Arizona Dreams

by Jon Talton

  It had not been a nightmare-inducing day. In fact, it had been a good day. Peralta had made only minor suggestions on the chapters. The cigar was fine, although I could still taste its bitter aftermath, even after two teeth-brushings and one swig of mouthwash. No reason to feel anxiety, aside from a potential lecture from the dentist. As I lay there, my heart still pounding from the dream, I wondered if I had somehow let Peralta down. His talk of retiring, of being worn out by the increasing madness of politics and society, was so unlike him that I thought he was joking. But he doesn’t joke. Maybe I should have tried to get him to talk more. Maybe I should have invited him over for a cocktail. No, that wouldn’t do. He was probably on some riff that had nothing to do with his doubts or fears or interior life. Mike Peralta had none of those things. It was what had finally busted up his marriage. It wasn’t up to me to try to reach him, not after nearly a quarter century of friendship. The cornerstone of that friendship was my willingness to let him be.

  We were interrupted anyway. Lindsey and Robin were on their way to the Biltmore to shop. Robin had become more of a fixture of those spring months, as Lindsey had little by little set her caution aside. I had learned that Robin’s last name was Bryson, that she rode a motorcycle, and had a master’s degree from the University of Delaware, where she had specialized in the WPA Art Project. This had brought her to the attention of a very wealthy retired cookie magnate in Paradise Valley, who collected paintings, murals, and posters from the Social Realism movement, among other enthusiasms. From power to the workers to collectibles for the capitalists. Robin lived with her boyfriend, Edward, in a bungalow down in the Roosevelt District. We had not yet met this Edward, who was an artist. As Lindsey had spent more time with Robin, it had seemed like a good thing. Lindsey had never been one to pal around with the girls, just as I had few male friends after college. A woman friend, a lost sister who had gotten her act together, was something new, and Lindsey seemed to like it.

  In my office, introductions were made and Peralta was unusually charming. As they talked, I studied the two women, searching for the sisterly similarities. They were both about the same height. This day, Lindsey was dressed in a white sleeveless knit top and black cotton skirt coming to just above her knees. Robin was wearing blue jeans and a vivid tie-dyed work shirt. Her newsboy cap from our first encounter was gone and her hair was loose. It was a thicker and wilder than Lindsey’s hair, fell below her shoulders, and was somewhere between light brown and blond. Robin was tan, while Lindsey was fair. She had gray eyes to Lindsey’s blue. Her features were more closely clustered, and her eyes deeper-set. Somehow her features didn’t assemble quite right, although they could be attractive when she was speaking, when her face became mobile and expressive. Yet they had the same mouth, dimples, chin. When they sat side by side, talked and laughed and glanced—there was connective tissue, in their eyes, and in glances and identical smiles.

  “What does a private curator do?” Peralta was sitting on the edge of the desk, and I swear he was sucking in his gut. It was a most un-Peralta like curiosity, and Lindsey gave me a secret smile.

  “She arranges the sex toys of the filthy rich,” Robin said, nodding her head in slow seriousness.

  “I always suspected,” Peralta said, and the room boomed with his unaccustomed laughter. Robin tended to be as off-the-wall boisterous as Lindsey was subtle and ironic.

  “I help guide the collector,” Robin said. “In art, that is.”

  “The rich guy,” Peralta said.

  “Right. His collection is focused on Social Realism and he’s interested in WPA-era stuff, but he also has some awesome Latin American paintings. Part of my job is to research the art scene. I’m in contact with the galleries, sometimes with artists themselves. I run a lot of interference. Some of the galleries can be really obnoxious.”

  “Kind of like Mapstone, here,” Peralta said.

  “David is interesting.” Robin smiled at me. “I’ve never had a brother-in-law before.”

  “So what else do you do?” Peralta asked.

