Arizona Dreams

by Jon Talton

  I looked down side streets: the fronts of the stucco houses were mostly garage doors, all the same paint scheme, no trees. And yet families were clamoring to get to Gilbert, if the newspaper was to be believed. The East Valley cities of Gilbert, Chandler, and Queen Creek, along with the Ahwatukee section of Phoenix, had become the white, upper-middle-class promised land of the Valley. There were two geographies of the mind here. For me, I looked around and saw all that was lost: citrus groves and flower gardens, clean air and a sweeter town. But for the newcomers, and almost everyone was, this was clean and new and warm. They had the good schools, youth sports, chain stores, and long drives that characterized the upper-income American suburban life. That, and they didn’t see anyone with brown or black skin or anyone who was poor.

  It was an unsettling geography. Neighborhoods didn’t connect to anything. Neighborhoods segregated by “price point.” Each was walled off from the world. The main roads were seven or eight lanes wide, separated from everything else by wide berms and landscaped dead zones. The buildings were all brand new, but sterile. At the dawn of the twentieth century, architects like Daniel Burnham had sought to create lovely and humane civic design. So was born the City Beautiful Movement. Now our newly built spaces were all about maximum profit. They were spaces of convenience and automobiles and yet at the human level they were spaces for prosaic drudgery. The City Beautiful streets of Willo and central Phoenix might as well have been a world away.

  And yet, I came upon a little town embedded in all this new suburbia. It was poignantly out of place, with its humble ranch houses with their low roofs. Once fields had surrounded them; now it was fields of houses. I crossed the Consolidated Canal and pulled into the Mormon Church parking lot to check my map. Finding Dana hadn’t been easy. But I called in a favor from a radio producer I knew, and she supplied a phone number for the woman who did the Arizona Dreams ad. Then I cross-referenced the number for the address.

  Dana’s house was located in a nicer part of town. Here the subdivisions were named Lakeside, Crystal Shores, and Regatta, and the houses were blessed with a rolling landscape, lush grass, older trees, and shade. A road took me over a bridge where I could see the lake that backed up to the houses. Some sizable boats were tied up. It looked like a synthetic reproduction of a Florida or California development. Those were fake, but at least they could spare the water. This was also “gated community” territory. But a landscape truck was helpfully sitting across the open gate into the subdivision I was seeking, so I just drove through. Why, they’ll let anybody come in.

  The house looked like every other one on the street, aside from a subtle rearrangement of some stonework or shade of tan paint. The architecture was like a mutt dog: watered-down Spanish colonial, pre-fab Tuscany, and a pinch of the homelier aspects of Tudor. There were three narrow arched windows facing the street, mounted in stucco and stonework, but somehow they didn’t seem to go with the rest of the front. A good half of the part that faced the street was a garage door. That meant most of the front yard was driveway, in this case an elaborate mix of brick and stone. What was left had been given over to a tiny lawn, unnaturally green, surrounded by beds of rocks and desert xeriscape plants. I was no architect, but let’s just say it was a long way from Willo.

  The doorbell set off a choir of dogs. I stood off to the side—it was a habit from my patrol days, when a knock might be met with gunfire through the door, and it also made sure she couldn’t see me through the peephole. There was no car in the driveway. But if she wasn’t home from work, I was willing to wait. Reiterating that willingness was about the time it took for the door to be pulled open. It was the strawberry-blonde mom from my office, and she had a merry greeting smile on her face. That is, until she saw me. She stepped back quickly and pushed at the door, but I was ready for that. I pushed back hard, sending the door into the wall and her back toward the dogs. They were two Rottweilers, and they didn’t like me one bit.

  “Get control of those dogs now or I’ll shoot them,” I said above the barking, forcing my voice down as I felt a giant pool of sweat form on my back. I put my hand on the butt of the Colt Python .357 Magnum holstered on my belt. But I didn’t retreat out of the doorjamb.

  “No, no!” Dana said quickly. “I’ll put them away. Come on, Precious, come on, Brownie.” She pulled Precious and Brownie away with difficulty and dragged them down a hallway. I gradually took my hand off the butt of the pistol and surveyed the foyer. Everything looked expensive and impersonal, as if bought whole from displays at Scottsdale stores. Then she reappeared and walked quickly toward me, and then we were outside. She closed the door behind her.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, all the butterscotch gone from her voice. “You can’t be here! I’ve got to go pick up Madison from band practice!” I didn’t budge.

  She grimaced. “My husband might be home any minute.”

  “We’ll bring him into the conversation, too,” I said.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, taking me by the arm and starting to walk toward the car. I stayed put. She had a wild look. “Do you have any idea who my husband is?”

  “Considering you lied about who you are, no.”

  “He’s Tom Earley.”

  At first it didn’t sink in. I shrugged my shoulders and started to speak.

  She cut me off. “County Supervisor Tom Earley.” She said it emphasizing every syllable.

  I drew in a breath and looked at her. This was the guy who had been questioning my job to Peralta. I felt a strange caution shiver from my spine up into my brain. I set it aside.

  I said, “So? That’s not my problem. Sheriff Peralta has put politicians in jail before. And he has nice facilities for their wives, too.”

