Arizona Dreams (7 page)

13

The small, worried manager conveyed us to an office that overlooked the casino through a darkened, one-way window. I followed Peralta inside and the casino manager went away. The office was large, with a highly polished wood floor, and ornamented with Indian pottery and baskets. A bank of television screens showed different angles of the casino. Out the window, I could see the detectives and crime-scene technicians still gathered around Damnation Alley, as if they expected the corpse of Louis Bell to hit the big payout. If so, it would give the manager yet another reason to worry. Or maybe celebrate. I could imagine the billboards around town: “Casino Arizona, Where You CAN Take It With You.” Peralta had moved to the large leather chair behind a long modern desk with a bare top. The chair barely contained his bulk. He just stared at me.

“Well?” I said.

He just shrugged, turning down the corners of his face so he briefly had bulldog jowls. The room was silent. The miniature city of lights out the window gave a sense of the symphony of odds and desperate hopes that lay beyond the thick glass. I walked along the wall, touching the window. The glass was cold. I was cold, and felt fifty pounds heavier from the gathering oppression.

I started talking. “The last time I saw an ice pick used that way was on the Willo home tour. It was stuck in the ear of a man who was lying naked in his bedroom. He owned some check-cashing outlets. Apparently clean—you told me this. Maybe somebody was trying to muscle in, take protection money.”

Peralta was swinging slowly in the chair, a heavy pendulum of fate. He said nothing.

“I don't know how that gets us to Louis Bell,” I said. “And so ballsy, taking him out in a crowded casino. That's sending a message, right?”

Peralta was looking at the ceiling. I went on, “All I know about Louis is that he honored his brother's last request, to be buried on his own land. This is Arizona, property rights as God and all that. Harry's property was way the hell out beyond the White Tank Mountains. It's good for nothing, unless you want to wait fifty years for Phoenix and LA to grow together. Otherwise, Harry was retired. He lived in a trailer near Hyder. The autopsy came back clean, I guess. So we have two desert rat brothers, and now one gets an ice pick in the ear. I was trying to stay out of this, remember? Follow orders and write a book.”

The room was large and without sound again. The floor made weird ghosts of the light coming from recessed positions in the ceiling. I didn't meet his eyes. The bank of television monitors on the other wall got my attention—whoever sat here could watch everything from the blackjack dealer's hands to the parking lot. Maybe one of them would reveal who scrambled Louis Bell's brains. I was growing angry with Peralta for the silent treatment, and at myself for feeling like a kid who was in trouble. What the hell did I do wrong? What was it about his moods that bred paranoia?

“You know about the woman named Dana,” I said. “I don't need to go into that again.”

I sat on a hard leather loveseat. Maybe the furniture was intended to make whoever sat there uncomfortable, be he employee facing dismissal or unruly customer. I knew the routine. I could feel the anger radiating off him. He didn't like surprises, especially ones that embroiled the Sheriff's Office in other jurisdictions, especially when he might not be able to run the show, as would happen with the feds. Soon he would explode—his rages were always frightening, even if you had lived through a dozen of them, even if you knew the generosity he was capable of in other circumstances. My stomach was tight. My mind was bouncing around the room, down to the slot machines, glancing off the corpse of Louis Bell, and ricocheting back to the glass office. I wondered what Sharon would say. I missed her. They had been married for thirty years, and now she was his “ex-wife.” That construction was still foreign. For all the years I knew them it was Mike and Sharon, never just Mike. She had been his awkward young shadow when Peralta and I were first partners. Even then, I like to flatter myself that I could detect a spark, a curiosity. Then she had gone back to school, eventually earning her Ph.D. in psychology. Later she would become the famous radio psychologist, the best-selling author. That seemed like a long time ago. Now she was in San Francisco in a new life. And I was cooped up in this glass cell with her ex-husband.

I said, “It doesn't seem to me that this is our problem. The guy in Willo is a Phoenix PD case. This one is tribal cops and the FBI…”

I was talking to myself. Talking myself out of the obvious. All the ways human beings hurt each other in Maricopa County, Arizona, and I'm just the egghead who paws through the old records, clears out the old cases. So what if I'm bracketed by homicide by ice picks. What's the connection between Alan Cordesman, check-cashing king, and Louis Bell, old fart at the casino? Not my problem. Murder in the next block of my neighborhood? It can happen anywhere. Same MO used for the brother of a dead man I discovered courtesy of my mysterious former student? Coincidence. Hell, maybe it was the new killing method being shown in gangsta videos or wherever the pathologies of our civilization are passed on today. It wasn't my problem. Unfortunately, that's not what the worry pain in my middle told me.

