Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  Then she kind of deflated. “Anyway, Miss Richie has nowhere to go. She was an orphan. No family. No friends outside the walls. What would she be released to?”

  She shook her head and ran slender brown hands through curling brown hair. “You’re a cop, so you have no reason to cut anybody a break. And most of the people I see in here, I can understand that. But, Jesus, the state of Arizona has taken this woman’s entire life. Can’t you just let her die in peace?”

  We sat in silence for a moment. There was nothing to debate. The truth is, cops routinely deal with the marginal, the ignored, the alone, the people who fall through the cracks, as Lindsey says. But Frances Richie was all that in the extreme. Finally, I said as gently as I could, “May I see her?”

  “She’s not really responsive,” Heather said. “I’ve been working in the unit for six months, and she’s never said more than five words to me. But, whatever.”

  She walked out in a whirl of loose denim and clopping clogs and came back in about ten minutes, backing in the door, pulling a wheelchair.

  Somebody said a great novelist could see the beautiful young girl inside the old woman. It would have been difficult with Frances Richie, even though the old news photos showed a young woman who was somewhere between cute and beautiful. Now her face was dominated by an enormous double chin, bulbous nose and battleship gray eyes poking from bony temples—the skull starting to come out at last—all mounted on a body long since overtaken by starchy food, inactivity, and disease. Heather Amis turned her toward me, knelt down and told her who I was.

  She just stared and nobody said anything for a long time. In the silence, the room’s smell of Lysol covering urine became apparent. Somewhere in the background, an electric something-or-other hummed.

  Finally, I said the only thing that seemed to matter. “We found the bodies of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell.”

  Frances Richie just stared that watery, unfocused stare, her eyes fixed on a place we couldn’t see.

  I went on: “We found them bricked up in a wall, down in a tunnel in a building near Union Station in downtown Phoenix.”

  Heather shot me a nasty look. I could see Frances Richie breathing harder, her bulky chest laboring to fill her lungs.

  “Miss Richie,” I said, “tell us how those boys got in that building.”

  “Is this really necessary?” Heather whispered, looking at me like I was the vilest man alive. “I’m going to get some coffee. I can’t listen to this.” She clopped off down a hallway, and I was alone with Frances Richie. But the old woman looked out into the sunlight, her face an unreadable ruin of wrinkles and fat. I stood and walked maybe ten feet, to a grimy window.

  Outside, brand-new sidewalks cut across the flat brown earth of the desert, heading to other buildings past barbed wire, elaborate gates and security cameras perched like electronic vultures. On the other side of the parking lot, a group of male convicts wearing orange jumpsuits were doing something in a cotton field. What was the tunnel into Frances Richie?

  I said, “I saw the photo of you in the dark dress the day you were brought back to Phoenix. Seemed like a very pretty dress.”

  I continued to look outside, just like she was doing.

  I heard a word that sounded like “blue.” Then she said, very clearly and not in an old-lady voice, “It was navy blue. It was the first store-bought dress I ever had in my life.”

  I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to break the spell.

  “You bought it in Phoenix?”

  “It was a present. From someone very dear to me.”

  I spoke carefully. “From Jack? Jack Talbott?”

  I turned to face her and she merely shook her head. Then her voice seemed to gather strength and timbre from being used again. “Jack Talbott. I haven’t thought of him in years.”

  Now it was my turn to be silent.

  “He was just a boy, really. We were so young then. He had a hard life and didn’t know any other way of getting by in the world, so he drank, he ran with women, he fought, he had a very quick temper.” She paused.

  “He was your lover?”

  She strained to hear. “Lover?” she asked loudly. “They told me never to talk about that, never.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She inhaled loudly. “He always treated me like a lady, like a queen.”

  “How did you meet him?” I leaned against the wall. Maybe the distance between us made her feel safe.

  “I worked at the Owl Pharmacy on Adams Street,” she said. Her sentences had a very even cadence until the last two words, when they felt an emphasis whether they needed it there or not. “Is it still there?”

  I shook my head.

