by Jon Talton
“I don’t like curious guys.”
“That’s why you killed Jax, too. Too bad he was a federal agent.”
Moretti opened his mouth but nothing happened except a string of saliva separated between his lips.
“Oh, you didn’t know that, Sal? You thought he was El Verdugo and he’d go to work for you? Be some insurance against the cartels?”
“What the hell are you talking about? You’re a crazy man!” He stood and backed away, keeping the gun on me. At a 1950s-style bar cart, he poured himself Scotch, neat. He didn’t offer me anything. Slipping the gun in his pocket, he consumed two fingers of the booze in one gulp.
“Jax Delgado was ATF,” I said. “He discovered that you were off the witness protection reservation. But it wasn’t the heroin he was after. It was the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop, which you secretly own through your friend Barney.”
The two black eyebrows slithered up his forehead. “Smart guy. How do you know this?”
“Just destiny.”
He slapped the glass down hard and paced the large room. It was amazing how isolated the space felt, but it was designed to be that way, so people could come in their garages, watch television and play video games, and never notice what might be going on outside their front doors.
“Nobody can prove it!” His voice echoed into the high ceiling.
“I thought you old-school guys didn’t kill cops, code of honor, and all that shit.”
“It’s no shit! It’s real. This Mexican passed himself off as a contract killer. The best! I don’t kill cops. Don’t you realize I could have killed you and the girl anytime? I could have had you killed in that parking lot with those spics, but I didn’t. I am a man of honor.”
“Forgive me, Salvatore.” I said it with the old-world flair of Judson Lee, and then laughed slow and low. I thought he’d shoot me right then, so I continued quickly.
“Johnny Kurita,” I said. Moretti’s tan dialed down by half. He slowly returned to his seat, gripping the gun. “Jax wasn’t just here to take down your gun pipeline. He wanted you on personal business. It was the kind of personal business his bosses didn’t know about: the murder of Kurita by your grandfather, Eugene Costa.”
Now the pigments reversed: a stroke-red blush broke its way through the stony brown skin.
“Personal business? Now you’re talking nonsense. What was I to him, huh?”
“You helped your grandfather in the killing.”
That was just a wild pitch, an improvisation that suddenly came to me—I didn’t have any evidence—but it found its way across the plate and he went for it.
He nodded very slowly and stared past me. “You do live up to your reputation, Mapstone.” He idly stroked the pistol in his lap, trying to figure me out. The young Sal the Bug would have killed me by now. The man before me knew he was in trouble, knew there were now too many loose ends. He stood again, agitated, and for a moment I thought he would pull out his own box of mementos. Then he sat again and said what was logical: “How the hell do you know?”
“I talked to Johnny Kurita’s little sister today.”
He watched me in silence for long minutes. The grandfather clock chimed.
“They were both hotheads.” Moretti was reliving the long-ago moment. “Grandfather and that Jap kid. They argued, then they fought each other right out there in the flower fields. I wasn’t going to let that Jap disrespect my grandfather.”
The black brows, the only trace of hair on his head, narrowed. “He came back from the war, this Kurita, and thought he was a real American, that the world owed him something. He wanted that land back. It wasn’t his anymore! Japs couldn’t even own land down there on Baseline for years, you know. Then they started coming in like locusts. When the government took the Kuritas’ property during the war, we got it fair and square. Hell, we’d have even leased it back to them.”
“You stole it. And Harley Talbott made it all look legal down at the courthouse.”
His mouth crooked down. “So what? Talbott owed my grandfather. Talbott owed the Moretti side of the family back in Chicago. The Costa side, the heirs all became totally legit, and sold that land for millions in the nineties. Funny, we buried the Jap right behind the flower shed that night. Now he’s under a parking lot by the swimming pool.”
I didn’t speak until he stopped laughing.
“What is history but a fable agreed upon, right?”
He was silent. The pistol drooped slightly in his hand.
Then, “None of this had to happen. I was minding my own business when this Jax, this man who you say was an agent, shows up at my home and starts asking questions about my grandfather Costa. He was a Mexican, for Christ’s sake. Supposed to be a hit man, supposed to only go through Barney. How the hell did he even know where I live? How did he know what happened in 1947? He wasn’t even born yet. The flower fields are a goddamned bunch of apartments now.”
“Maybe he didn’t even care about the land.”
“What the hell would he care about?”
“Simple justice.” I waited two beats. “Because Johnny Kurita was his great-grandfather.”
A palsy ran down the left side of Moretti’s face.
“Before he enlisted in the Army, Johnny met a pretty Mexican-American girl who was working at the Poston relocation camp. When he came home, he married her, and they had a baby boy. That little boy’s grandson was Jax Delgado.”
“And you’ve come here unarmed to tell me this? You have a death wish because I killed your sister-in-law?”
“Yes. What about you?”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘What about me?’”
“Don Salvatoré, you’ve been double-dealing so long you don’t even know right from left,” I said. “Selling guns to Sinaloa, selling guns to the Gulf cartel, too. Having your buddy Tom assassinate four top La Familia men. Why? Because you were afraid of what they might tell us? Because you want to set one side against the other like back in Chicago? You think you’ll profit from it. Well, you’re not in Chicago anymore, asshole. You’re playing way out of your league.”
