High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

  Now I wasn’t so sure. I had been in law enforcement longer now than I had been teaching. It felt so strange, so wrong. When I was twenty, I meant my time at the Sheriff’s Office to be a youthful adventure, a stint of public service, something I could tell my grandchildren about. Now, here I was, still, and there would be no grandchildren to tell.

  In any event, Melton didn’t deserve the history thing.

  I would email the report to him, fulfilling the county’s paperless ambitions. Then I would FedEx a resignation letter with my star and identification card.

  Doctors swept into the waiting room. One was a tall man about my age, the trauma surgeon. He looked and acted like a fighter pilot. The second was an Asian woman, introduced as the “hospitalist.” I had no idea what that meant. It was only a little past six a.m.

  Again, I should have taken notes, but I was too distracted by the presence of the docs and my hopes and fears.

  The surgeon was pleased Lindsey had made it through the first twenty-four hours.

  “That’s crucial for controlling shock and stabilizing cardiovascular and neural functions…”

  She showed good brain activity. She wasn’t paralyzed.

  But we weren’t past the crisis, he said—that would last through the first seventy-two hours “at least.”

  They talked about reversing the shock and dealing with any extra fluid swelling that occurs with trauma.

  The doctors wouldn’t make any predictions. I didn’t ask.

  “We continue to hold out hope,” the woman said.

  I realized that was meant to be honest yet comforting but it almost pushed me off the edge of a very tall cliff. I nodded.

  Did I wish to speak with a social worker? No.

  They swept off to do doctor things. Had I even gone to use the restroom, I might have missed them.

  I waited for visiting hours and sat with Lindsey. I left reluctantly. I wanted to stay, sleep in a cot next to her, never let go of her limp hand. But I didn’t have that choice.

  So I decided to take a walk.

  It was Monday.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The address McGuizzo had given me went to one of the skyscrapers in Midtown Phoenix. Once it had been the headquarters of a bank.

  The bank was long gone, one of the many casualties of the 1990 crash. Since then, much of corporate Arizona had either been bought up or migrated out to Twenty-Fourth Street and Camelback Road or to north Scottsdale. That left Midtown with half a dozen zombie towers. This office was in one of them.

  It was close enough to walk on a morning like this, when the temperature was barely sixty and the dry, clear sky ridiculed the plight of Lindsey and me and hundreds of other patients and family members at Mister Joe’s. The sun was its intense self. I slid on dark glasses. They also helped conceal my black eye.

  I trooped across the parking lot of Park Central, past the Good Egg where Lindsey and I had eaten breakfast what seemed like years ago, when we were fresh from our fun in the hotel shower and the biggest problem was a missing Mike Peralta and the diamonds. It seemed like a big deal then.

  The tower was a bland sheet of blue glass, turned at an angle to the avenue, utterly dead at street level. The architect, if you could call him that, had intended the building to have a relationship only with the automobile. Like all its siblings, it was attached to a long, multi-level garage that sat on its backside.

  That’s the way I made sure to come in with others. My timing let me catch up with a half dozen of the few people that still worked there. It was eight-thirty. I was the tallest in the group, dark hair, broad shoulders, too memorable. I was the only one who pressed the elevator button to the eighteenth floor.

  When the doors opened, a sign directed me to a law office in one direction. He was not a lawyer. I went the other way until I found the suite number that Jerry had written on the notepad. It went to a door, five long steps on the carpet and ten more on tile, making the turn that the building’s cube shape demanded. The door was only adorned with a number, no nameplate. Across from it was a fire extinguisher set into the wall, nothing else. Not even restrooms or a drinking fountain. It looked like a dreary place to work.

  I listened for a few minutes, pretending to study the note. Only the electrical hum of the tower’s core spoke back. Was the occupant a guy who rolled into the office early to talk to clients on the East Coast, or did he keep ‘Zonie mañana-time hours? There was only one way to find out.

  I put my hand on the door and turned it.

  The door opened.

  The view was dazzling through large windows. The outer office was empty and the lights were off. A receptionist’s desk was unstaffed. Two chairs and a sofa held no customers. On a low table, several celebrity magazines were neatly laid out.

  The art on the blond wood walls consisted of colorful, vintage travel posters: “visit the Pacific Northwest wonderland—travel by train,” “Grand Hotel Roma,” and “the Dune Beaches by the South Shore Line.”

  It was difficult to tell what business resided here.

  I decided to wait by the glass, taking in the South Mountains and Sierra Estrella. The air wasn’t too dirty this morning. I prevented my gaze from going lower, where it would find the white hulk of the hospital.

  And like the hallway, the room contained only the silence of human-made spaces, especially the whoosh of the air conditioning.

  “Anyone here?” I finally called out. The reception area had two doors. One, I had used to enter. The other was between the sofa and a sickly looking potted tree. I knocked and no one answered.

  I said “hello” as I opened the door inward. No one responded.

  This office was large but spare. The walls held more of those travel posters with fantastical images of trains, ships, and bathing beauties from the twenties and thirties. Two dark wood chairs sat in front of a desk that might have been new when the building went up. An executive chair with the stuffing coming out of a tear beside the head completed the ensemble.

