Arizona Dreams (5 page)

9

The city kept growing. Forty-eight thousand new houses a year. One hundred twenty thousand new residents annually. Five hundred square miles of urban area with Phoenix, the nation's fifth largest city, surrounded by two dozen suburbs and two Indian reservations. They called the suburbs “boomburbs”: Gilbert from 10,000 to 200,000 in twenty years; Mesa, with 450,000 people, now larger than the cities of St. Louis, Minneapolis, or Atlanta. To accommodate all this, the growth machine that is the Phoenix economy ate at least two acres of desert every hour. The swimming pools and golf courses, landscaping and water taps consumed millions of gallons of water daily, virtually all coming from manmade reservoirs and canals. The experts predicted only more growth. But all that seemed somehow removed from my life. I was embedded in the old city—old meaning the part of town that existed prior to 1950. I lived in a 1924 house and worked in a courthouse that was built in 1929, right on the brink of the Great Depression.

The gentle months slipped away. So did the immediate memory of my adventure in the Harquahala Desert. My assailants were quickly fed into the criminal justice thresher, with only a few dozen hours of my time spent writing reports and testifying. The big guy was going home—he'd spent half his life in prison for assault and robbery. The kid was another sad loser who never got past eighth grade and washed out of construction jobs. The detectives told me they were cheap help hired by a land company that owned adjacent property to keep out illegal dumping—and of course the company considered them independent contractors and was fully indemnified against such uh-ohs as assaulting a deputy sheriff. The fools hadn't even been protecting the right property.

The body turned into another bizarre Arizona story. He was Harry Bell, the landowner, aged eighty-two. Not a “Z” to be found—Harry's middle name was Truman and he drove rock and gravel trucks for a living. He convinced his brother to bury him out there when he died, as he did in his sleep in a trailer in a dusty lot in a little hamlet named Hyder, southwest of the city. It was Harry's last wish, to rest on the land he owned. Stranger things have happened in my state. The writer Edward Abbey, who hated modern man's incursions into the desert, is said to be buried somewhere on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, in a hidden grave dug by his friends. Bell's autopsy turned up nothing unusual, the detectives seemed satisfied, and if the county attorney prosecuted anyone I never heard about it.

Harry Bell had no children, only an ex-wife he hadn't seen in thirty years and a brother. No daughter named Dana. There was no record of a Dana Underwood in the Miami University alumni association, and the Dana Watkins the association showed was twenty-four years old and living in New England—too young to be my soccer mom on the edge of middle age. Why she came to me and sent me on an errand to find the body of Harry Bell—I had no answers. With Peralta demanding to see a manuscript, I decided not to press the matter. The mysterious Dana became a statement in a detective's file, although Patrick Blair didn't keep her “father's” letter. So I dropped it in a rarely opened desk drawer. It was my “get to it someday” file. It was a full drawer.

The gentle months slipped away. I received no more broadsides from the county supervisors. Lindsey and I were looking forward to our first real vacation in years: a late-June train trip across the Canadian Rockies. It was an indulgence we shouldn't have considered, so of course we did. Until then, we reveled in our nights and weekends on Cypress Street. Lindsey had her gardens, where she exploited the long growing season and outwitted the merciless sun. When she came in sweaty and covered in dirt, she was gorgeous. The evening often meant martinis on the patio, where we talked about our day and solved the world's problems. At night, we read to each other, often in bed, where she would drape a leg across me. We went through Graham Greene's
Travels with My Aunt
and David Kennedy's
Freedom from Fear
. The tamale women came to the door every Monday night and we bought a dozen each time. I gave Lindsey backrubs every night before bed. We walked to Encanto Park, and went to spring training games, which Lindsey loved.

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes. Somebody said that—Tolkien, I think. I didn't take anything for granted. But I liked to think we had both met at a point in our lives where we didn't have anything to prove, where we knew that what was rare and precious couldn't be valued in money. I knew I not only loved Lindsey, but I liked her and admired her.

