Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

By this time a tall, boy-faced man was hovering. He was dressed in an over-long T-shirt, baggy jeans and expensive sneakers. Megan excused herself without introducing me, and walked away with the fiancé. There was no time to ask why she felt paranoid working for Yarneco, or whether her boss had felt the same. There was barely time to appreciate her elegant beauty as she walked out with her slob boyfriend. I unconsciously straightened my suit coat and headed to the rain-anointed parking lot.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Choose a strand and pull it, follow where it led. That had been Gretchen’s advice. So on Tuesday I drove down Central into the south Phoenix barrio, across the Salt River that stayed dry despite the rain, past the brightly colored storefronts with signs in Spanish. A brave ice-cream man patrolled the corner of Southern Avenue with his pushcart, even though it was fifty degrees outside. Shops covered their wares in plastic against the rain. Working people huddled on the muddy, broken concrete of city bus stops.

  Every face I saw was Hispanic, and it made me think of the kid in the old motel, Hector Gonzales. Just before Peralta arrived, when I had asked him if he had killed Yarnell, he said something odd. He said, “Yarnell, he…” I had forgotten about it in the mayhem that followed. Now I remembered it. “Yarnell, he…” He said it as if he knew whom I was talking about, and yet it wasn’t necessarily the way you’d begin a sentence of denial, or confession. “Yarnell, he…” Nothing about these cases seemed right. I was thinking too much, or so Peralta had said. So I drove on, but didn’t stop thinking.

  The Phoenix I had grown up in had been little removed from its roots as a largely Southern town, and south Phoenix was the segregated wrong side of the tracks. It was a very Anglo city, with a relatively large African-American population, and Mexican-American families that had lived here for generations. All this had been swept away by the past ten or fifteen years, as hundreds of thousands of first-generation Latino migrants had crowded into a city whose population had tripled since 1960. The historic Golden Gate barrio had been bulldozed for Sky Harbor expansion. The newcomers had turned everything from the onetime white-bread suburb of Maryvale to many of the formerly black neighborhoods of south Phoenix into new barrios. Now the Midwesterners were coming, too. The citrus groves and Japanese Flower Gardens that had encircled the south edge of the city like a cooling, green necklace were falling to subdivisions, shopping strips, and gated properties. There were hard feelings and tensions on all sides.

  I was after different history: a man who had been at the Yarnell hacienda the night of the kidnapping. Finding people was easier than when I had been a young patrol deputy. Now the department had a software program called AutoTrack that allowed us to search through public records using as little as a name. I had more than that, because Luis Paz’s Social Security number was still in the Yarneco records from 1941, and the Department of Motor Vehicles had issued him a driver’s license in 1988. But his old phone number had been disconnected. With AutoTrack I found he was still alive, and living with his son. I tried to keep my heart from leaping into my throat in excitement.

  Luis Paz, Hayden Yarnell’s gardener, would be the only person left alive who had been an adult at the hacienda when the kidnapping took place. Although the case files showed that Paz was there that Thanksgiving night, there was no evidence he had been interviewed. Another case of lost paperwork, I was sure. But what if he had seen something that escaped the attention of young James or Max Yarnell? Maybe he could tell me what happened on the night when Jack Talbott was sleeping off a drunk, not committing a kidnapping. Or maybe Paz was in diapers with his memory gone. I had to try.

  I parked the BMW in front of a single-story cinder block house on a street without curbs or gutters. Around me was a poor neighborhood hunched in the shadow of some kind of industrial operation. The air smelled of an unknown chemical. But this house was neat, freshly painted and lushly landscaped. I counted four pickup trucks in the driveway. At the door, I showed my star and asked for Luis Paz.

  “He’s not here. Who the hell are you?”

  A big man around my age pushed out the screen door. I backed away instinctively. He was taller than me, broad shouldered, and carried his arms in the way of weight lifters. Resentment shone on him like sweat. I didn’t know what flavor of resentment, but it didn’t take a Ph.D. to know it involved cops. I told him who I was.