  “Some art can also be fraudulent, and I help him research a work he’s looking to buy, making sure it’s the real thing,” Robin said. “I also keep his library of books and periodicals, and records on the collection, things like insurance appraisals and bibliographical information. Don’t you yawn, now—this is not boring stuff! Sometimes I arrange for his work to be loaned to museums. Here’s where it can get sweet. Last year, I got a great trip to Madrid for just one painting. Then some weeks I feel like I’m a moving company—he’s got a house in Aspen and a penthouse in New York, besides the place in Paradise Valley. He’s got a very cool jet…”

  Peralta had as close to a rapt expression as his big immobile face could hold. It was fascinating. If I had launched into an exposition about the root causes of the Great Depression or the complex social changes of Renaissance Italy, Peralta would have been twitching after the second sentence. But I was not blond and long-legged, and Robin had a quirky charisma. She told a good story, had a big, uninhibited laugh, and looked at everyone she talked to with intense, friendly interest. When she was talking and laughing, the animation brought her face together in a way that was attractive. My biggest surprise was Peralta’s interest.

  “Who is this rich guy?” he asked. When she supplied the name, he nodded and exhaled. “Wish I could get him to contribute to my campaign.”

  “May I?” Robin snatched the cigar out of Peralta’s hand, struck a dashing pose and took a puff. She said, “Cuban?”

  He nodded approvingly, making no effort to retrieve it. I made an extravagant face at Lindsey, who raised her eyebrows and smiled. Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. They went on talking and sharing the Cohiba.

  There was a melancholy aspect to all this. For what seemed like my entire adult life, Peralta had been married to the same woman. In their heyday, Mike was rising to the top of the sheriff’s office and Sharon was becoming the most popular radio shrink on the West Coast. I cared about both of them. Even when I was living away, I had always found a friendly place with them when I came back to Phoenix to visit. But they were never very similar and the gulf only widened over the years. Now Sharon was living in San Francisco, and the sheriff seemed happy to work all the time, just as he had through their marriage and the raising of two daughters. I missed Sharon, but she was doing well. And Peralta showing some interest in Robin was better than him sitting alone every non-working moment in the big house in Dreamy Draw.

  I could almost hear their voices in the bedroom, as I lay in bed and my mind discarded the contents of the previous day. But then I was not fully awake. My mind was distracted by the bad dream. Gradually, I got that feeling in the belly that comes when you’ve been lying in bed, enjoying yourself, not quite with it, and then you remember the car has a flat tire or somebody said something you wished you hadn’t heard. Robin’s words came back to me. Robin did say it. I wasn’t dreaming.

  The conversation was on how the sisters had reunited. Robin and Lindsey took turns telling about that day in the neighborhood, when we had been called to the crime scene. This brought an update from Peralta on the homicide, him being a grand master of information, whether it’s cop gossip or an interesting investigation going on in another department. The victim was a lawyer, but he also owned two dozen check-cashing outlets, the banks of choice of immigrant workers, as well as human smugglers—the coyotes—and sometimes drug traffickers. But his stores seemed pretty clean, Peralta said. They had passed muster with a state attorney general’s investigation the previous year. Maybe somebody was trying to move in on him, get him to do illegal business or sell out. The victim had been forty-two years old, had lived in Willo for two years, and was named Alan Cordesman. And that’s when Robin spoke.

  “I knew him,” she said.

  11

  “There’s no history here, it’s so new.” People who moved to Phoenix from the Midwest often said that. That’s what Dana, or whatever her name was, said
. It’s a lie, born of an inability to look beyond the brand-new houses they bought and the brand-new Wal-Mart down the road. Arizona has a richer and longer history than the places many of them considered home. Ancient Indian peoples created diverse cultures. Conquistadors and padres cut a trail for European settlement. Cowboys and Buffalo Soldiers, Confederates and Federals, Mormons and Chinese railroad builders, miners and Navajo code talkers. Nope, there’s no history here. We also had our share of crime history. Dillinger came to Tucson thinking he could hide out from the small-town cops. He was wrong. Winnie Ruth Judd—the trunk murderess; now we know she was probably railroaded by the Phoenix elite, trying to cover up for one of their own. From the rustlers and bushwhackers of the nineteenth century to the international gangs of the twenty-first century, Arizona had always drawn badlands people.

