by Jon Talton
32
In Maricopa County, a suspect’s first hearing is called, logically, the initial appearance, or IA. Robin’s came a little after eleven on Wednesday morning, in a small, sterile courtroom downtown. Lindsey had been strangely detached from her sister’s fate, or perhaps still numb from the arrest the night before. She had done nothing, hadn’t even tried to visit Robin. But already I could sense Peralta’s hidden hand: When Robin was brought in wearing an orange jumpsuit, a tall, classically handsome man in a blue pinstripe suit announced he was representing her. This was James H. Goldstein, one of the top defense lawyers in town and one of Peralta’s close friends and political supporters. Robin looked haggard and pale, her healthy tan seemingly confiscated at booking. I felt strange, being at an IA for a family member, and I saw Lindsey suppress a shiver.
But an hour later Robin was free, back in her civilian clothes and sitting in the back seat of the Prelude, headed home. Goldstein had made a meal of the assistant county attorney, who looked about 12 years old and was ill-prepared. The judge denied the state’s request to hold Robin as a material witness and ordered her released, provided she stayed in the custody of her sister, the deputy sheriff. Kate Vare looked back at me from the prosecutor’s table, and it wasn’t a friendly look. Even though Robin was out of jail, I knew Vare would set aside her entire caseload to prepare a murder rap against Robin.
One of the first lessons I learned as a patrol deputy was that family fights are among the most lethal situations for the cops. Killing was more likely when the family members were cops. So I let the silent chill hang in the car. Neither Lindsey nor Robin spoke. I had never been with Robin where she was silent for so long. After a while, a fight, provided some catharsis came at the end, would have come as a relief. The only fight was one we saw at the Circle K gas pumps on McDowell and Seventh Avenue, two middle-aged women going at each other with fists in the gas line. Maybe they were sisters, too. Lindsey called 911.
“I want to see this property,” Lindsey finally said, to me. “Let’s drive out into the desert.”
We stopped at Cypress Street to change clothes and load drinking water, then we drove back down Fifth Avenue to the Papago Freeway. In addition to a fuel shortage and gas lines, Phoenix had earned a smog alert that morning. The air was so dirty we couldn’t even make out the White Tank or Estrella mountains until we were miles west of downtown. Even then, the scene couldn’t have been more different from my memory of the clear, wild mountain range that day in February when I had gone to check out the body report given to me by Dana Earley. Now the White Tanks were reduced to a fuzzy brown apparition squatting against the dirty horizon. But it didn’t seem to deter the homebuyers. Acres of rooftops had been added since I had last driven out this far. More “available” signs peppered the landscape. Fewer farm fields survived. After the Buckeye exits the subdivisions fell away and we were enveloped by the desert in high summer. Without our technological amulets of air-conditioned car and cell phones, we would have been frighteningly vulnerable.
Quitting Tonopah, I again took the exit at 335th Avenue. It still wasn’t much of an avenue, and soon we were traveling over a graded dirt road. We rolled over the basin of the Harquahala Desert, surrounded by scrub and low cactus, and, at a distance, mountains. We were insignificant actors in this arena bounded by eternal spectators. Every mountain told its own fantastic story. I was no geologist, so I let my imagination play on the paintbrush strokes of light and dark, purple, dun, black, and gray. I watched the whorls, slopes, uplifts and ledges, the spectacular leaps and fortress walls. Other mountains were plain, giant dirt hills and subtle, brooding slopes covered with scrub. Ages and ages: God’s canvas unprofaned by subdivisions and man. Against it we moved, just three people, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, trying to solve a murder. At least I hoped we all three shared that goal.