My days fell into a comforting routine. If I was working at the office, I took the bus down Central to Washington, then walked to the courthouse. At home, I sat at Grandfather's old desk, in the study that opened off the western end of the living room. I picked a dozen of the cases I had been handed since coming back home to Phoenix and being given a job by Peralta. Back then these had just been cases gathering dust in the records bureau, ignored by the cold-case detectives.

At first, he had taken pity on me. I knew that. I was recently divorced and denied tenure. I never intended to stay. But I found that I had a knack for the work. At least that's what I hoped, outside the moments, which were many, when I felt like a fraud in two worlds, academia and law enforcement. Having a county supervisor take a bead on me only reinforced that insecurity. Still, I recalled cases such as the murder in the 1950s of the mining executive. It hadn't been solved by DNA, or the autopsy, or cop luck. It was solved when, four decades later, I had applied a historian's touch. That key statement—it was untrustworthy because the supposed witness was a business rival, even an enemy, and was not even in the city on that date. Then I had found the investigating officer's notes—primary sources—which contradicted the press reports—secondary sources. Those discoveries had turned me toward a new interpretation of the sad events, then evidence—enough to indict, if the suspect had not gone on to a tougher court years before. Sure, a skeptical detective or journalist might have done the same. But I had done it two dozen times now with success. Recalling it made me feel better about these four years back at the Sheriff's Office, and more secure against the attacks of county supervisors.

For the book, I went through those case files again, crimes from 1932 and 1948 and 1959. Wearing headphones and listening to jazz CDs, I organized research and outlined chapters. Lindsey had set me up with a new Macintosh laptop, but I still loved working through paper files, making notes on cards and legal pads. Then, music off, I started writing. It was like grad school again, without the student loans. Once I settled down to the work, I found myself enjoying the writing. At night, during cocktails, I would read the manuscript to Lindsey. Sometimes I imagined returning to history writing—and not the tedious, statistic-laden stuff I had been forced to write to get published as an academic. David Hackett Fischer's
Washington's Crossing
was on my desk at work, and in spare moments I went through it—pure pleasure!—and wondered if I could do as well.

It was the second Thursday in May when Peralta sat in my office as I read a few chapters. One of the big windows was open because the sheriff had brought two Cuban cigars, Cohibas. It was against at least a page of county rules, but I wasn't complaining. It gave him something to do instead of stopping me to question a minor word choice or make a suggestion I hated. Finally, he sat contentedly wreathed in tobacco smoke, closed his eyes and listened. The old office seemed at home with men smoking cigars.

“Maybe it's time for me to retire, Mapstone.”

I stopped reading and looked at him. Then I laughed. He just stared at me with his coal-black eyes until I stopped.

“You ever hear of Mara 18?”

“A gang,” I said.

“Yeah, well…” He let some ash fall off his cigar and let it sit in the ashtray, a little Cuban smokestack industry on my desk. “I'd call it a terrorist organization. Mara 18 started in LA. Back in the '70s it was Mexican immigrants. Then in the '80s, they started recruiting Centro Americanos—all these rootless young men who came here to get away from the wars down there. Only this wasn't the Boys and Girls Club. Their big enemy is the Salvatruchas—that's mostly Central American, Salvadoran, you know.”

“They're operating over here?” I asked.

“Don't let the chamber of commerce know,” he said. He took his cigar again, took a puff, kept it in his hand. “A little before seven this morning, a carload of Mara 18 gets out at an apartment, it's in a county island over by Tolleson. They go in and kill five people. Only four of those people are under six years old.”

“God…” It was all I could say.

“None of the neighbors wanted to talk, of course. Nobody wants to talk and get killed. But there's a utility crew working across the street. They said the guys in the car had tattoos on their faces, their foreheads. That's the way these gang members look.” He rubbed his eyes, then slowly shook his head. “Turns out, the apartment was being used by Salvatruchas—but of course the men aren't there. How long before we get a retaliatory hit on Mara 18? A day? A week? Places in this town are like Baghdad, or the West Bank.” He sighed and watched the tip of the cigar.

