Arizona Dreams

by Jon Talton

  I watched his face for a hint that he was joking: a slight lift in his eyebrow, an extra watt in the eyes. His expression was impassive. My stomach was suddenly hurting. Our conversation had gone from idle to nasty in racecar time.

  “I thought that nut Earley was just grandstanding.”

  “That nut represents a lot of voters,” Peralta said, leaning forward and sketching something indecipherable on my desk.

  I said, “So he wants to cut funding for public schools and Child Protective Services, then decry why we have so many young people who end up in your jail.”

  “That may be true,” Peralta said, “but it doesn’t seem to matter when people vote. They respond to this stuff that Earley says. He’s the face of the new Republican Party, Mapstone, and you’d better believe they want to knock me off in the primary. And I mean as sheriff. Forget about governor.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re an institution. A legend.”

  He grunted and shook his head. “Times change, and in their eyes I’m just somebody with brown skin.” I looked at him. Peralta was incapable of irony.

  “This town runs on two engines,” he said, “conservative politics and real estate. And Tom Earley is big in both. He made a fortune developing shopping centers. He’s incredibly connected. He’s ambitious as hell…”

  “So what do you want me to do?” I asked, my voice rising. “Give him a campaign contribution? Resign?”

  “If you lose your job, you can sell that house,” he said. “Have you seen the price appreciation for those old houses? I don’t get it. But, hell, you could sell it, buy a bunch of rental houses, leverage the hell out of your equity…”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.

  He sniffed and cleared his throat. “The main reason I tried to talk you out of going to Portland was your wife. I couldn’t lose Lindsey. She’s my star. She’s one of the top computer crime experts in the country now, Mapstone. She works with the feds as often as she works for me. She means a half-million-dollar grant from the feds to the Sheriff’s Office. I’d have had to make her divorce you if you went to Oregon…” He sat back and drummed his big fingers on his belly. “Do you get my point? These guys like Earley are gunning for me and for you. So if you want to keep playing cop and playing historian, you’d better…”

  “I’ll write the goddamned book,” I snarled. “So you can run for governor.”

  He was about to say something when a knock came at the office door.

  “Dr. Mapstone?” The voice went to a woman, who leaned her head around the door. I beckoned her in. Peralta stood and strode out with the grace that only certain big men can manage.

  4

  “Was that Mike Peralta, the sheriff?” the woman asked.

  “No,” I said. “It was Mike Peralta, the asshole. They’re often mistaken for one another.”

  She looked at me wide-eyed, and then filled the room with laughter. A nice laugh.

  “You haven’t changed a bit.” She shook her head fondly and sat in one of the straight-backed chairs. “You’re also just as tall, dark, and handsome as I remember.”

  Pleasant-looking, you’d call her. In glasses, with tortoise-shell rims. Maybe around thirty-five, with strawberry-blond hair, parted on one side and falling to her shoulders. Dressed in a copper-colored sweater and navy skirt. The sweater made her pinkish skin seem more flushed. It was a pleasantly forgettable face. You’d have to spend a lot of time with that face to find it remarkable. I had no idea who she was.

  “Miss…?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” She stood hastily and thrust her hand across the desk. I shook it. “There’s no reason you should know me. I was one of your students, Dana Underwood. I was Dana Watkins, then. At Miami. I guess I look different now.” She smiled. Smiling, it was a better face.

  I smiled back and invited her to sit down. As an itinerant history professor I had taught at Miami University in Ohio, the University of Denver, and finally San Diego State. At Miami, I was not much older than my students and teaching the kind of survey courses where the class size is not as large as the crowd at a Suns game. I must have made quite an impression for her to look me up.

  “This is a beautiful old building,” she said. “I didn’t even know Phoenix had any old buildings.”

  I told her it was built in 1929.

  “My gosh,” she said. “They didn’t even have electricity then, right?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. You never knew these days. So I just smiled. If she had been one of my students, she hadn’t had much aptitude for history. In a moment, she started talking again.