  “We’d come from Oklahoma in 1936 and papa worked off and on in the produce sheds down by the railroad tracks. But a truck backed over him one day and he died.” She paused and breathed heavily. “So mother worked as a maid, but she died of TB, and I got a job at the drug store. I could eat lunch for free at the soda fountain.”

  She reared her head up a little and took another deep breath. “He was walking by one day on the sidewalk, and I was inside by the pharmacy counter, and we saw each other through the window. And he turned back and came inside. I didn’t want to seem easy, but I couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop smiling. And he couldn’t either. What is your name?”

  “David Mapstone.” I could see Heather starting back in the room, but she picked up on my eyes and came in slowly, quietly, behind us.

  “Jack Talbott worked for Mr. Yarnell. Jack wanted to open his own garage someday.” She raised her head again, as if inhaling the memories. She paused. “Mr. Yarnell took kindly to him. Mr. Yarnell was a kind man.”

  She licked her mouth with a huge gray tongue. “Do you believe in love at first sight, David Mapstone, sheriff’s deputy? Do young people still believe in that?”

  I shrugged not-so-wisely. “I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Never met a girl in stir who didn’t believe,” Frances Richie said. It was strange to hear a woman who looked like a grandmother use a word like stir so casually. But she was nobody’s grandmother.

  “Why did Jack take the twins?” I was so damned clever. Just toss in the hard question after the softballs.

  “Jack.” It was the only thing she said. She rubbed her eyes.

  I repeated the question and she stared at the wall.

  “Did you know he was kidnapping Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell?”

  Her heavy head seemed to slip down a bit. Then she started to snore and for a long moment I thought she was gone. Then she raised her head and met my eyes, and her gaze was suddenly intense.

  “I had a hat with that dress, David Mapstone,” she said, sounding the syllables of my name like they were a strange, lost language. Her eyes were bright with tears. “It was the prettiest thing I ever owned. A little, blue felt slouch fedora, but for a girl. Like in the movies. I felt like a movie star. The jail matron in Phoenix took it.”

  Chapter Eleven

  As I flew back at eighty miles-per-hour across the waterless expanse, it sank in how little Frances Richie had really told me. I had conversed with living history. But I had learned about a twenty-four-year-old’s beloved hat, not about the most notorious kidnapping in Arizona. Then the old woman was asleep again. I gave a list of questions to Heather Amis, and she grudgingly agreed to ask them.

  It didn’t feel as if a millennium was coming to an end, but the year 2000 was only six weeks away. I didn’t have much to show for it. It was an arbitrary piece of calendar, to be sure: the year 2000, A.D., Anno Domini, the Year of the Lord. Or, for historians, the more inclusive C.E., for “common era.” Still, it felt amazing and strange to be alive to see this arbitrary turning of the calendar. As the homely sprawl of Mesa flew by the car windows, I thought about what was happening in the world at 1000 C.E.: the Middle Ages in Europe, and widespread fear of the end of the world. Leif Erickson supposedly discovered America. Beowulf was written. In what would become Phoe
nix, the Hohokam civilization was thriving. I was deadly in any trivia match.

  Back in the city, I spent what was left of the afternoon showing photos of the pocket watch to jewelers. One shot showed the watch open: the hands were frozen at eleven-fifty. The owner of an antique jewelry shop in downtown Scottsdale identified it as a Waltham, Model Ninety-Two, eighteen size with twenty-one jewels.

  “It’s a beauty.” He looked at the photos with a magnifying glass. “Railroad quality. Solid gold hunting case, and I would assume that’s fourteen-karat gold. Double-sling porcelain dial. Very nice.”

  “Is it rare?”

  “Waltham made a lot of watches. In fact, they were the first company to mass produce watches in America, did you know that? But they also made some exquisite watches, too. The Ninety-Two, it’s not a terribly rare watch, but it’s not that common, either, especially with the gold case. I’d bet fewer than a thousand of that model were made. Looks like yours is in very fine condition.”

  “When was it made?”

