by Jon Talton
“This is bullshit.”
Vare crossed her arms smugly. “Your sister-in-law has a rap sheet. Did you know that? Not good for the image of the sheriff’s office. Petty theft. Bad checks. Possession. That last one sent her away for six months in Colorado. This was before tough drug sentencing, lucky for her. I make her out for some kind of addict and con.”
“Did you find drugs?” I demanded.
I saw Vare’s teeth flash like a predator’s. “No. I found better. I found this.”
She dangled a small plastic evidence envelope. I took it reluctantly.
“That ring matches the photos from Cordesman’s insurance records. It was his mother’s wedding ring.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Mapstone,” she cut me off. “That ring was the only thing missing from Alan Cordesman’s house the day somebody rammed an ice pick into his brain.”
“Now wait…”
“I found that ring in your sister-in-law’s room, in your garage apartment.”
I said, “Kate, this is nuts. I can’t explain everything about Robin, but we’re working on something that’s going to tie up Cordesman and…”
“Look, you son of a bitch,” she hissed. “I think that somebody who rammed an ice pick into Alan Cordesman’s brain was Robin, and I’ve got the evidence to make a case. It’s only a matter of time before we find why she would have done the same thing to the old man in the casino. She’s going downtown as a material witness while we talk to the county attorney. And you—you’re lucky we don’t toss your whole house, and take you both into custody for harboring a fugitive. I bet you knew, you son of a bitch…”
I moved out of her way. “Thanks for the professional courtesy, sergeant.”
“Out of professional courtesy,” she said, “you and Lindsey aren’t going downtown, too.”
30
Little things. In retrospect, I should have wondered more about them. Robin was an art student without art books or art. The garage apartment had remained nearly as bare as the day she moved in. She had come back to Phoenix because a rich man in Paradise Valley wanted her expertise in WPA-era art. Where were her Social Realism posters? Why had she never mentioned the restored WPA murals in the old downtown Post Office? I was afraid to find out if she really worked for this rich man, or if a boyfriend named Edward ever existed. We walked with Robin to the curb. The streetlight illuminated tracks of spent tears. Bend down. Watch your head. Swing your legs in. The prisoner section of patrol cars is cramped and smelly, the seat invariably sticky. The cars drove west on Cypress, then their taillights swung onto Fifth Avenue toward downtown and disappeared into the night.
When I stepped inside the door and closed it, Lindsey turned on me, a furious light in her eyes.
“Did you fuck my sister?!” she screamed, and gave me a hard, line-of-scrimmage shove.
She screamed again, “Did you fuck Robin? You did, didn’t you! You fucked her!” She battered my shoulder with her fists. “God, I knew you would! I knew it!”
The woman standing before me was a stranger, a snarling bully who seemed capable of any cruelty. “You fucked Robin!” she screamed again. She rammed her arms toward me again, and I caught them, as gently as I could. I was saying “no,” but her eyes told me she wasn’t listening. For a moment, we wrestled arms and hands. Lindsey shrieked half words and obscenities. This banshee’s face flushed a vivid red, something close to murder in her eyes. She was also strong as hell. I tried to pull her close, to hug her, calm her down. She pulled away and one hand cuffed me sharply on the right cheekbone. It was enough to break the rhythm of rage.
“Oh!” she moaned. “Oh, Dave, oh, baby…I hurt you…”
“I’m okay,” I said, unconsciously backing away. My cheek throbbed, my breath came rapidly and I was tamping down my own surprise. And anger. The whole room seemed alien and hostile. It was a feeling that lasted until she took my hands. We ended up on the couch, and for a long time she just clung to me and cried. I looked at us a couple of times, reflected in the picture window. For a few minutes my watchful, poetic lover had been annihilated, and someone else was there. I let my eyes search for answers in the vaulted ceiling. I only found a couple of spider webs.
“Lindsey,” I finally said. “I want to tell you what happened with Robin…”
She shook her head adamantly. “Later. Not now. Just forgive me and love me…”
“I do,” I said. “There’s nothing to forgive…Robin and I…”
“No,” she said. “Don’t. Just forgive me.”