The Bell property looked much the same. Suddenly the desert was lush again, with towering saguaros, demonstrative ocotillos, standoffish yucca, barrel cactuses fat and content, and my old nemesis the cholla. Thick palo verdes marked the wash that was hidden in the deep cut just outside our view to the east. To the north, the land lifted in a steady slope from the road, headed toward the fez-shaped butte and the sharp-featured mountains beyond. When we all stepped out of the car and closed the doors it was as silent as deep space. But here the star of the solar system was close, and the heat threatened to overwhelm every other sense. Lindsey put on a floppy hat. Robin and I settled for sunglasses. I walked them up to the old gate, then down the rutted path to Harry Bell’s cairn, explaining again what had happened that first day. The rocks had been neatly replaced over the grave, and as we got closer I noticed something else. A headstone, made of a shape and rock to fit in with its surroundings, stood at the western end of the cairn. Harry Truman Bell, was carved there, along with his years of birth and death. Then the words: He loved this land.
“Where did that come from?” Robin spoke for the first time.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Unless Louie paid for it before he died.”
“Why did Dana want to bring you out here?” Lindsey asked softly, more to herself. “There’s nothing here. It’s miles from anywhere. Why did she want you to come out here, where two guys would attack you?”
“Could she have known that?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Lindsey said.
“They were supposed to be guarding another property, where they grazed cattle in the spring and some contractor had been doing illegal dumping.”
“I know that’s the story,” Lindsey said. “It just seems too convenient, getting you out here, beating you. Maybe they meant to do more than that.”
“Look at that depression in the ground over there,” Robin said, pointing to an indentation in the slope. “That’s a sinkhole. It might mean there’s a cave. I did some caving with an old boyfriend…”
Lindsey turned away with an angry swing of her waist, and I knew what she was thinking. What could you believe about Robin?
Just then we heard a high distant roar, and two black diamonds darted through a canyon that cut its way between the northern mountain range. They were trailing brown exhaust: fighter jets from Luke Air Force Base. Then they banked, climbed, and shot across the desert heading south. The Barry Goldwater Gunnery Range was that direction. Before silence settled on the desert, I noticed that Lindsey had left us. She was walking up the slope toward the butte.
Robin touched my arm.
“David, please don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” I said. “I don’t trust you.”
“You felt something for me that night, David, I know you did.” Her face was insistent under a sheen of perspiration.
“I didn’t feel anything,” I said. “Speaking of fakes, your boyfriend Edward was one, right?”
She stared at the ground. “I couldn’t tell you I’d been seeing Alan. Lindsey would have freaked. ‘Glad to see you after all these years, Sis, and by the way the corpse you just found was my boyfriend.’ Alan had been after me to move in with him. Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t.”
“And the black eye you had the night you showed up on our doorstep?”
“A little stage makeup I got at Bert Easley’s.” She took my hand, but I pulled away. “Oh, David. I had to have a story. I was scared. Can you believe me?”
“How the hell should I know?” My stomach was tied in the kind of knot that would baffle an Eagle Scout. “I just hope you’re not a murderer.”
“I didn’t kill Alan,” she said matter-of-factly. “But I know somebody was trying to hurt him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A couple of weeks before he was killed, Alan started getting phone calls in the middle of the night. He’d get out of bed and go in the other room and talk. At first I was really pissed, because I thought he was juggling me with his other girlfriends. The second time it happened, I went to the bedroom door and listened. Alan kept telling somebody no, a
nd how what they were asking was impossible, he wouldn’t do it. ‘Quit threatening me.’ I heard him say that at least twice, and then he said he would go to the police if this person didn’t leave him alone.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“No,” she said. She turned away from the sun, which was now far in the western sky. I moved to face her.
“That night,” Robin said. “We went to First Friday, dinner at Cheuvront’s, toured some of the galleries. But we’d been fighting all night.”
“What about?”
“Why? I can’t even remember.”
“You’d better because the police and the prosecutor will want to know. Fighting can be a motive.”
“I didn’t!” she shouted, then pulled her voice down. “I didn’t kill him. But when we were leaving Paisley Violin, this big pickup truck stopped by the sidewalk and the guy inside called Alan by name. So Alan walked over and talked to him. I couldn’t hear, but it obviously upset Alan. I didn’t even go home with him that night. I crashed with a girlfriend.”
