Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  “Max Yarnell,” Lorie declared, as if she had spoken a whole paragraph.

  I sighed and started mixing the drink.

  “Are you making martinis?” Lorie demanded. “Why don’t you make one for me?”

  “Because martinis blur judgment,” I said. “You told me that years ago.”

  “So? It would do you good.”

  “I would bore you. I was never dangerous enough.”

  “Yeah, but we could have fun while I was reaching that self-destructive conclusion.” She gave a deep, sensual giggle. I imagined her too-wide smile and the toss of her short dark hair. I sealed up the gin and ice in Grandfather’s deco cocktail shaker and I gave the concoction a good workout.

  I took out one of the Neiman Marcus martini glasses my colleagues had given me as a going-away present from San Diego State University when I lost the tenure sweepstakes. I had a lot of going-away presents. The clear fluid slipped delightfully into the glass, little frigates of ice cruising the surface.

  “Max Yarnell,” Lorie said again.

  “I honestly don’t know much. I’m as baffled as everybody else. You know, ‘police are baffled.’ That’s me.”

  “David!” Her voice was suddenly taut. “He’s one of the richest and most prominent men in the state, and he’s been murdered less than three weeks after it seemed like the Yarnell kidnapping had been solved? This whole thing stinks.”

  “I don’t doubt it, but how?”

  “You’re the one with the Ph.D., my love.”

  “Fat lot of good it’s done me.”

  “Look, I’d love to play career one-downmanship, but I’ve got a deadline. What’s Peralta holding back?”

  “Don’t put me in that position, Lorie.”

  She sighed and said, “I’d like to put you in a position all right, but I guess you’ve got to go drink martinis out of Leslie’s navel.”

  I dropped an olive into the martini like making a green wish. “Lindsey.”

  “Whatever,” Lorie said. “Give me something, David. How was Max Yarnell killed? Gun? Knife? Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic? The PIO won’t tell me a goddamned thing.”

  “You know the cops always hold back details, stuff the suspect alone knows. And you know I can’t tell you that. “We’ll talk.”

  “Hey,” she said. “Be careful, David. I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into but it’s pretty heavy-duty. Watch that sweet melancholy-intellectual ass of yours.”

  She could always make me smile.

  I put Count Basie on the stereo and went back to the staircase. From the perch of the carpeted steps, I savored the martini. Gotten myself into something heavy-duty, but what? What could a 58-year-old kidnapping have to do with a murder that happened yesterday? Hadn’t the DNA test said those skeletons weren’t even the Yarnells? Then what had Max Yarnell wanted to talk about with me? This same Max Yarnell who had his assistant pull the property records on the Triple A Storage Warehouse and then pretended to be surprised to learn his company owned it. Was he already dead as I was sitting at the gate, pushing the little red button on the communications box? Would it have made a difference if I had immediately agreed to a meeting? What was I missing?

  It could all be a coincidence. Maybe he just surprised a burglar; maybe he only wanted to complain to me again about my lack of respectful behavior toward him, only this time with the liberating influence of alcohol; maybe he pissed off some environmental activists who decided to return him to the soil a little early.

  That all could make sense, until you had to figure in that damned doll.

  I went back to scanning book titles. All that history. The only problem was the history I didn’t know. Out the picture window, the world appeared dark and profound, my valley of low ranch house rooftops and big sky, where stranglers, snipers and killers of rich men with secrets did their restless trades. I thought about what Philip Roth said: “the terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides.” Then I heard James Yarnell’s voice in my head and I jumped to my feet.

  The garage-apartment behind the house was where I was building an HO-scale model railroad, a scene of Phoenix in the 1950s. It was a place to store boxes of books, old clothes and things headed for Goodwill. I guess I could have rented out the upstairs to a boarder if I wanted to clean out about forty years of records stored from Grandfather’s dental practice.

  I opened up the musty apartment and stared at the boxes and filing cabinets. Old patient records from my grandfather, the dentist. James Yarnell had said Grandfather had been their dentist way back when. Could it really be this easy? I started looking through files, getting a sense of how things were organized, or not. For decades, it seemed, Grandfather had an assistant named Mrs. Hill. I could barely remember a large woman with steel-wire stiff gray hair and thick fingers. Now I detected her steadfast handwriting on files before the 1950s, when typewritten labels took over. Her filing was quirky, made more so by the move of the records from Grandfather’s old office on McDowell after he had finally retired. It took some time. I mixed another martini, came back to the garage apartment and dug in again.

  In about an hour, I heard the door from the house open and Peralta’s heavy tread came over the walkway to the apartment.

  “What are you doing, Mapstone?” He stuck his head in the door.

  I held up the files.

  “Finding the Yarnell twins,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “I don’t hate all men,” Gretchen was saying. “Maybe I’m wary of the species in abstract. When your name is Gretchen Goodheart, it brings out the predator in some men.”

  When she spoke, her mouth animated those double lines that became dimples when she smiled. They were like double parentheses etched into the smooth skin around her mouth.

  “A good heart is good to find,” I said.

  “I like a few individuals of the species very much.” She touched my arm.