I assured her, but I’m not sure if she was really listening. She seemed elsewhere, as if she might just drift away if I weren’t hanging on tightly.
“I heard Linda’s voice coming out of my mouth,” Lindsey said. “I heard her yelling, just now. It was just as vivid as if I were twelve years old, and listening to her fight with her boyfriend, or me or Robin for wanting to stay out. But it was me, my voice. Oh, my God…”
I stroked her dark, straight-as-a-pin hair, pushed it back from her face.
“I can’t believe Robin could kill someone,” she went on. “But I don’t know anything. Look what people do when they’re crazy on meth or something else. She was such a sweet little girl…I didn’t like what she became as a teenager. I thought I saw all Linda’s bad traits in her. Linda’s destructiveness. What a fool I was. Linda’s bad traits are all in me, too. And I thought I spent my whole life trying to get away from that…Oh, Dave, your poor face…”
“Do you want to go down to the jail? The deputies would make an exception for you.”
“No.” She shook her head.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said. “They won’t arraign her until the morning. We’ll call Peralta. He’ll line up a good lawyer.”
“I can’t sleep,” she said. She sat up and looked at me, her eyes a tangle of red. “I really thought I had escaped my upbringing. Then I thought Robin had done the same thing, and I was so proud. It seemed possible. I hadn’t seen her in nearly ten years. And on the surface, I thought, ‘I’ve walked away from someone who would drag me down.’ But I never stopped hoping that one day, I might be walking down a street, maybe with the man of my dreams, and I would run into Robin, and she would have had a happy ending, too. You must think I am such a fool.”
“You’re the most sensible person I know,” I said. “You changed my life, Lindsey. Everything was different and better after the first time I saw you. In Records. In that black miniskirt.”
She smiled at me, that familiar treasured face. She stroked the good side of my face gently.
“So things can change,” I said. “I’ll never fault you for loving someone and hoping…”
“Let’s get out of the house,” she said. “Let’s just drive. Distract me—now that I’ve committed spousal battery. Let’s go spy on your soccer mom, Dana.”
“She lives behind a gate, unfortunately. I’d love to find the hydrologist, Earl Rice.”
“No forwarding address,” she said. “So what about Jared Malkin, managing partner of Arizona Dreams? You drive, and I’ll find his address.”
She read out an address in north Scottsdale, so we sailed on rubberized asphalt north on the Piestewa Parkway, rising through the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. Traffic was light. The city looked best at night. The car was quiet except for the tapping of Lindsey’s fingers on her keyboard. When we turned east on the 101, Lindsey spoke.
“Here’s a story in the Republic archives about Jared Malkin. He’s fifty-five years old, worked for his old man, who was one of the biggest developers in Orange County. Lucky Sperm Club kid. Had his share of trouble, though. County records show he had two hundred lawsuits against him back in the 1990s over a development in Surprise. He’s connected to East Valley Republicans, especially County Supervisor Tom Earley. Lucky again. Did some housing in Gilbert and Chandler. Arizona Dreams is by far his largest project. Major homebuilders, big capital from real estate investment trusts in New York. Sounds like a big shot. I�
��ll save this for you.”
“What about arrests?”
“You are so suspicious, Dave. But I already checked. No IRS liens, either. I want to do some snooping on Arizona Dreams LLC. It’s not as shut-tight-secret as Miss Battle-Axe thinks. But for now, I’ve got to give my eyes a break.” She shut the machine off, and the cabin of the car fell into darkness as we got off the freeway and made the long drive north on Scottsdale Road.
By the time we were winding through the Desert Mountain area, the gas gauge was below half-full. I hadn’t noticed one open gas pump on the way up here.
“God, I hate Scottsdale,” she said. “The attack of the plastic pod people. I always feel like the shortest, fattest, poorest person up here. But at least I’m not a plastic pod person.”
“Definitely not.”