“I get tired of this shit, Mapstone,” he said, in a tone of voice I had never heard from him before, a far-away voice. “It's like the world is just crazy. And what kind of future do I have anyway?”

“Governor Peralta has a nice ring to it,” I said.

“Not in this state,” he said. “Maybe I need a change. I could be making money in real estate, just like everybody else.”

“As you said to me about teaching, ‘you'd be bored,'” I said. “You were born to be the sheriff of Maricopa County.”

He was about to say something when the door opened. Lindsey and Robin came in laughing.

10

That night I dreamed of men with tattoos on their faces. Blue ink was etched into their foreheads and cheeks. I couldn't read the words, but they were in English, not Spanish. The tattooed men were digging a grave in the desert, then they were trying to bury me in the grave, slamming bowling-ball-sized rocks onto me, and the rocks didn't hurt but I was fighting for my life in dream slo-mo. I couldn't breathe. Then I was in our bedroom, watching the bluish moonlight coming in from the street. The only sound was Lindsey's quiet, regular breathing. I put my hand on her hip, and let her warm, soft skin reassure me that this was reality.

It had not been a nightmare-inducing day. In fact, it had been a good day. Peralta had made only minor suggestions on the chapters. The cigar was fine, although I could still taste its bitter aftermath, even after two teeth-brushings and one swig of mouthwash. No reason to feel anxiety, aside from a potential lecture from the dentist. As I lay there, my heart still pounding from the dream, I wondered if I had somehow let Peralta down. His talk of retiring, of being worn out by the increasing madness of politics and society, was so unlike him that I thought he was joking. But he doesn't joke. Maybe I should have tried to get him to talk more. Maybe I should have invited him over for a cocktail. No, that wouldn't do. He was probably on some riff that had nothing to do with his doubts or fears or interior life. Mike Peralta had none of those things. It was what had finally busted up his marriage. It wasn't up to me to try to reach him, not after nearly a quarter century of friendship. The cornerstone of that friendship was my willingness to let him be.

We were interrupted anyway. Lindsey and Robin were on their way to the Biltmore to shop. Robin had become more of a fixture of those spring months, as Lindsey had little by little set her caution aside. I had learned that Robin's last name was Bryson, that she rode a motorcycle, and had a master's degree from the University of Delaware, where she had specialized in the WPA Art Project. This had brought her to the attention of a very wealthy retired cookie magnate in Paradise Valley, who collected paintings, murals, and posters from the Social Realism movement, among other enthusiasms. From power to the workers to collectibles for the capitalists. Robin lived with her boyfriend, Edward, in a bungalow down in the Roosevelt District. We had not yet met this Edward, who was an artist. As Lindsey had spent more time with Robin, it had seemed like a good thing. Lindsey had never been one to pal around with the girls, just as I had few male friends after college. A woman friend, a lost sister who had gotten her act together, was something new, and Lindsey seemed to like it.

In my office, introductions were made and Peralta was unusually charming. As they talked, I studied the two women, searching for the sisterly similarities. They were both about the same height. This day, Lindsey was dressed in a white sleeveless knit top and black cotton skirt coming to just above her knees. Robin was wearing blue jeans and a vivid tie-dyed work shirt. Her newsboy cap from our first encounter was gone and her hair was loose. It was a thicker and wilder than Lindsey's hair, fell below her shoulders, and was somewhere between light brown and blond. Robin was tan, while Lindsey was fair. She had gray eyes to Lindsey's blue. Her features were more closely clustered, and her eyes deeper-set. Somehow her features didn't assemble quite right, although they could be attractive when she was speaking, when her face became mobile and expressive. Yet they had the same mouth, dimples, chin. When they sat side by side, talked and laughed and glanced—there was connective tissue, in their eyes, and in glances and identical smiles.

“What does a private curator do?” Peralta was sitting on the edge of the desk, and I swear he was sucking in his gut. It was a most un-Peralta like curiosity, and Lindsey gave me a secret smile.

“She arranges the sex toys of the filthy rich,” Robin said, nodding her head in slow seriousness.

