Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  “And Frances?”

  “Grandpa died thinking the little bitch had betrayed him. We made sure she kept her mouth shut once she was in prison.”

  “Really, how was that?”

  “I’m dying here, Mapstone!”

  “Put your hand over your wound. Apply direct pressure. I don’t think you silenced Frances. I think she chose not to talk.”

  “You’re full of shit, Mapstone. You’re gonna tell me a broken heart over my grandfather shut her up? I’m finished talking. You’re a deputy sheriff, even if you’re a dirty one. So you have to arrest me, or arrest him!” He nodded toward Bobby without having the courage to look at him.

  I said, “Frances didn’t have the abortion.”

  “What are you talking about?” Yarnell started to gesture but stopped himself. Bobby kept the gun trained on him.

  “She had the baby in jail,” I said.

  “That’s…That’s impossible. We paid…”

  “Not enough, I guess. She had that baby and it was adopted,” I said. “So the only thing this woman has left in the world is taken from her, but at least the baby has a chance to be safe and free. She knew if she said anything it might make the Yarnell family go after that baby. Mother love is powerful. Maybe it was the only thing left inside her after you and your family were through. Makes me wonder if there’s another heir to Hayden Yarnell out there, maybe more than one.”

  “That’s not…”

  “They might have an interest in the Yarnell Trust after you lose every dime.”

  Yarnell stared past me and spoke in a monotone. “When she was just his mistress, it was one thing. She got pregnant but Grandpa made Dad adopt the twin boys. Max was a little kid. He never knew. But Grandpa and that little bitch couldn’t leave it at that. They loved each other.” He made it sound like an unprecedented phenomenon. “After Grandma died, he was going to marry Frances…”

  “When was this?” Bobby asked.

  “Nineteen forty-one. My dad and Uncle Win couldn’t talk Grandpa out of it. He was going to remarry and start a new family. He said he was sick of his sons and their gambling and failures.”

  “You were part of it,” I said. “You also forgot to come back and get the two loose ends you left down here inside the wall. It must have been a hell of a way for little boys to die. Suffocating. In the dark.”

  Yarnell momentarily shook his head, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Dad had to do what he did. There was no other way. We were going to lose everything. Those boys weren’t even his children.”

  Bobby glanced at me, something unreadable in his black eyes.

  “Dad suffocated them in their sleep,” Yarnell said. “That night. Then we carried them down here, to the tunnels under the hotel, and put them in the wall. The next day Dad ordered the tunnels sealed and closed the freight elevator. It would have worked if Dad and Win hadn’t gotten at each other’s throats about the gambling and the art collection. If he,” Yarnell pointed at me, “hadn’t found the tunnels.”

  He paused and swallowed hard enough that I could watch the saliva fall down his sweaty throat. “…If he hadn’t found my goddamned pocket watch.”

  Yarnell looked around the bleak room, looked into the tunnel, as if for the first time. We all stopped and stared at him. The hard man brought low by unaccustomed pain and fear. Even the goon with both his knees gone stopped whimpering.

  Yarnell added in a whisper, “They didn’t suffer.”

  Chapter Forty-three

  Christmas week. I stayed at Gretchen’s apartment with my foot up, listening to Handel’s Messiah on the CD player, foolishly mixing Macallan and painkillers, reading Burckhardt’s classic The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. I had missed it in college. Now, it was pure enjoyment. It made me want to write and teach history again. I was glad to be alive.

  Gretchen checked in on me from time to time, amazing me with what a man with only one good leg can accomplish. Peralta sorted out the Yarnell case, only making me write a few dozen pages of reports and statements. James Yarnell was under arrest for very current offenses: assault on a police officer, conspiracy to commit murder, giving a false report. Peralta’s detectives were working on other charges. Peralta was outraged to be in Bobby Hamid’s debt, and kept threatening to indict him for assault with a deadly weapon. Bobby would beat the charge, just like he had all the others. He could take care of himself, as I had chillingly learned. For a moment, the enemy of my enemy had been my savior. It made me feel strange.

  The city settled into serious holiday business: the run-up to the Fiesta Bowl, high season at world-class resorts, packed five-star restaurants, a big golf tournament. The days were brightly sunny and the nights cold, magical. The smog wasn’t too bad. The twentieth century ticked out its last days. In Willo, the winter lawns gleamed as if every blade of grass was lit up by electricity, and the neighborhood put out luminarias along all the sidewalks. Gretchen and I had our own celebration, two or three times a night.

  ***

  The bricks were set in place one at a time. It was done by a man’s hand, a thick hand with copious hair on top, an ape’s hand really. He ladled on the mortar and it ran off the sides like pancake batter. And I could only watch. It was dark and for a long time I watched with interest. So this was how bricks were laid. The hand moved very precisely. Every brick lined up perfectly. But I was inside, inside a tiny opening, so small I couldn’t move. The wound on my foot seemed better, but my legs were inert. My hands were dead at my sides. And by the time I realized what was happening, every brick took away a little more air, and the hand kept laying them in place, and the mortar kept running like batter, and I couldn’t breathe. I could only scream.

