Concrete Desert

by Jon Talton

  He said, “Why the fuck are you here, Mapstone? I thought we were rid of you.”

  “You never should have brought me into this in the first place.”

  “That was her.” He indicated Julie. “She can be quite clever when she’s lucid.”

  “And what about you? Back from the dead?”

  He smiled. “It worked. As far as that prick Bobby knows, I’m dead and his money is long gone.”

  “That’s not showing much gratitude for a man who seems to have set you up pretty damned well,” I said.

  “Entrepreneurship is the American dream,” Townsend said. “I was tired of working for someone else. And when you work for Bobby, the run is great, but it always ends. I knew it was coming to an end. I handled the high-end shipments, the big money, and the risks were just too great. Bobby would have given me up to DEA and written it off as a tax deduction. But with a million dollars in seed money and the right clients, I’d turn old Bobby over to the feds and take his business.”

  “So who died in your place?”

  He looked annoyed. “Some drifter Julie picked up down in town. We had a few drinks, found out he had no one to miss him, and in general, he did have my body type.” Townsend laughed. “Julie told him we wanted him to join a threesome.”

  “You took a chance that the cops would assume it was you.”

  “Cops get busy like everybody else,” he said. “I wanted to make this easy for them. After I had the money stashed away, I set up our drifter to look like me. I knew the cops had intelligence linking me to Bobby Hamid, so they’d assume it was a drug execution. Then I had this place, secluded, but I could watch the comings and goings down below. First the cops. Then Bobby’s people, twice. It was like ‘hide in plain sight.’ They never knew I was here.”

  “It almost worked,” I said. “But when you start murdering people, it’s hard to make things go right.”

  He looked at me.

  “Phaedra. She had someone who would miss her and find out what happened. And that was me.”

  “Very commendable, Professor Mapstone,” Townsend said. “And you are going to get the chance to join her, if you believe in the oppressive bullshit doctrines of Christianity and Western civilization.”

  “Well then, we’ll both head that way.” I put my hand on the Python’s grip.

  “I didn’t hurt her,” said Julie, who sat back on the floor between us, rocking back and forth, running her fingers through her hair. “I just needed the money.”

  “Shut up, Julie,” he said sharply, watching her and then me.

  “You shut up!” she screamed. “You told me this morning you loved me and that we’d finally get married.”

  “Bitch,” he said.

  I said, “I guess I should have known from the start that she was yours.”

  “Oh, and how’s that?”

  “She had bad taste in men,” I said. “And it didn’t add up that you and Phaedra got together through the personals. That would be a risk for someone in your, uh, profession. You met Phaedra because you were already involved with her big sister. That must have been complicated.”

  “You can’t stop, can you?” Townsend said, gripping the gun tighter. “You just have to know what happened.”

  “And why.”

  “Is that the historian in you, or the cop?” he sneered. “A famous man said, ‘History is mostly bunk.’”

  “Henry Ford,” I said. “He also admired Adolf Hitler.”

  Townsend shook his head, smiled, and indicated Julie. “We first met on the party circuit in Phoenix. Julie was with some dickhead lawyer who liked to get her fucked up on cocaine. We hit it off. You can understand, I’m sure. You two were an item in college, right? But Phaedra was, like, in bloom. First time I saw her, I knew I had to do whatever it took.”

  “Like concealing the fact that you were a drug mule.”

  “It’s a big business, Mapstone, and I made more money in a week than you’ll make in a lifetime.”

  “But not enough to ensure ‘happily ever after’ with Phaedra.”

  “Julie wouldn’t leave it alone, wouldn’t stay away. One morning, she caught me and Phaedra in bed and tried to kill us both with a butcher knife. It was bad news. Phaedra left and went back to Phoenix.”

  “So why couldn’t you leave her out of it? If she didn’t know you were into drugs, why did she have to know that you were going to rip off Bobby Hamid for a million dollars?”

  “My fault,” he said breezily. “I wanted Phaedra in my life. She had a real hold on me sexually. But Julie was my lover and my business partner. I needed them both.”

  I arched an eyebrow.

  “Julie was a pipeline for some very high-powered people in North Phoenix and Scottsdale society. You think those people come home and have a martini? Cocaine is the drug of choice, and Julie—from her days as a piece of expensive eye candy—knew the right people. If I was going to supplant Bobby Hamid, I had to have Julie.”

  “So,” I said, “you got Phaedra to come back for the weekend. I guess Julie was supposed to be gone. She came back unexpectedly, and you quarreled. She threatened to go to Bobby Hamid about your plans, and Phaedra overheard. So Phaedra took off, and you had to go find her. Am I close?”

