Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  ***

  The new freeway system took me from Peralta’s place, nestled into the bare mountainside overlooking Dreamy Draw, to central Phoenix in less than ten minutes. Traffic was light, traveling fast. Charlie Parker was on the BMW’s CD player. I got off at Seventh Street but didn’t feel like going home yet. The house would be too damned empty. I drove slowly through Margaret Hance Park, which sat atop the Papago Freeway and concealed the highway’s ugly gash through several blocks north of downtown. It was once a fine old neighborhood of bungalows and period revival houses, but all that remained was my old grade school, Kenilworth, the new city library, and the nearly new park, which sprawled uninvitingly amid the empty land.

  South into downtown. Bobby Hamid was right about a building boom. After years of abandonment, downtown Phoenix was coming back at least a bit. The ballpark loomed massively amid the skyscrapers. A big federal building was going up near the city and county government centers. Some nights there were even crowds on the streets. Not tonight, though. Phoenix reverted to its small-town roots on holidays. The sparse traffic cruising Central disappeared entirely as I turned down Monroe, then went south again on Fourth Avenue. I could see the pale stucco facade of Union Station at the foot of the street and I let the BMW slowly slide down the block toward it. I interrupted Charlie Parker and listened to the echoes off the buildings, the tires scraping across the old railroad tracks.

  I slowed to a stop just ahead of the old Triple A Storage warehouse, which stood forlornly off to the left. A couple of homeless men looked me over and scuttled off. Preservationists wanted to make these old warehouse blocks into an entertainment district. But that would require Phoenix to show an uncharacteristic sense of its past. When these old buildings were thriving with commerce, when premier streamliners like the Sunset Limited and Golden State Limited called at Union Station, when the graceful little mission-style building was the center of life here—most of today’s three million Phoenicians weren’t even born and their roots were thousands of miles away. This was a new-start, tear-it-down city that gave it up for the first developer who said we were pretty.

  The old brick warehouse had really been a railroad hotel, right at the foot of the street that led into town. Thanks to Gretchen, I knew it had still been a hotel in 1941 when Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell were somehow taken inside and left in a wall in a hidden basement. Franklin Roosevelt was president, Nazi tanks were rampaging through Russia, and this street in the little farm town of Phoenix, Arizona was busy night and day with train travelers. So how did the twins get in there unnoticed? And why would Jack Talbott pick such a very public place to hide his victims? The street radiated only silence and gloom back at me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  On Sunday night, I dreamed a vivid dream about Lindsey in the rain. And then I realized she was really there in bed with me. We were both crying silently, big streaks of salty tears in the desert, and she was stroking my face with warm, soft hands, and I was holding onto her for dear life, and life was suddenly so precious and clear and treacherously sweet, and we didn’t dare say a word.

  When the alarm went off at eight, I was alone again. But I felt sore and spent in all the right places, and a single long-stemmed yellow rose sat on the bedclothes, the bud barely opened. Outside the bedroom window, the sprawling city was utterly still except for the insistent patter of early-winter rain beating on the dust of new real estate developments. Maybe someday our lives would be normal enough that I could wake up with my complicated lover in my arms. But I knew in the silence of our lovemaking last night she had really said goodbye.

  The Republic was wet. I brought it in and tried to read it anyway. Stories on the Y2K computer worries, a multiple shooting a half-mile away, and a new leg of freeway opening out on the edge of town. Another story on a record low number of people getting married and fewer saying they were happy when they did. I pulled on some sweats and drove over to Starbucks to start my day’s rituals.

  By nine o’clock, I was at Phoenix Police headquarters. Little orange hoods declared the parking meters off limits today, so I parked two blocks away amid the vacant lots of an old neighborhood. Well, not a neighborhood now. Just emptiness.

