Cactus Heart (10 page)

20

I came back to the courthouse from Scottsdale and pulled out a legal pad. I could hear Lindsey's voice telling me to use the Mac, but I needed the comfort of pen on paper. Lindsey. I was sending prayers and good thoughts to her, yet I had this feeling that some terrible breach had come upon us like a shipwreck on the unsuspecting.
Don't worry, Dave.
I was a worrier, and now I felt like something akin to a bad cold was coming over me, my heartbeat too noticeable, my brain full of dread. I shifted in the creaky old desk chair and started making notes on the case, what I knew, what I didn't know. The latter list was a hell of a lot longer. By the time I left, it was nearly midnight. I was tired and getting nowhere on a fifty-eight-year-old double-murder. The BMW's fuel gauge was nearly on empty, a little needle stuck in the festive dash display.

At the light on Roosevelt, a VW Jetta full of Asian teenagers pulled up beside me. They flashed me clean-cut smiles and then one showed me a little machine gun, just like it was prized artwork he had bought at First Friday. I thought very clearly: am I supposed to show you mine? I smiled back stupidly. Then they drove away going the speed limit, signaled, turned right and disappeared down a side street. I didn't feel scared or brave or outraged, or even like calling PPD on the cell phone. It was time to get some sleep. All day I had been hoping I would find Lindsey waiting for me.

But Peralta was sitting in my driveway.

We walked into the kitchen in silence and I handed out beer. Sam Adams, love it or leave it. I told him about James Yarnell in Scottsdale.

“Stay on the case,” he said, sipping reluctantly from my loathsome yuppie brew.

“And do what?” I was getting cranky from lack of sleep.

“What's the next step in a case like this?” Peralta the academy instructor.

I threw my hands in the air and walked out. “I'm too fucking tired to employ the Socratic method on the chief fucking deputy.”

He appeared in the bathroom doorway as I was preparing to brush my teeth.

“Did you hear from your little friend today?”

“Lindsey. No.”

I didn't answer beyond that.

“Sharon and I are having problems.”

I just started brushing, nice circular strokes that would make Grandfather happy.

“Do you know what it's like to be in the spotlight all the time.” he said. “No, you don't. It's not like I can just go check into a hotel, without this showing up in
New Times
next week.” That was the alternative paper that had waged war with the sheriff for years.

He went on, “They've already got me as the next sheriff. Shit, I haven't even decided to run. Anyway, my personal life is none of their business.”

I would leave the First Amendment arguments to Lorie Pope. I just kept brushing. Circular strokes. Rinse. Spit. Floss.

“I guess I should get a place of my own, quietly,” he went on. “I just…Hell, it seems like such an irrevocable step. I can't figure out what she wants. How the hell can any man figure that out nowdays?”

I was a silent poster boy for dental diligence.

“Goddamn it, Mapstone. This isn't easy for me. You know what I mean?”

I looked at him. His face seemed heavier and more careworn than I could remember. I looked back in the mirror for some vain reassurance.

“No, I don't know what you mean,” I said. “It's fine for you and Sharon to fuss over my personal life for fifteen years, and I don't get to be let in to yours?” I wanted to say:
You demand to know other people's weaknesses but never show yours
. But I was just dragging. I said, “Stay here when you want, for as long as you need.”

I cleaned up and turned out the light. “You know where the guest bedroom is. There's an extra door key in the black pot on the kitchen counter. I'll buy some Coors and try to keep the noise down from my reading.”

“Fuck you,” he called after me as I went in my bedroom. Then, very quietly: “Thanks.”

***

So began the strange life we fell into that season. Peralta and I acted like two bachelors sharing an old house. Most of the time, we barely saw each other. He was in no mood to cook grand dinners. One night we got takeout from Hong Kong Gourmet and rented two Dirty Harry movies—Peralta was contentedly critical of the actors' combat shooting stances. We didn't talk about love and women. He was neat and nearly invisible as a roommate, but a steady beachhead of Peralta's clothes and county reports built up in the guest room.

