by Jon Talton
“How is she doing? Peralta wants to know.”
“Really? Peralta courting my sister. That’s too weird to contemplate.” She made a face. “I think she’d be a handful for any man, so I’m glad she’s got this Edward. Although I’d like to meet him. Why do you think she hasn’t introduced us to him? Am I being a typical big sister?”
I shook my head, nodded. She laughed. My insides were so relieved that our spat of the morning was forgotten.
“I don’t know how to be a normal sister,” she said. “I don’t know what that’s like. Maybe there’s no such thing. But the training sure wouldn’t have come from my family. Sometimes I can’t figure Robin out. We’ll be going along, and something I say will set her off. She can be very emotional. We had a fight yesterday where she essentially blamed me for Linda killing herself. Then it was over and she apologized and we made up. It can be a roller-coaster.” She brushed back an errant strand of hair. “I heard a radio report the other day…I kind of half heard it. But some expert was talking about how relationships are like physics, and if you’re really into somebody you feel everything—love, hate, fear. It made me think, at least. So if I seemed like a bitch this morning, I’m so sorry, Dave.”
“No, no,” I said. “I was out of line. I’m being too hard on Robin.”
“She likes you, Dave. She thinks you’re very smart and attractive.”
I was going to speak, but then the loudspeaker called our name and we went toward the cantina. Another round of “Hotel California” was starting up.
By the time we paid our bill and headed for the parking lot, it was closing in on eleven o’clock. But instead of turning north on Central toward the city, Lindsey steered to the right.
“What?”
“You’ll find out.”
Now it was clear that Lindsey had her plan for the evening, too. She turned on Dobbins and avoided the closed entrance to the park. We headed east past houses that hadn’t been there when I was a kid—that statement could be my standard disclaimer about virtually any Arizona vista. Then the park came closer to the road. Lindsey pulled off the road and gave me a long, luxurious kiss.
She pointed to a sleeping bag in the back seat. “You could carry that.”
“The park closed at sunset,” I mumbled.
“So call the police.”
Our walk was lit by stars and city lights. They made the barrel cactuses and boulders into shadowy companions as we picked our way up a steady incline. Critters scampered away with snaps and rustles as we walked. I wanted to think they were all jackrabbits and roadrunners. But the landscape seemed benign. The night was as dry as an old manuscript, with the desert air offering no resistance to our hike. She gave me her hand and I helped her across a break in the rocks. Ahead of us were the low mountains that are a fixture in the Phoenix landscape. Lost? Check your directions by the mountains. But from where we stood, they presented themselves as a steady black uplift that suddenly cut off leaving nothing but sky. Our navigation stars came from the television towers above the Dobbins Overlook, dozens of red lights blinking reassuringly. I had hiked these trails many times as a Cub Scout, but was ashamed to say I hadn’t been back since I returned home to Phoenix as an adult. But I wasn’t feeling like a Cub Scout right that moment.
Lindsey took the sleeping bag out of my hand and deposited it on the ground. We stood on a sandy, flat pause in the earth, surrounded by saguaros and rocks the size of sentinels. Above us, the torrid red stars pulsed and below us Phoenix spread out like a galaxy turned on its side. We just watched the lights, saying nothing. I slipped my hand around her waist, a feeling so wonderfully familiar—so right—and yet still so novel. The only sound was the everywhere-and-nowhere roar of the city below us. Then she was unbuttoning my shirt.
All the stars were still glowing later. Lindsey lay back against me. I nuzzled her neck and draped an arm over her breasts. Her fair skin was my oasis amid the blackness of the desert at night.
“Tell me a story, History Shamus.”
“South Mountain Park is the largest municipal park in the world. The only historic murder I know of happened in…”
She shook her head. “Tell me a hopeful story.”
I pushed my nose through her soft hair and nibbled her ear. She laughed her low, adult laugh. The horizon of lights blinked insistently. Amid the lights, the night was clear enough to make out Camelback Mountain miles to the north.