We cruised slowly along streets lined with exquisite desert landscaping, stucco walls, and heavy iron gates. The road rolled here and there with the land to make way for a dry wash. Where they were visible, houses sat back in tasteful spotlights. You could almost feel the aura of conquest. Up here, middle-class was a house that cost two million. But being rich in Arizona wasn’t always what it seemed. More than one was unfurnished on the inside except for a card table and a couple of lawn chairs. I was happier in Willo.
“Slow down,” Lindsey said. “It’s got to be right up here.”
For such a big-time developer, he had a smaller house by Desert Mountain standards. But it looked pleasant, a single-story, Santa Fe-style adobe. Two cars sat in the rustic gravel drive, one a gray SUV. And SUVs are so commonplace on the streets of Phoenix, even gray ones called Armadas, that I wouldn’t have given it another thought. Except at that very moment—and the dashboard clock said 2:14 a.m.—at that moment, the door to the house opened and a woman with strawberry blond hair walked out. She had an overnight bag in one hand, and the hand of a tall, husky man in the other. Then she turned and gave him a kiss. It wasn’t the kind of kiss that business partners exchanged, even in north Scottsdale.
31
We had a quick breakfast at Susan’s Diner and returned to the house in north Scottsdale at eight a.m. The goal was to catch Jared Malkin before he could hide behind the broad-shouldered security men in the lobby of the Arizona Dreams office. It was Wednesday now, and by Peralta’s clock we had until Friday to find something that would make this investigation something more than a political hot potato. Another clock was ticking now, too: Robin. She was scheduled to go before a judge today at eleven. So far, we had too many leads and too few answers. John Locke said “the great art of learning is to understand but little at a time.” Maybe so, but he never had to deal with Mike Peralta.
After seeing Dana Earley kiss Malkin outside his door, we followed her back to Gilbert. When she pulled into her gated subdivision, we returned home for a few hours of restless sleep. Lindsey had asked a prime question, the one I had yet to answer: “Why did this woman come to you in the first place?”
The door to Jared Malkin’s house came open even as we were walking up the flagstones, past the carefully manicured desert plantings. Someone had told me these took as much water as the lawns and trees of the historic districts in Phoenix. Inside the doorframe stood a tall man with curly black hair, a shaggy black moustache, and a meaty face built around a pendulous red nose. His eyes fixed on Lindsey. I might as well have been one of the ocotillos whose blooms were dying in the summer heat. But his voice and mannerisms seemed agitated even before we identified ourselves.
“You must have the wrong house,” he said.
“You’re Jared Malkin?” Lindsey asked.
“Yes, but…”
“So how could we have the wrong house?”
“All right, all right, come on inside,” he said, and disappeared into the house. “No telling what the neighbors will think.”
The great scholar Jacques Barzun celebrated a cultured person as one with a well-furnished mind. I didn’t yet know about Malkin’s mind, but the people that furnished motel rooms had decorated his house. It was all forgettable sofas, end tables, and desert scenes framed behind glass; maybe they were even bolted to the wall to keep guests from carting them away. There were no books. He led us back to a kitchen table and sat down. I went through it again, as I had with Shelley Baker. Malkin used a butter knife to put sardines slathered in mustard on a cracker. When he ate, his moustache became a broom for crumbs and yellow residue.
“So why do I care?” he said simply. He was continuously shaking his right leg.
“You’re the managing partner of Arizona Dreams, right?”
“Right.” He kept chomping and shaking his leg, both at about the same rhythm.
“Why would one of your top executives have her card found on the scene of a homicide?”
“Deputy, I don’t have the foggiest goddamned idea. Are we done now?”
“No,” I said. Then I went through the questions about Harry and Louie Bell, about the property west of Tonopah, about the school bus near Hyder. Did he know them? Had he been there? He kept shaking his head.
“Earl Rice?”
“Rice,” he said. “Sure. He was a consulting hydrologist for Arizona Dreams.”
“Who did what?” Lindsey asked.