  Even when I left Phoenix to teach in Ohio, back in the late 1970s, these straight, wide streets that ran for ten blocks between downtown Phoenix and the Arizona state capitol had been a neighborhood. It had surely been in decline—that’s why they put the ugly police headquarters out here—but it had been a neighborhood nonetheless, with people, life, history. That damned word again. Victorian houses and bungalows had brought the semblance of modernity to a frontier town in the 1890s. Adobe and brick apartment houses had been graced with upstairs sleeping porches for an age without air conditioning. They had stood there, along palm-lined streets, all the way to the state capitol. Now, nothing. Block upon block of leveled, grassless vacant lots. Meeting them to the west: ghastly state office buildings. Back when. I remember. I was starting to sound like a geezer, but I couldn’t stop noticing things. Maybe that’s the curse of years.

  Inside police headquarters, there was Lt. Augustus Hawkins. He sat at his desk just as he had the first day I saw him, behind paperwork that looked like a besieging army of forms and reports. This time, however, two other detectives were lounging at the tiny conference table in his office. In another chair, a woman wearing a visitor’s ID looked up at me and gave a little smile. Hawkins didn’t look up, but he gave a hearty post-holiday hello.

  “Put on your ID card.”

  “We have the DNA test back?” I asked, pinning the MCSO card to my pocket. It had been exactly two weeks since we found the skeletons.

  “The fucking thing doesn’t match,” said one of the detectives. He looked eerily like O.J. Simpson, a fact that must have made for some interesting times out on the job.

  I just stood there in silence. I’d heard what he said, but my mind didn’t want to process it.

  “Must not be your famous Yarnell twins,” drawled the other detective, a white guy with the beefy looks of a second-string football player gone to seed and dark permed curly hair. The young cops favored crew cuts and shaved heads. Some older cops, from the ’70s, still thought they were disco studs. Maybe I was being unkind.

  I took the last empty chair and let them fill me in. The woman, who introduced herself as Deb Boswell, was a pathologist from the medical examiner’s office and a national expert in these matters. She launched into a twenty-minute lecture about polymorphisms and probabilities, alleles and slotblocks, electropheresis and PCR, and how much they still couldn’t determine. I was at my liberal arts most ignorant in such matters, but the cops weren’t doing much better.

  “Bottom line,” Hawkins broke in, “the DNA fingerprints don’t match.”

  “The preferred terms are DNA profiling, or DNA typing,” she said mildly. “It’s not really like fingerprinting.” She faced me. “What all this means, Deputy, is that the two skeletons you found are identical twins. The DNA tells us that. While identical twins have different fingerprints, genetically they’re indistinguishable. But the boys don’t appear to be related to Max and James Yarnell.”

  She shuffled her papers and pulled out another sheet.

  “This is a case where there wasn’t enough nuclear DNA in the remains. So we used the mitochondrial DNA. There’s many more copies of that in a cell. One big limitation is that it’s passed down by the mother.”

  “So,” I said, “these might be the Yarnell twins, but they had a different mother from Max and James Yarnell?”

  Hawkins coughed loudly. “You’re reaching, Mapstone. You never said this cattle baron had more than one wife.”

  “Actually, we’re talking about the cattle baron’s son. Morgan Yarnell was the father of the twins. But, yeah, he was only married once. Still…”

  “You were wrong, Mapstone, admit it,” O.J. Simpson said. I ignored him.

  “He’s right,” Boswell said, “this outcome could be explained by a different moth
er. Otherwise, we can’t say a lot with certainty, because we were able to get such a small sample from the bones. It wasn’t enough for an RFLP, which would be more conclusive.” She leafed through sheets of paper in her lap that looked like large bar codes.

  “Hawkins,” I started.

  “Please don’t.” He held up his hands. He took a moment. The stress radiated off him like a cloud from a damaged Soviet nuclear reactor. He leaned back in the chair and it creaked loudly, even though it was the newest high-tech metal and non-allergenic upholstery. I was amazed to see such life in him.

  “Gentlemen, this is a matter of case clearance. This is a matter of resources. Do you know how many new homicides we have in this city every year?”

