by Jon Talton
We read the newspaper together. In addition to the news of the dreadful economy, the Legislature slashing everything from health care for children of the working poor to closing state parks, and the silly features written to make readers feel better, it contained several stories about the “cartel hit squad” arrested and facing charges. It didn’t mention’s the hit squad’s alleged murder of ATF agent Jax Delgado, of course. The reporter and editors also seemed oblivious to the larger implications of the arrests. So did the millions living here. Tea Partiers protested outside the Capitol against taxes, immigrants, and the government. They were too ignorant to know Arizona wouldn’t even exist as a habitable place without aggressive government action. Every day a new real-estate project slipped into foreclosure.
Robin and I pulled our small, contented world closer around us. I told her more stories about old Phoenix and learned about some of her adventures. I took her to the old cemetery just west of the Black Canyon Freeway, and, under the canopy of its old trees, we left flowers on the graves of my grandparents and the parents I never knew. We took the rough brush from the car—meant to wipe off snow—and used it to scrub the dust from the headstones. We sat in the grass, and she leaned her head on my shoulder. Lindsey called every four or five days and talked to each of us. She talked to Robin far longer. Our talks were unbearably light considering the deep-soul talks that had been our sustenance for years. What was she listening to? Carrie Newcomer, Heather Nova, and Dar Williams. What was she reading? Marcus Aurelius and Camus.
When Robin and I emerged from our research at the State Archives that day, it had been raining and a very faint rainbow was visible behind the downtown towers.
***
Lindsey loved rainbows. She seemed to bring them out. I had seen more Arizona rainbows since I had met her than I had seen in my entire life. She would call me to the window to watch them, where we lingered while she painted the scene with her words, her arm around my waist. The summer of her pregnancy, the monsoon season was poised to be the new strange normal. When I had been a boy, the summer rainstorms had come into the city regularly from mid-July through early September. The lightning and thunder were spectacular. The rain constituted the majority of the precious seven inches a year that made the Sonoran Desert lush and unique in all the world.
When I moved back, I found a metropolitan area that had become a 2,500-square-mile concrete block. The summers were becoming hotter and longer, and the monsoons strange and unpredictable. In this strange new normal—all that most of this city of newcomers knew—the big thunderheads stayed beyond the mountains, as if they were gods surveying the mess that man had made of their timeless Salt River Valley. And when the storms rolled in, they were often violent. One storm two years before had been so savage that it knocked the telephone poles on Third Avenue straight down and ripped off some roofs. The meteorologists talked about microbursts and the collision of the weather front with superheated concrete, especially in places like Sky Harbor airport. I thought about how those storm gods might be releasing their kindled anger.
But while last summer had been hot and scary with the broken gasoline line, the monsoons had been as before. In addition to the obligatory dust storms and dramatic nighttime lightning shows, several times a week we had gotten real rain. And real rainbows.
One afternoon I had come home early and found Lindsey and Robin together in the upstairs apartment. Lindsey stood at the window as the clouds moved away and the room lightened.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s a double rainbow.”
It was: twins soaring all the way through the boiling sky toward Camelback Mountain.
“It’s a good sign,” Robin said.
An hour later, Lindsey started bleeding.
***
What is the dark matter that controls our fates, that brings catastrophes upon us suddenly? We are fools to even consider it. And what of the losses that we can never fully purge, never grieve away? Never make right. Never atone for. Never even hold a funeral or let our friends know what has collapsed us. Our child was gone without ever having breathed this fated atmosphere, without even a name.
My wife was only saved from bleeding to death by a procedure that meant she could never have children of her own. It was just another moment on a planet of tragedies, but it was our tragedy, our world knocked off its axis, taking with it all the tomorrows we had so vainly believed in. Later, when she was awake, Lindsey had demanded to know what had happened to her child. That was how she phrased it, “my child.” The doctor was not delicate: the fetus had been disposed of in the hospital incinerator. That was the way it was. Lindsey had nodded once and stared ahead dry-eyed.
I looked back on those three months with Lindsey as golden. But the complexion of the time was more complicated than that, as any historian would tell you, more shaded, nuanced. Someday when I could bear it, I might see it with greater clarity. We had grown closer together than ever, and yet mysteriously also drawn apart, as if making room for someone. Lindsey became very dependent on Robin, and now it was clear that having lost her job and facing the worst recession since the Depression, Robin embraced being needed. They denied that they were going shopping for baby things. “I don’t want to jinx it,” Lindsey said. The poetic watchfulness in her that had first so attracted me became something more. She worried. She was acutely aware of changes in her body, even as the doctor reassured her. A few days before the miscarriage, she had said, “Something doesn’t feel right,” and the doc reassured her again.
But she would never be set at ease. These were the first days when I had seen her grow suddenly angry with me over seemingly like small things. But, in her mind, nothing was small. Although the breach was quickly healed, this was a new side of my love. And me? I probably did a hundred things wrong. Maybe the worst, that day when she first saw the blood in her panties, was to say, like a towering ass, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Now I was lost in the past as the rainbow faded over the Chase Tower. Robin lightly touched my shoulder. “Just be with me in this moment, David.”