Out of a dry mouth I said, “I need to find this woman, Dana. She's a connection somehow.”

“I agree,” he said evenly. He stopped swinging in the chair.

I stared at him. “You agree? What about me being chained to your book, trying to be a real historian—I think that's how you put it—not being a hot dog, and not interfering with a PPD investigation?”

His large eyes filled with innocent surprise. “Why are you so upset, Mapstone…?”

Movement drew our eyes to the big window. The crowd surged like disturbed water, and we saw several uniformed officers pushing through. They appeared to be chasing someone. I looked at Peralta, but he was already halfway to the door. We walked quickly down the steps. Getting across the casino floor was easy by following in the jetstream of Peralta. Then we burst out the door into the blinding sunshine. Four tribal cops were handcuffing a slight Hispanic kid. He couldn't have been more than twenty, with a razor cut and dramatic thick eyebrows. He had that odd look of the newly arrested, part confusion and part defiance. One of the tribal cops explained what had happened.

“He tried to make a run for it, and when we caught him he had this in his pocket.”

Peralta pulled out a handkerchief and took the wallet, then carefully opened it.

He said, “Driver's license says Louis Bell.”

14

I had my plan for that evening. Mexican food with Lindsey at Los Dos Molinos and then some reconnect time at home. The restaurant sat near the foot of the South Mountains in a building that was once Tom Mix's house. And even though the cowboy star was long gone, the place was the best in town for the kind of New Mexico-style cuisine that is so spicy it makes you sweat. Even with the tourists fleeing the impending summer, Los Dos was crowded. The hostess was so unbending I'm convinced even Peralta couldn't just walk in and get a table. So, after putting our name on the waiting list, we did the usual penance with the crowd on the patio, eased by beer and chips.

“So he was killed while playing slots?” Lindsey kept her voice down and her eyes wide with interest. “Talk about hitting God's jackpot.”

“Or not,” I said. “Catching the suspect with the victim's wallet in front of a hundred witnesses ought to be enough that even Patrick Blair could get a conviction.”

“Dave,” she laughed. “What has he ever done to you?”

Part of me would have loved to ask. Ask, that is, what has he ever done to Lindsey? Part of me cowered in primitive emotions and another part was alive with aroused voyeurism. How odd: to have lived a life of the mind; that life was supposed to tame and mediate those nasty feelings, take them out and study them, make them safe, even boring. Mountbatten, the last British viceroy in India, was cuckolded by Nehru—that gave the historians a laugh. And it wasn't as if I hadn't enjoyed enough romantic adventures to make up for my youthful awkwardness. Then I won the great prize that sat across from me, sipping her Modelo Especial and dipping a chip into the hottest salsa. So I didn't ask…and I didn't tell, either, about Gretchen. Lindsey said she didn't want to know that much about my old lovers, that it was better for her mental health. She was wise as always.

“Professor…” she said, squeezing my hand. “You have that faraway look.”

I smiled at her. Her dark hair shone lustrously in the dimness. It brushed her collar when she moved her head.

I said, “Tell me about your day.”

“Just computer stuff,” she said. “Still helping our good friends at the Justice Department.”

“You are such a big deal.”

“To you. And I'm glad of that. It kind of scares me what we can do now—how little privacy people have, and they don't even know it. But it scares me that bad guys like terrorists can hide their money in cyberspace and move it with the touch of a finger. So…”

She let the words trail off. Inside the cantina, I could hear the third rendition of “Hotel California” by the guitarist. He had drunken accompaniment from some patrons.

Lindsey went on, “Robin thinks what we do is a threat to civil liberties. I never thought of it that way. But maybe she's right.”

“How is she doing? Peralta wants to know.”

“Really? Peralta courting my sister. That's too weird to contemplate.” She made a face. “I think she'd be a handful for any man, so I'm glad she's got this Edward. Although I'd like to meet him. Why do you think she hasn't introduced us to him? Am I being a typical big sister?”

I shook my head, nodded. She laughed. My insides were so relieved that our spat of the morning was forgotten.

“I don't know how to be a normal sister,” she said. “I don't know what that's like. Maybe there's no such thing. But the training sure wouldn't have come from my family. Sometimes I can't figure Robin out. We'll be going along, and something I say will set her off. She can be very emotional. We had a fight yesterday where she essentially blamed me for Linda killing herself. Then it was over and she apologized and we made up. It can be a roller-coaster.” She brushed back an errant strand of hair. “I heard a radio report the other day…I kind of half heard it. But some expert was talking about how relationships are like physics, and if you're really into somebody you feel everything—love, hate, fear. It made me think, at least. So if I seemed like a bitch this morning, I'm so sorry, Dave.”