  It was dim with shades down keeping out much of the light.

  I stepped in.

  “Hello?” Out of old habit, I added, “Sheriff’s Office.”

  It looked as if I had beaten everyone to work this morning.

  Then I saw the shoes attached to legs hanging at a low angle in a doorway to my left.

  The legs were attached to a man who was attached to the doorknob by a necktie. Make that two neckties, one solid blue and the other a red rep pattern. I was all for wearing ties in this barbaric age, but this was a little overboard. His face was one foot from the floor and his arms were stiff at his sides.

  On one hand was a 1995 class ring from the United States Naval Academy.

  I snapped on the lights to the bathroom but there was no need to check a pulse. He was as straight as a well-planed two-by-four. Rigor mortis sets in within three hours of death and fades away after twenty-four. Given his stance of attention at the absurd angle, I would say he had killed himself twelve hours ago.

  A more thorough sweep of the office revealed nothing special, certainly not safes containing stolen diamonds for wholesale.

  I slipped on the latex gloves and locked the door from the office to the hallway. Then I went back into the private office.

  The corpse’s wallet contained credit cards, a health-insurance card—little late for that now—two twenties, and a few business cards that only gave his name and phone numbers. Stuck to a credit card was a driver’s license. I disentangled them and held it up to the ambient light. The license was issued to Matt Pennington. He was forty-five and showed a Scottsdale address.

  “Find Matt Pennington,” Peralta had written to me. Here he was.

  Using the memo app on my iPhone, I wrote down the information. Then I slid the wallet back and went through his front slacks’ pockets with more difficulty. His bladder had emp
tied and, surprisingly in the dry climate, the pants had not dried. Keys in one pocket. A pack of cigarettes in another.

  No cell phone. I ran my hand around his belt, and there was no phone case on it, either.

  I went back to the pack of smokes, reached in, and pulled the box out.

  It was the distinctive blue hardpack of Gauloises Blondes, the same brand Lindsey sometimes smoked. She bought them online because they weren’t imported into the country anymore.

  The health warning was inscribed in French at the bottom of the azure front panel.

  “No kidding.” I muttered quietly. Talking to dead people was something I had learned as a young deputy, the black humor that saved us. Tom Frazier and his fellow EMTs probably did the same thing. Always out of earshot of civilians, of course.

  The pack had been unwrapped and I opened it. Half the cigarettes had been smoked and a matchbook was inside. I dug it out, hoping it advertised a bar or restaurant where Pennington might have been a regular. It was blank.

  But not on the inside.

  In blue ink, someone had written a phone number. I copied it on the iPhone and replaced the cigarettes in his damp pocket.

  Down on one knee, I could see his face. “What the hell did you have this for?”

  I asked. The face, purple from lividity, blood collecting after the heart stopped, did not answer.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The air conditioning switched off and the rooms grew very quiet as I studied the scene. There’s no easy way to die but this was particularly…I searched for the right word. Something between “gutsy,” the ability to hang yourself from a doorknob and not stop when all you had to do was lower your arms and hands and take the pressure off your neck, because this would not be a fast way to kill oneself.

  That, and “preposterous.” If you wanted to kill yourself and you are on the eighteenth floor of an office tower, why not leap through the window, or toss a chair through first and follow it down to the pavement? This building was a creation of the 1980s and I doubted the windows were that strong, particularly since it was thrown up on the cheap during the years of the savings-and-loan racket.

  Unless you didn’t kill yourself but had help.

  You were “suicided.”

  I was very conscious of the sound of my breathing as I checked his wrists.

  Pennington looked a little under six feet and in good shape, easily strong enough to fight back against a five-five woman. Unless she had a gun on him.

  What if he had been handcuffed from behind and left to slowly strangle? Or tortured for information, a little bit of pressure applied from the back, as he slowly suffocated from the neckties. He would have held out hope until the darkness closed around him and slammed shut for the last time.

  His pale, stiff wrists showed no cuts from being handcuffed. But there were ways around this, such as putting something like a washcloth between the skin and the hard metal of the cuffs. That way, any evidence the person had been shackled from behind as he slowly suffocated and struggled would be more difficult to detect.

  Plastic Flexcuffs were another option. Use a gun to intimidate, make him get on his knees, restrain him, put the ties around his neck, start asking questions.

  Strawberry Death probably had better tricks than that.

  My tricks were limited by time, by who might be expecting Pennington’s office to be open. I quickly went through his desk drawers, the most interesting item being a nine-millimeter pistol in the top right-hand drawer, for all the good it did him. Or, if he really wished to kill himself, why not use that?

  I did a quick study of his desk. The top was cleared of everything but a blotter and a telephone. Not even a laptop. In fact, there was no computer in the office, although there was a charging cord and a T1 cable. Strawberry Death took his laptop.

  If it was her. Historians are warned against something called confirmation bias, where every piece of information backs up your existing hypothesis. It’s a big no-no. Pennington might have made many enemies. But she was the killer at-large whom I knew.

