Arizona Dreams (9 page)

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.”

“Please.” 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.

“Maybe this woman is just nuts,” she said, sitting on my desk, facing me, while I rubbed her feet.

“Mmmm,” she said.

“Is that irritating you?”

“I'll bear up,” she said. “I'll tell you when to stop.”

I said, “Peralta says I'm the one who's nuts. He was as angry as I've ever seen him that I had anything to do with Tom Earley's wife. He didn't want any explanations. He just ordered me to stay away. Why is he so afraid of Tom Earley?”

“Earley wants to destroy El Jefe,” she said. “He and his allies call the sheriff a liberal. Can you believe that?”

I shook my head. “Politics have become so extreme, especially in Arizona. When I was a professor, I was considered right-wing. In today's Arizona, I'm what the Tom Earleys of the state would call a liberal, or a socialist.” I sighed. “Considering Earley was specifically questioning the need for me in the Sheriff's Office, I should be the one who's scared. I know Peralta's just looking out for me. But the whole thing is creepy. Tom Earley uses me as political cannon fodder, and his wife shows up in my office. If Dana's story is true, and she was a blackmail victim, she wouldn't be a cooperative witness. She's got to protect her husband.”

“Maybe she's protecting herself,” Lindsey said.

I gently caressed her finely sculpted ankles. I could see why the Victorians thought the sight of a woman's ankle was a scandal.

“I just need to get out of it,” I said. “Pass this information on to the detectives. Let them sort it out. I told Peralta I'd find her, and I did.” I started on the other foot. “Or,” I said, “I could ignore Peralta and arrest her for filing a false report.”

“Don't get in a fight with the East Valley, Dave,” she laughed. “That would hurt El Jefe's reelection chances.”

“That whole suburban thing baffles me,” I said.

“It's not your thing, Dave. Not mine, either. Why don't you just give it to the detectives and go back to the book.”

“Peralta's book,” I said.

“It's my History Shamus' book,” she said, smiling at me warmly. “I love the parts you've read to me. I lived some of those cases with you. Anyway, you've seemed contented when you're writing. I like that.”

She leaned forward and ran her fingers through my hair. “But there's bad news.”

“I'm going bald?”

“No, Dave. I do love your wavy hair, and it's fine. But I just came from the federal building, and they want me in Washington for a week. There was a major breach of corporate computer systems yesterday. Cisco, Bank of America, a bunch of others. Who knows what the hackers got away with.”

“You'll have fun,” I said, without enthusiasm.

“I'd have fun on vacation there with you, whispering history in my ear as we toured the city. Instead, I'll be cooped up at the FBI in endless meetings with a bunch of propeller-heads. I hate to leave My Love. But when I get back, we get to leave on our real vacation. It's going to be wonderful, Dave!”

She made me smile. “I am so looking forward to that, especially the time with you.” I kissed her hand. “In the meantime, I'll be fine. Don't be gone long.”

She put her hand on my cheek, looking at me with her dark blue eyes. “I need you, Dave. You keep me centered.”

I leaned up and kissed her, letting our tongues dance together. “I'm so proud of you,” I said. “Please be safe. Remember the Russian mafia…”

She sat back. “I think about it all the time,” she said. “Maybe we should make that life change we talked about. We could make some money off the house. Go someplace that's not so screwed up, get real jobs.”

“We would have done that if I hadn't failed in Portland,” I said.

“You didn't fail. They were assholes who didn't see how brilliant you are.” Then, “I hope it's not a problem that Robin is still at the house.”

“I hardly see her,” I said. “It's not a problem at all. Maybe I'll take her to dinner with Peralta, be a chaperone.”

“He does like her,” Lindsey said. “She said today that I was a bitch.”

I just watched her. I reached above the fabric of her pants and massaged her calf.

“It's a sister thing,” she said, running her hand through her hair. “Seriously, Dave. I know she's kind of like the houseguest that won't leave. But she's been through a bad experience, and I haven't wanted to nag her.”

“It's not a problem.”

“I won't be gone long, Dave. Just a week.”

“I know,” I said. “I'll just be writing. Everybody can sleep better knowing they got the ice-pick killer. If they got him.”

She raised an eyebrow.

I said, “I could see Patrick Blair using a Taser on the poor guy's nuts to get a confession.”

Lindsey just looked at me. Then she withdrew her leg.

Something had changed in the big room. I said, “I was making a joke.”

“Patrick is very professional and kind,” she said quietly. “He wouldn't do that.”

“It was a joke, Lindsey,” I said, feeling my face flush. “I'm sorry I offended your friend. I'm glad he has you to defend him.” My voice had an edge to it. I could hear that.

“What is it about you and Patrick?”

Before I could answer, she added quickly, “I know you're after some trip to the dark side. I don't know why.”

I stammered, “I was just joking.”

“No you weren't.”

The office air was filled with static electricity of things unsaid, unasked. A long time passed in silence. Then Lindsey touched my hand lightly and left. She didn't slam the door.