High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

  As I walked back through the store, the fat man was where I had left him. Only his tombstone eyes moved, tracking me.

  Jerry, for show, followed me to the door, shouting. “Beat the shit out of me. Go ahead and watch the claim I file against the county! This is an honest business. I don’t know anything about any goddamned computers…”

  “Okay, Jerry…”

  “Tell me I’m clean, you bastard! I want to hear it.”

  “You’re clean. It was a misunderstanding. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  He was still yelling from the door when I got in the Prelude.

  It was better not to linger. I drove to the corner, pulled into another asphalt lagoon. Say what you will about Phoenix but you can always find another parking lot.

  There, in the lonely dark, my heart started hammering and I could hear the blood pulsing through vulnerable arteries and veins in my neck and temples. I could hear my breathing, hot and dry. Taking my hands off the steering wheel, I watched them tremble.

  All this foolishness over what for me was a garden-variety panic attack.

  I hesitated to even use the expression, for they were truly debilitating for most people. I was very high functioning. Panic skirmish? Anxiety Cold War? They never kept me home under the covers.

  Still, it put a name on the periods of high melancholy and anxiety that had struck me periodically since I was nineteen, the day after my grandfather died. I didn’t know what they were for years. They were one of my eccentricities I kept to myself.

  Then, one day I read an article about panic attacks and the symptoms seemed to fit. I felt better when I learned that Lord Nelson and Sigmund Freud probably suffered from them, too. The knowledge didn’t make them go away. Lindsey did.

  Now, alone in the car, I scanned the lot for trouble. Finding none, “Rockin’ Robin” replayed in my mind. It would be there for days.

  Robin loved me, or so Lindsey had said. Robin was not the falling-in-love type.

  I tried to unspool the snarl that had drawn Robin and me together. Danger, need, passion, electricity. It was all that and more. Beware the cunning and treachery of memory, especially concerning lovers.

  Would I have left Lindsey for Robin? Never. But how could I know all the contingencies, all the counterfactual history? Lindsey might have left me for one of her lovers in D.C.

  All that was in the past. In the present, I might lose Lindsey after all. The thought paralyzed me.

  My head was hammered by pain. It was from the very real damage the hitwoman had done to my face, but also from the fear that I would lose both of them, Lindsey and Robin. Especially that Lindsey would never wake up again. Cliché but true, she was the great love of my life. And, yes, fear that I would lose Mike Peralta, too.

  “Quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

  There, I was talking to myself.

  This would be an opportune time for Strawberry Bitch to take me out.

  I distracted myself by imagining the criticism I would face for such a statement in the faculty lounge.

  When a hitman does his job, he’s praised for being independent, assertive, and effective, but when a woman does the exact same thing you call her a “bitch.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said out loud.

  We hope you will be more gender-sensitive in the future, Professor Mapstone. You enjoy a position of white male gender-privilege that’s not even apparent to you, you bastard.

  “Thank you for pointing out my failing. I’m sorry, although I suppose tenure-track is kaput for me. I will not use the term Strawberry Bitch.”

  Until her gender-power is being used on me from the business end of another H&K Mark 23.

  Then I thought about the situation more seriously. A .45-caliber Special Forces pistol was not an assassination weapon. Hitmen favored .22 caliber pistols firing sub-sonic rounds. These were easy to silence.

  So why was she carrying the big gun? For intimidation purposes, perhaps.

  Kate Vare had described the bag she had dropped outside our house containing burglar tools, handcuffs, and tranquilizers. Maybe she had intended to stage a murder-suicide—as if I had shot Lindsey and then myself. With the handcuffs, perhaps she intended to torture one or both of us.

  For her stones.

  As the cars sped past like comets in search of a star, I thought again about her other words, to the effect that she would kill me to fulfill a promise to Peralta.

  In her anger, Lindsey had chided me for being naïve, but would Peralta have unleashed this reaper on me? Was I kidding myself about the man I thought I knew? But then I remembered his words on the Dictaphone, “You’re going to hear a lot of things about me. Don’t believe them.”

  I rolled down the window and took in the breeze, thought about how close I had come to being blown apart by Belma’s sawed-off shotgun, and my hands became steady. I pulled out my iPhone, and dialed to ask about Lindsey.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I stopped at the house and changed into casual clothes for the overnight shift. The file from Melton was still there, demanding my attention. Not for the first time, I wished I had told him no, whatever his threats to Lindsey. Everything might be different now.

  Or not. We had been on Strawberry Death’s to-do list that night.

  Lindsey’s rings went into a sock, which I rolled up with its mate and dropped back in the sock drawer. I slid a couple of books off the shelves and put them into my briefcase with the MacBook Air. Then I put a light jacket on to conceal my big Colt revolver and headed up to the hospital.

  There it was so quiet and deserted that I was able to find a space in the two-block-long parking garage close to the skywalk entrance. I checked out the concrete expanse carefully but no killer was hiding in wait. I walked through the automatic doors and headed toward the massive complex of buildings. The skywalk was empty and Tom Petty’s voice was coming over the speakers, singing about learning to fly without wings.