  “My husband was transferred out here with Motorola a few years ago. He was laid off, but that’s a different subject. Anyway, I started seeing your name in the papers, as the history expert who worked as a deputy. I always thought there’s no history here, it’s so new. But when I’d see your name, I’d say, ‘I was in that guy’s class.’”

  “Thanks for remembering,” I said. I wasn’t a good listener just then. I was stuck back in Peralta World, thinking of what I should have said to him.

  She said, “You were a wonderful teacher, Dr. Mapstone.”

  “How about David.”

  “David,” she said, and folded her hands neatly in her lap. Her eyes were watery, making her seem on the verge of tears even when she smiled. Her eyes made a track of my office. It was not much different from when it opened in 1929, with sumptuous dark wood paneling, deco light globes, and tall multi-paned windows with curved tops. I had scavenged the furniture from county storage, and added too many books.

  “I can’t believe how much time has passed. I see you’re married now.” She pointed to my wedding band. “Do you have kids?” I said I didn’t. “I have two, can you believe it? Madison is seventeen and a senior, and Noah is a junior. They’re great kids. I never thought I’d be a soccer mom.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  She cleared her throat, and started again. “I came here today because I need help.” I didn’t recognize her, but I recognized her voice. Even serious, it had a lilt, as if you could turn butterscotch into sound. Where did that voice fit in my past?

  I thought about what Peralta had said. It wasn’t like I had time to be helping former students. But I said I’d do anything I could. David Mapstone, always happy to help the taxpayers of Maricopa County and avoid sitting down to write.

  Dana Underwood pulled an envelope from her purse and set it carefully on my desk. It looked unremarkable, a white No. 10 envelope. I half wondered if she was here to contest an old grade with me.

  “Now, David, it takes me awhile to get to the point. This drives my husband crazy, but it’s just the way I am.” Her hand brushed back her hair, tucked it behind a small pale ear. One reddish strand still fell against her glasses. “You see, my father died last year. Cancer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you, but after he died it was up to me to go through his things. He was a pack rat, and mother was in no condition…this is all back in Rocky River. I can’t say I was close to my dad. I didn’t really know him. He was a self-made man. He’d started out working the ore boats out of Cleveland. And he saved enough to buy some old rental houses and fix them up. That’s how he got his start. He never even graduated from high school. But he did really well in real estate, which is how he could pay to send his children to places like Miami. He even bought land out here. It’s still in the family.”

  I put a finger on the envelope. “Is this about your father?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I warned you. Yes. It’s a letter. To me. He wrote it, and left it in the drawer by his bed. As you can see, it says, ‘to be opened after my death.’ When I found it, I was a little afraid.” She paused and looked around the office again. “I mean, what was it going to say? You know, you get older and see something of life, and you realize that your parents…nobody’s parents are saints. So I let it sit for a few days. But then one day I read it.�
��

  She reached for the envelope, lifted it toward her, then seemed to think better of it and set it back on the desk.

  “David, I think he killed a man. I think, I fear, my father killed a man.”

  “And you didn’t know about this?”

  She shook her head. “If he did, he got away with it, David.”

  I let out a breath, too loudly. “He confesses this in the letter?”

  “That’s all the letter is about,” she said. “It’s very matter of fact. I would rather have learned that he had a mistress or that I had been adopted…”

  “Why would he write it down?”

  Her hair had come loose again. She swept it back and said, “I think he finally wanted me to know. After he’d been diagnosed, and knew he didn’t have long. He knew I’d take charge, and I’d find it. But the crime—if it happened—was in 1966.”

  “Was your father the kind of man who would kill somebody?”

  “I thought he was when he found my boyfriend in bed with me when I was seventeen,” she said. “And I mean that. He had a bad temper. And he’d had to have been tough to make it in Cleveland. But, no, nothing like that.”