“I don’t have time to give lessons in development,” he snapped. Then he smiled, “Even for a young lady with such beautiful dark hair and fair skin.” You could almost smell cheap cologne coming off him. He went on, “The Groundwater Act of 1986—you gotta have a one-hundred-year supply of water, guaranteed, if you’re going to do a project out in the desert, like Arizona Dreams. A consulting hydrologist is part of the process, so you can document the water supply for the state.”
“A water supply anywhere?” Lindsey asked.
“No, no. It’s got to be water on the property, under the ground, the aquifer.”
“Have you heard from Mr. Rice lately?” I asked.
“No,” Malkin said. “He retired about a year ago. I heard he moved down to Panama. Talk about getting a lot of house for the money. It’s a steal in Central America. Lot of folks here are retiring down there.”
I didn’t mention Dana Earley. No need to tip our hand yet. I let things fall into silence. Let him fill it. Only the refrigerator motor whirred in the background. More sardine carcasses disappeared in Malkin’s fast-moving maw. He had large dark pores on top of his cheekbones.
“Ha!” he said.
Ha, what? I glanced at Lindsey and waited.
“I knew you recognized me,” he said to me. “It’s true. I used to be Jerry von Shaft. That was my stage name.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
Lindsey asked what he was talking about.
“You’re too young to remember, Miss,” he said to Lindsey. “But those were great days. In 1978, I was one of the top-paid actors in adult films. Almost up there with John Holmes and Harry Rheems. You can still find me in DVD, films like Revenge of the Horny Cheerleaders. I play a detective, just like you guys. See, there was plot and acting. Great days, before I got too old and video rentals ruined the old adult entertainment business. Great way to pick up women, too. At least it used to be. After paying out for three marriages I can’t even afford to get an erection in this town.” He leered at Lindsey. “No offense, ma’am.”
He ran an index finger around the empty sardine tin and then sucked the juice. “What was your favorite movie that I did?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I could name all the presidents, but here I was at a loss.
“Don’t be shy.” A wide smile expanded the bushy mustache. “Your pretty partner here won’t tell your wife. Don’t expect us to believe you spent the seventies in some library studying.”
Lindsey said, “So you ended up in real estate in Phoenix?”
“Life’s funny,” he said. “Phoenix is a hick town. But it’s sunny almost every day. I can play golf anytime I want. I get to live out here with the gazillionaires, and I’m paying about the same as I would for a sha
ck in L.A. Guy can come over here, throw up a few houses, make a killing. You ought to try it.”
“Why all the LLCs?” Lindsey asked.
Malkin smiled at her and shook his head.
“Arizona Dreams LLC also does business as AZD2 LLC, Sierra Montana LLC, and Camino Vista LLC. The land for your development changed hands with about two dozen limited liability corporations, by my count. And you secured a loan from Tonopah Trinity LLC. A lot of these LLCs have the same address.”
He blinked several times, showing long lashes.
“You’re very bright,” he said, “and very beautiful.”
“About the real killing,” I said. “What about your trip to Malibu?”
His nostrils flared. “How the hell did you…? That goddamned Shelley loudmouth bitch. I was on a business trip. To meet one of my investors. I’ve been patient with you two until now, but you’re starting to piss me off. Do you have any idea of the powerful people I have as partners in Arizona Dreams?”
“Ms. Baker made sure not to tell us,” Lindsey said in her calm alto.
He looked at her a while, then smacked his lips and stood. I tried not to imagine him as Jerry von Shaft. He said, “Look, I wish I could help you. But I can’t and I’m really in a hurry. Something’s come up. Always a bad day in the development business.”
We walked toward the door, back through the anonymous living room to the anonymous foyer.
“I read somewhere that you destroyed Hohokam ruins,” I said. This came from Lindsey’s research on Malkin.
“Those weren’t protected,” he snapped. “I made sure. My lawyers checked and double-checked everything. I paid good money for that land. Do you have any idea how much it would have cost to bring in a bunch of archeologists, that kind of shit? The project wouldn’t have been doable. And for what? A bunch of old mud walls, some pieces of pots? Give me a break.”
“No value to history, huh?” I asked.
“You want history, Deputy,” he said, “visit a fucking museum. Now, I really gotta go.”