  One or more of them stuck an ice pick in my neighbor’s brain. Only the police didn’t have a suspect, and my sister-in-law Robin had known the victim.

  “I knew him casually,” she had said. “I met him on a First Friday, at a gallery down on Roosevelt. He seemed like a nice man…” Then she told a story about riding her motorcycle to Denver and stopping in every honky-tonk along the way to dance with a cowboy.

  Later, Lindsey and I had talked about it. It was a conversation that didn’t end well. Lindsey and I have few fights, and we’re quick to seek mutual forgiveness. But I’d be damned if I knew how we got into this one. Toward the end, she seemed agitated but said I seemed agitated. And I felt misunderstood—that’s just what she said I was doing to her position. Which was: Robin said she knew the guy, what’s the big deal? “I didn’t say it was a big deal,” I said. “I just wonder if she should tell the police she knew him.” She said, “She met him at a gallery with a hundred other people. Dave, you’re being paranoid.” We went on this way for fifteen minutes, when Lindsey said something I had never heard her say before, “I just can’t talk about this any more.” And, uncharacteristically flushed and red-eyed, she got up and left the room.

  Later, she hugged me close as I prepared to leave for work, and gave me enough of a French kiss to please a Parisian. But the encounter left me feeling a little raw. I remembered saying something about whether we should trust a woman who had a history of substance abuse. “That’s not fair!” Lindsey came as close to a shout as I had ever heard her use in conversation. In a calmer voice, she said, “Robin is thirty-five years old, and she has ten clean years behind her.” My blood was up by then, too, and it was an effort not to say, “she claims she has ten clean years.” But I said nothing. I knew we would talk about it later.

  The fight was still on my mind that afternoon as I left the Hayden Library at the university. I had spent the day surrounded by Hollinger boxes and files that contained source material for the book. Now, I walked down Cady Mall, past buildings that hadn’t changed much since I was a student. The money went to biotech, business, and athletics, not liberal arts. It was hot enough to be uncomfortable, the sun reflecting intense light back from the sidewalk. But a breeze was blowing from the north, and coeds walked past in the latest incarnation of provocative miniskirts. I was the model of worldly discretion, marital fidelity yet appreciation.

  Then I saw a slender, well-dressed man walking directly toward me. He saw me, so it was too late to switch course. I should have done so anyway. He was not the kind to wave. He merely held out his hands appreciatively and smiled.

  “Dr. Mapstone, are you teaching again?”

  “Hello, Bobby.”

  “You look so at home on campus, Dr. Mapstone,” he said, and changed direction to fall in at my side.

  “We shouldn’t be seen talking,” I said.

  “And why should I not talk to you?” He had a slight English accent. “Because Sheriff Peralta has convinced you that I am the godfather of organized crime in Phoenix?”

  I stopped and faced him. Bobby Hamid was wearing a navy pinstriped suit that covered his trim form with perfection. His lovely muted blue tie went with a white shirt that was dazzling in the sun. Not a molecule of sweat dared visit his movie-idol face. I faced him and said, “Look me in the eye and tell me it’s not true.”

  He smiled, kept eye contact, and affirmed that it was not true. “But of course you do not believe me,” he said. “You see it as a cheap trick of revisionist history. You have a strong loyalty to your friend, the sheriff. And in his anti-Persian bigotry, he cannot handle it that I, who came to this very campus as a foreign student, could become such a success. To me, an American success story involving a Middle Eastern man is nothing but good for our society today…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, resuming my walk. Unfortunately, he matched my stride. “You’re a venture capitalist, and an Episcopalian, and on the board of a dozen worthy charities.”

  “All true,” he said. “Now I am not saying our city is without crime and corruption. Far from it. Things happen in Phoenix, Dr. Mapstone, and they seem inexplicable. But then you realize there’s a certain, let us say, alignment of interests. The moneyed and political classes get their way. Funny thing. But those are the friends of your sheriff. I am happy to be an outsider from such things.”