  “Who was this man he killed?”

  “It doesn’t say. Now, don’t dismiss me. I know what you’re thinking. He only refers to him as ‘Z.’ He writes that he felt he had no choice, but nobody would have believed him. But there’s so little to it—just a few sentences. No sense of really why this happened, what drove him to do it. There are so many questions.”

  “Dana,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear this. I know it’s got to be a shock, coming on top of losing your father. And I’m honored you’d look me up. But I don’t really see how I can be any help.”

  “This is what you do, David,” she said, her eyes bright. “Crime and history. I remember you said that every historian’s dream is to discover a letter in an attic.”

  “I think I probably said something like a letter from Abe Lincoln or George Washington…”

  “Well, it’s not that,” she said primly. “But I need to know if my father really did kill a man.”

  I tried to watch her closely, but instead I felt the largeness of the room around us. My eyes drifted to the Republic on my desk, with headlines about continuing drought, a twenty-car pileup on Interstate 10 and a six-year-old boy found chained by his parents in a box. So much trouble in my city. I said, “Do you really want to know? Sometimes it’s better not to know everything.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I have to know. Wouldn’t you want to know if your father was a murderer?” She pushed the envelope at me. I didn’t touch it. She said, “Anyway, that’s not all. The other thing he writes is where we can find the body.”

  I felt relief. “Then it’s clear. If you really fear that this is possible, you’ve got to go to the police back in Ohio.”

  She shook her head violently, unleashing a small cascade of hair. “No, David. I came to the right police. The man is buried right here in Arizona.”

  5

  A few days later, I checked out a Ford Crown Vic from the sheriff’s motor pool. Lately I’d been riding the bus in anticipation of Phoenix finally finishing the light-rail line on Central; when that happened, I could take the train the mile-and-a-half between the house and my office in the old courthouse. With this well-used piece of county property, I drove west and left the city. I tried to leave the city, but it kept spreading out. The cotton and alfalfa fields that stood when I was a kid had long since been covered with subdivisions. Now many of them, once new safe suburbia, had become slums. The little farm towns had turned into cities, densely packed red tile rooftops stretching to the horizon. Farther out, the remnants of farms sat like an unwanted tenant as the shopping strips, car dealerships and houses encroached. Signs hawked new developments from a dozen builders. A billboard half the size of a football field and as well constructed as a city hall promised yet another project, the words standing out in ten-foot gossamer, “Arizona Dreams.”

  Where Interstate 10 curved around the booming suburb of Goodyear, the horizon opened up. The White Tank Mountains spread out in front of me, a vast purplish expanse slathered with the distinctive pale rocks that give them their odd name. The mountains, which I usually saw as a smudge to the west, suddenly looked majestic and wild. Behind them, the sky was an electric blue, ornamented with similarly bright fluffy white clouds. It was a scene increasingly rare in my town, with its dirty air. But the land I passed through was not empty. The sun glinted off the rooftops. Elsewhere, every empty parcel of land had a sign that proclaimed “available.”

  As traffic lightened up, I let myself hear Lindsey’s voice in my head. She had awakened me at three that morning to hear the rain. It was a rare and lovely sound in the thirsty land. I slipped out from the covers to watch the drops fall with increasing force on the dark street outside. Then I came back to bed and she had warmed me. Then our hands conjured their usual magic, but later, as she lay panting, sprawled atop me, I knew her mind was someplace else.

  After she had tucked her toes under my legs, as was her custom, I ventured, “Are you okay?” She just pressed her head against my shoulder and said nothing. The rain had settled into a gentle brushing sound on the roof. I listened for a while, then whispered, “Is it Robin?” But again, she had been silent, and she became so still that I thought she was asleep. I just held her, feeling her heart beat against mine.

  “I spent so many years trying to escape it, Dave.” She spoke in a whisper, as if she didn’t want the room to hear. “Why is Robin here? Why was she on our street?”