  There was something else: besides the faint but growing odor of death from Pennington’s corpse, I detected traces of Chanel Number Five.

  Coco Chanel had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II. She had hired a former perfumer to the Tsar to create the scent that would bear her name. Five was her lucky number. “Your mind is an amazing thing,” as Peralta told me.

  That meant Pennington was connected to diamonds. Perhaps a fence.

  The closet showed me a tantalizing file cabinet with combination locks on each of the four drawers. No time. I needed to be out of this office.

  Still, I lingered.

  “Well, I found him, what next?” I whispered.

  Hearing nothing in the ether from Peralta, I played the best hunches I had in a dim room with a dead man. I studied the edges of the filing cabinets. It appeared as if they had been built into the closet itself. Only an inch of the heavy metal was sticking out of a black wooden frame.

  I tapped on the drawers. They sounded empty. But diamonds weren’t likely to take up much space inside.

  I spun the dials, pulled on the drawers, and nothing happened.

  Four drawers.

  I tried setting each dial to coincide with the last digits of Pennington’s birthday. Not one drawer opened. On each one, I ran his birthday as a four-segment combination. They stayed locked.

  Being there was growing from foolhardy to insane to linger this long. But only the quiet kept me company.

  Then I remembered the class ring and started setting the four combinations from the top town: one, nine, nine, five. I don’t know why I tried it, but when I slid the last dial over to five, the wall clicked and the file cabinets popped ever so slightly toward me.

  Reaching around again, I pulled on the left side. It gave way and I was staring at the door to a safe. The safe had a digital keypad and an inset handle that looked as if you turned it, the result would be a missile launch. “Valberg,” a modern black-and-orange label said. The file cabinets were a false door.

  Another ten minutes went by as I tried putting in different combinations. Each time, a small light went red and who knew what might have happened if I kept at it.

  I closed the false door and it sealed with a soft but definitive sound. I spun the combination knobs around to random numbers.

  When the phone rang it was a low, muted tone. But you might as well have attached jumper cables to my spinal cord, connected to a fully charged battery. I stared at the desk phone. The digital read-out glowed lagoon green. It said, UNKNOWN.

  I approached it warily. Two rings. Three.

  My hand touched the receiver.

  Then I picked up.

  “Pennington,” I said.

  A long pause followed and I was instantly sorry I had answered.

  Then a man’s voice said, “What’s wrong, Mister Pennington? You’re late. ”

  “I was tied up.”

  “Is everything in order?”

  The voice was a medium timbre, speaking standard American English, no movie villain German, no cartel Spanish.

  He didn’t know Pennington’s voice.

  So far, so good.

  Now the real gambling began.

  “A woman tried to kill me.”

  A long pause. Maybe I had made a bad move. I expected the line to go dead.

  But he came back on. “Her name is Amy Morris. That’s what she goes by, anyway. She’s after the diamonds, too.”

  “You should have warned me.”

  A pause. Then, “We thought you were safe, out of the loop.”

  “I don’t like being out of the loop,” I said. “What about Peralta?”

  “Peralta is a different problem, and it’s better for you not to know. He’s our problem. Did you kill the girl?”

>   “No,” I said. “She got away. She’s a fighter.”

  “She’s well trained. They say she was a Mountie, you know.”

  “Hell! She’s a cop?”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “It may not even be true. There are many stories about her. If they sent her for you, we need to meet quickly. At the place you designated.”

  “No. That’s not safe now. I don’t like this.” The agitation in my voice was easy to manufacture. “Not if this Morris woman knows about me. Makes me wonder who else knows. We need a new meet point. And what about the FBI?”

  Another pause, longer this time, and I worried that I had finally stepped out of bounds.

  But the voice came back yet again, a taut tone. “Mann’s window is closing.”

  Mann. I thought about Peralta’s recorded warning.

  I said, “How much time? This has all gone to hell. I don’t feel right about this.”

  “Calm down, Mister Pennington. Let’s meet. It would be good to finally see you.”

  I tamped down the flood of adrenaline in my system.

  When I didn’t answer, the voice turned angry. “You’re acting pretty foolish if you’re going to let your fear of that girl keep you from the million dollars you stand to make on this deal. You came highly recommended, but we can go somewhere else if we have to.”

  A million dollars? Off a million-dollar diamond robbery? How did that work out?

  I said, “This is business. I want it done right.”

  “That’s better.” His tone returned to normal. “So when do we meet, and where?”

  “Soon. I’ll call you.” I paused. With the blocked number, I didn’t know how to reach him. I said, “Give me a new number. I don’t trust the old one.”

  “You’re being paranoid. But if it will help…” and he read out ten digits.

  “Thanks. I’ll call.”

  Before he could protest, I hung up.

  A few seconds later, the phone rang again. UNKNOWN. I didn’t pick up.

  I wiped down any surface that I might have touched before putting on the gloves. Then I checked the peephole into the hallway. The corridor was empty. I unlocked the door again, stepped out, and softly closed it. I put on my sunglasses.