by Lynn Kostoff
Just past the municipal airport is Frontier Cleaners store number two.
Jimmy and Don are on the clock, straight autopilot. They have the moves down. The store’s a walk-through.
They’re out in just under fifteen minutes.
Then it’s a backtrack, Jimmy keeping Squaw Peak in sight, navigating, Don taking Thunderbird Road to Tatum Boulevard and south to Doubletree Ranch, and they’re in Paradise Valley now, Jimmy keeping an eye on the clock, things looking good. By the time the employees figure a way out of the locked break rooms and get to a phone for some 911 action, Jimmy and Don will be at Via Deventura off Doubletree riding the confusion and delayed reactions.
They circle the block an extra time at the Via Deventura store, double-checking, but there’s no sign of unmarkeds or tucked-away blue-and-whites. Nobody’s expecting them.
The store turns out to be a copy of the first two. In and out. Fourteen minutes.
“Crime spree,” Jimmy says, transferring the cash and coins to the first canvas bag. He imagines a slow-motion line of dominoes falling.
“Look at the box, you don’t believe me,” Don says, grinning. “The picture, the ceiling fan’s hanging from the sky, nothing above it but blue and those puffy clouds.”
Jimmy wants to hit all seven stores, one fell swoop, that’s what his gut is telling him, but he’s remembering how he worked it all out on paper, back at the Mesa View Inn, “applying himself” as his guidance counselor and teachers used to say, and he’s sure the way the dominoes are falling, that he and Don have time for one more visit before the element of surprise completely disappears and a pattern emerges.
Four out of seven. Not bad. Jimmy can see Richard at the supper table later on in the evening, after all the police reports are filed, telling Evelyn about his day.
Jimmy directs Don down Pima toward Tempe.
TEN
Evelyn Coates watches them from behind the counter, the sudden influx of bodies a half block away as students enter or leave the southwest boundary of the campus.
She’s not sure what to do with her hands. She touches her hair, the countertop, the cardboard placard advertising ASU discounts, the scanner for the register.
Finally, as if they were something she’d lured and managed to trap, Evelyn slips her hands into the pockets of the green Frontier Cleaners smock.
There’s a tug high in her chest from something that’s trailed her all day since breakfast.
It had been a morning like hundreds of other mornings in their marriage, Richard having shaved, showered, dressed for work, and come down to the kitchen, where he gave Evelyn a quick kiss and took the paper to the breakfast nook and worked his way through the sections, saving the crossword puzzle for last, folding the page into a neat small square, pausing to take a sip of orange juice, and then picking up a pencil.
It wasn’t like Richard expected her to make breakfast. Evelyn had offered. She hadn’t slept well and was up early anyway.
She had buttered and quartered the toast and was working on the eggs, two of them, sunny-side up, the way Richard always ate them, but then she had looked down into the skillet and taken the edge of the spatula and grazed each yolk, watching as their centers collapsed and yellow spooled across the whites.
It had been as if her hands belonged to someone else.
She kept waiting for Richard to say something or to hear herself offer to fry him two more, but neither happened. Richard had looked at the plate and then over at her and gone on to eat the eggs without complaint. Between bites, he had talked about an article from the paper on the city planning commission, mentioned an upcoming dinner party, and asked her if she knew a seven letter word for passionate.
He had been pleasant and agreeable, and the longer Evelyn sat across from him, the worse she felt. She’d gone out of her way to purposefully ruin her husband’s breakfast. She’d been mean and petty, childishly vindictive. She didn’t know what was wrong with her.
Evelyn takes her hands out of the pockets of the smock. The surface tension on her skin is like that of a tall glass of water filled to the brim.
She wishes she were sorry.
Evelyn remains at the counter during the long stutter of a sun-drenched afternoon. She watches the students rather than the clock. She begins to notice pieces of herself and pieces of Richard and pieces of others they knew twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, ten years ago. Outside, everything’s retro, no dominant or overriding style, no distinctive generational trademark, just bits and pieces of previous decades, a fashion statement that doesn’t make one, ponytails and crew cuts, chinos and bell-bottoms, button-downs and sleeveless flannels, platform heels and Birkenstocks, cowboy hats and baseball caps and bandanas, barrettes, nose pierces, peasant blouses, tattoos, sideburns, miniskirts, and Doc Martens, everything shorn of context, floating free of time and circumstance, as indiscriminate as wind-blown pollen, and for Evelyn, the sight of all those students on the street is both exhilarating and disconcerting: They’ve gotten away with something but don’t seem to know they have.
