by Jon Talton
“Where are you?” he demanded, with no preliminaries.
“On a bus.”
There was a long pause.
“What are you doing on a bus, Mapstone?”
“Riding it.”
“Are you crazy? What’s your twenty?”
He was talking cop-speak. I told him my location.
“Get off now. I’ll pick you up at 24th and Van Buren. If they don’t throw you in the loony bin.”
I hit the call button just in time, and was soon standing on the curb with the diesel fumes and the shopping-cart mumbler. I was still thinking of counter-factual history: What if I hadn’t come back to Phoenix four years before? My world wouldn’t exist at the whim of Mike Peralta.
In only ten minutes a shining black Ford Expedition pulled up. Peralta was using his driver today. I got in the back with him. He filled up his side of the seat, but his attention was focused on a file in his lap.
“Who is Louis Bell?” he asked, still reading.
I was in a brain fugue for a moment, then remembered sharply.
“He’s the brother of a guy who was found dead in the desert,” I said evenly.
“Harry Bell?”
“Right.”
“You’re a very bad boy, Mapstone. Finding dead bodies when you are supposed to be working on our book.”
“Sorry,” I said, staring at the red ears of the young deputy driving. I made myself take a quiet deep breath. There was no telling how the sheriff might react to the stimulus of insubordination, incompetence, or trying to sneak something past him. Put a gun in his face or a dying child at his feet and he’s the calmest man on the planet. He has other moods, too.
“So tell me what led you to this body of Harry Bell?”
I went through it with him as we drove. I imagined the brother had somehow complained to the Sheriff’s Office. Maybe he was mad that the chain gang tracked up the property, or a deputy had been rude. Maybe he was claiming we had robbed the corpse—I’ve seen civilians make worse charges. Sometimes they’re true. So I told Peralta about the appearance of Dana What’s-her-name, reminded him in fact that he had briefly seen her the day he was leaving my office. He refused to remember. I told him about Mrs. Every Soccer Mom, with her hands in her lap and her memories of me as a teacher. About the letter from her father, with a confession to homicide and precise directions to the body.
“Where are we going?” We were now on the Red Mountain Freeway, speeding past Tempe Town Lake.
Peralta set aside his folder and looked at me. His eyes were unreadable. “You’ll see. You aren’t the only one who gets to keep secrets.”
“This wasn’t a secret,” I said. “I just didn’t think…” I let the sentence trail off.
“Go on,” he said. “You got the letter from the old man, and you went out to the desert. You find the body of this Harry Bell. Did you know him? Know his brother?”
“No and no.”
“Go on.” He opened a new file and started making notes with a gold pen.
I went on. But I was also wondering. Peralta had been a genuine friend to me over many years. Some days, though, I tired of his games, his pride in having people beholden to some transaction or obligation. I’m sure he wasn’t even aware of them, as most of us are not fully self-aware. It was worse for him. Although he was brave and charming, he was also stubborn and, on so many fronts, shut down. His curiosity didn’t extend beyond cop stuff and golf—even a younger interest in custom cars had been set aside. He didn’t read books and was proud of it. He didn’t know much beyond an encyclopedic knowledge of law enforcement, and wore that comfortably. In this, he was different from his late father, Judge Peralta, and from Sharon. They had been divorced for a year now. Without her, his worst tendencies seemed to come out. I used to think Peralta was a throwback. But now I realized that he is the American male of the new century. I admired Peralta for many things. But I wondered if I liked him.
By this time we were pulling off the Pima Freeway and entering a parking lot. It was smaller than a New England state, and full of cars. Beyond was a dun-colored building that could have been a Wal-Mart or a Best Buy. It was a big box—a big box of gambling. Going a few hundred yards east of the Scottsdale city limits made the difference. Casino Arizona was the economic prize of the Salt River Indian Reservation. We were in a sovereign nation, and also a part of suburban Phoenix. The city ended abruptly and changed to fields—the Pima and Maricopa Indians had been farming in Arizona for centuries. It was a good bet they were related to the Hohokam, the ancient people who dug the canals and settled in the valley that became Phoenix, and then disappeared. No history here, remember? Fast forward to the twenty-first century, where the sweet spot for these Indian nations is the gambling addiction of the white-eyes. Indian gaming had come to Arizona while I was living in California, and although I was vaguely aware of casinos encircling Phoenix I had never been in one. I was no prude. Gambling was one of the few vices I had passed on when going through the devil’s cafeteria line.