  He glanced at me with baleful pale eyes. “Excluding the county and those strangler murders. But this department has had to detach twenty detectives to help the sheriff on that. And we’ve got thirty more working on the Grand Avenue Sniper. Resources are too tight to be wasting time on some history project!”

  It all had the ambiance of a nasty faculty meeting when someone’s tenure was at stake. I mischievously recalled making love with Lindsey in a world without small men enforcing the rules of bureaucracies.

  Hawkins said: “We’re fucked. Do you understand that? We inconvenienced a very powerful man with friends on city council. The media is expecting this to be the bones of the Yarnell twins. Now we have nothing.” Media—are, I thought. I couldn’t stop correcting freshman papers. Nobody spoke for what seemed like a minute.

  “We have a mystery,” I said finally.

  I swear the pathologist smiled a little.

  “I’ve dug into some very old crimes before. And, let me tell you, it makes the clearance rate suck at first.”

  He exhaled dramatically. “You’re a sheriff’s deputy,” he sputtered. “You’re not really even that. We went on this very expensive snipe hunt based on your, what? Intuition? Knowledge of historical trivia? Do you have any idea how much DNA fingerprinting costs?”

  He filled me with sudden malice. I wanted to say: You pale, little badge-toting turd. I used to flunk your moron daughter when she had to take a history class to keep up her volleyball scholarship. And she would have done anything—anything, Gus—to just scoot by with a D.”

  I said, “We still have to find out who the bones belong to. You can assign a new team to the case.” I looked over the two detectives, who gave me sour frowns. “Or let me keep going. We know these are twins. We know they were found in a building owned by Yarneco. The pocket watch has the Yarnell brand on the cover. Maybe there is a different mother. Maybe there’s something about the family we don’t know, such as an adoption…”

  “Maybe, maybe, Jesus!” Hawkins said. “This was supposed to be simple.”

  I started to speak but he cut me off. “Max Yarnell is very angry over all this, and he doesn’t want to be bothered about it any more.” Hawkins seemed to catch himself. In a lower voice, he said, “Of course, that won’t impede our investigation. No favoritism here. But you, Mapstone, you are done now.”

  “Fine.”

  We all just sat there. He ran his hands across his paperwork, made a note, signed a form. He looked up and we were all waiting. Then he remembered some dialogue from TV cop shows. “Get the hell out of here,” he moaned. “All of you!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I took the back door into Peralta’s office suite and sat on his sofa while he finished an interview with a blonde TV reporter.

  “So it’s okay for you to plant stories,” I said when she and her cameraman had gone.

  He walked over to his little refrigerator and pulled out a Diet Coke. He didn’t offer me anything. “I didn’t used to date that one. Anyway, I’m the boss. So why are you here? Progress?”

  “I’d call it that. The DNA test came back. Unfortunately, it doesn’t match the two living Yarnell brothers.” I ran through the information from the meeting, cheating off my notes for the technical stuff. Peralta swayed back and forth in his desk chair, slurping from the soft drink.

  “So it’s inconclusive, but we’re probably not going to get anywhere unless the Yarnell brothers cooperate, and that’s not going to happen. So I’m on to the next case.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” The chair was at a dead stop.

  “Whoa, what?”

  “What the hell do you mean, you’re on to the next thing. You haven’t fixed this goddamned thing yet.”

  I sank deeper into the thin cushions of the sofa. I had come into the room on the wings of liberation. I should have known it wouldn’t go down that way.

  “It’s a city case.”

  “So?”

  “You know, a city. This one is called Phoenix. It has a police department, a good one, despite Lieutenant Hawkins. The bodies were found in a building inside the city limits. City police departments tend to frown on interference from the sheriff’s office.”

  “So?”

  I tossed my notebook aside. “I can’t believe you!”

  “Chief Wilson still wants you on the case.” He stood, mountainous behind the desk.

  “How can he still want me on the case when the meeting just finished up five blocks from here?”