“What did the man in the truck look like?” I asked, feeling as if someone with cold hands was brushing against my neck.
“He was big, a white guy, shaved head,” she said. “He had an amazing tat on his arm.”
We turned to watch Lindsey returning from the slope of the butte.
“Look at this, all these plants,” she said. “You walk up there and look in the distance and it doesn’t look this way. There’s a distinct change when you get within maybe three-quarters of a mile of this land.” My wife was a gardener. She noticed things. She planted white flowers and oleanders so the blossoms would be the last things you saw in the twilight. But my darling was also a cop. She went on: “It came to me: this isn’t about some pickpocket at a casino, or protection money for a check-cashing outlet, or Dana being blackmailed. It’s not about any of that. Everything in this case started here, with this patch of desert. Now I know why somebody murdered to try to get this land.”
I am so proud of my brilliant wife, and I should have let her go on. But suddenly the scales fell from my eyes, too, and I blurted it out: “There’s an aquifer.”
Robin said, “Holy fucking shit.”
33
The next day I ran down Jack Fife, the security consultant who had hired the two goons that welcomed me to the Bell property back in February. It was an overdue visit. With a little badge persuasion, his secretary told me where I would find him. It was one hundred ten outside, and I was on my own. Lindsey was baby-sitting Robin—“the prisoner” as she called her behind her back—at the house, using the Internet to work on our case. Lindsey said she didn’t want to talk to Robin, because she would no doubt be called to testify against her. Instead, she spent hours going through real estate, tax, and court records related to Arizona Dreams and Jared Malkin. “He may act like a dumb-ass,” she said. “But he’s not dumb. Not with this complicated a paper trail.”
So she had already armed me for my meeting with Jack Fife. I was on my own with Peralta. My reflexes wanted to report to him, especially tell him our hunch about the underground water on the Bell property. But it wasn’t time yet. We didn’t have it tied up. And if I caught him in the wrong mood, he might just shut us down and send the case to Pima County. Don’t even send him an e-mail, Lindsey said: It could become public record if the case blew up into a political scandal.
I had little of the Machiavellian in me. I was onto something more elemental. Instead of intriguing as advised by The Prince, I was following one of the oldest dictates of the West: “Whiskey’s for drinking, and water’s for fighting over.” Maybe, killing over. The sense grew in me each time I drove over a bridge that spanned one of the canals that are like the exposed arteries of Phoenix’s lifeblood. This utterly unnatural city was the product of many water fights: whites against Indians, Arizona vs. California, Lower Basin battling Upper Basin, and everyone against the desert. Growth and prosperity in the West came with water. And far from the myth of rugged individualism, the water often came thanks to grand federal projects. Without them, Phoenix would have been nothing but a village. Donald Worster wrote about this ably in his book Rivers of Empire. I was only a little envious. And yet, history indicated the desert was a tenacious adversary if you chose to fight it. For proof, you only needed to recall the vanished civilization of the Hohokam, who built the first canals. Or the dropping water table in Pinal County. The desert repaid.
The noon rush was already thinning out when I arrived at La Perla. It was one of the oldest restaurants in town, wedged into a little block of downtown Glendale on the other side of the Santa Fe railroad tracks. Jack Fife was a squat man with a comb-over and wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and a wide blue tie. He didn’t seem surprised when I slid into the booth across from him.
“My name’s David…”
“I know who you are, Mapstone,” he said. “Chips?” He pushed a basket toward me and went back to a giant plate of cheese enchiladas. “You’re Peralta’s history boy.”