  It was Monday night. We were sitting in a booth at Los Olivos, the oldest Mexican restaurant in Scottsdale and one of my favorites. It was our first real date and the place was overflowing with winter visitors. Max Yarnell had been dead for a little more than two days.

  We had been talking about Frances Richie, about the bad sense and bad luck to fall in with somebody like Jack Talbott. Gretchen had said he represented a type of man that made women hate all men.

  Philosophy and enchiladas. I was glad for a break. Sunday had been nonstop for fourteen hours, as I trailed along with sheriff’s and police detectives as they interviewed people in the homicide of Max Yarnell.

  He had been one of the richest men in the Southwest, and one of the loneliest. He had divorced his wife of thirty years back in the early 1990s and then had gone through a string of pretty young trophies, none of the women in the picture recently. His children lived out of state; one lived in London. He and his brother, James, hadn’t spoken in seven months. His assistant, the lovely Megan, was on vacation in San Diego. So apparently on Friday night, Max Yarnell had worked in the midtown skyscraper until around four, then had driven home. He lived alone, with a housekeeper and cook who only worked as needed. With business dinners and travel, Max Yarnell didn’t seem to have much time to enjoy his sweeping views.

  All that work had produced enemies. The defense company owned by Yarneco had faced government investigations into alleged contracting fraud. Another Yarneco subsidiary had terminated an employee who had vowed to come to Phoenix and personally kill Max Yarnell. It was a promising lead until the man was found with a new job and a tight alibi in Seattle. But the biggest trouble came with the company’s ambition to open the first new copper mine in Arizona in years.

  Yarneco was not only being sued by environmental groups, but also by its erstwhile partner, a giant mining conglomerate from Australia. The Aussies’ lawsuit claimed Yarneco had misrepresented key geologists’ reports about the site. Yarneco counter-sued for breach of contract. Only thirty million bucks were at stake.

&
nbsp; And that was the gentlemanly part of the troubles. Earlier this year, the Gila County sheriff had investigated two arsons at the site office of Yarneco near the Arizona town of Superior. Then Yarneco headquarters started getting phone calls threatening worse if the project wasn’t stopped. The most recent phone call came the previous week. Unfortunately, with the too-smart-by-half mentality of corporations, Yarneco didn’t report this call to the cops. It just hired more bodyguards. On Sunday afternoon, I had listened to the tape on the twentieth floor of the Yarneco Tower.

  “This is your last warning.” The voice had sounded strangely altered, like putting Harry Connick’s voice track through a blender. “If the mine isn’t stopped within a week, the criminal Max Yarnell will be executed.”

  “That’s it?” Peralta had asked. One of the tough boys I first noticed in the oversized suit coats had nodded. Peralta had nearly spat on the carpet.

  “And you didn’t think this was worth telling us about?”

  He had just stared, slightly cross-eyed. “I was following orders, sir.”

  How many times had we heard that in this bloody century?

  I had thought the voice sounded male. Peralta had been sure it was a woman. He had it sent off to the FBI to be analyzed.

  Yet outside of the security boys at his office, Max Yarnell wasn’t acting like someone who was afraid. Alarm company records showed the system at his house was not armed the night he was killed. Yarnell only armed it each night around midnight when he turned in, and while he was away. He left work early that day, saying he was going to work from home, but no, he hadn’t mentioned that he expected visitors that night.

  All these thoughts kept replaying themselves as we sat in the restaurant.

  “In a way,” Gretchen said, “it sounds like Frances had bad luck with men all her life.”

  I savored a mouthful of cheese crisp.

  “I mean, after Jack Talbott, she was kept in prison her entire life by the Yarnell brothers. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I guess one might take it personally if somebody kidnapped his brothers and they were never seen again.”

  “We don’t even know they did it!” Gretchen shouted, holding my wrist tightly enough that it hurt.

  “Sorry.” She let go. “When I drink, I get passionate.”

  She was on her second margarita.

  “Do you doubt they did it?”

  “I don’t know, David. I don’t know.”

  “The newspaper articles made it sound pretty open-and-shut.”

  “The newspapers,” she said, her tone neutral. Then, “So what do you think happened with Max? Are you allowed to tell me?” The rich brown eyes fixed on me intensely. “Do you trust me, David?”

  “You’re helping me on the kidnapping, so of course I trust you. On Max, we just don’t know much.”

  “He sounded so powerful. So much money.”

  “Didn’t do him much good in the end.”

  Gretchen sipped her drink. “Do you wish you could have that kind of world? All that money? And you didn’t even have to work for it. It just seems like a madness nowadays. Twenty-five-year-old kids with millions in stock options. And here we are, two civil servants.”

  “I envy the rich their options,” I said.

  The waitress brought our check. One other couple came in and sat at the opposite end of the room. They weren’t talking to each other.

  Gretchen said, “My dad’s a teacher, so I’ll never inherit much money.”

  “Well, my grandfather was a dentist before dentists made big money.”

  “And your parents?”

  “They died in a small-plane crash. I was just a baby. Dad was a lawyer for the state. Mom was a music teacher. I didn’t really know them.”