  Sharon had nothing new to tell me. This time it was my turn to shoo her off to get rest. She said I looked exhausted.

  Two new Phoenix Police officers were outside the ICU. I checked them out long enough that they started giving me the cop eye. This caused them to take extra time looking at my driver’s license—no need to bring my badge into it—before I was buzzed into the unit.

  It was almost ten and I was given a lecture about visiting hours, but they took pity on me and allowed me inside Lindsey’s room.

  I sat by her high-tech bed and held her limp hand, reading Billy Collins poems aloud. He was her favorite poet. IV bags were changed. A nurse looked at me indulgently, as if to say, She can’t hear you. I knew that she could and kept reading.

  After my ten minutes were up, I sat down in the waiting room with the file in the chair beside me.

  It was still there when I woke up.

  The wall clock showed five after three and I was momentarily disoriented and frightened. The room was empty. No one passed in the halls.

  I picked up the file folder, snapped off the rubber band that held it together, and began to read. Pretty soon I was making notes.

  Seeing my old handwriting in the cramped boxes of the original incident report made me think of that David Mapstone. Doing the calculations, I seemed impossibly young. I was juggling being a deputy with working on my master’s degree.

  I had taken my own apartment at the edge of the lush Arcadia district and had left Grandmother alone in the house on Cypress. She understood a young man’s desire to be on his own. At that time, when the state was determined to ram the freeway through the old neighborhoods, they were in decline. More than once, I found a homeless person sleeping on Grandmother’s lawn.

  I drove a ten-year-old Firebird that I was inordinately proud of. I should have kept it—I would have owned a classic. My girlfriend was named Deb. She’s a history profes
sor at Cornell now. I thought Heineken was a sophisticated beer and I knew too little of jazz. The bad recession of 1981 was still lingering.

  The service weapon I carried as a deputy was the same one as today, the Colt Python .357 magnum with a four-inch barrel. It wasn’t regulation but the supervisors let it fly. They knew I wanted the stopping-power of the big gun, something the .38 didn’t have. If a hopped-up criminal came at you, the .38 would eventually kill him. But he might keep coming and kill you, too. The .357 magnum would knock him down. I was a believer in stopping-power.

  A month before, Peralta had become the youngest captain in the history of the Sheriff’s Office, an obvious comer. He kept pressuring me to stay in the Sheriff’s Office, not become an academic. Sharon had completed her Ph.D. in psychology. They had two young daughters. We had become social friends and would eat Mexican food he cooked every Wednesday night.

  The nasty recession of the early 1980s was still hanging on. The metropolitan area was two-and-a-half million people lighter than today.

  I was different from the other graduate students. For someone my age, I had a real job that mattered, one with adult responsibilities, one with duties that carried consequence. On the other hand, most of the other deputies held me in some suspicion. A college degree was rarer then in law enforcement, much less somebody who wanted to be a history professor. It made for an ongoing tension, this living two lives.

  That July day, the midnight-to-eight shift was slow. The schedules worked for me so I could go to class and handle my slave-labor grad-student teaching load during the day. Who needed sleep at that age?

  I was on patrol far from the city, west past mile after mile of farms and into the desert that framed the White Tank Mountains. I was there because Caterpillar, which ran a desert proving ground up the side of one steep rise, had been hit by a series of burglaries.

  The area was popular with high-school keggers and the occasional body drop, whether done by the mob or freelance killers working for money or trying to conceal the consequences of their murderous passion. They assumed we wouldn’t find a body out here. We nearly always did.

  Otherwise, it was the desert: silent, incomprehensible, teeming with wildlife at night while on the surface, to the untrained eye, a creation of brute simplicity where saguaros that could live for centuries looked at you as nothing more than a passing trifle.

  At 6:07 a.m., with the angry summer sun already thirty degrees above the horizon, I found a car sitting off a dirt road a mile from Caterpillar. It was a faded green 1967 Dodge Monaco with Arizona plates and no one visible inside. I pulled behind and radioed in my location—ten-twenty—and the tag number. When the dispatcher told me it wasn’t stolen, I stepped out and checked the vehicle.

  It was empty and unlocked. Inside, I found no weapons or drugs. The keys were in the ignition and when I turned them to bring up the alternator, the dashboard showed me a full tank of gasoline. The tires were worn retreads.

  The trunk held a spare tire, jack, and a large first-aid kit, nothing more. It was neat and had been recently vacuumed.

  I thought about backing away and waiting, in case these were burglars. But the break-ins at the proving ground always involved cars pulling right up to the fence. Recreational hikers this far from town were rare in those days. I pocketed the keys and decided to check the area on foot.

  The monsoon season hadn’t started yet, so the chalky soil was hard-packed and didn’t show tracks well. But I spotted some light foot treads leading out into the desert. From the cruiser, I slung a canteen over my shoulder and put on my Stetson to shield me from the sun. I followed the footprints.

  They disappeared as the land became rocky. I took a chance and went straight, finding them again thirty feet away on sandier soil. I was hardly an expert tracker. In this case, I was lucky.

