Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  I hunched down, feeling suddenly cold. “How much did you know about your family’s affairs back then?”

  “How much does a kid know?” he said. “We weren’t the happiest family in the world, but we weren’t the unhappiest either.”

  “The records you let me see, they show a company that was in trouble.”

  “It was the Depression.”

  “Morgan took more of a role in the company.”

  “Yes, Dad was the reliable son.”

  “What about Win?”

  “Win wasn’t in the business.”

  “So no problems with the Yarnell Land & Cattle Co. other than the general economy?”

  James shook his head. “Mapstone, I had my head more on horses and girls, not necessarily in that order, than the family business. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get away from it. Max was the businessman, always was. Let’s walk down the street and get a drink.”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “One more question. Are you sure your brothers were blood kin?”

  For just a moment, he looked remarkably like Max: the piercing, impatient glare. “What are you talking about?”

  I told him about the dental records.

  “That’s impossible.” He stood and started to walk away.

  I followed him. “Why would it be impossible?” I demanded. “People are adopted all the time.”

  “You’re crazy,” he shouted, in a breathy, drunken voice. I was surprised by his reaction. Gone was the easy-going demeanor of that night at Gainey Ranch, when I had first asked about the adoption issue.

  “Those remains are your brothers. But they’re not your mother’s children. Help me solve this!”

  “Leave me alone!” He walked faster, his gait turning oddly effeminate. Then he ran, a sad little-old-man run, back toward the gallery.

  That’s when the air behind me exploded with a single whip-crack.

  Ahead of me a shop window shattered into a thousand shards of plate glass. A woman screamed. James Yarnell gaped at me, his eyes overtaken by terror. I ran and jumped on him, throwing him roughly to the ground behind a little wall that separated the shop fronts from the sidewalk. My handgun was in the bedside table at home and my cell phone was in the car. Some Boy Scout I was: Be prepared, hell.

  He was whimpering beneath me. “Are you hit?” I whispered. He shook his head.

  Then everything was silent again. Even the traffic over on Scottsdale Road seemed to have disappeared. We were safe behind the wall—unless whoever shot at us was mobile, and coming our way. “We’ve got to move,” I said.

  I scuttled down the sidewalk, keeping the wall between us and the street. Come on, I motioned, and James crawled after me. But after about ten feet the low wall ended, and the next protection was a dark breezeway in the next building, an additional, eternal ten feet away.

  “What is going on?” James gasped.

  “You tell me. Have you received any threats, anything at all?”

  “No, no, nothing!”

  “Can you run?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered.

  “You’ve got to try,” I said viciously. “We can’t stay here.” The streetlights burned down on us, the bright, dry air emphasizing our vulnerability.

  James looked at me.

  “Ready?”

  He nodded. His eyes were wide and bloodshot.

  I grabbed him by the arm and hauled him up. My knee and ankle were hurting again, but I felt every muscle in my legs tense and pulse with energy. We bolted to the breezeway, our shoes echoing loudly off the concrete.

  I heard that whip-crack sound, louder now, and I knew we were dead. But I was too hyped to be scared. A wooden post shattered just ahead of us. I felt the splinters against my face. I dragged Yarnell and made us keep running. Then I threw us down into the darkness of the breezeway as another shot snapped behind us. The bullet ricocheted violently off the walls, adding in a weird tuning-fork kind of sound.

  “Go!” I whispered and pulled him along. We ran through the breezeway and through a gate into an alley.

  Turning right, I pounded toward Scottsdale Road. Yarnell fell onto the dirty asphalt. I picked him up and pulled him by his arm and his belt until he was running again. We kept to the backs of the buildings and the sheltering darkness. Then we burst onto Scottsdale Road and the beloved sight of people and traffic.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I needed to get out of the city, so the next day I followed Lorie’s notepad-sheet full of directions to the outskirts of Black Canyon City, a village loosely spread across the foothills along the interstate north of Phoenix. I was on business. Peralta was getting testy, the Yarnell case distracting him from the Harquahala Strangler. That morning, he had presided over a meeting downtown. Two detectives named Kimbrough and Mitchell—I’d worked with them before and we’d established something like mutual respect—would do the traditional cop work on the Max Yarnell murder. They would also handle liaison with Scottsdale PD on the attempt on James Yarnell’s life. I was to focus on the kidnapping of the twins, and find out how, or if, it connected to the other crimes. I was happy to be working back in the past, where you were shot at less frequently. Still, I had the Colt Python .357 magnum on my belt now, the black nylon holster feeling uncomfortable and comforting at the same time.