It was three p.m., but the parking lot was full. By the time we pulled under the portico marked for valet parking, it was clear Peralta was not thinking of an afternoon of blackjack. Several tribal police cruisers sat bumper-to-bumper, flanked by sheriff’s vehicles and unmarked sedans. I turned to Peralta. The SUV had stopped but he was getting out the door. I followed him inside, past a cordon of tribal cops.
We walked through the lobby into a vast, dimly lit space. It seemed that way, at least, after the intense sunlight outside. Light came from row upon row of slot machines packed closely together and from a discreet purple glow around the ceiling. More light identified the Pima Lounge and Starz Bar. Then the room opened into a large space under a circular ceiling. The noise was overpowering, electronic pings, blips, and gurgles, snatches of up-tempo songs that changed every few feet, nothing coherent, just a wave of unending sounds. All the sensory inputs were meant to focus on the business at hand. I recalled Grandfather’s admonition that casinos were not built by the money of the winners.
We walked quickly past the machines, which looked high tech and elaborate—not at all my memory of slots. They had names like Xanadu, S’mores, Triple-Double Diamond, and Wild Thing, and comfortable seats were attached. Few were unattended. The crowd was mostly older and badly dressed, although that description embraced much of the population of Greater Phoenix. From the slack look of their faces, they could have been working in a textile mill. Nobody looked to be having a good time. None turned to notice as we walked through, escorted by two linebacker-sized tribal cops in uniform.
Then we were alone, stepping around a row of chairs that had been set up to block off a far province of the slots empire. More tribal police stood watch. Beyond them, all I could see was a circle of men wearing plainclothes and badges on their belts. One of them broke free: Patrick Blair. He looked at me with the suppressed glee of a tattling child. Then another man came forward. He was small, with worried, hooded eyes and TV preacher hair. He wore an olive dress shirt and tie of the kind picked out by a certain kind of wife. He was a white man with a loud whisper.
“Sheriff, we need to deal with this quietly and get this out of the sight of our patrons.”
“Everyone here will have to be interviewed before they can leave,” Peralta said.
“But that could be two hundred people.”
“Everybody,” Peralta said. He looked around. “I don’t see anybody taking offense. Anyway, it’s a tribal and federal case…”
I left them talking and walked ten feet farther.
“So the professor didn’t tell the sheriff about his little adventure…”
“Fuck you, Blair.” I was all out of devastating one-liners.
Our dustup was threatening to disturb a man who was sitting before a big slot machine called Damnation Alley. The machine was still making sounds of gunfire and action-movie music. It informed us that it could take every kind of bill up to twenty dollars. The man looked frail inside a check
ed short-sleeve shirt and old blue jeans. Some gamblers are so dedicated they will sit for hours before the slots. It’s understandable they might even fall asleep on one. Unfortunately, the small man slumped backward in the seat was merely perfectly balanced by some odd combination of gravity, body mass, and the onset of rigor mortis. When I saw the ice pick handle protruding from his right ear, I’m sure the whole casino could hear the catch in my throat.
Blair watched me. “His wallet’s gone. But I met him a while back, with Snyder, when we interviewed him about his brother’s body being found in the desert.”
“Louis Bell.”