  Maybe twenty minutes later, as the land dipped in a graceful slope, I saw him face down and maybe five feet away from a large stand of cholla. He had dark-brown hair and wore yellow running shoes. When the direction of the breeze changed, I knew he was very dead.

  What a great way to end the shift—with a stinker.

  I pulled out the heavy portable radio on my belt, a new innovation, and called for the medical examiner and detectives.

  As a uniformed deputy, my job was pretty simple. Secure the scene. That was easy, given that we were in the middle of nowhere. Today the area is overrun with houses, including the fancy subdivision of Verrado. Back then, it was silent emptiness.

  My other memories were few. Because of the incident, I had to get a friend to cover for me in teaching my undergraduates that day and I made good overtime from the county.

  As I read on, I learned more about my stinker.

  His name was Tom Frazier and he was twenty years old, an emergency medical technician for Associated Ambulance and completely alone in the world. His mother had died of a heart attack three months earlier. He had no brothers or sisters and his parents had apparently divorced years before.

  Aside from his work colleagues, who spoke well of him, he seemed to have no friends. He had no girlfriend. In those days, no detective would ask about a boyfriend unless it was a vice investigation.

  If the file ever contained a photo of Tom Frazier, it was gone. All that remained were shots of the scene and the autopsy.

  The detective wrote that Frazier was saving money for college and his bank account held five thousand dollars. But that, aside from the old Dodge, made up his assets. He rented an apartment, not far from where I lived at the time, was up-to-date on his rent.

  The last person to see him alive, at least according to the reports, was his ambulance partner at the end of their shift. When he didn’t report for duty twenty-four hours later, the Associated supervisor called his home but the phone went unanswered. No answering machine, much less today’s cell phones.

  The medical examiner estimated he had been out there for a little more than thirty hours. In high summer, that was plenty of time for the sun and heat to do its damage to the corpse.

  This meant he drove out into the desert and then walked away from his car in darkness. The car was in running order.

  He didn’t walk back toward the city, which was curious. The land sloped up toward the mountains there giving a nice view of Phoenix to the east. He could have seen the city lights in the distance.

  Instead, he walked south for more than a mile. Nowadays that would be heading toward Interstate 10. Then, only farm roads and a two-lane highway lay in that direction and miles away.

  Two weeks later the toxicology findings came in and the detective stopped his efforts to find out about Tom Frazier and why he had left his car and walked into the wilderness with no water.

  I read the three-page tox report, marveling at how primitive it was compared with today. But it was modern enough make the cause of death definitive: a heroin overdose.

  The case was closed as a probable suicide.

  The theory was that Frazier was despondent over his mother’s death and decided to push himself over the edge with too much H.

  This was the conclusion of the eighty-seven pages of documents before me. The case was listed as cleared but much about it didn’t make sense to me. I wanted to think that even the young me would have known it, had I circled back around to follow up.

  For one thing, why didn’t Frazier simply stay in the car and die? Also, given the amount of the drug in his system, it was amazing he walked as far as he did.

  The reports contained no evidence that Frazier was a drug abuser. His body was decomposing and had been snacked on by coyotes, but the medical examiner found no evidence of multiple needle holes. He wasn’t an addict. His colleagues said he didn’t even smoke pot.

  So maybe he chose to use heroin once as his ticket out.

  Maybe. But where was his paraphernalia? When I had searched the car, I had found nothing. Addicts, especi
ally with decent-paying jobs, had shooting kits nearby, all the time.

  The detective surmised that Frazier must have sat down and shot up once he was out in the desert. But no needle, cooking spoon, lighter, or tourniquet was found.

  By the time all the official cars have arrived and deputies had tramped through the area surrounding where the body and car had been found, it was impossible to even know for certain if Frazier had really been alone.

  I was as much to blame as anyone. I didn’t suspect a homicide. I only saw another example of a fool walking into the desert in the summertime.

  The desert makes people do strange things. But this was a suspicious death not a suicide. Tom Frazier had no one fighting on his behalf to find out what really happened out there, not even the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

  Did he have enemies? Why would he spend money for a tank of gas if he intended suicide? Who else saw him on his day off? What was his demeanor in the days before his death? How did he spend his days off?

  The biggest problem was that his wallet was missing. For the second time, I went through the inventory of items found. The wallet was neither on him, in the car, nor in the desert between the vehicle and the body.

  This was long before the immense migration of illegal immigrants headed el norte through the desert, many dying there. The land was astoundingly empty by today’s standards. Someone wouldn’t have happened upon the corpse and stolen the wallet.

  In addition, a skirmish line of academy students had swept the terrain searching for anything, finding nothing.

  His car tag and dental records had identified the corpse.

  He was buried in the Green Acres cemetery in Scottsdale, the arrangements paid for by an unidentified family friend.

  I opened my MacBook Air and wrote up my assessment. To: Sheriff Melton. From: Deputy David Mapstone. It was like the old days, only the wrong man was sheriff. I blind copied Kate Vare. It also wasn’t my “history thing,” as Peralta called it.

  The history thing. It had set me apart from an ordinary cold-case detective, using a historian’s techniques to dig deep into the case and its times.