“This place lay abandoned for four hundred years,” I said, “except for the ghosts of its past and the phantasms of its possibilities. Here was one of the most fertile river valleys in the world. A Nile or a Euphrates. And yet, if you had ridden your horse into it in 1870, you would have found it empty.”
“I like this story,” she said.
“It’s called Phoenix because it rose from its ashes, like the bird of mythology. The ashes were the Hohokam, who built one of the most advanced irrigation societies in the New World. But the river was capricious—flooding in the spring, but then going years with barely a trickle. The Hohokam civilization disappeared—what happened is still a mystery. Then after the Civil War, settlers found this place and cleared out the old Indian canals. They were on the verge of abandoning it, too. But they dreamed what it could be. And mighty acts of faith and technology made the desert bloom. Now it’s the fifth-largest city in the nation.”
She leaned her head back and kissed me.
“You’re a romantic,” she said.
I adjusted myself so I could feel the length of her back against my chest. I said, “When I was a kid, the city was surrounded by fields and citrus groves. From up here in the daytime, we could have looked down and seen orange trees, then the Japanese flower gardens—they seemed to go on forever. Then, the city. It was beautiful. Too bad we had to pave it all over.”
“I wish I could have seen it, History Shamus. I just don’t know why we have to lose so much that’s beautiful.”
It was after one a.m. when we turned down Cypress Street. My body was feeling worked out and giddy in a way that comes from only one source. I was already imagining curling up in bed with my lover. But someone was on the porch, sitting on the step.
“What is Robin doing here,” Lindsey said sleepily. Then, in a tense voice, “My God, look at her eye.”
15
The city kept growing. Mile-long trains brought lumber and steel that soon became buildings. Eternal desert turned into ephemeral subdivisions, offices and retail strips. Sixteen billion dollars in new highways. Four thousand new construction jobs a month. From mountain reservoirs and a canal from the Colorado River came 400 billion gallons of water a year to support a megalopolis in a place that received a mere seven inches of rain a year. The growth leapt over mountain ranges and rerouted rivers. It inspired new policy centers at the university and lively debates in the newspaper. You heard it in the rhythm of heavy equipment and nail guns, and the music of melodious Spanish spoken by the framing crews in a hundred developments. You saw it in the ubiquitous pickup trucks of contractors and tradesmen, lined up in traffic on the freeways and ornamenting subdivision driveways. As May turned into June and the temperature shot above one hundred ten, I was reminded that our summers were getting longer and hotter. But hardly anyone in Phoenix had been around long enough to know this.
Robin moved in with us, staying in the small apartment over the garage that connected to the main house by the walkway that led off the living room. You got to it by taking the bookcase-backed stairway on the north end of the living room. The arrangement had been my suggestion, made after a very long night when we had found her battered and waiting for us on the front step. She had had a fight with her boyfriend, the elusive Edward. The damage to Robin was a nasty purple splotch growing around her left eye. Lindsey had immediately wanted to call the police. Then she was ready to arrest him herself. I had never seen my wife so depart from the preternatural calm that is so much a part of her. At one point, Robin was physically holding Lindsey back from the phone or t
he door. Robin said she, too, was to blame, and had given as good as she got in the fight. She just wanted to get away from Edward and let the relationship be over.
Lindsey, who had seen plenty of domestic violence as a young deputy, would have none of it. “The woman always blames herself,” she said. “This asshole will do it again, if not with you then with someone else.” And then: “You know this happened to Linda more than once. We watched it happen, remember?”
I felt out of my element, watching these two women who, until a few months ago, hadn’t seen each other in years and yet were connected by invisible strings of blood and personal history. I fetched ice for Robin, and mostly kept my mouth shut. There are times to not take charge. Finally, though, I broke the stalemate. Robin would stay with us for a few days. I offered to go with her the next day to retrieve her things from Edward’s house. But she refused help, saying that he was leaving on a business trip and the next day it would be safe for her to go alone. Lindsey never wavered from wanting to arrest and prosecute the bastard, as she unfailingly referred to him.