13
The small, worried manager conveyed us to an office that overlooked the casino through a darkened, one-way window. I followed Peralta inside and the casino manager went away. The office was large, with a highly polished wood floor, and ornamented with Indian pottery and baskets. A bank of television screens showed different angles of the casino. Out the window, I could see the detectives and crime-scene technicians still gathered around Damnation Alley, as if they expected the corpse of Louis Bell to hit the big payout. If so, it would give the manager yet another reason to worry. Or maybe celebrate. I could imagine the billboards around town: “Casino Arizona, Where You CAN Take It With You.” Peralta had moved to the large leather chair behind a long modern desk with a bare top. The chair barely contained his bulk. He just stared at me.
“Well?” I said.
He just shrugged, turning down the corners of his face so he briefly had bulldog jowls. The room was silent. The miniature city of lights out the window gave a sense of the symphony of odds and desperate hopes that lay beyond the thick glass. I walked along the wall, touching the window. The glass was cold. I was cold, and felt fifty pounds heavier from the gathering oppression.
I started talking. “The last time I saw an ice pick used that way was on the Willo home tour. It was stuck in the ear of a man who was lying naked in his bedroom. He owned some check-cashing outlets. Apparently clean—you told me this. Maybe somebody was trying to muscle in, take protection money.”
Peralta was swinging slowly in the chair, a heavy pendulum of fate. He said nothing.
“I don’t know how that gets us to Louis Bell,” I said. “And so ballsy, taking him out in a crowded casino. That’s sending a message, right?”
Peralta was looking at the ceiling. I went on, “All I know about Louis is that he honored his brother’s last request, to be buried on his own land. This is Arizona, property rights as God and all that. Harry’s property was way the hell out beyond the White Tank Mountains. It’s good for nothing, unless you want to wait fifty years for Phoenix and LA to grow together. Otherwise, Harry was retired. He lived in a trailer near Hyder. The autopsy came back clean, I guess. So we have two desert rat brothers, and now one gets an ice pick in the ear. I was trying to stay out of this, remember? Follow orders and write a book.”
The room was large and without sound again. The floor made weird ghosts of the light coming from recessed positions in the ceiling. I didn’t meet his eyes. The bank of television monitors on the other wall got my attention—whoever sat here could watch everything from the blackjack dealer’s hands to the parking lot. Maybe one of them would reveal who scrambled Louis Bell’s brains. I was growing angry with Peralta for the silent treatment, and at myself for feeling like a kid who was in trouble. What the hell did I do wrong? What was it about his moods that bred paranoia?
“You know about the woman named Dana,” I said. “I don’t need to go into that again.”
I sat on a hard leather loveseat. Maybe the furniture was intended to make whoever sat there uncomfortable, be he employee facing dismissal or unruly customer. I knew the routine. I could feel the anger radiating off him. He didn’t like surprises, especially ones that embroiled the Sheriff’s Office in other jurisdictions, especially when he might not be able to run the show, as would happen with the feds. Soon he would explode—his rages were always frightening, even if you had lived through a dozen of them, even if you knew the generosity he was capable of in other circumstances. My stomach was tight. My mind was bouncing around the room, down to the slot machines, glancing off the corpse of Louis Bell, and ricocheting back to the glass office. I wondered what Sharon would say. I missed her. They had been married for thirty years, and now she was his “ex-wife.” That construction was still foreign. For all the years I knew them it was Mike and Sharon, never just Mike. She had been his awkward young shadow when Peralta and I were first partners. Even then, I like to flatter myself that I could detect a spark, a curiosity. Then she had gone back to school, eventually earning her Ph.D. in psychology. Later she would become the famous radio psychologist, the best-selling author. That seemed like a long time ago. Now she was in San Francisco in a new life. And I was cooped up in this glass cell with her ex-husband.
I said, “It doesn’t seem to me that this is our problem. The guy in Willo is a Phoenix PD case. This one is tribal cops and the FBI…”
I was talking to myself. Talking myself out of the obvious. All the ways human beings hurt each other in Maricopa County, Arizona, and I’m just the egghead who paws through the old records, clears out the old cases. So what if I’m bracketed by homicide by ice picks. What’s the connection between Alan Cordesman, check-cashing king, and Louis Bell, old fart at the casino? Not my problem. Murder in the next block of my neighborhood? It can happen anywhere. Same MO used for the brother of a dead man I discovered courtesy of my mysterious former student? Coincidence. Hell, maybe it was the new killing method being shown in gangsta videos or wherever the pathologies of our civilization are passed on today. It wasn’t my problem. Unfortunately, that’s not what the worry pain in my middle told me.
