moment. He seemed to read me and merely held out a finger, commanding silence, as he moved into the living room and sat heavily in Grandfather’s old green leather chair.

  “I need a place to stay,” he said. “I don’t want to talk.”

  “Are you okay? Is Sharon okay?”

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. I held up my hands in surrender and we sat in silence. Finally, I went into the kitchen and came back with two beers. He took one in his massive hand, studied the label with disgust—it was a Sam Adams—but he drank.

  I was suddenly aware that I was naked under the robe and my crotch was still delightfully wet from Lindsey, and all in the presence of the chief deputy. He didn’t seem to notice. I had never been good at guy talk, where everything real was submerged subtly beneath words of sports and work and women. And I was particularly at a loss in Peralta’s company, where his sheer presence overwhelmed everything like a mountain dropped into flatlands. So we sat. I thought of Lindsey, of her body and expression as she pleased herself atop me. The twelve-foot-tall bookshelves that Grandfather had built kept watch over us.

  “Tell me you own a television, Mapstone,” he said at last. “Even you’d want to watch the History Channel.”

  So I took him into the little study and he took over Grandfather’s desk chair. With the tube on ESPN, he became a contented self-contained unit. I went back into the living room and read for a while, James Morris’ Pax Britannica, immersing myself in the adventures, characters and follies of the British Empire. It was the kind of book I wish I could write, but now, at forty, I knew I might never have the time or the talent. Still, Lindsey gave me a bookmark with George Eliot’s quote: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

  Later, when I could hear Peralta snoring, I went to the linen closet, pulled out a comforter, carefully spread it over him and shut down the house for the night.<
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  Chapter Nine

  The trill of the phone pulled me out of a hard, dreamless sleep into a sun-filled room. I was just in my bedroom, seven forty-six on the digital clock next to the photo of Lindsey from the San Diego trip.

  Lorie Pope’s voice jumped at me. “David, did I wake you?”

  “No,” I groaned and swung out of bed onto unsteady feet.

  “You always needed at least seven hours of sleep, as I recall,” she said. “So last night must have been interesting.”

  “Not the way you think.”

  “Really?” she said. “Isn’t that a wonderful word? Interesting. May you live in interesting times.” She laughed her fine, crystal laugh.

  I pulled on some shorts and walked to the kitchen, where I poured orange juice and drank it in one long swallow.

  “I don’t have anything new to leak, my dear.” I pulled aside the blinds and looked into the yard. The oleanders and bougainvillea needed trimming, the joys of a nine-month growing season.

  “I’m calling to make a deposit, my love,” Lorie said. “It’s only fair.”

  I could hear computer keys clattering in the background of her voice.

  “Remember your skeletons in the wall? And the man who was executed in the kidnapping? Jack Talbott? Remember he had a girl with him?”

  “Right. Frances Richie.”

  “She’s still alive,” Lorie said.

  I sat at the wicker kitchen table, my heart pounding a little harder. “Really?”

  “I shit you not,” she said. “She is still at the women’s unit at Florence, where she has been since 1942.”

  “How did you find this out?”

  “I’d like to say it was terrific shoe-leather reporting, but actually, somebody called and left the tip this morning. One of the clerks passed it along to me.”

  I thanked her and hung up. Frances Richie had been twenty-four when she was arrested with Jack Talbott in Nogales. That would make her about eighty-two now. A true life sentence.

  My head a little clearer, I went to see if everything of the night before had merely been a strange dream. The living room was sunny and serene behind the picture window, the ceiling-high bookshelves familiarly pleasing. I walked into the study and there was no Peralta. But the comforter was left folded on the chair with military precision and the newspaper was set precisely in the middle of the desk.

  May you live in interesting times.

  ***

  Over at the Starbucks at Seventh Street and McDowell, I stopped to buy my usual vente, non-fat, no-whip mocha. I sat outside at a round table surrounded by trim, young white professionals, all attractive, all well off, all unsure whether they really want to live in this wonderful little historic district of stucco homes surrounded by the inner city. They clutched their lattes and the alarm buttons to their Range Rovers and hurried in and out.

  And why not be afraid? Look at this morning’s Republic. In addition to another story about the discovery of the skeletons, it was chock-a-block full of post-modern mayhem right here in paradise. The centerpiece was about the pressure to catch the Harquahala Strangler. There was more in the B-section: some teenagers in Gilbert thought they were vampires and murdered a twelve-year-old girl to prove it; a visiting nurse was raped and killed in Mesa; some gangbangers tried to ambush two Phoenix cops out in Maryvale. And a string of shootings on the west side had been tied together and now police were seeking one suspect. He now had a name, too: the Grand Avenue Sniper. Otherwise, the Cardinals were losing, the big Indian casino south of town was booming, everything with a “dot-com” attached to the name was making millions and the desert was disappearing into the city at the rate of an acre an hour.

  I finished the sports section when the cellular phone rang. I hoped it would be Lindsey. It was Peralta.

  “Progress,” he demanded.

  “What? It’s not even nine in the morning.” I was cranky. “I could have briefed you at the house last night. Or this morning, I mean, at two o’clock.”

  “You’re a tragic fucking figure,” he said.

  “Fuck you. I’m sure we’ve found Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell, but PPD is going by the book. DNA tests and all.”