Two weeks later, Robin was still in the little apartment that had served, at various times, as Grandmother’s sewing room and Grandfather’s office. Nobody seemed to mind the arrangement. Lindsey was on loan to the Justice Department, so she left early for the federal building downtown. Some days I worked at home, and this gave me my first one-on-one conversations with my sister-in-law. She talked a lot, much of it about herself. But just when it risked becoming tedious, she was suddenly very interested in me, in my experiences and opinions.
Sometimes, I thought she was testing me.
“Lindsey’s gained weight,” she pronounced one day.
“I think she’s beautiful,” I said.
“I hadn’t seen her in years,” she said. “Anyway, maybe it’s because she’s happy.”
Other times, I began to see her inner turbulence. One morning we started talking about a college education, but by the end Robin was nearly shrieking at me about how she’d had to go to work when she was fourteen and I was being a snob. She had attended the University of Delaware, so I don’t know where she got the impression I was looking down on her. Later she apologized. But we had other talks that took the same course—not many, but once in a while. I came to realize that Robin had a very different emotional arc from Lindsey.
Robin was a major jock and enjoyed running through Willo. When I was home, she would stop in the study after her run to talk. I would get close to heat exhaustion from the two-block walk to the bus stop. She merely displayed a healthy glisten of sweat and breathed as easy as if she were sleeping. In her running togs, she was quite a specimen: tanned, muscled, and leonine with her thick, long hair. She was leggy like Lindsey, but her calves and quads were well defined. Her breasts were larger. This was all women-in-the-abstract, a condition that comes from a satisfying marriage to the woman you find most attractive in the world. And even in my hungriest horn-dog days, I wouldn’t have let myself contemplate my wife’s sister. And she still had that cute boy’s face.
“Lindsey Faith was always the pretty one,” she said as if reading my thoughts. “I think I look more like my dad. She has Linda’s beauty. But I’d say she’s luckier in love. I hope so, David. Don’t take that the wrong way, I’m just kind of down on all relationships right now.”
I said I could understand.
“The old me would really hate Lindsey for what she has. With you, the house, the whole domestic bliss routine.” She winked at me. “But that’s the old me. Lindsey told me you lost your folks when you were a baby. And you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
She looked away and said, “I always felt alone, too.”
I had my own distraction: finding Dana. In this, I couldn’t have been worse off. I had no name I was certain of. No date of birth. No Social Security Number. These were the essentials for taking advantage of the vast and growing tentacles of law enforcement. I had no photo—just her story, a lie no doubt, and the memory of her face and manner, flawed I am sure. Eyewitness accounts are often so. When I was a patrol deputy, we called them “eye-witless”—fifty people can see the same event and each could have a different and conflicting recollection. That was proving true in the investigation of the ice-pick murder of Louis Bell. The medical examiner fixed the time of death at around eleven that morning, and for two hours he sat slumped into the chair where he was finally discovered. Still, there had been around two hundred fifty people in the casino. All had been interviewed by the cops, and nobody remembered seeing anything. He might have gone undiscovered for hours longer had not a grandmother from Sun City been antsy to play the slot machine he was blocking.
But we had a suspect anyway. His name was Jesus Esparza, age eighteen, a small-time hood with burglary, pickpocket, and prostitution arrests. The feds liked him for the murder, and Phoenix PD was looking to connect him to the Cordesman murder. That one might be trickier, considering there was no forced entry and apparently nothing missing. This brought Peralta back to his first theory. Maybe Esparza was a hustler that Cordesman had picked up and taken home. Cordesman was single, and the neighbors didn’t recall seeing any women come and go from the house. I was more skeptical. I couldn’t set aside the visit from my former student to send me on a fool’s errand in the desert, one that had led me to one body, to the Bell brothers, and finally to Louis Bell with an ice pick in his brain.