  “Around 1892. Model Ninety-Two, get it?”

  I asked him if the serial number could be traced. He wasn’t optimistic. “The company went out of business in the fifties,” he said. “I could tell you more if you brought it in.”

  Sure, I thought, I’d be happy to bring in, when Lt. Hawkins lets me check it out from the evidence room. When hell froze over. But I knew this much: The watch found with the twins’ bodies was not just a workingman’s brass watch, not something likely left behind by Jack Talbott. Yet there was nothing in the reports about a missing watch from the Yarnell house. The watch was never mentioned at all.

  I drove downtown with the top down on the BMW. The day had turned cooler with a line of high clouds from the west, and it was hard to imagine that one hundred ten degrees or the raw sun of July were even possible. By the time I reached the courthouse, the streets were jammed with office workers heading out to the suburbs, out to one of those new cul-de-sac developments carved out of saguaro cactus forests. The days were definitely getting shorter, even in the Valley of the Sun. I could tell it by the dusky texture of the light in my office, which just a month before had been filled with sun at this time of day. Now, not yet five-thirty, the room felt faded and tired. Or maybe it was just me. I walked to the substantial old desk, set my notes down and sat myself, feeling the weight of all the violence and loss. I wished Lindsey didn’t have to work tonight.

  The old jail had been located on the floor above me, the jail where Jack Talbott would have stayed during his trial. Ugly legends surrounded the place, and one day I had toured the cells with Carl. They still possessed a shadowy smell of captivity. For a minute, I just listened to the old-building sounds, waiting for a ghost to appear and explain everything. And that’s when I realized I wasn’t alone in the room. Sitting elegantly in a straight back chair ten feet away from me, staring out the window and picking a piece of lint off his cuffed pants leg, was Bobby Hamid.

  “I hope I didn’t startle you, Dr. Mapstone.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I said, too damned obviously startled. I wished I hadn’t left my Colt Python at home.

  “Forgive me,” he said. His accent was vaguely of the British public schools. “I came here looking for you, and the security guard, a very nice fellow named Carl, let me in to wait.” It was just screwy enough to be true. “I made the assumption that you would not walk in the door and start shooting, like our friend, Chief Peralta.”

  I looked around the room, as if anything there could be of interest to Bobby Hamid. Sixty-year-old murder cases, books on Arizona history, aging police logs and reports, empty Starbucks cups. My laptop was where I had left it this morning.

  “You have balls the size of Tucson,” I said.

  “Very good,” he said. “The Arizona allusion.”

  “What do you want?”

  He stood and walked over to the desk, then chose another chair and sat, posture perfect, dark suit set off with a conservative, polka-dot navy tie, any sense of menace only to be imagined by me.

  “The sunsets this time of year remind me of Iran when I was a boy,” he said, looking out the window. “Before the revolution there. But we live in revolutionary times, do we not, Professor Mapstone? Can you think of a time with more upheaval than our own? Even Europe in 1848? ‘Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.’ Do you recall who said that?”

  “Emerson,” I said. “I’m not going to have a graduate seminar with a drug dealer. For all I know, you broke into a county office. I’m sure the Crips and Bloods down in the holding cells would love to help you off with that five-thousand-dollar suit.”

  He laughed softly. “Ah, David, you do not wear the tough-cop mask with the ease Chief Peralta does.” He crossed his legs and folded manicured fingers atop one knee. “Why would I need to be a drug dealer when I can get rich legitimately in the nation’s sixth largest city? And for my pleasures, I have Indian art, beautiful women, the knowledge of good acts done for the community.” In the dimness of the room, he looked like a young Omar Sharif.

  He raised an arm expansively, indicating the view out the windows. “Look at downtown coming back. A new baseball stadium, science center, nightlife. And that doesn’t even take account of my portfolio of tech stocks. My goodness, the return I get from investing here is far superior to what I hear one might receive from, say, smuggling heroin. Once you factor in the true business costs and risks, of course.” A narrow smile played across his handsome features.