  “Very close, Professor Mapstone,” Townsend said. “I am impressed. If you must know, there was also something specific that Phaedra knew—a place I use to store things—and I couldn’t take a chance with her knowing that.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Julie had been silently crying through all this, but suddenly she said, “I told him just to let her go. She wouldn’t bother us. She was already disgusted with both of us and wanted to be as far away from this as she could get.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Julie,” he snarled. “You wanted the money as badly as I did.”

  “And you came to me to find Phaedra,” I said. “So you must have had something in mind.”

  “I knew you’d protect her,” Julie said simply. “She was like you.”

  “I did a crappy job of that,” I said. “I might have done better if I’d known what was going on.”

  “You know I couldn’t tell you.”

  “So why did she agree to meet you?”

  “I was going to take her to you,” Julie said. “But he found out.” She pointed to Townsend.

  “Anything that was done to Phaedra, we did together,” he said quietly.

  “Not quite,” I said. “You raped her. You also were the one who strangled her, I bet.”

  “I had to make a choice,” Townsend said coldly. “Not even Phaedra was worth losing a million dollars and my life. Afterward, I drove her to the desert.”

  “And you arranged her in a way that would send a message to me.”

  “Oh, don’t think you mattered,” he said. “Your exploits merely inspired me. I immediately called the police. I didn’t want her body exposed to the elements.”

  “A compassionate man,” I said.

  “I didn’t intend for it to happen,” Julie said. She was different again. She stood up and walked over to Townsend and put her hand on his arm. “But somehow, I know Phaedra understands. She loved me. We loved each other. She wouldn’t want me living the way I did.”

  “You see, Mapstone, it all comes down to money and sex. They’re thicker than blood,” Townsend said. “I have money and I have Julie. Whatever happened between us, we always wanted to be richer, and we always fucked each other’s brains out. Nothing and nobody could ultimately come between that. I hope that doesn’t disillusion your bullshit college ardor for her.” He raised the gun. “And I am bored with this conversation.”

  “Did your Julie tell you she slept with me for three nights?” I said hastily. Julie stared at me with a glassy look. Townsend’s mouth tightened. “She seemed pretty needy. I didn’t hear her calling out your name, Greg.”

  He jerked his arm away violently and pushed her. “You told me you were through sleeping around, Julie. My health is at stake. And our
security.”

  She looked at him sullenly. “I didn’t.”

  “What else does he know? What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing.”

  He said very quietly, “Lying bitch.” And he shot her, the automatic filling the room with a high-pitched, eardrum-bursting blast.

  He immediately pointed the gun at me, before I could draw or go to Julie. She was against the wall, sliding down. Blood trickled out around the solar plexus, darkening the center of her light blue blouse. She was staring at me in surprise, moving her mouth silently.

  “Don’t do it, Mapstone,” he yelled. Then: “Tell me what she told you…when she fucked you.”

  I just stared at him with a fool’s courage.

  He stiffened and then exhaled. “Tell me, and I’ll let you go. I mean, I’ll just tie you up. That way, I can have time to get away. I’ll let you live.”

  “That’s probably what you told Phaedra, too,” I said.

  “What do you want from me!” he screamed.

  “You’re the one with the gun pointed at me,” I said.

  He screwed up his face and lowered the gun a bit. “Let me get my money, and I’ll let you live,” he said. “I need a partner. You’re a smart man.”

  “And you are a stupid man,” I said. “The money’s gone. We found the storage locker and Phaedra’s car.”

  His eyes widened. “What the hell are you saying?” He let his elbow drop.

  I drew the Colt.

  “No!”

  The room exploded and something tore into my left shoulder.

  I lined up the sights, squeezed the smooth trigger action of the Python, felt the big gun leap in my hand, squeezed it again, and Townsend was instantly blown backward in a cloud of noise and smoke and blood. He collapsed heavily into a lamp, two large holes in his chest, a look of shock and disbelief in eyes that were already dead. The little automatic clattered harmlessly to the floor.

  I holstered the Python and knelt before Julie. She was breathing very shallowly and her eyes followed me. The bluest eyes I ever saw. She had lost a lot of blood. Her skin was an ashen color. I started to rise to call for help, but she put her hands on my arms tightly. Tears were running down her face.

  “Oh, David,” she whispered. “I’m a mess.”

  My left shoulder was numb. My eardrums were ringing. And I was crying, too. I can’t say exactly why.

  She pulled herself into me and I held her. “Cold, it’s so cold,” she said. “David, I’m so cold.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Lindsey and I are not beach people. She does not tan. I become bored too easily. But the gentle San Diego sun feels so good on my shoulder, on the nickel-sized scar just below my collarbone. We lie on a clean, little-used beach I know in the Sunset Cliffs neighborhood, our legs entangling. She is rereading Anna Karenina. I am halfway through John Keegan’s history of the way battles and war shaped America. It is a good book, and I can almost hold it in my left hand now without pain. The Pacific is the color of Lindsey’s eyes, and it is beginning to show the cold restlessness that warns summer is almost over.