  “David! Wake up, baby. Wake up. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

  Gretchen was next to me, stroking my face. “You were having a nightmare. It must have been awful.”

  I took big breaths and surveyed her large bedroom with relief. “I know, don’t tell a dream or it might come true.”

  She held me close. “I have dreams about you and me, and I want those to come true, David. Oh, baby, you’ve been through so much. But you’re safe with Gretchen. This awful thing is over. James is in jail. They killed that kid who stabbed Max with the petrified wood. It’s over.”

  I let her rock me to sleep, my face nuzzling her russet-colored hair.

  Then I came awake. I just stared into the dark for a long time.

  ***

  “David? Couldn’t you go back to sleep? The holidays are so hard.” She leaned over and kissed me, holding a hand against my forehead. “You feel clammy.”

  She got out of bed and brought me a glass of water. She looked more beautiful than ever: the ambient light playing off her hair; the shadows accenting the lovely planes and curves of her face, her robe open and revealing.

  “What is it? You’re upset.”

  I didn’t want to speak, didn’t want words or a voice to say them.

  A wave of nausea just kept washing across me, again and again. But then I was letting her reach under the covers. It was a nice feeling.

  “I know just what the patient needs,” she said. I was hard as a twenty-five-year-old.

  Grandfather used to say that corruption ultimately wasn’t about payments under the table or anything so prosaic. It wasn’t even about evil, at least at first. It was about what happened inside when a person got comfortable with what he knew was wrong.

  “No,” I said, pushing her away. She flashed those rich brown eyes and drew back.

  I swallowed some acid saliva down my sandpaper throat and said, “How did you know Max had been killed with petrified wood?”

  “David, what are you talking about?”

  “We held back that information. Nobody knew how Max was murdered except the cops and the suspect.”

  “You told me, you goof!”

  God, I wished it were true. “I didn’t, Gretchen. I never told you that.”

  She didn’t protest. She ju
st watched me. We stared at each other a long time, until I looked away.

  “If I call the city archaeologist’s office, am I going to find out that there’s no Gretchen Goodheart on the staff? That’s what I will find, isn’t it?” I swung out of bed and reached for my clothes.

  “David, please! You’re going to start the bleeding in your foot. What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I’m going down to Phoenix PD and see if they have a city staff directory.” In agony, I pulled my pants over my injured foot, then slipped on the sweatshirt.

  “I don’t work for the city.” She sat back against the headboard and pulled her robe tightly around her. “I did help you, David. I helped you in ways you don’t even know.”

  Why the hell was I starting to cry? I whispered, “You probably don’t even wear a cowboy hat.”

  “I thought eccentricity would be disarming,” she said.

  “I was disarmed.”

  I waited for her to protest, to say she could explain, oh, God, how I waited. She just leaned forward, put her arms around her legs and rocked. With every throb of my foot the room and the world were collapsing around me.

  “And the dolls. That was you.”

  Silence.

  “So what organization, Gretchen? Who are you with?”

  “What?”

  “The FBI has been obsessed with eco-terrorism, and I thought they were overreacting. Apparently I was wrong. You used me to get close to Max.” I was talking in short bursts. I couldn’t do more. “That night, you probably used my name to get him to let you in. Tell me a former smoke jumper isn’t strong enough to knock a man down with a kick or a punch, and then…” God, my foot was throbbing in pain. “…And then pick up an ornamental piece of petrified wood and plunge it into his breastbone.”

  “It’s not like that.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I’m not with anybody but me!”

  My clothes were on and I should have left. But I just sat on the other side of the bed, our body language nothing worse than a couple having a fight.

  She said, “I never meant to hurt you.”

  The damned pulse against my eyes.

  She came over, bent down and kissed me on the forehead, and then on the lips. I let her do it.

  “I really love you,” she said. “I thought you hungered for justice like I did.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you know Max offered me money?” she said. “As if that could make up for anything.”

  All I could muster was a deep sigh. She took my hand and stroked it. I felt so tired.

  “Three years ago, I learned that my dad had been adopted. He didn’t know anything about the circumstances. It happened when he was a baby, so he has no memory of his real mother. A year ago, I learned I could never have children. It became really important to me to know where I came from. So it took some time. It took some money, and some other things. But I finally found Frances. She’s my grandmother.”

  My foot was caught somewhere between the worst cramp you can imagine and the deep pain of a broken bone. I just let it throb.

  “I said I was a law student looking into wrongful convictions, and they let me visit her. I knew she was my grandmother, my flesh and blood, immediately. But she was so far gone, she didn’t even realize who I was. And then I learned the whole story. How the Yarnells had kept her in there for all those years. What they had done to her.”

  “So you murdered Max.”

  “Those are your words.”

  “God, Gretchen, stop lying to me. If you love me, give me the truth.”

  “I’m not sorry for what happened to Max, whoever did it. That’s the truth.”

  “That’s because you did,” I said dully. “Then James Yarnell. I remember. You checked your watch that night, after we had dinner, and you suddenly left. You needed to be there when he was locking up the gallery and walking to his car. It didn’t seem to matter to you, that night in Scottsdale, if you shot me along with him.”