  I reached for the phone on my desk. He said, “It was you who found those skeletons in the old building down by the Union Station, no?”

  I eased the phone back into its cradle.

  “I imagine it is true what the newspaper says, that they are the famous Yarnell twins that were kidnapped in 1941. A man was caught with some of the ransom money, and with a woman, if I recall what I read. He was executed. Yet the bodies were never found.”

  I reached for the phone again.

  “My problem is strictly business, Dr. Mapstone. That building, the Triple A Storage warehouse. I want to buy it. I want to develop that entire area. And I nearly had a deal with the owners, then this. Now the city has the building sealed. I cannot move ahead. I am losing money every day I cannot act. Do you realize how fast downtown real estate prices are rising because of the baseball stadium?”

  “I don’t care, Bobby.” I let the phone be. “And even if I did, how could I do anything?”

  “You have influence with Chief Peralta, and he has influence everywhere. Do you think it is easy for me to come asking a favor from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office?”

  “Well, I’ll be happy to mention it to Peralta. Now, I really need to get some work done.”

  He raised a hand deferentially. “I do not wish to waste your time. I know Chief Peralta has a lot on his mind, what with his marital troubles and all.”

  He studied my face. “Oh, yes, I keep track of the people who, uh, do not wish me well in achieving my American dream. Frankly, I find his wife shrill and pedantic, at least on her radio show. Perhaps she is different in real life.” He shook his head slowly. A philosopher. “Ah, Americans and marriage, so much difficulty. American men confuse the things a wife can do with the things one needs from a mistress. And then those murders he can’t seem to solve. He has seen his reputation take a bit of a beating in the press because of that. I feel badly for our friend right now. I really do.”

  “I bet.”

  “Maybe your pretty, young friend—Lindsey, is it? —can help him trap this madman. She certainly made the difference on the Phaedra Riding case, did she not?”

  “You claim to know a hell of a lot about sheriff’s office business,” I said, feeling a deep tension conquering my neck and shoulders.

  “The Harquahala Strangler is a dangerous case, Dr. Mapstone. If I could help Chief Peralta stop these killings I surely would.”

  I should have thrown him out of my office. Instead, I sat there like an idi
ot and let him talk. He had more than balls—there was a reckless intelligence and charisma to him that was both compelling and disarming.

  “You have heard from him every bad thing about me, whether true or imagined,” Bobby Hamid went on. “But like me, Dr. Mapstone, you are an educated man, a man of the world. You know the purely evil man, like the purely good one, doesn’t exist.”

  He sat back a bit in the chair and the wood creaked loudly. Then for a long time we just regarded each other across the desk, his eyes in shadows, me feeling my heart pound. Yes, Peralta had told me much of the bad about Bobby Hamid: a college student at Arizona State in the late 1970s, he stayed in this country after the fall of the Shah. He was reputed to have come from an upper-class Iranian family, but nobody knew for sure.

  At first he ran a doughnut shop, but his immigrant’s success story quickly verged into owning topless bars that were notorious for prostitution and drugs. Around the mid-nineteen-eighties, he was reputed to have had a lock on the cocaine trade for half the city. Along the way, there was a trail of cruel murders of assorted informants, rivals, and narco-groupies. Yet he could never be tied to any of it—never did a day in jail, as Peralta put it. And he slowly bought himself into respectable business and civic life. He was Peralta’s obsession. I could understand why.

  Finally, he said, “Tell me what you thought of the Yarnell heirs you met.”

  “You know I can’t discuss a case.” The truth was, I still couldn’t get an appointment to meet Max Yarnell.

  “You do know that Yarneco, the family development company, owns that warehouse.”

  Well, no, I didn’t. Against the coolness of the room, I could feel sweat forming against my chest.

  I said, “The records say a real estate investment trust in Baltimore owns it.”

  “And Yarneco is majority owner of the REIT,” Bobby said. “Just thought you’d want to know. They own a lot of the property down there. Once they were produce warehouses. Now everybody wants the land. Even the county, to expand Chief Peralta’s jail.”