I was down to calling every person named Underwood and Watkins in the phone book. This yielded nothing but ill will for the Sheriff’s Office, as if I were just another telemarketer. I could bet I was on the verge of ill will from the sheriff himself, every day that I didn’t produce the soccer mom with the letter from dear old dad. The second Monday in June, I drove out to a construction site in Maricopa, following my last lead. Just a few years before, this village stood as an isolated dust-catcher on the other side of the South Mountains. Its momentary importance had come a century before, when it was the connection to the railroad from Phoenix. But as I drove out the long, two-lane highway, I could see how much had changed. Subdivisions rose on both sides of the road, completed houses or framing, behind mud-colored walls. The combination of the dun-colored, flat land and monotonous new housing was numbing. The “yards” in front of each house were not even large enough to plant one tree. I didn’t get the appeal. But part of it must have come from signs promising prices in the high ninety-thousands, well below Phoenix proper.
My destination was an uninspiring expanse of desert, where I found a man sitting in a new Mercedes convertible. He got out and introduced himself as Josh.
“Hope my directions were good, Deputy Mapstone,” he said, pronouncing it like “Map-stun.” “I’m all over the Valley in my job, so I appreciate you working around that.” He had a pale, round face and shaved head. Although he wore expensive-looking slacks, he topped them off with a T-shirt. It showed an image of the planet and the caption: “Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is water. The rest is available.”
“Sure,” I said. “What exactly do you do?”
“I assemble land,” he said. He was a fast talker. “Me and my partners. This here,” he poked his thumb at the desert, “this will eventually be five thousand homes. But first we have to put together the deal for the developers. A property this size might come from twenty or thirty different purchases of land. Some of them are just a few acres; maybe a family’s held it for generations. The trick is to get these farmers to sell.”
“Is it hard?”
“Nah,” he said. “But they keep wanting more money.”
“I saw your name in the Miami alumni newsletter,” I said. “You contributed an item about an alum who had received a community award here.”
“Yeah, Ted Griffin. You must do some obscure reading,” he said, slower now.
“I wondered if you might be in touch with people here who attended Miami?”
“Not really,” he said. “A few. You can’t swing a dead cat in Phoenix without hitting som
ebody from Ohio.”
I told him who I was after, and he shook his head faster with each specific detail of Dana’s description. Hell, I knew I was playing long hunches, but they were all I had left. In a few minutes, I left him with his Mercedes and his empty land, and I began the long, depressing drive back to the city. To make matters worse, the old county Crown Vic only had an AM radio, so I absently pushed buttons to take me from commercial-filled rock stations to commercial-filled country stations. I almost didn’t hear it.
“Arizona Dreams,” the voice said. “Your home town. Imagine a master-planned community that’s a real community, with real neighborhoods, like you remember from when you were a kid. We’re imagining that for you, at Arizona Dreams…”
The sales pitch was droning on long after I had slammed on the brakes and pulled off next to a cotton field. The only thing I was buying was the voice. That pleasant voice with a hint of butterscotch.
I said out loud, “Hello, Dana.”
16
Two days later, I borrowed Lindsey’s Prelude, put Coleman Hawkins in the CD player and got on the freeway. Even though I played “Father Cooperates” twice, it occurred to me how out of place the music was for Phoenix suburban commuting. This was music for city sidewalks and basement jazz clubs, for smoky introspection. It didn’t blur your mind, like country or hip-hop. Hawkins made you want to be right there, listening to every note. He was out of place here, like me. I went east on the Red Mountain Freeway, trying to beat the afternoon rush hour. It was only two o’clock. But I hit traffic by the time I came to Tempe, and it never let up. One of the perverse outcomes of years of a building mania on the city fringes was that the supposedly quiet suburbs suffered from monstrous congestion. Things got worse when I came to the Price Freeway and turned south.
In another thirty minutes, I landed in Gilbert. For a few minutes, I just drove around, getting my bearings. When I was in college, this had been a tiny farm town surrounded by fields, far from the nearest inkling of city. Now it was dense with red tile roofs, that tedious signature of the Phoenix building industry. I drove past subdivisions with names like Summer Meadows, Neely Ranch, and Madera Parc. I wondered if that “c” on “parc” let the developer add another ten percent to the price. And there probably once had been a Neely Ranch, a real ranch. But all I saw now were houses jammed together on the flat former farmland.