I nodded and we started to walk to the car.
She said, “It’s all we really have.”
20
We carried the copied case files home and laid them out on the big desk in the study. I was tempted to give Robin the trial transcript, but didn’t want her to get bored. She was excited by this historical sleuthing. So I divided the work, taking the transcript myself and giving her a small stack of police and arson reports.
It was tempting to look back on 1940 as a more innocent time, and that’s probably true. Wars always change nations, coarsen them; Woodrow Wilson had known that on the eve of World War I. And the Arizona and America of 1940 had yet to go into World War II, much less the Cold War, and our current imperial adventures. Advanced communications consisted of dial telephones — the police radio system was only eight years old. Social networking was done at barber and beauty shops, the railroad depot, and the American Legion hall. But human nature persists in all its darkness, and even the little town of Phoenix had its share of violent crime back then. It also had a disproportionate amount of corruption.
The city commissioners themselves were said to control some of the local rackets. The Mafia was beginning to discover Phoenix, a town where cops and judges could be bought, where the banks could be used to launder money. On the outside, it was just a sunny farm town, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of citrus groves and fields. My grandfather’s dental practice was downtown. But Phoenix was also segregated, this place that had been settled by plenty of ex-Confederates. The relatively large black population, which came west with the cotton crop, went to separate schools. The Mexican-Americans were set off in their barrios. The main places everyone mingled were in the produce warehouses along the railroad tracks and in the red-light district on the east side. That was also the scene of Phoenix’s worst race riot, when soldiers went on a rampage during World War II. The official de
ath count was three, but probably was much higher. It was history the chamber of commerce didn’t want you to know.
“Are you bored?”
“Yes.” I was honest.
“It’s fun to watch your face,” she said. “See your mind wander.”
“I just don’t know how much we’re going to be able to help Nick DeSimone clear his grandfather. I wonder why he even cares that much. I probably have several horse thieves and worse in my woodpile.”
“You’re just afraid of getting pulled into Peralta’s orbit. Becoming a private dick.” She said the two words with lewd glee. And it was true enough: I could see Peralta using this project as the “point of entry” drug to get me in his new game.
“What would be so bad about that?”
“I’m just tired of it.”
“He’s very entertaining,” she said. “I remember the first time he said he wanted to tell me his philosophy. That’s exactly what he said, ‘my philosophy.’ I was ready for something heavy and wise.”
I quoted Peralta from rote: “ ‘If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.’ Don’t get me wrong, Peralta probably saved my life when I came back to Phoenix. I really enjoyed the job. But I’m ready for something new.”
“What?”
I just put my lips together and shook my head.
“There’s no more market for history professors than there is for private art curators.” Her face assumed a half-smile. “It wouldn’t be bad. I’d work with you. We could make him fix that old neon sign.”
“You’re a dreamer,” I said. “You could find work outside Phoenix.”
“Do you want that?”
“No.” I said it too fast.
“If you’re done with the job, why did you bring home all those boxes of case files?”
“Maybe I’d write a book.”
She gave me a disbelieving smile. “You were going to work those old cases. Admit it. I admire you for it.”
“A few of them. I thought, in my spare time.”
“That’s the David Mapstone I know and love.” She stopped and we looked at each other, not sure what to say next. Finally, she said, “For now, why don’t we try to fight for Paolo? It doesn’t sound like anybody did it when he was alive. This Harley Talbott sounds like a total creep, a big man with power. I know you want to be the objective historian, so I’ll be the little cartoon creature on your shoulder, whispering in your ear, ‘fight for Paolo.’ It’s a matter of simple justice.”
“Fair enough.”
I went back to the transcript.
“This is a funny name.” Robin ran her fingers down one Xeroxed page. “Detective Navarre. Sounds like something out of a Bogart movie.”
I slapped down the sheaf of papers. “You have got to be shitting me.”
Frenchy Navarre. Sometimes it was spelled “Frenchie.” I told Robin what I knew. He wore two guns and was one of the most brutal and dangerous cops the Phoenix force ever produced. If there had been a Bad Phoenix Cops blog in the forties, Frenchy would have generated a post a day. The worst Frenchy story was from 1944, when he was off-duty and given a ticket by another officer, one of the few African-Americans on the force, a man named David “Star” Johnson. Frenchy went into one of his rages, shot and killed Johnson right on Second and Jefferson streets. A jury acquitted him and he went back to work. Johnson’s partner caught him at headquarters one day and shot him to death in revenge. The legend was that Frenchy went down shooting and the bullet holes remained in the stationhouse—then located in the old Courthouse—for years afterwards.
Now here was Frenchy Navarre as a detective on the DeSimone case.
Robin handed me the paper. It was a typed confession signed by Paolo DeSimone, given to Detective Navarre. Paolo said he was drunk and mad because Big Sam McNamara wouldn’t sell him liquor. Later that night he came back with a can of gasoline and set fire to trash at the back of the building. I could imagine Frenchy beating the confession out of him. But that would be letting my prejudices get the better of me.