He raised the Beretta.
The front door crashed open.
Sal looked up, confused by the laser scopes dancing on his chest. He quickly put the gun on the table and smiled.
“This man tried to kill me, officers. Thank God you got here…”
The men I first encountered on Central Avenue moved with the same sinister efficiency. Sal was pulled up and handcuffed before he even comprehended what was happening. Then he saw the roll of duct tape. His panicked eyes met mine for a long ten seconds.
“Wait.” I took the duct tape myself.
“Zack,” I said. “The kid who delivered the money to Sabrina. Did he know what she was going to do to earn it?”
He squirmed in the grip of the men, staring hatefully at me. “You goddamned right he did. I gave him the chance to do the job himself, prove himself a man, but he was a little coward.”
I wrapped the duct tape around his bony head myself, covering his mouth even as he tried to keep speaking. I shoved his pistol in my belt. Then the men hustled him out to a waiting SUV, its motor quietly running. Within two minutes, we were all gone from the pleasant street where everyone was deep inside the Arizona Rooms watching television and where bad things never happen.
Elegy
Low clouds hung over the city the night that Lindsey and I hopped the fence and made our way into the old cemetery. It was now called Greenwood Memory Lawn but it had been around since 1906 and was still adorned by hundreds of old trees shading the well-manicured grass. The city had grown around it and left it behind.
It was just as well. The news of local mayhem had been especially harrowing lately. It turned out that a Chicago mobster, Sal “the Bug” Moretti, who had been put in witness protection here, was selling heroin out of his Chandler house, using teenagers as couriers. The teens all came from “good families,” and nei
ghbors of Moretti were quoted: “these kinds of things just don’t happen here.”
Moretti was also the secret owner of a big gun shop on Bell Road that was raided by the feds for selling guns to the drug cartels. A decorated ATF agent had been killed as part of the operation, and Moretti would be charged with murder, too. If they found him. Although ten teenagers from Chandler and Ahwatukee had been arrested, Moretti had apparently escaped. “Vanished without a trace,” the news stories kept saying.
Indeed.
Not every case was unsolved. In Bakersfield, a man already in jail was charged with the murder of four men in Maryvale the previous month. The police said a sniper rifle, found in an abandoned car, had linked the man to the killing. The case was broken thanks to an anonymous tip to the Silent Witness line. I checked the Web site for the Bakersfield paper and two days later learned that extradition wouldn’t be an issue: Tom Holden had been stabbed to death by another inmate, who was reputedly a member of La Familia. Meanwhile, every day brought news of fresh death south of the border: fifty killed in one day. The cartels kept growing, alliances shifting and breaking apart, the organizations dividing like cancer cells.
But in Phoenix, after two days of careful excavation, the bones of a World War II Japanese-American veteran had been discovered under the parking lot of an apartment complex on Baseline. Kate Vare was in the newspaper saying it was being treated as a homicide from the late 1940s, and that the discovery was the result of “painstaking police work by the cold-case unit.”
Indeed.
Now we walked past the tall old memorials to the familiar graves: my parents, my grandfather and grandmother. The flowers that Robin had left a few weeks ago were broken and dead. There was no room left in the family plot for me. We had bought a space for Robin in the garden columbarium. But I knew she wouldn’t want that and Lindsey had agreed.
We brought her ashes with us and gently spread them across the family plot. It amazed me how little was left of a person. I fought the pressure building against my eyes and the tightness in my throat. Lindsey was already weeping. Ashes to ashes. Dust in this valley of dust. This valley of tears. Civilization was breaking down all around us. It had happened in Phoenix before, with the Hohokam, when things grew too complex and nature rebelled, human nature bowed and broke.
Now it was happening again. It was starting all over, right here, in this city that had risen from its ashes and was being devoured again, starting here and moving across an America that didn’t even pay attention to Phoenix.
Civilizations fell.
I followed Zack Grady for an entire week. Sal Moretti’s Beretta was tucked in my pants with a full magazine. The all-American drug dealer who took the cash to Sabrina, knowing she had killed Robin. He had been offered the job himself and turned it down. But he didn’t go to the police. He didn’t do anything to stop it. While wishing for sleep at night I ran the scenarios through my mind, how I would grab him, drive to a secluded spot in the desert, and put a bullet in his brain. I let Sabrina live. Something inside me felt sorry for her. Zack — in many ways he was the worst of the lot. He was a young sociopath who was just getting his first taste. The next time he would be happy to kill. He had been someone’s adored child once, but that made me despise him even more. He had survived.
The last night I watched as he walked down a half-mile length of cars at Chandler Fashion Center, his stride full of insolence. The Prelude tracked him slowly from behind, lights off, the pistol gripped in my right hand. The passenger window was down and I would simply order him into the car. Maybe I’d handcuff him again. Or maybe I’d just beat him into unconsciousness with the police baton in the back seat.