“You provide security people for the real estate business,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “That’s part of what I do. Developers and property owners hire me. You know, keep away the tree huggers, the environmental terrorists, the thieves.” He chewed and talked, a string of cheese suspended from his lower lip. “How ’bout those gas lines, huh? I hear some guy shot a gas station attendant in Mesa last night. Doesn’t take much to turn people to animals, especially in this hick town. When I came here from LA thirty years ago it was a hick town, and it’s still a hick town.”
“Why do you stay?”
“I’m here for the lifestyle,” he said, dabbing hot sauce on his food like an inattentive priest sprinkling holy water.
“Last February, your boys got a little zealous with me, out west of Tonopah.”
“Look,” he said, wiping his mouth, then his forehead, with a napkin. “I cleared all that up. They were protecting another property. It was all a mistake. I fired the assholes, and you guys put them in jail for assault.”
He wadded up the napkin and put it on the table. “Why are you bothering my lunch, Mapstone? I already got that reflux thing. Wakes me up in the middle of the night with this acid coming out of my throat. Getting old sucks.”
His entire face seemed to press in on itself from top and bottom as he gave a grimace of pain.
“Getting old sucks,” I agreed. I watched him, played a hunch. I made no claim to being a great detective. Kate Vare didn’t think I was a real cop at all. I was just the history shamus, taking a leave from writing Peralta’s book. I would have been happier researching a crime from 1920. But this case had acquired its own internal propulsion. Too many people had died already. And Lindsey and I were stuck in the middle of it. I tightened my abdomen, as if expecting a punch. In a business voice, I said, “You have the right to remain silent.”
“Wha…?”
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you.”
He laughed and coughed. “What the fuck are you Mirandizing me for? Have some chips…”
“You have the right to an attorney…”
“Oh, you’re a hard ass cop, huh? You don’t do it well.”
“You have the right to an attorney.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, giving a dismissive wave of his napkin, “and if I can’t afford one, the county will appoint one for me. Quit dicking with me. I was on the Mesa force for twenty years. I think I know the bit. Why the hell you trying to come after me now, for something that happened six months ago and has all been settled.” He scooped a huge piece of enchilada in his mouth. Through bites he said, “My lawyer’s gonna love this false arrest case.”
“Your guys weren’t protecting the other property,” I said. “I talked to the landowner this morning. He didn’t know anything about it. He’s never heard of you.”
Fife put his fork down and picked out a pack of Camels. He lit one. His hand shook.
“So,” I said, “the sheriff would naturally wonder why your employees were out there. When they attacked me, they were nowhere near the other land anyway. They were on the Bell property.”
“So maybe Bell hired us to do that?” Fife muttered.
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place,” I said.
“Well…”
“Why didn’t Louie Bell tell that to the deputies when they were talking to him?” I said. “He said he didn’t know anything about them.”
“I do a lot of security,” Fife said. “I don’t even remember the particulars of that. Look, it was a couple of bad apples…”
“It was almost as if they were out there looking for trouble,” I said. “I didn’t see any environmental terrorists out there, Jack. There wasn’t anything to steal, either. It was like they were looking to teach somebody a lesson.”
“Look, Mapstone…”
He stared at me, little eyes imploring. I went on, “We know that Tom and Dana Earley were trying to buy that thousand acres from Louie Bell, and Louie was balking.”
“I don’t know anything about this,” he said. “Tom Earley, the county supervisor?”
“Tom Earley was sending letters demanding that the sale go through. Somebody else was doing more than writing letters. A little muscle to encourage the old coot. Then he ends up dead, in a casino, with an ice pick in his ear.”
“What’re you telling me this for?” he said, rolling his head around his fat neck, taking a drag on the Camel.
“You sent muscle out to the property, Jack. I met them.”
“The Earleys are good, God-fearing people,” he pleaded. He was sweating profusely now, matting down his comb-over and soiling his short-sleeved shirt.
I just sat and watched him. Then, “Maybe you had Louie Bell killed. There was a lawyer working with the Earleys named Alan Cordesman. He was killed with an ice pick, too. Pretty high body count for a land deal, Jack.”