“The arson investigator’s report.” Robin held up two pages. “It says a firebomb was thrown through the front window of the store. That jibes with the newspaper accounts.”
I looked it over and handed it back to her. The transcript was incomplete but raised questions, too. There was no public defender then. It appeared that DeSimone received legal counsel from a local lawyer either paid by the county or doing pro-bono work. He introduced several motions that were denied by the judge. One was to throw out the confession as coerced.
“You’re onto something, History Shamus.”
“Here’s Navarre on the stand. He’s asked why he arrested Paolo. Says he was given a tip by another man who had been in the drunk tank where Paolo spent the night on September 29th. Name of Eugene Costa. He told Frenchy that Paolo told him he burned down McNamara’s.”
I flipped through, trying to find if Costa had testified and what he had told Paolo’s lawyer on cross-examination. The pages were missing.
“The joys of historic research: more questions than answers. All the cops and lawyers are long dead. I can try some of my retired police buddies, but they were too young. I don’t see the hand of Harley Talbott in any of this. If he owned the judge and jury, we can’t prove it.”
“Don’t give up.” Robin went back to her half of the record.
***
We kept at it for three days. The police records betrayed a slipshod investigation. McNamara himself said he believed Talbott had ordered his store burned because he wouldn’t pay the extra “taxes” demanded for Talbott’s liquor. The cops never interviewed Talbott. The tip from Eugene Costa and the “confession” by Paolo kept them on a single, simple theory: one drunk Italian burned down the liquor store.
At the Arizona Room of the central library, we went through old city directories and phone books. Eugene Costa was listed from 1939 through 1948 and then he disappeared. Phoenix was a city of transients. I called around to the law firms to see if they had any information on the man who had defended Paolo—it was a long shot and came back empty. The fire department’s arson records from 1940 were long gone. I couldn’t find any manuscripts or diaries about Harley Talbott during this period. He had probably donated a fair amount to the library.
“So give me something else to do.” Robin gathered up the legal pad on which she had been making notes. The Arizona Room hours had been cut back again and we were being told it was time to leave.
I admired her passion and persistence, saw something of myself in her. So I let her go down to the county offices to research land transactions from the period involving any of the principals we were tracking: Paolo, Talbott, Costa, Frenchy, the judges and lawyers involved. I would go home to Cypress where I would start to write a very incomplete report for Judson Lee. I would feel bad about taking his money. She kissed me goodbye beneath the shade screens of the light-rail station. She took the train south and I waited for the one heading north. I realized it would be the first time she was out of my sight since that last week in December.
21
We worked together on the computer to finish the final report. We couldn’t exonerate Paolo DeSimone. We could give a history of the case, from the initial firebombing to Paolo receiving a ten-year sentence and then being paroled after five years. The report also had background on Paolo working for Talbott as a driver and the power that the big man wielded in the city, as well as some of the allegations that dogged him past the grave. Most critically, we listed the investigative errors and inconsistencies, including Paolo wanting to take back his confession—given under duress to one of the most famously nasty cops in Phoenix history. Robin had added an appendix that painstakingly listed properties that Talbott owned in 1940, and some land bought by the otherwise mysterious Eugene Costa a few years later.
Judson Lee read quickly through the report, lingering on a few pages, and pronounced himself pleased. I told him not to b
other with the money—I didn’t believe we had earned it. In my old job, I had actually cleared cases. Peralta wouldn’t have been satisfied with this. I handed the unsigned check back and said this was on the house.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Dr. Mapstone,” he said. “You know this city.”
I thought about our recent travels into gangland. “I’m not sure anyone knows this city.”
He scrawled his signature on the check with his small, sun-browned hand and passed it back. “Utter, ultimate, truth may be beyond the finest historian. This should be more than enough for my client to make a start to clear his grandfather’s name.”
I took the check. He shook my hand. Did his old-world kiss of Robin’s hand and she laughed. I continued to apologize as he left, wishing we had found more, giving Robin credit for the good stuff. He waved it off, moving with surprising spryness.
“Anyway.” He turned to face us on the front step. “Napoleon said, history was nothing but a fable agreed upon.” Then he drove away in a new cream-colored Cadillac.
“It’s five grand and nothing to sneeze at.” Robin was reading the look on my face. “Let’s go out and celebrate tonight.” The smile took over her face. “I’ll wear a skirt even.”
I relented and felt my shoulders relax.
“You get to choose the place.”
“Good. First, give me the keys to the Prelude.”
I handed them over and asked her where she was going. It was an innocent enough question.
“Girl stuff.” She walked out of the study laughing that wonderful, house-filling laugh.
***
A little after midnight Robin wanted to go outside and see the stars. We pulled on clothes and walked into the backyard, where the oleanders and citrus trees provided dark, sheltering masses around us. We sat in the old chairs by the chiminea that Grandfather had built so long ago. She lolled her head, sending her hair cascading down the chair back.