“No, no,” I said. “I was out of line. I'm being too hard on Robin.”

“She likes you, Dave. She thinks you're very smart and attractive.”

I was going to speak, but then the loudspeaker called our name and we went toward the cantina. Another round of “Hotel California” was starting up.

By the time we paid our bill and headed for the parking lot, it was closing in on eleven o'clock. But instead of turning north on Central toward the city, Lindsey steered to the right.

“What?”

“You'll find out.”

Now it was clear that Lindsey had her plan for the evening, too. She turned on Dobbins and avoided the closed entrance to the park. We headed east past houses that hadn't been there when I was a kid—that statement could be my standard disclaimer about virtually any Arizona vista. Then the park came closer to the road. Lindsey pulled off the road and gave me a long, luxurious kiss.

She pointed to a sleeping bag in the back seat. “You could carry that.”

“The park closed at sunset,” I mumbled.

“So call the police.”

Our walk was lit by stars and city lights. They made the barrel cactuses and boulders into shadowy companions as we picked our way up a steady incline. Critters scampered away with snaps and rustles as we walked. I wanted to think they were all jackrabbits and roadrunners. But the landscape seemed benign. The night was as dry as an old manuscript, with the desert air offering no resistance to our hike. She gave me her hand and I helped her across a break in the rocks. Ahead of us were the low mountains that are a fixture in the Phoenix landscape. Lost? Check your directions by the mountains. But from where we stood, they presented themselves as a steady black uplift that suddenly cut off leaving nothing but sky. Our navigation stars came from the television towers above the Dobbins Overlook, dozens of red lights blinking reassuringly. I had hiked these trails many times as a Cub Scout, but was ashamed to say I hadn't been back since I returned home to Phoenix as an adult. But I wasn't feeling like a Cub Scout right that moment.

Lindsey took the sleeping bag out of my hand and deposited it on the ground. We stood on a sandy, flat pause in the earth, surrounded by saguaros and rocks the size of sentinels. Above us, the torrid red stars pulsed and below us Phoenix spread out like a galaxy turned on its side. We just watched the lights, saying nothing. I slipped my hand around her waist, a feeling so wonderfully familiar—so right—and yet still so novel. The only sound was the everywhere-and-nowhere roar of the city below us. Then she was unbuttoning my shirt.

All the stars were still glowing later. Lindsey lay back against me. I nuzzled her neck and draped an arm over her breasts. Her fair skin was my oasis amid the blackness of the desert at night.

“Tell me a story, History Shamus.”

“South Mountain Park is the largest municipal park in the world. The only historic murder I know of happened in…”

She shook her head. “Tell me a hopeful story.”

I pushed my nose through her soft hair and nibbled her ear. She laughed her low, adult laugh. The horizon of lights blinked insistently. Amid the lights, the night was clear enough to make out Camelback Mountain miles to the north.

“This place lay abandoned for four hundred years,” I said, “except for the ghosts of its past and the phantasms of its possibilities. Here was one of the most fertile river valleys in the world. A Nile or a Euphrates. And yet, if you had ridden your horse into it in 1870, you would have found it empty.”

“I like this story,” she said.

“It's called Phoenix because it rose from its ashes, like the bird of mythology. The ashes were the Hohokam, who built one of the most advanced irrigation societies in the New World. But the river was capricious—flooding in the spring, but then going years with barely a trickle. The Hohokam civilization disappeared—what happened is still a mystery. Then after the Civil War, settlers found this place and cleared out the old Indian canals. They were on the verge of abandoning it, too. But they dreamed what it could be. And mighty acts of faith and technology made the desert bloom. Now it's the fifth-largest city in the nation.”

She leaned her head back and kissed me.

“You're a romantic,” she said.

I adjusted myself so I could feel the length of her back against my chest. I said, “When I was a kid, the city was surrounded by fields and citrus groves. From up here in the daytime, we could have looked down and seen orange trees, then the Japanese flower gardens—they seemed to go on forever. Then, the city. It was beautiful. Too bad we had to pave it all over.”

“I wish I could have seen it, History Shamus. I just don't know why we have to lose so much that's beautiful.”

It was after one a.m. when we turned down Cypress Street. My body was feeling worked out and giddy in a way that comes from only one source. I was already imagining curling up in bed with my lover. But someone was on the porch, sitting on the step.

“What is Robin doing here,” Lindsey said sleepily. Then, in a tense voice, “My God, look at her eye.”