“I always suspected,” Peralta said, and the room boomed with his unaccustomed laughter. Robin tended to be as off-the-wall boisterous as Lindsey was subtle and ironic.

“I help guide the collector,” Robin said. “In art, that is.”

“The rich guy,” Peralta said.

“Right. His collection is focused on Social Realism and he's interested in WPA-era stuff, but he also has some awesome Latin American paintings. Part of my job is to research the art scene. I'm in contact with the galleries, sometimes with artists themselves. I run a lot of interference. Some of the galleries can be really obnoxious.”

“Kind of like Mapstone, here,” Peralta said.

“David is interesting.” Robin smiled at me. “I've never had a brother-in-law before.”

“So what else do you do?” Peralta asked.

“Some art can also be fraudulent, and I help him research a work he's looking to buy, making sure it's the real thing,” Robin said. “I also keep his library of books and periodicals, and records on the collection, things like insurance appraisals and bibliographical information. Don't you yawn, now—this is not boring stuff! Sometimes I arrange for his work to be loaned to museums. Here's where it can get sweet. Last year, I got a great trip to Madrid for just one painting. Then some weeks I feel like I'm a moving company—he's got a house in Aspen and a penthouse in New York, besides the place in Paradise Valley. He's got a very cool jet…”

Peralta had as close to a rapt expression as his big immobile face could hold. It was fascinating. If I had launched into an exposition about the root causes of the Great Depression or the complex social changes of Renaissance Italy, Peralta would have been twitching after the second sentence. But I was not blond and long-legged, and Robin had a quirky charisma. She told a good story, had a big, uninhibited laugh, and looked at everyone she talked to with intense, friendly interest. When she was talking and laughing, the animation brought her face together in a way that was attractive. My biggest surprise was Peralta's interest.

“Who is this rich guy?” he asked. When she supplied the name, he nodded and exhaled. “Wish I could get him to contribute to my campaign.”

“May I?” Robin snatched the cigar out of Peralta's hand, struck a dashing pose and took a puff. She said, “Cuban?”

He nodded approvingly, making no effort to retrieve it. I made an extravagant face at Lindsey, who raised her eyebrows and smiled. Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. They went on talking and sharing the Cohiba.

There was a melancholy aspect to all this. For what seemed like my entire adult life, Peralta had been married to the same woman. In their heyday, Mike was rising to the top of the sheriff's office and Sharon was becoming the most popular radio shrink on the West Coast. I cared about both of them. Even when I was living away, I had always found a friendly place with them when I came back to Phoenix to visit. But they were never very similar and the gulf only widened over the years. Now Sharon was living in San Francisco, and the sheriff seemed happy to work all the time, just as he had through their marriage and the raising of two daughters. I missed Sharon, but she was doing well. And Peralta showing some interest in Robin was better than him sitting alone every non-working moment in the big house in Dreamy Draw.

I could almost hear their voices in the bedroom, as I lay in bed and my mind discarded the contents of the previous day. But then I was not fully awake. My mind was distracted by the bad dream. Gradually, I got that feeling in the belly that comes when you've been lying in bed, enjoying yourself, not quite with it, and then you remember the car has a flat tire or somebody said something you wished you hadn't heard. Robin's words came back to me. Robin did say it. I wasn't dreaming.

The conversation was on how the sisters had reunited. Robin and Lindsey took turns telling about that day in the neighborhood, when we had been called to the crime scene. This brought an update from Peralta on the homicide, him being a grand master of information, whether it's cop gossip or an interesting investigation going on in another department. The victim was a lawyer, but he also owned two dozen check-cashing outlets, the banks of choice of immigrant workers, as well as human smugglers—the coyotes—and sometimes drug traffickers. But his stores seemed pretty clean, Peralta said. They had passed muster with a state attorney general's investigation the previous year. Maybe somebody was trying to move in on him, get him to do illegal business or sell out. The victim had been forty-two years old, had lived in Willo for two years, and was named Alan Cordesman. And that's when Robin spoke.

“I knew him,” she said.