  I thought she was going to faint. “Mapstone,” she stuttered, “I can’t…I didn’t…”

  “You did,” I said. “You filed a false report. That’s against the law.”

  “But I…” She grabbed my arm again, her eyes glistening in near-tears. “Please give me a chance to explain.”

  “I am. Invite me inside. We can have a nice long talk. Reminisce about the days at Miami. That beautiful campus in Oxford. What a great teacher I was.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “I cannot let Tom find you here! Please…meet me tomorrow. I promise I’ll tell you everything. Please!”

  I was ready to be a hardass, but something in her plea softened me. I’m a patsy. So we agreed on a time and place for the next day. I told her I would be back on her doorstep with uniformed deputies if she failed to show up. Even inside my car, I could still hear the dogs barking.

  I drove back downtown on the Price Freeway, watching the hardening of the traffic arteries going in the other direction. What a lifestyle. Out to the suburbs. Out to safety. That was the theory, at least. Yet the paper that morning told of a girl being abducted and raped not a half mile from the walled subdivision I had just left. And the running gunbattle down Chandler Boulevard the night before. A fourteen-year-old girl had guns at home and a plan to shoot up her school in Gilbert. And the armored-car guard gunned down in Ahwatukee. So no place was safe. Which was good for job security in law enforcement, unless you were the freak with the Ph.D. in history who was a patsy for wives with excuses. Somewhere in the gridlock, County Supervisor Tom Earley was headed back to his lifestyle, and his Dana with secrets. I wondered if he still wanted to X me out of the sheriff’s budget. He probably would really want to now. I was on the way home to Lindsey and a martini, a much preferable destination.

  17

  Business was strong at the Home Depot on Grand Avenue. That was true, at least, on the curb at the edge of the parking lot, where the independent contractors that comprised Phoenix’s piece of the global economy did what they could. They were lean brown men in jeans, with ball caps and cowboy hats, their number fluctuating around a dozen depending on the traffic. I watched as a Ford pickup stopped, engaged in a curbside negotiation. Three men then jumped in the truck bed and
it drove off to whatever construction or landscaping work was to be done. I wondered what was the going rate? Five bucks an hour? A tidy fortune compared to the men’s poor villages in the interior of Mexico or Central America. Dana watched me watching the commerce.

  “They should send them all back to Mexico,” she said primly. “That’s what my husband says.”

  “That will be a neat trick,” I said, “considering there are probably half a million illegals in just a few miles around us.”

  Dana looked at me with alarm.

  “They won’t hurt you,” I said. “Anyway, how would you be able to buy so much house for the money without illegal immigrant labor.”

  “You’re such a cynic, David,” she said. “I keep wanting to call you Dr. Mapstone.”

  We were sitting inside her gray SUV. It was called an Armada, and seemed at least two stories above ground and suitably armored to protect us from the Home Depot parking lot. We were far from Gilbert, hard by the railroad tracks and the ever expanding west side barrio, far enough for Dana to feel safe meeting me. I said, “I don’t care what you call me. We’re not friends. You’re lucky I didn’t arrest you yesterday.”

  Her face flushed further, a neat trick. It started to match the scarlet blouse she was wearing.

  “I really was at Miami,” she said. “And you really were my teacher.”

  “What year?” I demanded.

  “Nineteen eighty-five.”

  “Where did class meet?”

  “The room? I don’t know. Somewhere in Upham Hall.”

  I watched her carefully, but she stared straight ahead, avoiding my glare. She added, “I had quite a crush on you.”

  “You’re still lying.”

  “I didn’t lie!” she said, her voice rising. She scolded me as if I were one of her kids running the television too loud. “You found a body, didn’t you? Right where the note said.”

  “The man in the desert was killed by your father?”

  “That’s what the note said!”

  I explained that Harry Bell’s body had only been in the desert a few weeks, not since the mid-1960s. I wondered if I would be so patient if her husband weren’t a county supervisor. She stared so hard at the windshield her eyes might have popped out and made a run for it. Then she started sniffling and tears beat her eyes to the exit.

  “Try again,” I said.

  “Bastard!”

  “You had a crush on me, remember?”

  We sat in silence, the only sound being the quiet purr of the engine and the air conditioning. Outside, the temperature was climbing above a hundred. Soon it would be hot enough to make all the new transplants wonder what the hell they were thinking when they decided to move here. Inside, I was uneasy. The more I had thought about Dana and Tom Earley—“stewed about it,” as Lindsey would say—the more I worried that I was being used to embarrass the sheriff. It made sense: this persistent critic of the Sheriff’s Office, and me in particular, had sent his wife to concoct a historic case. Then Mapstone would waste sheriff’s resources digging up a man who had died of natural causes and only wanted to be buried on his own land. Why the hell was I sitting here? I should have been alerting Peralta. But if this was the game, why hadn’t the trap been sprung back in February when we discovered the body?

  My misgivings were interrupted by the sound of sobs. Dana was bent forward with her face in her hands.

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “It’s my fault.”

  “What is your fault?” I asked.