  The directions led me to a sun-beaten, single-wide trailer perched on the edge of a squat mesa. Scrub-covered hills and blown-apart rock formations swept away in every direction. The purple mass of the Bradshaw Mountains piled up to the northwest, and off to the east a ten-story-high rock prism sprouted out of a butte. Down below, Interstate 17 emitted a steady moan and I could smell the exhaust fumes this far away. To the south, the mountains were obscured in a brown soup: Phoenix. I parked the BMW next to a Harley, grabbed a satchel of file folders and stepped out onto the hard ground.

  “I got a twelve-gauge and you’re way lost, mister,” a woman’s voice came from the trailer. Another day, another gun aimed at me.

  “I’m looking for Zelda Chain,” I called.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “David Mapstone. Lorie Pope sent me.”

  A screen door flew open and a large, pear-shaped woman, poured into a brown house dress, scrambled out. “Why the hell didn’t you say so, honey? You almost gave me my morning target practice. My, you’re a tall one. No wonder Lorie likes you.”

  I knew she was pushing eighty, but her face had a youthful animation. Her hair was long and colorless, falling back over her shoulders. Her eyes were large and full of fun.

  “Things have gotten too dangerous,” she said. “That damned city.” She gestured toward Phoenix.

  “We have Major League Baseball,” I volunteered.

  She gave me a vinegar look. “When I moved out here years ago, it was a half-hour drive before you even got to the outskirts. Now, I hear they’re doing one of these goddamned ‘planned communities’ right across the wash from me.” She gestured across the dry creek bed. “It will have forty thousand people. Hope I’m dead by then.”

  She saw me eyeing the Harley. “Don’t worry, honey. That hog doesn’t belong to some big drunken boyfriend who’s going to come home and catch us.” She laughed until she drowned in a phlegmy cough. “That’s my bike. Don’t ride as much as I once did. Fell too damned many times. It’s a credo for life: don’t ride if you’re afraid to lay the bike down.”

  Zelda Chain invited me into a living room crowded with books and furniture, and insisted on serving iced tea. It was in a mason jar and smelled of bourbon. She pulled a Marlboro and lit up.

  “I always used to joke that I’d end up in a trailer outside Gallup, New Mexico,” she said, dropping across from me on an ancient stuffed sofa. “Hell, I couldn’t even get that far away from Phoenix. But, as Lorie probably told you, I was the librarian at The Republic for forty-seven years. I’m damned proud of that. I retired in 1985. Well, they retired me. Now I don’t even read newspapers anymore. I don’t want to know how awful t
he world is. Never watched television. I’m tempted to tear out the phone.”

  I asked about Hayden Yarnell and the history of the kidnapping, but she leaned back, rearranged her long, dry hair like a shawl over her shoulders and smiled like a young girl. “Lorie tells me you’re a history professor and a deputy sheriff.”

  “That’s true.”

  “That’s like being a gas company and an Internet company all in one,” she laughed. “I own stock in one like that. Bastards. Never gets above nineteen dollars a share.”

  “Kind of like me, I guess.”

  She crushed out the cigarette and lit another. “Young people aren’t taught history any more,” she said. “They haven’t been for thirty years or more. It’s one reason the world’s so insane.” She waved the cigarette around like a smoky wand. “My uncle fought in the Spanish-American War,” she went on. “And he lived to see Americans walk on the moon. We don’t have that sense of connection to our past now. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. What did Faulkner say? ‘The past isn’t even past.’ We just have to rediscover every truth the hard way. Such arrogance.”