  “I’m investigating the kidnapping and murder of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell. I know that happened a long time ago. But our information is that your…grandfather?…was there the night it happened.”

  “He’s my grandfather. He doesn’t know anything.” His voice was low and decidedly unfriendly.

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to talk to you, huh? Look around, you think cops are welcome in this ’hood? They only come when they bring trouble. Like that kid who was murdered over on Buckeye yesterday. Sounds like he never had a chance. The TV said he had a gun, but you know that’s bullshit. You cops carry guns to plant on the people you shoot.”

  I let that go on by. My ears were still ringing from the shooting.

  “And what kind of a cop has a ride like that?” He nodded toward the BMW.

  “You probably don’t know that we recovered the remains of the Yarnell twins…”

  “What? Do you think I’m stupid? I read it in the newspaper.” My charm was obviously working on him. “I thought that was solved. They caught the guy way back when. He was an Anglo.”

  “He might not have done it. There’s new information. That’s why I was hoping…”

  His eyes bore into me and the rain sprinkled on us. “You don’t know anything about my dad. You think you’re going find some dumb old Mexican. He’s a retired small-business man. He took the money he saved while he was young, while he was working for the Yarnells, and he started a lawn service. By the time he retired, he had more than a hundred men working for him.”

  As he lectured me, I could see the glow of a television screen beyond the doorway, but it was impossible to see who was inside. Then someone was watching me, a little girl with luxurious black hair and a nose pressed against the screen.

  “I learned all about the police as the arm of the dominant power establishment when I was a student at Princeton,” he went on, watching me closely. “Does it surprise you a homeboy went to the Ivy League?”

  “No.”

  “Bullshit! I come back here and there’s no work except in real estate, and there’s a cop on my doorstep. Class and race and power, man. If this house were in Paradise Valley, you wouldn’t dare come here. You’d be dealing with some lawyer.”

  “I just want to ask Mr. Paz if…”

  “Hey, Pablo!” I turned to see a low-rider Honda stopped on the street. Four heads with close-cropped haircuts were staring at me. “This guy giving you trouble?”

  My stomach tightened. Suddenly this seemed like a really bad idea. The little girl kept watching me.

  “Look. I’m not here to hassle you or your grandfather. I saw the bones of the two little boys. It’s all that’s left. Andrew and Woodrow. They were four years old. I’ve seen a photo of them in cowboy outfits. I bet they were like any kids that age. Then somebody took them. They were sealed into a wall, and they probably suffocated in there. I don’t care whether they were rich kids or poor kids, they didn’t need to die that way. And we’ve gone for fifty-eight years without knowing what really happened. I think your grandfather could help. I can’t imagine he wouldn’t want to try.”

  Pablo’s mouth turned down. Almost involuntarily he looked back into the house, at the little girl, and in a voice of unbelievable tenderness, “Go back in now. Go be with Lito. I’ll be right there.” Then he cocked his head. “It’s okay,” he called out, and gave a meaty wave to the occupants of the Honda. “We’re glad you’re back in town,” they yelled and rolled off.

  “At least consider it.” I held out my card, and after a long moment Pablo took it.

  Chapter Thirty-six

/>   Pull a strand and it breaks. There was as much chance of talking to Luis Paz as there was that Phoenix would become a city of rain like Seattle. It put me in a rotten mood for the shooting board, which met all afternoon. I had been a bit player in the incident on Buckeye Road, but that didn’t prevent the usual savaging by internal affairs, an assistant county attorney and a board of senior officers. “Why didn’t you fire?” they kept demanding. “Why did you hesitate?” The kid seemed pretty dead without my assistance.

  Back in the courthouse, I was arranging neat piles of work on the big counsel’s table that sat beside the white board when the phone rang. It was James Yarnell.

  “We’re home free, Mapstone.”

  “Oh, sorry I didn’t tell you about the suspect in Max’s homicide. I just assumed the other detectives…”

  “I’m not talking about that. Didn’t you hear? Scottsdale PD made an arrest this morning.”