I let him go. I was so far down a darkened path that I didn’t know how I could find my way back, find my way back to Lindsey and some semblance of the life we once had, find my way to a future I could at least endure. Taking him into the desert would only push me further into the darkness. I had already found parts of myself that frightened me. We were the good guys. That was what Peralta always said. It’s what separated us from the ones like Zack and Sal and Tom Holden. I let him go. Two days later he was arrested as one of Sal’s dealers.
Inside the cemetery, Lindsey and I listened to the cars roaring on Black Canyon Freeway, the sirens on 27th Avenue, a quick succession of gunshots, the echoes of the Tea Party rallies at the capitol where the legislature was destroying what took a century to build here, the last cries of the immigrants dying of thirst in the desert. Who will excavate our ruins of Wal-Marts and parking lots? Who would want to?
But at that moment, sheltered by the big trees, the low clouds, and the enchanted Sonoran Desert twilight, we sat cross-legged on the grass and leaned into each other. When I was a child, I had dreaded the trips out here. Cemeteries had frightened me. Grandmother’s love of the place had given me the creeps. Now I understood the matchless peace and beauty here.
“Poor Dave.” Lindsey stroked my arm. “Nick and Nora Charles are fictional characters. You thought you were marrying this sweet young thing with cheerleader legs and with no history and we’d go out and make the world right.”
I had never assumed that about her—well, maybe the cheerleader legs—but I said nothing, happy to hear her voice.
“You’ve taught me so much. Opened so much of the world to me. I love the jazz and martinis and cops. And the history…oh, Dave. You told me everything about yourself and your adventures, but you don’t understand. For me, where my life wasn’t dull, it was something I was ashamed of, something that made me feel worthless. I didn’t really understand what has been building inside me because our being together was such a gift.”
“All I ever wanted was you,” I said. “And truth and bone, as you once said.”
She laughed lightly. “Easier said than done, I guess.”
I wanted to say that her history hadn’t made her worthless. Far from it. But I wondered who she was now. She spoke first.
“Did you fall in love with Robin?”
In love. Such a loaded word, especially for women. I had grown to like, admire, and probably love Robin. If I lingered too long in that contemplation, it would be unbearable. I said, “I cared for her.”
She put her arms around me. “You care too easily.” That weightless laugh again, then a sob. “Robin built a lot of walls to protect herself. But I can tell you…”
She swallowed hard. “I can tell you, she cared for you right back.”
The broken shards sitting against my vital organs again shifted painfully. When I could speak again, I said, “I’m in love with you. With you, Lindsey. I think I was from the first moment I saw you.”
“I know.”
Draw me a map of the human heart. I am lost.
“I’ve failed you so much, David. I lost our child. I failed Robin.”
“No. Never.”
“It’s true. My life is a failure.”
I stopped for a moment. A light rain baptized my forehead. “Turn off your Linda Unit, Lindsey Faith.”
Now she laughed fully, my old Lindsey, if only for a moment.
Five minutes later I gathered the courage to ask, “Do you love him?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. No hesitation. After a long pause: “I just wanted to feel something again.”
The shrapnel sliced against my heart. How long before I would just bleed to death?
I said, “You left me once before.”
“I know.”
And that was all she said. We were both damaged.
The rain was falling hard and straight now, seeping through our clothes. It felt fine. We watched as Robin’s ashes vanished into the grass and the timeless soil.
“Oh, God.” Lindsey choked it out.
We held each other and cried a long time in the precious spring rain. I prayed that we would all be together again in the morning. Then I helped her up and she kept her index finger in my hand as we walked together through the darkness, tryin
g to find our way out again.
***
Peralta was tapping slowly on a laptop computer when I walked into his office the next afternoon. He looked up, unsurprised.
“You think you’re real clever, don’t you.”
I shrugged.
“You could have gone to jail.”
“I know.”
“You could have been killed.”
“That would have been fine.”
“Have you ever considered…” He stopped, for he probably knew I had considered everything. My dirty hands were at my side, my academic detachment lost like luggage thrown out on a distant highway. I almost said: maybe I’ve become more like you. But I didn’t say it because I didn’t know what I was becoming. Whatever it was had no regrets over the rough justice meted out to Sal Moretti or Tom Holden. The detached part of me that remained knew it wasn’t quite right. But if I looked too long in the rearview mirror this would be the least of the demons chasing me. Peralta leaned back, straining his luxurious executive chair.
I looked around the place. It was as homely as it was austere. But this was where he had decided to make his stand. And it occurred to me, amid all the madness, that he was my oldest friend. Lindsey didn’t know what she wanted. Robin was gone. My hometown wasn’t home any longer. But my oldest friend was here, making his stand. So I would make the stand, too. I desperately needed to make this stand. So I said I was ready to go to work.
“About goddamned time!” He barked it but his face radiated relief.
“Two conditions.”
“Oh, fuck.” He closed the laptop and opened his arms: hit me.
“First, I want a decent chair, like you have.”
He nodded. “What else?”
“Restore the sign out front, neon and all.”
“Do you know how much that would cost?”
I stood there with folded arms.
He mashed his lips together. Then: “Mapstone, you’re a real bastard. All right, we’ll do the goddamned sign. Now I’m in the historic fucking preservation business, and all to provide a welfare-to-work program for a washed-out professor who’s a not-bad lawman…”