I was grateful for the company. As the days went by without word from Lindsey, I grew tired of leaving clever, unanswered messages in her voice mail. The conviction grew on me that I might never see her again, at least as a lover. Or maybe I knew that at an instant when the phone rang at midnight, when she told me of her mother's suicide. I put the copy of Dante back in the bookshelf. I kept the rose she left me in a little vase on the bedside table as the leaves turned black.

I grieved to myself, without the poleaxed pain that lived in my middle for the first year after Patty said she was leaving. That first time Lindsey made joyous love with me, I saw her as such a miraculous appearance in my life that I vowed not to jump into the vortex of hope and fear that breeds possessiveness. I just let her and us unfold, and I would never regret that. Maybe I always knew it was temporary, and if she didn't run away first, well, maybe I would. So I grieved to myself and tried to create a world of small forward motion.

For the next few days, the Phoenix Police went away. I was the sole investigator on the Yarnell case, a sign that they saw me as both incompetent and harmless—not a bad place to be in a large bureaucracy. The only stipulation: I check in with Hawkins once a week. The skeletons case quickly departed from the minute-long attention span of the Phoenix media. Christmas was coming and a new Nordstrom was open in Scottsdale.

I did what I could.

I spent hours looking over old missing-persons reports from the 1930s and early 1940s. I hooked up with an FBI cold-case expert in Washington. I went through reams of old police logs. Anything to figure out whether twins other than the Yarnell brothers could have ended up walled into the basement passage beneath the Sunset Route Hotel.

James Yarnell gave me permission to examine the Yarnell family papers that were boxed up in the archives of the Arizona Historical Foundation and the Arizona Collection at the Burton Barr Central Library. So every morning I stopped off at my office, made myself not look for an e-mail or voice message from Lindsey, and then drove to the library for at least two solid hours' work. It was like grad school all over again.

The papers told me that the Yarnell family enterprises were complicated even back in the 1940s. The Yarnell Land and Cattle Co. included ranches around the state, citrus, cotton, mining, even development of a “new subdivision outside Phoenix,” which was about half a mile from where my neighborhood sat in the inner-city today. Hayden Yarnell had been about seventy-five years old in 1941, but he had still managed his empire with precise notes and direct orders: when to move a herd to the High Country, how much to price some land near Bisbee, why he thought the company's offices in the Luhr's Tower were too expensive. His scrawl across yellowing memos and creaky ledgers was loopy with age and carried the flats and edges of an old fountain pen.

Yarneco was very much a family business back then. Morgan Yarnell, Hayden's son and James and Max's father, was a regular cast member in the corporate records. In the 1930s, it looked like he took over the cattle business. Then in 1939, Morgan was named vice president, putting him directly below the old man. Loan documents for farm land around the Valley and railroad shipping contracts were routinely signed by Morgan after 1939. Occasionally in a board document I saw the name Emma Yarnell Tully, Hayden's daughter, but she seemed to have little to do with the company.

Those same documents might name Hayden Winthrop Yarnell, Jr., Morgan's brother. His nephew, James Yarnell, called him the “bounder of the family.” But he was a cipher in the corporate records, and appeared little more in the family photos. I looked at a man with a long, weak face, hardly the face of a bounder. He was two years older than Morgan, and as far as I could tell he never married, had no children, and lived off the family fortune.

One afternoon, I came across a slender, vanity-press volume to commemorate Hayden Yarnell's seventy-fifth birthday. He'd come a long way from the gunfight at Gila City. My finger slid across grainy black-and-white images of the patriarch with the snowy, full head of hair. The fierceness was still in his eyes, undimmed by the stiff white collar and heavy wool suit and decades of comfortable wealth. He looked so out of place, standing in the foyer of his mansion, fingering his watch chain. I wanted to see him as my mind's eye did—the cowboy, the miner, the quintessence of pioneer Arizona.

The watch chain. My eye lingered.