  Peralta grunted through the cellular system.

  “The case was initially investigated by Joe Fisher. He was a legendary detective on the Phoenix force. That’s cool.”

  “If you say so, Mapstone.”

  “Why do you care?” I asked.

  “Because you’re my project.”

  Before I could respond, he said, “I see your old girlfriend had a big story about the Yarnell case. Funny how that happens.”

  “Well, Mike, we work for America’s Toughest Sheriff. Theater and all that.”

  “Why do they keep using that bad photo of me?”

  “I want to go out to Arizona State Prison,” I said. “Can you grease the skids?”

  “What? You teaching history to the cons?”

  “I’ll laugh when I wake up. Frances Richie is still alive out there. She was the woman arrested with Jack Talbott in the Yarnell case.”

  “Jesus. We have judges letting murderers out in seven years. What the hell is she still doing in prison?”

  “One of many questions I want to ask.”

  “What questions?” I could see him sitting back at his big desk, shaking his head. “We know who did it. What else is there to know?”

  “Hey, you want me to work the case. Let me work the case. I want to know how the bodies got into that old warehouse. I want to know where that pocket watch came from. I want to know why the chief deputy doesn’t seem to have enough to do so he has to micromanage me.”

  “All right, let me call the warden,” he said. Then, “I put your Lindsey on the Harquahala case.”

  “So I heard,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s ‘my’ Lindsey, though.”

  “Really?” His voice changed. “Why is that?”

  “Because these are the nineties. At least for a little while longer.”

  Now it was his turn to search for a comeback. I said, “Three years is a long time to come up dry on a case like the Harquahala Strangler.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “and you haven’t had every law enforcement agency and media outlet in the West second-guessing you, either.”

  “You’re a tragic fucking figure, Chief Peralta.”

  He ignored me. “It’s a serial killer: some nerdy, unemployed, impotent white guy with a rage, like Kirk Douglas in that movie they show on cable.”

  My mind went blank for a moment. “I think you mean Michael Douglas.”

  “Whatever. We’ll catch him.”

  “So let me drink my mocha.”

  There was a long pause. “Mocha?” Then the line went dead.

  Chapter Ten

  The highway from Phoenix to Florence once traveled for miles through citrus groves until it hit Apache Junction, then turned south into the desert. Nothing but two lanes through the cactus and hard cracked earth for another hour or more. Now the highway was a freeway. The citrus groves were gone, replaced by closely spaced subdivisions and trailer courts, shopping centers and fast-food restaurants. The only familiar sights came from Superstition Mountain looming in the east and the desert at the end of the urban pipeline, and these seemed at risk. I’d always been an Arizona libertarian, reared on Barry Goldwater values of individual freedom and cussed independence. But every day that Phoenix ate another twenty-four acres of desert I was turning into an environmental extremist.

  In another hour, I rolled out of the desert into Florence. It’s a typical one-industry town, but instead of coal or textiles, it depends on the forcible detention of human beings. Some of them are bad-break losers who never connected with the Franklin Planner map of life, others are as feral as the guys we met on the street Monday night, who’d literally just as soon kill you as look at you. Either way, they were the commodity that allowed these desert Florentines to scratch out a living.

  Not too many years ago, the A
rizona State Prison was a tough joint cut off by bleached walls and miles of arid wasteland from the fine people of the Grand Canyon State. Now it was one of many facilities run in the area by the corrections department. But if humanity regained its virtue tomorrow, the entire non-convict population of Florence would be out of work.

  Frances Richie was neither in the big central prison nor in the women’s unit. A guard directed me past a half dozen one-story modern buildings—they were right out of the Cold War missile silo school of architecture—until I came to one with a sign that said: UNIT 13. An appropriate sign of bad luck for what had been a twenty-four-year-old woman who fell in with the wrong kind of man. I checked in, showed credentials, signed papers, and was shown into a large, sunny room stocked with institutional tables and chairs. In a moment, a door buzzed and a woman in a loose denim jumper and clogs came in and shook my hand.

  “I’m Heather Amis,” she said. “I’m a social worker here.” She was in her thirties and so tan that her skin, lips, hair, and eyebrows were varying shades of brown. Only her eyes stood out a bit, two green orbs amid the brown. She had a learned calm, but her words weren’t: “I have to tell you, I was hoping you wouldn’t come.”

  “It’s always good to be wanted,” I said.

  “You were very insistent on the phone that you come today,” she said. “I read the Republic. Finding the bodies of the Yarnell twins.”

  She motioned me to sit and I folded into a hard plastic chair made for a midget with a strong back.

  “Miss Richie is in her eighties. She has diabetes and a heart condition. She can’t be in the general population at the women’s units. She’s senile. So she’s here.”

  “What is here?” I asked. “It’s not exactly prison-like.”

  “We’re kind of a nursing home,” Heather Amis said.

  “Why not just release her?”

  “She was an accessory to a capital crime and for years the Yarnell family opposed it. Yarnell money has elected a lot of governors and legislatures. Parole boards pay attention.”

  “Do they still oppose it?”

  “I don’t know, Deputy.” A flush of anger crept into her tan cheeks. “She’s been left to rot in the system for decades. I may be the first person who ever took an interest in her.”