  “This,” she said. “Misleading you. There was no real letter from my father. He’s alive and living in Gold Canyon. I needed help. I didn’t know where to turn.”

  I kept quiet.

  “Back in the late eighties, my husband was a partner with two vile little men, Harry and Louis Bell. Tom was just building his real-estate business, and the Bells owned some land in Tempe. We developed a little shopping center. There was lots of savings and loan money then, so everybody was doing something.”

  As her tears subsided, she talked straight-ahead and business-like. Gone was the elliptical ditziness that she had shown in my office, whether it was an act or not.

  “The Bells swindled us,” she continued. “It was a complicated case, so I won’t bore you with the details. We took them to court, and won. But they filed for bankruptcy, and we never got a dime.”

  I settled back in my seat and said nothing. Across the parking lot, business had slowed down. The men milled about like a meaningless picket line. The combination of heat and exhaust fumes in the air gave them an insubstantial, ghostly look.

  “Well,” she went on, “about two years ago, I started getting phone calls. It was a man, he didn’t give his name, He always called when Tom was gone. He said he had information that we had broken the law on the shopping center investment, and he asked for money to keep quiet about it.”

  “Who was this?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I always thought it must be Harry Bell. Tom was very successful and well-known by then. So Harry was going to get revenge for being forced into bankruptcy.”

  “Why not go to the police?”

  Dana stared straight ahead. She kept running her finger along her seat belt shoulder strap like a barber sharpening a straight razor.

  I said, “So Bell had something on you and your husband.”

  “Look, it was a long time ago,” she said. Now her hand clutched the shoulder strap. “This man said he could prove that Tom had defrauded his partners and the RTC in the shopping center deal. Well, those were the Bell brothers. He claimed he had documents. He said he would go to the media.”

  “Did he defraud them?”

  “Of course not!” she said.

  “So why not go to the cops?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “My husband is a great man. He has so much to give. I couldn’t let them hurt him this way. I never even told him about the calls. So I agreed to pay. I had inherited some money a few years back from my aunt. Ten thousand dollars. It seemed worth it to protect Tom. It was just like a movie. I took out the money as one-hundred-dollar bills, and put them in a gym bag. He told me to take the bag to Superstition Springs Mall and leave it behind this certain palm tree in the south parking lot. And I did. Three days later I got the documents in the mail.”

  I was sweating despite the air conditioning going full blast. I said, “I still don’t believe you. Want to try another lie?”

  “This is the truth,” she said quietly.

  “The calls stopped after I paid,” she went on. “For a while. Then, after the first of the year, they started again. This time the man said he knew my husband had killed Harry Bell. It just sounded mad. But I looked in the newspaper to see if there was a death notice, and there was. It didn’t say much. There was no word about how he died. Then one Saturday, a letter comes in the mail. It has a photo of this rocky grave in the desert and instructions on how to get there. Thank God, Tom wasn’t home to see this. There was a note. It said I was to pay $100,000 or he would go to the police with evidence that Tom had killed Harry Bell and put him out there. So I came to you.” She stared at me and her large green eyes looked liquid—with tears, emotion, acting, I couldn’t tell.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Why would you come to me? How did you even know about me?”

  “I really was in your class, David,” she said, touching my hand. I drew it back. “You don’t even remember me.”

  I couldn’t recall her at all. I wondered if I was lost in the fog of a brain in its forties, or if I were being played as a patsy.

  I said, “So why not tell me the truth? Why lie?”

  “I had to protect Tom,” she said, her eyes closed tightly. “He has enemies, you see. Any great man does. If I had gone to the real police, and told them I had paid blackmail money—it would have been all over the newspaper.”

  “So instead of the real police, you came to the play police—me.”

  “Plea
se.” She touched my hand again. “Don’t be offended. I thought if I gave you a trail, you’d follow it and get these people who were doing this to us. I read the papers and watch TV. I know some of the big cases you’ve cracked. So I gave you the story that I did. If a man had been murdered and buried out there, you could get to the bottom of it. And it obviously worked. I haven’t gotten another letter or phone call.”

  I angled myself to face her and moved in close. I didn’t want her to have a chance to look away.

  “There’s just one problem,” I said. “If you suspected the Bell brothers of blackmailing you, then you had a perfect motive for murdering Louis Bell.”

  Her eyes widened and she swallowed with difficulty. “What are you saying?” she rasped.

  “Louis Bell was murdered last week. Somebody stuck an ice pick in his brain.”

  She shook her head and said nothing.

  “Do you know the name Alan Cordesman?” I demanded.

  “No! What do you want from me?”

  “The truth.”

  “I am telling you the truth!” she screamed.

  We just stared at each other. The men across the parking lot were sitting down now, letting the sun beat on them. I opened the door and dropped to the pavement.

  “You’d better get me that blackmail note with the photo of the grave,” I said. “Or I will go to the sheriff, and I don’t care who your husband is.”

  I looked back at Dana. She was red-faced, puffy-eyed and about to say something. But I slammed the door and walked away.

  18

  I tried to sort it out that afternoon with Lindsey. She had stopped by my office after lunch, looking like a million bucks in a black pantsuit.