  The vastness of the ocean reminds me of that night in Sedona, of one of the last things I remembered before passing out. I was found by Deputy Taylor, who summoned help. They carried me out of the cabin to a waiting ambulance, in which I’d be driven to a clearing to meet a medevac helicopter. And the stars—my God, the stars. Billions and billions, uncountable, unimaginable. Pain and shock do strange things. I remember thinking of all the centuries and all the history those pinpoints of light represented. The suns of unimagined civilizations perhaps? Light that had originated when the Declaration of Independence was signed, that had been someone’s day and night when Caesar was subduing Gaul. I remember thinking how, back in college, Julie loved for me to drive her into the desert to see the stars. The next thing, I was lying in a hospital bed, groggy. Lindsey was holding my hand tightly, and Peralta was snoring softly in a chair at the foot of the bed.

  The next day, Peralta told me what he thought I should know: Townsend was dead, of course. His DNA matched him to Phaedra Riding’s murder. The case was closed, “which is more than I can say for the Harquahala murders,” Peralta said ruefully. I would have to appear before a board of inquiry, but Peralta assured me it had been a “clean kill.” What a strange phrase. I had gone forty years without taking a human life. I wished I could have gone a lifetime.

  Sam Larkin confessed to killing Rebecca Stokes. He still claimed it was an accident. His association with Dennis Copeland, a cop killer, would be harder to portray as accidental. Lorie Pope wrote a great Sunday story on the case—hell, I even looked okay without my beard in the photograph. Peralta didn’t charge McConnico, who abruptly announced he was retiring from politics.

  “Maybe the next governor is Mike Peralta,” I said.

  Peralta laughed. It was a nice sound.

  “You know,” I said, “he offered me a professorship if I’d just go along. One old Arizonan to another.”

  “You have a job,” Peralta said.

  ***

  Now, hard by the sea, Lindsey and I don’t talk about all that has happened. We talk about art, literature, jazz, and, of course, history. We read to each other out of a rucksack of books we lug along. We laugh a lot. After we make love, we never talk: The silence and all that has gone before it are too important. And all of this helps. Only occasionally do I think of Julie. Only every now and then do I wake from dreams about her bleeding to death in my arms, so cold, so cold.

  I have spent my life with books and ideas. I am a trained historian. But I’ll be damned if I understand the devils that destroy human beings, that cause them to destroy themselves. The itches we can’t scratch. The dark cells waiting for the right switch to turn on and consume us in a hungry confusion of longing and revenge and rage. Lindsey once asked me if I believe in good and evil, and I do. But I can’t bring myself to think of Julie Riding as evil. And that is my failing, for she surely flirted with evil, took it home for a onenight stand, and it moved in for good.

  History is an argument without end, as one of my professors used to say. Historians and detectives build cases, believing in the justice of our endeavors. I was trained to sit in academic detachment, take the full measure of time, and formulate arguments that will carry the day in articles, lectures, and books. I expect to know. But detectives don’t usually have time on their side. In my new job—or maybe it is my old, old job—there is much I can never know. I am the historian of Rebecca and Phaedra, and I can’t say I did a good job.

  At night, we walk into Ocean Beach and eat Mexican food and wander through the kitschy shops along Newport Avenue. Lindsey collects postcards and giggles at the tourists, and I adore her more than I should dare.

  Just before we came here, I got an E-mail from Patty. She said she was moving back east, to Virginia, and intended to get married again. It didn’t bother me. San Diego is no longer a city of demons for me. So maybe some history has been settled.

  School has already started, and my internal clock, set by years of teaching, is a bit askew. But no universities are clamoring for me. So I will stay on at the Sheriff’s Office as a deputy and a consultant, working the old cases, wearing my star a bit more comfortably, trying not to aggravate Peralta too much. The sheriff, always looking for publicity, wants me to write a history of the department. It’s money I’ll need.

  I never got around to listing the house with a realtor, and now Lindsey is too fond of it. She can hardly wait to get back and take control of the gardens that Grandmother so loved. I will unpack my books. I will throw the boxes away.

  The storms don’t come into the city anymore. But maybe they will return someday. There is so much I do not like about Phoenix now: It is too big and too dirty and too dangerous and too hot in the summertime. Behind its dramatic beauty and opulent wealth lie violence and decay made more stark and ugly by the desert. But we grew up together, Phoenix and I. It is the only root, the only touchstone m
y life has. It is the keeper of my history, as surely as it is the keeper of the Hohokam’s. It is my city. It is, for all of this, home.

  It is good to be home.

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