  I just listened and stroked her soft hair. Knowing that Lindsey had a tough childhood didn’t help me understand her reaction to this mystery sister. I knew other things might have been on her mind, too. She was indeed the valuable one in the family, as Peralta noted. Lately she had helped bust a money-laundering operation working through a small bank in North Scottsdale. But there was nothing small about the players. The feds claimed the money was part of a complicated financing scheme involving Mexican drug lords, the Asian sex-trade, and Middle Eastern terrorists. It reminded me of the eighteenth century trade triangle of slaves, rum, and molasses. It worried Lindsey. Robin worried Lindsey. For that matter, there was an unsolved murder just down the street. There was a lot to worry us all. But it didn’t seem like the right time to ask her for anything more. I could feel her tears on my skin. And then I felt her breathing smooth out, and pretty soon I was asleep, too.

  Now I was so far west that the mountains had shifted. The White Tanks were to the east, and south of them the Sierra Estrella piled up massively, an unfamiliar view. Due south was a low ridge of bumpy tears in the horizon; the Gila Bend Mountains, I think. When I came off the interstate, the city was gone. After a mile of driving on a two-lane road, even the scruffy trailers and junkyards of the desert rats had been replaced by chaparral and brittlebush and empty country. The bones of an old gas station passed my window. The freeway didn’t exist when Dana’s father allegedly killed “Z” and buried him. The way into the desert would have been longer and more tortuous, but the directions were clear enough.

  Stashing bodies in the desert was nothing new—this Harquahala Desert had been the dumping ground for a serial killer a few years back. Lindsey had finally stopped him. That had been when we were first getting together. This desert had memories, secrets. And yet another one, courtesy of a dead man’s letter. I still had it locked in my desk drawer. It was one page of inexpensive white paper. The writing was in blue ink, in a jaggedy script. But it was legible, and, as she had said, it was matter-of-fact:

  Dear Dana,

  If you’ve found this letter and opened it, then I’m gone. I’m sorry to give you another shock. But it has to come out. I killed Z in March 1966. I had to. You have to know he left me no choice. I took his body out to the property west of Tonopah and buried him. It wasn’t a proper burial. Just rocks.

  There was one sentence in a different tone. At the botto
m of the page. It read:

  Don’t hate your old man, Dana. I had to do these things, for you. I loved you whether you knew it or not.

  Dana didn’t know who “Z”’ was. All she knew was the directions to the property, which the will had made hers. Her father had a notion of raising cattle on it. But this was rough country, with little more than creosote bush covering the hard, rolling ground. Not even a Texas longhorn would last out here, which is why it was so unappealing to settlers in the nineteenth century. They passed through, if they had to, on the way to California. Yet after another thirty minutes of bumping over a dirt road, I was pretty sure I was there, and the country had changed. Several saguaros with multiple arms towered over dense stands of prickly pear, pincushion, and cholla cactus. Beyond were palo verdes, hackberries, and even a couple of cottonwood trees. A creek was nearby. Bright orange flowers were starting to bud on the long fingers of ocotillo and gnarled deep green branches of buckhorn cholla. Even the ubiquitous creosote looked greener. I could see why the land had appealed to Dana’s old man. An ancient wooden gate parted a long, disheveled fence of barbed wire. Behind it, maybe half a mile away, was a smooth butte the shape of a fez. I parked the Crown Vic in front of the gate and was grateful to stretch my legs.

  Dana said the property was an even thousand acres. As the desert floor swept up to the butte, it became craggier and strewn with burned-looking boulders the size of a Mini Cooper. Closer to me, it was especially thick with the yellow-white fuzz of teddy bear cholla. Jumping cactus. It made me glad I didn’t go out in the desert like a tourist from the Midwest—in shorts. The land was utterly silent. It was almost a frightening sensory experience for a city boy. Although the soil was dry and the sky was bright blue with fluffy February clouds, the ground smelled of rain.