  She stopped and looked at me. “Ah, Mapstone, you are in the clutches of an old lady with too many crotchets and grudges against the world. What did you specialize in, in graduate school?”

  I hadn’t been asked that question in a while. “America in the Progressive era and the Depression.”

  “To each his own,” she said. “Pardon my sexist language. I specialized in eighteenth-century England.” The merry eyes reasserted themselves. “But my dad also made me learn to type. So you’re lucky you have a skill to fall back on.”

  She waddled over to a bookshelf filled with file boxes labeled in old-lady-scrawl. “Can you believe the newspaper wanted to throw all this out?

  “So,” she said, “which one of you wants to know about Hayden Yarnell? The history teacher, or the lawman?”

  She pulled out a large file box, blew the dust off and set it on a Formica table. “The year was 1941. Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened yet. Phoenix was still a small farming town, with some dude ranches and tuberculosis sanitariums—they called the patients ‘lungers’ then. Hayden Yarnell was the richest man in the state. He had a big house on South Mountain. It burned in 1942, not long after the kidnapping. He died soon after that. Talk about a string of bad luck. The ruins of the foundation are probably still out there. He also kept an apartment at the Hotel Westward Ho, like the rest of the Phoenix elite. Rumor had it he kept a mistress there, too. Back then, they called the big men in town the ‘summer bachelors.’ When it turned hot, they’d ship their wives off to someplace cool, and their summer girls would show up.”

  All this was before she even looked into the files.

  “What if I told you we found the skeletons of two children, entombed in a basement wall in a downtown warehouse owned by the Yarnell family? And somebody is now killing off the remaining Yarnell brothers.”

  She exhaled from somewhere in her ankles. “I’d say I need a drink.” She took my mason jar and banged into the small kitchen. “You need one, too. Bourbon is the house specialty.”

  “Easy on the dose for me.”

  She returned and leaned on the table, watching me intently. “You found the Yarnell twins? Holy crap. Maybe I’ll have to subscribe to the newspaper again.”

  “What do you remember about the time of the kidnapping?”

  “Well,” she eased herself into a chair, “everything. It was Thanksgiving, an unusually cold autumn. Do you know we used to get hard frosts in Phoenix before they paved everything over? Anyway, I’d been at the paper for about three years. We all had our eyes on the war in Europe, and we knew it was just a matter of time before Japan jumped on us. But Phoenix was so isolated then, and things were very quiet.”

  “Morgan Yarnell waited a week before reporting the kidnapping to the police.”

  She nodded. “Strange, huh? He was the father of the twins. But the fact that they waited to call the cops was never very widely reported. The family had pull with the newspaper publishers, so no surprise there. I assume they figured they could handle it themselves, and any publicity might make the kidnapper kill the twins. Remember, the Lindbergh kidnapping was still very fresh in everyone’s minds. Talk about a media circus. The Yarnells were very well known, much more so than today.”

  “But did Morgan get a ransom note, or what? It’s not clear from the record.”

  She opened the file box and leafed through some yellowed papers. She produced some reading glasses from her pocket and angled them on her nose. “He told the police that the twins were taken from their rooms at the Yarnell mansion on South Mountain on the night of November 27, and their nanny discovered them missing the next day. He received a telephone call that day demanding a hundred thousand dollars be put in a locker at Union Station. He complied, but after a week the boys still weren’t returned, so he went to the police. No mention of a note or any communication beyond the call.”

  “Did they have direct dial in town then? Maybe an operator helped the kidnapper place the call. I wish somebody had tried to find where that call came from.”

  “Honey, I wish I was twenty years old with a cheerleader’s body, still with my IQ, of course. Nobody was asking these questions. When Jack Talbott was caught, everyone was convinced justice was done. Wait.” She leafed through a file of yellowed newspaper clippings and paper. “Maybe not everyone. Here, look at this.”