  “If that had been me…if it had been, I’m a good shot.”

  “You have the perfect alibi for that night: dinner with your lover, the deputy.” My mouth felt as if it were coated with acid.

  Gretchen said softly, “Frances was a twenty-four-year-old girl who never did anyone harm. Her only fault was to fall for an old man who was betrayed by his sons! And then their sons carried it on. They could have stopped it any time. Just let her out and let her be. They had the money to let it go away.”

  “I guess they thought they were in too deep.”

  “They were evil,” she said simply. “They had blood on their hands.”

  “That may be,” I said. “But the punishment isn’t up to us.”

  She faced me, her eyes fanatically bright. “How many more decades would we have to wait for your style of justice, David?”

  “My style of justice?”

  “How many?” she demanded. “You’re the historian. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

  “And there’s no place for forgiveness?”

  Her hands became fists and her voice rose an octave. “Tell my grandmother about forgiveness!”

  “I can’t imagine she wanted her granddaughter to live the same nightmare that she did. Don’t you realize she stayed quiet all those years so your father would be safe, so the Yarnells would never even know about him?”

  She sobbed softly. “Are you arresting me?”

  I said nothing.

  Then she kissed me, the most tender kiss of my life. It dawned on me that she could kill me, too, if she chose. Right that minute, I didn’t care. I heard her whisper, “My God, we could have been good together.”

  I willed myself from her arms, willed myself out of the bed, willed myself out of the pain and desire to pass out. I grabbed the cane they had given me in the hospital and hobbled toward the door.

  I stopped at the threshold of the bedroom. “How can you be sure you’re right?”

  “You know I’m right.”

  “I know I took an oath as a deputy sheriff. I know James Yarnell is under arrest, and we will prosecute him lawfully.”

  “Well,” she said quietly. “You take your justice. I’ll take mine.”

  Epilogue

  Peralta didn’t come home that night. The next morning, I found out why.

  Strangler Killed In Gunfight With Deputies, the headline said. Photos showed Lindsey—it was a mug of her in uniform that was at least two years old—and Patrick Blair, looking gorgeous. And the strange, round-faced man who followed me that night in the Ford Econoline van. “Alleged serial killer,” proclaimed type under his face. I looked at Lindsey’s face and was suddenly afraid to read more. I felt a deep stab in my stomach.

  I made myself read:

  A 38-year-old Mesa man about to be arrested as the notorious Harquahala Strangler shot it out with sheriff’s deputies Tuesday night. One deputy was wounded. The suspect, Mark Wayne Bennett, was fatally wounded.

  The firefight took place at the suspect’s apartment on North Val Vista after sheriff’s detectives attempted to serve an arrest warrant. After the suspect opened fire, Det. Patrick Blair was wounded. He was listed in guarded condition at Desert Samaritan Hospital.

  Chief Deputy Mike Peralta praised Deputy Lindsey F. Adams, for saving Blair’s life and preventing the suspect from escaping. Peralta said “substantial evidence” links Bennett to the slayings of 26 women in the Phoenix area. The alleged murderer had become known as the Harquahala Strangler because most of his victims were left in the Harquahala Desert west of the city.

  On Christmas Eve, Peralta walked in the door just before six. I shook his hand and congratulated him on solving the case.

  “From your new buddy.”

  He handed me a box with blue gift-wrapping. It was a bit smaller than the kind of hatboxes Grandmother once favored.

  “Who?”

  “Bobby Hamid,” Peralta sneered. “You kno
w, he closed the purchase on the Triple A Storage Warehouse today. Says he wants to preserve the building. He’s even going to excavate the tunnels.” He eyed the package. “You going to open that or am I going to have to call the bomb squad?”

  I slipped off the wrapping and opened a box filled with Styrofoam worms. I reached in my hand and caught the edge of something smooth.

  “Good Lord, Mapstone,” Peralta said.

  It was a piece of Santa Clara pottery that glowed blackly in my hand. He bought the building and he’s going to excavate the tunnels, and take whatever might be hidden down there…

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  Peralta looked at me a long time, then he just shook his head and walked into the living room.

  “What I really want is a well-made Gibson,” he said. So I hobbled to the kitchen and made drinks. When I came back out, the tree was lit and the picture window open to the street. Out on Cypress, the other Christmas lights glowed merrily back at us. I put on the Messiah again, the Boston Baroque recording. Peralta settled into the big leather chair, and I closed my eyes, reflecting on a year of so much change, so much loss, so many close calls and blessings.

  Peralta wanted to read from the Bible, from the Book of Luke, because that was the way his father did it on Christmas Eve. Peralta had his formal occasions, and deviation was unthinkable. It had been the same tradition with Grandmother and Grandfather. I retrieved the heavy King James Version from the bookshelves.

  Peralta drew himself up in the chair and read, “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus…” He really had a beautiful voice, rich with intonations and possibilities.

  Then he passed the book to me.

  My voice was still raw from the talk with Gretchen, and all the wide-awake hours after that.