  “He knows. He does. And I want you on the case. Anyway, the kidnapping happened in the county. The old geezer’s hacienda was in the county back then.” He sat back down, looking pleased with himself.

  The idea of spending more time in Hawkins’ office made my stomach hurt. “Why do you care?” I demanded. “Never mind, I know. When are you going to catch this guy?”

  “That’s just what little Rachel there wanted to know. And I had to be patient and diplomatic with her. I don’t have to with you.” After a pause, he added, “It set us back that Lindsey had to go for a few days.”

  “Well, it was obviously for nothing important.” The mention of Lindsey’s name instantly made me miss her more. I said, “Why do you need her anyway? Cut her some slack. She just lost her mother.”

  “She wanted this job,” he said. “And she’s getting along really well with Patrick Blair. Not my business, Mapstone, but she really likes him. He really likes her.” My stomach manufactured a tidal wave of bile.

  He looked at me mildly. “Mapstone, you used to have such a good attitude, when you were a young deputy.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “That was before you got your mind pickled in shit working around all those eggheads,” he said. “Your case doesn’t seem that hard to me.”

  Everything I wanted to say would have just made him angry, meaning even more determined to keep me where I was.

  “We’ve got the skeletons, right? The DNA test proves they’re twins. How many other twins went missing back then?”

  “None that I know of. I could check newspaper clips and missing person’s records.”

  “See, you’re already moving ahead. And you’ve got that watch, right? Is that the Yarnell brand on it?” I nodded. “See, it has to be the twins.”

  I thought so, too. But I didn’t know how to get the case off dead center if the Yarnells wouldn’t cooperate. And I had been ordered away by Hawkins. None of this made any impression on Peralta.

  “Hawkins doesn’t matter.” He was back to swinging his chair back and forth, drinking the Diet Coke. “Chief Wilson and I agreed that you will take this case alone, now. They have plenty to keep them busy, and you have special expertise for this kind of thing.”

  “Max Yarnell?”

  “Try to be more charming, Mapstone. And go see his brother. Sharon and I met him once, at his art gallery. Seemed like a nice guy.”

  “I give up.” I stood to go. “I’ll give you some theater. Distract the media. America’s Toughest Sheriff. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “No.” His voice was like a shot. “I want you to investigate this case.” He was standing and his onyx eyes were wide in his immobile face. “I want you to gather evidence. I really want it closed. Those two little boys died an awful deat
h, and this sheriff’s office will never forget the victims.”

  If you didn’t know Peralta the way I did, you’d have thought he was just making a speech.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Scottsdale night was scented with ease and pleasure, the perfect camouflage for wealth, privilege and grasping madness. Across the vast ballroom, I saw the straw-colored hair of the war-hero senator’s younger wife. She was in an animated dialogue with a squadron of forty-something Republican women while her husband trolled out of state for presidential IOUs. Her mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t. There in the tailored Hugo Boss suit was the chief executive of the Mayo Clinic, out checking on the highly profitable desert outpost of his empire. Beside the ice-sculpture of a saguaro cactus, the famous Indian artist, in polished silver bola tie and black jeans, nestled in a soul-talk with the skeletal Newport Beach socialite who now kept a modest, million-dollar casita on Camelback Mountain. Laughing by the bar, the owner of this season’s hottest gallery in town, recently separated from wife No. Four—yes, the department store heiress—but apparently finding solace with a teenage-looking redhead in a paper-thin black minidress.

  They all knew their roles in the whirl of resort-life that was just beginning a new season: the older men with their square jaws and squash-court athleticism; the newly affluent younger women on their arms, who practiced a kind of prostitution we might all do if given the chance and the beauty; the pleasant older couples with complicated lives back East, being slowly mummified by the desert sun; the aging ingénues hoping for a new meal ticket. There was the occasional oddball, like that pot-bellied Anglo with the loud voice and the greasy, gray ponytail, nursing a cause or a fading reputation. The elite from Silicon Valley and Hollywood sprinkled the crowd with celebrity. Someone said Spielberg was here tonight.