  It was newspaper copy paper, flimsy and brittle with age. It was datelined Florence, Arizona, July 20, 1942. I read the lead aloud:

  “‘Convicted kidnapper John Henry “Jack” Talbott was executed in Arizona’s gas chamber early this morning, but not before his last words accused Hayden “Win” Yarnell Jr. of masterminding the kidnapping of his four-year-old nephews.’”

  I sat up straight. “I never saw this story.”

  “That’s because it didn’t run in the newspaper. The publisher himself spiked it. The publisher was a good friend of the Yarnells, remember, and this Talbott character was hardly the most reliable witness. So the account of his last words never ran.”

  Another Marlboro flamed to life. She swept away the smoke with an incantatory wave of her bony hand.

  “As I said, Mapstone, it was a small town. People talked. They knew Win Yarnell—that’s the name Hayden Jr. went by—they knew he was the black sheep. He drank, womanized. His wife left him. He had a terrible gambling habit. Used to gamble in the old Duece—they bulldozed it in the ’70s to make that horrible Civic Plaza. He gambled with Bravo Juan.”

  “Great name.”

  “Bravo Juan ran the numbers in the Deuce. He had an arrangement with the sheriff and the police chief, and kept everything in order. But the story went that Win Yarnell was deeply in debt to him. How do you like that, Mapstone? A loser named Win? Anyway, it all made the old man so mad, he disowned him, cut him right out of the business and the will.”

  I asked when that happened. “The late 1930s,” she replied. “Everybody talked about it. It was a little town. People felt sorry for Mr. Yarnell, ending up with the sons he did. I guess Morgan was okay, but never that bright. And Win was a lost cause.”

  I gingerly sampled the bourbon. “So was Win enough of a lost cause to kidnap his nephews?”

  “Maybe.” Her voice became momentarily precise and delicate. “People are capable of anything. Didn’t Solzhenitsyn say that the line separating good from evil doesn’t run between nations or parties but through every human heart? Maybe it was Dostoevsky.”

  “Solzhenitsyn, I think.” I thought of Lindsey, my Russian literature expert.

  Zelda exhaled a plume of smoke. “What if Win stole Morgan’s children to get a ransom to pay Bravo Juan and something went wrong? Nobody thought Win was a killer, much less of his own nephews.”

  I thought about that. “On the other hand, it might make more sense that Bravo Juan or somebody like him snatched the kids to put pressure on Win or the family to repay
the gambling debts. Why didn’t the police ever do any checking?”

  “Oh, even a college professor can’t be that naive. This was the most powerful family in the state. Phoenix was a corrupt little town where the elite got what they wanted. Look at the way they had railroaded Winnie Ruth Judd just a few years before that. Anyway, in this case the cops had a man caught red-handed with the ransom money, or part of it at least, and with the pajamas. Why would they need to do more?”

  I just let the bourbon and information burn my throat.

  She fished out a brown file folder and handed it to me. Yellowed papers bulged out from the sides. “Here’s Jack Talbott’s police record. Do you have it?” I shook my head. “You can add it to your collection.”

  I slipped off the rubber band and leafed through the papers. Talbott had received a suspended sentence for burglary back in Elwood, Indiana. In Phoenix, he served a month in the county jail for assaulting a fellow drunk. That was in June 1940. Another arrest came in November 1941 for public drunkenness. I slowed down my reading. I read it again.

  “This is strange. Jack Talbott was arrested for public drunkenness outside a bar on Second Street on November 27.”

  She reached for the report. “Let me see that. I never noticed that before.” She stubbed out the Marlboro and scanned the page with her finger.

  “Mapstone, that was the day of the kidnapping. Could he really have been set up, just like he claimed?”

  “Maybe not.” Peralta’s skeptical voice was in my head. “The booking record shows he was arrested at one-ten a.m. that day. He could have been released in a few hours. The kidnapping was later that night. Maybe he got just sober enough to steal those little boys. It’s impossible to know without the jail release record. What about the art collection that disappeared? Could that have played into this?”

  “Oh, you know about that. It was another thing the newspaper never reported. Supposed to have been quite a collection. But it disappeared after the kidnapping. Let me think…after the kidnapping, and before the old man died.”