  I sat in my chair, letting the creak echo off the high ceiling.

  “It was this woman, she was obsessed with me,” he went on. “She was on the art scene in Santa Fe, and I thought she had a little talent. It turned into an affair. Bad judgment on my part. That was a year ago, and after we broke up she moved to Scottsdale. She would come by the gallery. Then she started getting nasty, making threats. But I thought she was harmless.”

  I stopped him. “Are you telling me this woman has been arrested for taking the shot at us?”

  “Yes, yes! Lisa showed up outside my house, screaming at me. The cops were watching me, of course, and they arrested her. They told me she had a pistol in her car, the same caliber as the one that was used on me. Right now they’re calling her a ‘person of interest,’ whatever that means. I guess they have to run tests.”

  Why wasn’t I happy for him? Another neat bow was being tied around the case, and all my fears about a link to the kidnapping were just so much paranoia. So what if the same kind of doll that had been delivered to my office door was also found in Max Yarnell’s house, with the charming addition of bloody doll hands? Calm down, Mapstone. Get in the holiday spirit. So I told him it was great news. Then I was about to tell him that Jack Talbott couldn’t have been at the hacienda the night of the kidnapping, but he was in a hurry.

  “Let’s catch up after the first of the year, Mapstone. I’ll call you.”

  My next call was to Gretchen. I told her I had to work for the next few nights. Believe me, I didn’t want it that way. But the Yarnell kidnapping was still unsolved. In my mind, it was more unsolved than it had been when I fell into the freight elevator in the dark a month before.

  I finally had to settle down to the hundred small disciplines that separate the historian from the cop. We live in a state of incomplete and contradictory knowledge. It’s what keeps historians arguing and publishing. That wasn’t much comfort now, because I lacked the scholar’s critical distance from this piece of history. But I would try. And if I were lucky, I would live with a little less uncertainty. I discussed my theories with no one.

  I needed the comfort of research, informed by technique and imagination. I wanted evidence. I wanted contrary evidence even more. Reconstruction. What happened? Interpretation. Why? Pattern and bias. What was I missing? It was solitary work.

  I mined archives scattered across the city: the state archives, the library at Arizona State University, the Arizona Room at the Phoenix Public Library, the state historical society, the Arizona Historical Foundation. I returned to the old files of the Phoenix Police, and added data from the county assessor and recorder. I spent half a day at the state vital statistics department. I tore apart ten boxes of court transcripts that had been boxed up longer than I had been alive. Dusty pages and decaying volumes. Each one said, “I was there”…“I have something to tell you.”

  I sat in on the monthly breakfast held by some retired Phoenix cops at Bill Johnson’s Big Apple, and each one had an opinion about the case. Unfortunately, none had firsthand knowledge of it. I pored over maps and blueprints of the warehouse district, old plans from the city water department, and a survey of the area by the Salt River Project. At the Phoenix Police Museum, amid the display of a real police motorcycle and a mockup of the city jail in frontier times, the curator showed me Joe Fisher’s memoirs. He let me borrow a desk and I settled in to read it.

  It was a hardcover book, but it looked self-published. My Years on the Phoenix Force, by Joe Fisher. Using the skimming technique familiar to any former graduate student, I leafed through. It was badly written, although, hell, throw in some statistics and you could probably get it published in a professional history journal today. Fisher wrote about his role in the 1931 case of Winnie Ruth Judd, the trunk murderess. There he was again helping the Tucson cops arrest John Dillinger and his gang in 1934. If the writing hadn’t been so dry, I would have been tempted to linger. I knew that Fisher had been repeatedly decorated for bravery. He brought the most modern techniques to the force. And he had amazing success in coaxing confessions. Unfortunately the book seemed to offer no insights on these things, and I didn’t have the time. I moved forward, looking for the Yarnell kidnapping.