Evelyn almost expects to see herself walk by the store. This afternoon, it seems possible. She’ll look out and see herself cross the street, recognize herself at twenty, long straight hair streaked by the sun, braless under a loose-fitting white blouse tucked into tight, faded Levi’s. Evelyn, done with classes, and on her way to meet her future husband at Mill Station. Evelyn, twenty, and in love.
In a blink, the image disappears. So does the street. Evelyn’s looking at the slatted white backs of the blinds. There’s a loud click.
Then there’s a man in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and allergy mask. He’s holding a gun.
The phone starts ringing.
He takes a step forward, then hesitates when she turns fully in his direction, seems to tense, acts like he might suddenly turn and leave.
The phone continues to ring.
Evelyn asks if she should answer it.
He tells her no.
Behind her from farther back in the store, someone is telling people to come on and move it.
The phone doesn’t stop.
The man steps up and raps the counter with the pistol and then points it at the cash register.
“Everything,” he says.
It’s not the voice, no.
The rings bleed into each other, shrill and insistent.
Evelyn’s hands are trembling.
“Come on,” he says. “You heard me. I said everything.” He looks quickly over at the telephone. It won’t stop ringing.
It’s not the voice, no.
It’s the T-shirt.
A faded purple and orange Phoenix Suns T-shirt, a basketball sprouting flames with SCORCH ‘EM printed below, the shirt wrinkled and not overly clean, the seam along the right shoulder torn and frayed. A small tuft of hair poking through. The same one she’d noticed two nights ago when she’d gone to answer the door while Richard was out back grilling salmon steaks.
Her hands are still trembling when she leans over the counter and hooks the string of the mask with her index finger and pulls it down.
“Everything?” she asks. “Even the coins, Jimmy?”
ELEVEN
There’s always a pecking order, Aaron Limbe thinks. You can’t get around that. Sometimes it’s right up front and in your face, and at others, it’s hidden, but it’s there. Always.
And that’s just and right and meet as far as Aaron Limbe’s concerned. A pecking order serves a purpose. It clarifies things. It separates the weak from the strong, the inferior from the superior. It’s necessary. God knew that. What else is Genesis if not the laying out of a grand pecking order?
God made one mistake though. If He was going to fix things after the garden and the fall, He should have made Christ a cop and sent him back to set the world straight, reestablish the law and the rightful order of things. That’s what people needed, not the Mr. Softee we got stuck with. Christ just made everything worse by making excuses for everyone and callin
g it forgiveness. He blurred the lines of what had been there from the beginning, turning everything inside out with all that “first shall be last” lie.
Aaron Limbe wouldn’t have asked for thirty pieces of silver. He’d have done it for free. Or better yet, he’d have stepped in and taken him out himself.
There’s a place for everything.
People, though, have either forgotten or ignore that truth.
Aaron Limbe hasn’t.
Limbe slows down when he spots two Tempe police cars set nose to nose with their blue-and-whites flashing in front of Frontier Cleaners. He parks at the curb and studies the scene, looking at it as if through two sets of eyes, one belonging to the cop he’d been and the other to someone who’s been reduced to working for a scumbag like Ray Harp.
Harp had liked the idea of having an ex-cop in his employment. Aaron Limbe had left the Phoenix Police Department barely a step ahead of the Internal Affairs Division and DA and formal charges. The evidence had been circumstantial—Limbe, after twelve years on the force, knew how to tidy up a crime scene—and Limbe figured he could have beaten the case they were trying to make if it hadn’t been for the barrage of media coverage. Worried about public image, the bureaucratic boys and girls upstairs had predictably wrung their hands and then used them to cover their own asses.
Even with that, Limbe might have ridden the whole thing out.