Out of a dry mouth I said, “I need to find this woman, Dana. She’s a connection somehow.”
“I agree,” he said evenly. He stopped swinging in the chair.
I stared at him. “You agree? What about me being chained to your book, trying to be a real historian—I think that’s how you put it—not being a hot dog, and not interfering with a PPD investigation?”
His large eyes filled with innocent surprise. “Why are you so upset, Mapstone…?”
Movement drew our eyes to the big window. The crowd surged like disturbed water, and we saw several uniformed officers pushing through. They appeared to be chasing someone. I looked at Peralta, but he was already halfway to the door. We walked quickly down the steps. Getting across the casino floor was easy by following in the jetstream of Peralta. Then we burst out the door into the blinding sunshine. Four tribal cops were handcuffing a slight Hispanic kid. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, with a razor cut and dramatic thick eyebrows. He had that odd look of the newly arrested, part confusion and part defiance. One of the tribal cops explained what had happened.
“He tried to make a run for it, and when we caught him he had this in his pocket.”
Peralta pulled out a handkerchief and took the wallet, then carefully opened it.
He said, “Driver’s license says Louis Bell.”
14
I had my plan for that evening. Mexican food with Lindsey at Los Dos Molinos and then some reconnect time at home. The restaurant sat near the foot of the South Mountains in a building that was once Tom Mix’s house. And even though the cowboy star was long gone, the place was the best in town for the kind of New Mexico-style cuisine that is so spicy it makes you sweat. Even with the tourists fleeing the impending summer, Los Dos was crowded. The hostess was so unbending I’m convinced even Peralta couldn’t just walk in and get a table. So, after putting our name on the waiting list, we did the usual penance with the crowd on the patio, eased by beer and chips.
“So he was killed while playing slots?” Lindsey kept her voice down and her eyes wide with interest. “Talk about hitting God’s jackpot.”
“Or not,” I said. “Catching the suspect with the victim’s wallet in front of a hundred witnesses ought to be enough that even Patrick Blair c
ould get a conviction.”
“Dave,” she laughed. “What has he ever done to you?”
Part of me would have loved to ask. Ask, that is, what has he ever done to Lindsey? Part of me cowered in primitive emotions and another part was alive with aroused voyeurism. How odd: to have lived a life of the mind; that life was supposed to tame and mediate those nasty feelings, take them out and study them, make them safe, even boring. Mountbatten, the last British viceroy in India, was cuckolded by Nehru—that gave the historians a laugh. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t enjoyed enough romantic adventures to make up for my youthful awkwardness. Then I won the great prize that sat across from me, sipping her Modelo Especial and dipping a chip into the hottest salsa. So I didn’t ask…and I didn’t tell, either, about Gretchen. Lindsey said she didn’t want to know that much about my old lovers, that it was better for her mental health. She was wise as always.
“Professor…” she said, squeezing my hand. “You have that faraway look.”
I smiled at her. Her dark hair shone lustrously in the dimness. It brushed her collar when she moved her head.
I said, “Tell me about your day.”
“Just computer stuff,” she said. “Still helping our good friends at the Justice Department.”
“You are such a big deal.”
“To you. And I’m glad of that. It kind of scares me what we can do now—how little privacy people have, and they don’t even know it. But it scares me that bad guys like terrorists can hide their money in cyberspace and move it with the touch of a finger. So…”
She let the words trail off. Inside the cantina, I could hear the third rendition of “Hotel California” by the guitarist. He had drunken accompaniment from some patrons.
Lindsey went on, “Robin thinks what we do is a threat to civil liberties. I never thought of it that way. But maybe she’s right.”