  It wasn’t there. No index, damn. I went back through, but it still wasn’t there, and the book was nothing if not chronological. One of the most famous cases of his career, and he didn’t write about it. The book ended with a murder in 1943, and a typewritten insert in the back gave Fisher’s bio, including the fact that he had died in 1947.

  I gave the book back to the curator, explained my dilemma, bought a museum membership, and lingered over a photo of the detective bureau, circa 1940. Fisher was identified, a short man in a fedora and suit with a broad, forgettable face. He didn’t look like a tough guy at all.

  I spoke to him under my breath. “What the hell were you up to?”

  “Deputy,” the curator called out and I walked over.

  “I have one other idea for you,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  “What do you mean Frances is dead?”

  “She had a stroke the afternoon after your visit, Deputy.” Heather Amis’ voice was raw as sunstroke. “She slipped into a coma, and she died last night.”

  It was Thursday morning and I was back at my office in the old courthouse, and suddenly the cavernous room felt claustrophobic. My travel plans for that day were evaporating.

  “So now she’s finally free. Fifty-seven years she spent in here. I just can’t believe the cruelty. This poor, poor woman. And please spare me your speech about the rights of the victims.”

  “I wasn’t going to make a speech. What happened to her sounds rotten.”

  “You have no idea.”

  I felt all my theories crashing into the wall of silence that developed on the phone. Finally, I asked, “Did you get a chance to ask her any of the questions I left for you?”

  “No. You got her to talk more than I had ever seen. And she never said another word before she had the stroke.”

  “Do you know about the crime?”

  “I learned everything I could,” she said. “I also went back in her medical records.”

  “I’ve learned a few things.” I shouldn’t have been discussing the case with a civilian, but how could my luck get any worse? “I learned that Jack Talbott couldn’t have been there the night of the kidnapping.”

  Heather gasped, and I told her more.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “So old Hayden Yarnell must have suspected his son Hayden Jr. had done it. My God, that explains everything.”

  “I can’t go that far,” I said. “I don’t know Talbott’s involvement. He was found with some of the ransom money in Nogales and the boys’ pajamas. That would still sway a jury today.”

  “But Frances!” she nearly yelled. “My God, Frances was just caught up in this.”

  “Maybe. She was an accessory. She went to Nogales with Talbott. Why?”

  “I don’t know!” Heather’s voice was taut with frustration. “But I believed in her! It’s not like she
had any family or even a lawyer. Nobody was fighting for her. And don’t think I’m a pushover, David. I know every inmate says she’s innocent. I think Frances really was.”

  “Did she ever say so?”

  “No. But have you found anything new that implicates her?”

  I had to grant her that I had not. But if Frances had explained her innocence at the trial, told how she was caught up in something with which she had nothing to do, it was on pages of lost court transcripts. That was possible, but the newspaper accounts had no mention of it. She also never took the stand.

  Heather started talking even before I was finished. “Maybe she was covering up for someone!”

  “But then to not talk for all those years in prison? Why? Why still be covering up in the sixties, even the nineties, for God’s sake.”

  “You’re dealing with the Yarnell family. Anything is possible when money and power are involved.”

  “So why didn’t they have her killed, or have her released and buy her off?” I said. “Her silence was an act of her power, when you think about it. She made this choice. Most of the ransom money was never recovered. Maybe Frances knew where it was hidden, and she thought she would get out someday and retrieve it. That’s a powerful motive to keep silence.”

  “God, I’m sick of men talking about power and women living without it! Do you believe what you just said?”

  After a pause I had to admit I didn’t.

  “I’ve been reading some of the notes the lead detective made in the case,” I said. “Joe Fisher. I just found some of his files. He had reservations about whether Frances was involved in the kidnapping. He testified at her trial for leniency.”

  “My God…”

  “But he couldn’t get past the fact that she was found with Talbott, with some of the ransom money and the pajamas. I have no idea whether he knew that Talbott was in jail the night of the kidnapping, but he did interview a lot of people about the possibility that others were involved.”