But then, Jimmy Coates, the human monkey wrench, jammed up the works.
Ramon Delgado was a high-profile Mex lawyer who had made a name for himself defending illegal aliens and the ones who brought them in. Delgado also maintained a number of safe houses off the books, putting enough paper between himself and their operation to keep himself comfortably insulated legally. He had a white girlfriend and drove a red Mercedes. He was a hero to all the taco-benders in Phoenix and knew how to play to the liberals in the media who cast him as an updated version of Robin Hood.
Delgado and Limbe had had their share of run-ins. Leaving the courtroom after his last acquittal, Delgado had winked at Limbe.
Aaron Limbe knew this: Borders were part of the pecking order. You draw a line. This side. That side. Things are clear. Everything has its place. Once you cross a border, the balance is upset. The natural order loses its definition. Why else call them illegal aliens?
Aaron Limbe also knew this: A Mexican is nothing more than a nigger in a sombrero.
Aaron Limbe had reintroduced Ramon Delgado to his place in the pecking order.
He had staked out Delgado on his own time, waiting until the next bunch of bordergoats were set up in one of his safe houses. Limbe had then grabbed Delgado after hours in the parking lot of the Hibiscus Club and thrown him in his car.
On the front seat between them were two jumbo bags of Milky Way miniatures that Limbe had purchased earlier in the day.
Limbe drove one-handed, keeping his .38 on Delgado until Ramon had eaten the contents of both bags.
I am going to be seriously sick, Delgado had said. Please.
Just before he tossed Delgado’s insulin works out the window, Limbe had winked at him and said, No, you’re going to be seriously dead, Ramon, and very soon.
Limbe had then driven to the safe house. Along the way, he carefully explained to Ramon why he had to die.
Limbe had been so intent on laying things out for Delgado that he narrowly missed rear-ending a battered white pickup that had stalled beneath a traffic light.
Before he could pull around, a short dark-haired guy was at the driver’s window waving some cables and asking for a jump. When the guy started to poke his head through the window, Limbe pushed him away. Delgado began yelling for help. Limbe threw the car in reverse and got out of there.
Later, he would remember his surprise that the guy had been white. The battered pickup had pure Mexican written all over it.
There had been one man watching the safe house. A skinny little guy with a Walkman, who stupidly opened the door on Limbe’s first knock.
The rest of the beaners were in the back of the house, sequestered in a windowless addition. Twelve of them.
Limbe dragged Delgado into the room and had him repeat the explanation Limbe had given him earlier. If you’re going to die, it’s important to understand why. Every death is a lesson.
Delgado, though, was shaking and sweating and slurring his words and losing track of what he was supposed to say.
Limbe made him start over and ran him through the explanation until he got it right.
The beaners began crossing themselves.
Limbe left Delgado in the back room with them and boarded the door shut.
Then he set the place on fire.
Limbe himself called it in. He assumed—correctly as it turned out—that there’d be witnesses who could place him or his car in the Mexican quarter. He kept his story simple: He was supposed to meet a snitch in the lot of the Hibiscus Club, but the guy never showed. Limbe drove around for a while looking for him. He spotted the fire, called it in, and waited, keeping the civilians away, until the trucks and ambulance arrived.
The press and television people latched onto the fire, turning the twelve beaners into martyrs.
A few reporters also started taking a closer look at him.
He stuck to his story.
The newspaper people found a leak and got access to Limbe’s personnel file and arrest records, and there were the usual claims of a long-standing pattern of intimidation and brutality and the usual clamor over departmental cover-ups and looking the other way.
The mayor felt the public pressure and eventually got involved, leaning on the police commissioner, who set in motion an IAD investigation.
Aaron Limbe was temporarily suspended.
He stuck to his story, figuring he could ride things out. The evidence did not go beyond the circumstantial. It was everybody’s word against his.
Limbe was waiting for the city to tear itself apart. He had shown people where they lived. What they were. Reestablished the pecking order. There’d be no room or need for forgiveness after that.
It might have worked, too—Limbe the agent of a truth worthy of the city’s namesake—if Jimmy Coates hadn’t gotten picked up for grand theft auto.