  A flock of coeds walked by and Bobby asked, “So how is your book coming?”

  By now I was sweating from frustration. “How do you know these things?” I said. Peralta had been convinced for years that Bobby had a mole inside the sheriff’s office.

  “I’m a big fan, Dr. Mapstone. Are you writing about my case?”

  “Not until Peralta puts you away for many years,” I grinned.

  “Oh, David, please. You do the tough cop act so badly…although you seemed to protect yourself well enough when those two hoodlums assaulted you a few months back.”

  “Peralta is right. You’ve paid off a spy in the department.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I just hear things, keep up with the people I care about.”

  “How can I get off that list? Or, maybe given your reputation, forget that last request.”

  “I was talking about the Hayden Yarnell case,” he went on. “It was one of your most remarkable. The grandsons of the famous rancher, kidnapped in the Great Depression and disappeared. Dr. Mapstone’s greatest triumph, I would say.”

  “I remember it.”

  “And whatever happened to that lovely young woman you were seeing then, while you and Miss Lindsey were on the ‘outs’?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, too hurriedly.

  “She seemed very sensual, very sure of herself—so American,” he said. “Gretchen, I think her name was.”

  I just kept walking.

  “Ah, well, I can understand you choosing Miss Lindsey, once she had tired of, what should we call it, ‘testing the waters’ with that handsome young detective. And you conceive yourself too American, too upright, to have taken Miss Gretchen as your mistress. I must confess, I might have had a hard time choosing between the two…”

  “Bobby, what is your fucking point?”

  “I’m sorry I upset you,” he said, lightly touching my sleeve. “I just hoped that you were writing about the Yarnell case.”

  “Rest your worried mind,” I snarled.

  We walked in silence for a moment, then he said, “I am not one to seek anything to which I am not entitled. But I did save your life, David.”

  “You did.”

  “So the one time I really did shoot someone in the sheriff’s jurisdiction was to save his best friend.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue and teeth. By that time, we had reached the bus stop.

  “Used any ice picks lately?” I asked.

  “Such an imagination,” he laughed. “Where are you parked?”

  “I took the bus, Bobby.”

  “Very responsible.” He applauded softly. “Soon we’ll have light rail, and almost be like a real city. Well, I must be off.” He insisted on shaking hands again. “I don’t want to make the class wait. I’m teaching this semester, in the executive MBA program.”
>
  “Goodbye, Bobby.”

  He walked back into the campus. Then he turned, as if he had forgotten something. He said, “Do be careful out in the desert, Dr. Mapstone. And I can’t wait to read my chapter in your book.”

  12

  Counter-factual history. It’s a fancy way of imagining things—say, if America had stayed isolationist during World War II and the Nazis had won, what kind of world would we be living in? Counter-factual history: What if Bobby Hamid had not appeared three years ago when a bad guy was about to put a bullet in my brain? My world would have been over. Bobby was a killer, and I owed him my life. What if I had stayed with Gretchen? No contest there—although why did I feel the flush of guilt over remembering her? It was a guilt that probably informed my intense dislike of Patrick Blair. Lindsey and I weren’t together then. She had run away from me, remember? After we were back together, we hadn’t compared notes about our time apart. We weren’t the kind of couple who shared every detail, right down to the anatomical specifics, of our past lovers.

  A future with Gretchen would have been impossible—she lived too many lies, carried too much darkness beneath them. It had been a crazy time in my life, and not surprisingly, the liaison with Gretchen had carried all the thrill of the temporary and the dangerous. What if Lindsey hadn’t come back, come to my door that Christmas Eve? It was a history too bleak to contemplate. That winter of Gretchen and Lindsey—that was a story to tell another day.

  The bus was passing the tattered oleanders of State Hospital, where the Trunk Murderess escaped twice, when my cell phone rang. The readout glared peralta.