  “Oh, baby…”

  “I was very fortunate with my grandparents. And who knows about great wealth. There’s that whole business about the rich man passing through the eye of a needle.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Please, no religion during the holidays.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was being ironic. How could you know these days?

  Just then my cell phone rang. The number was unfamiliar.

  I excused myself and went to the little alcove off the Los Olivos bar to return the call. A mariachi band was playing Christmas tunes in the sound system.

  “Deb Boswell.”

  “It’s David Mapstone with the Sheriff’s Office,” I said.

  “Mapstone, you’re quite something.” Her voice was brighter than the dour academic I remembered from Hawkins’ office. “Your grandfather was a dentist?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And he treated these boys? Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why would that be? Why would he have treated them?”

  Suddenly I felt like I was in an interview room with the cops, on the bad luck side of the table.

  “He was a dentist,” I said. “Phoenix was smaller then. It probably had 40,000 people during the Depression, and not that many dentists. I don’t know.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m from Detroit, so it’s hard for me to have a sense of this place.”

  “I found the records stored among Grandfather’s files. I immediately logged them into evidence.”

  “It was pretty unusual to see dental X-rays in 1940,” she said.

  “These were rich people,” I said. “And Grandfather loved gadgets.”

  I was bursting with anticipation, but something told me not to rush her.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s the jackpot. Based on the dental records, the skeletons you guys found are indeed the remains of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell. Each little boy had a silver filling in a molar.”

  “And the DNA profile?”

  “Both tests are telling us accurate information,” Boswell said. “Deputy, you have a mystery on your hands.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I walked Gretchen to her truck, reveling in the cool, dry evening. She wore a lightweight leather jacket over a dark blouse and tight blue jeans. The leather felt soft and supple as I slipped my hand around her. She leaned into me. The Christmas lights were up in downtown Scottsdale, and tourists sauntered along window-shopping, pairs of shadows down the street.

  “Do you want some company?”

  She put her hand in my back pocket. “That would mean I would have to give you my address.”

  “Do you trust me, Gretchen?”

  “If you came to my place, you’d fuck me,” she whispered, her voice husky. “You might just fuck me crazy.”

  I ran my hands down her sweet, denim-encased hips, pulled her closer.

  “That would be the idea.”

  She checked her watch. “Why don’t I come to your place later? Will your high-powered roomie be put out?”

  For a moment I wondered if she were married. That might be one reason to not give me her address, to not ride out here with me. We stood beside her big white SUV. I caressed her face and she leaned in, kissing me deeply. As we were parting, I told her the latest news on the twins.

  “It is definitely them,” I said. “Either the DNA test was inconclusive, or they had a different mother from Max and James.”

  She turned her head away and I could see her eyes were full of tears. They gleamed off the streetlights like new stars.

  “Gotta go, David. Thank you for a nice evening.” She gently but firmly pushed me away, and soon the Ford’s taillights disappeared around the corner. I was left alone on the street.

  I drove slowly down Main Street, past the rows of tony galleries. The car was a warm haven for a man mellowed by two Negra Modelos and aroused by Gretchen’s kisses. Clots of white-haired tourists milled along the street. Then, past the traffic circle with the bronze of the bucking bronco, Main Street emptied out. I was just about to accelerate over to Goldwater Boulevard when another white head caught my eye. A man in a checked shirt and khaki pants, sitting on a bench.
It was James Yarnell.

  “I’m seeing you more often than I see my wife,” he said after I stopped and got out. We had interviewed him on Sunday.

  “Are you all right?”

  He looked me over in an unfocused way. I could smell booze on him.

  “I’m just closing up for the night.” He gestured over his shoulder to the Yarnell Gallery’s large, well-lit windows. I sat on the bench beside him, and for a long time we just listened to the night noises in a city of cars.

  “Eventually you lose everybody,” he said.

  “I’m very sorry about your brother.”

  “I didn’t love him,” he said. “I won’t pretend that.” I thought of Lindsey’s anguished words about her mother. “It’s just he was family. We were the last of the famous Yarnell brothers.”

  James stared into the sidewalk. “Max wasn’t always the man he became, the man you met. He was a link to my parents and my grandpa and my little twin brothers.”

  A little group of tourists speaking German walked behind us, wowed by a large painting visible in the gallery.

  “What do you think happened to Andrew and Woodrow?”

  He shook his head, his handsome face a mask.

  “Deep inside, I always knew they had to be dead. But when you never have a resolution, you never really know. So you always hold out hope. Grandfather hoped nearly to the end. He’d been able to do so much in his life out of sheer will. Then, he just seemed to give up one day. This great life force went out of the man.”

  The tourists moved down the street and we were alone again. I said, “You don’t talk about your father much.”

  He leaned back on the bench and sighed. “Morgan Yarnell had the misfortune to be the son of a larger-than-life man, and the husband of a very strong woman, my mother. Even his brother, Uncle Win, was colorful and loud. Dad wasn’t a bad person. He was just so…” he searched for the word, “…eclipsed. I guess he deserves more memory than that from his son. But, you see, when you’re a boy, those big personalities stay with you. By the time I came back from the war, Dad was dead. I guess I never really knew him.”