At the time, Limbe had not been able to foresee, let alone prevent, what happened.
While locked up in city, Coates began reading the newspapers and recognized Limbe and Delgado. Instead of playing to the DA or IAD, Coates made noise to the chief, who then called the commissioner, and Coates went on to cut his own deal. He wanted them to lose the paperwork on the grand theft auto and explained about the jumper cable incident, italicizing the fact he could place Limbe and Delgado together the night of the murders.
The chief and commissioner saw the opportunity to quickly clean house and avoid the fallout from the publicity of a trial. Limbe was called in and the situation laid out. The chief and commissioner had already signed his resignation papers. He was handed a pen.
After Limbe left the force, nobody else, not even the private security companies, would touch him.
That’s what he’d become. Untouchable.
For a month, he’d averaged eight pieces of hate mail a day. He’d hoped for more.
It had taken a long time for Limbe to find out the name of the guy with the jumper cables and white pickup. The brass had put a tight lid on the paperwork for the case. Limbe was patient. He waited and quietly asked around, and he eventually hooked up with a few right-thinking white guys on the force who were willing to do a favor for someone who’d once been one of their own.
As soon as he got the name, Limbe set out to kill Coates, only to discover Coates was doing time in Perryville Correctional after having been popped with a tractor-trailer load of black-market saguaros.
So Aaron Limbe had to wait.
He was untouchable. While he waited, he began to understand exactly what that meant.
He snaps to. He’s not sure how long he’s been parked at the curb watching the light
s on the blue-and-white strobing the front windows of the dry-cleaning shop. He feels the beginnings of a headache blooming at the base of his skull. He climbs out of his car carrying two of Ray Harp’s metallic blue three-piece suits and crosses the street. He recognizes one of the Tempe cops, a guy named Henderson, and strolls into the middle of the crime scene.
Henderson tips back his cap and scratches his forehead. “Come on, Aaron, you know the drill.”
“I’m just curious is all,” Limbe says. “What you got, a straight armed? I don’t see any blood.” A few feet away a woman with dark blond hair is giving a statement to a fresh-deck rookie.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Henderson says, still going at his forehead.
“I know.” Limbe smiles. He watches the woman, listens to the spin she puts on her words. He unwraps a breath mint, slips it on his tongue.
“You can bring those back tomorrow,” Henderson says, pointing at the suits.
“Who’s the Gash?” Limbe asks, nodding in the blond’s direction.
Henderson shakes his head and sighs. “The owner’s wife. She was working the register.”
“She’s nervous,” Limbe says.
“Of course, she’s nervous,” Henderson says. “She just got held up.”
The rookie cop takes everything the woman says down. He’s polite and attentive. Limbe smiles. She’s nervous all right. But not because someone stuck a gun in her face. Aaron Limbe’s been around enough crime scenes to read a witness.
“What did you say her name was?” he asks.
“Coates. Evelyn Coates,” Henderson says.
Limbe takes in the last name and smiles and listens to the rookie read back her description of the perp. She nods one too many times.
Limbe considers telling Henderson that his primary witness is lying through her teeth.
He doesn’t though.
Instead, he files it away.
TWELVE
Jimmy wishes he’d had a say in where he was to meet Evelyn. He’s got this thing about Scottsdale. The place gets on his nerves. It’s one of those peculiar American cities, like Key West, that have mortgaged their history with charm. The place started out in the late 1800s as nothing more than a bunch of tents and adobe houses that catered to lung cases from back East, but by the 1930s, Scottsdale was promising more than cures, branching out into recreation and elegance, the tents giving way to high-profile hotels and rustic resorts promising desert vistas; and with more big bucks pouring in from back East, Scottsdale began billing itself as the “West’s Most Western Town,” continually feeding the myth and enlarging its allure, reinventing itself to the tune of 183,000 square miles, the place now a trendy hybrid of the biggest lies from the Old and New West, the tourists and locals, as if by unspoken agreement, conspiring to hold each other hostage to its fabled charm. Everything in Scottsdale had the feel of something italicized, the place doubling as noun and its own adjective.