Here was a family photo, with a caption identifying Morgan Yarnell and his sons, Andrew, Woodrow, Max, and James. It put me back in my chair for a moment, to see the actual faces. The twins were dressed in Western shirts, boots, toy guns, staring menacingly at the camera. Innocent little faces with that long Yarnell nose. Disappeared for half a century, little boys lost.

I'm not particularly good with numbers; that's one reason I never made it big in the history business, which today emphasizes statistics and social science. But it didn't seem that Yarneco was doing well in the 1930s. No surprise there, considering the Great Depression was dragging on and the towns and rural areas of the West suffered longer and deeper downturns than many places. Still, a string of tense letters from bankers indicated that even businesses that should have been doing all right were suffering. I had written my Ph.D. dissertation on the Depression in the West, and I knew the dude ranches and fledgling resorts actually helped prop up the Phoenix economy during that time. That was not the case of the resort owned by Yarneco. It was sold in 1939 under threat of foreclosure.

I saw more of Gretchen Goodheart. Every couple of days, she dropped by my office, delivered a new insight, if not a new blueprint, to the underground passages where the twins were walled up. Gradually on the cork bulletin board that sat on an easel in my office we built a little collage of facts. One day she asked if I would go horseback riding with her, and we spent a Saturday out in the desert. She had a quality of depth that was appealing and rare. It was the holidays and I was needy. But I wanted to believe I would have appreciated her in any season.

21

It was nearly nine on Friday night and I stood at the office window, listening to carolers down in a nearly deserted Patriots Square. They sang “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and then “Jingle Bells” before a fire truck went by with siren screaming. I picked up the phone on the second ring, but there was only a light buzz in the background. I was about to put it down when a voice said my name.

“You know who this is?”

“I don't.”

“Everybody knows my voice. The damned president knows my voice. It's Max Yarnell.”

I sat down in the wooden swivel chair. “How may I help you, Mr. Yarnell?” He sounded very drunk.

“I need to talk to you,” he said. “I need to see you. Tonight. Can you come out here?”

“Where is ‘out here'?”

He started into directions heading me into the McDowell Mountain foothills in the far north of Scottsdale. I scribbled them onto a sheriff's office memo pad.

“Mr. Yarnell,” I said. “It's late, it'll take me an hour to get out there.”

“Goddamn it, Mapstone, you could do it in thirty minutes. I do. I really need to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Not on the phone,” he slurred. “Out here, where it's safe.”

“Safe from what?” I could hear “Frosty the Snowman” wafting through the open window.

“Never mind,” he said. “I'll call you back.” The line clicked off.

It reminded me of an eccentric old professor at a university where I had taught. At work, he was distinguished and aloof, a giant in his field of research. But he drank alone at home and after the first few glasses, he reached for the telephone—sometimes he called female students he had a crush on, sometimes colleagues he was peeved at. He was quietly pushed into retirement after he made an obscene call to a dean's wife. I made a note to call Max Yarnell the next day.

When I got the car out of the garage to head home, though, I felt differently. It was nothing as formed or sophisticated as a premonition. Just a murky anxiety. I pulled out the address and drove toward Scottsdale. I slipped onto the Red Mountain Freeway at Seventh Street and shot through the older neighborhoods of east Phoenix, cruising at seventy-five at treetop level. Then the freeway jogged southeast into Tempe, past Rural Road, and I took the connection to the Pima Freeway. That took me north into Scottsdale, the city off to my left, the Indian reservation off to the right. I got onto surface streets at McDonald, put the top down, and drove through north Scottsdale. The night was crisp but I was warm inside my leather jacket.

You couldn't touch a house out here for less than a half-a-million dollars, and it was the older part of Scottsdale. I went through McCormick Ranch into the horse properties. Past Shea Boulevard, across the Central Arizona Project Canal, and into the estates running up to the McDowell Mountains. A discreet sign promised “gated canyon living.” Twenty years before, this had all been empty desert.

Before I got into Fountain Hills, the developments thinned out as the road climbed. I reached the scenic lookout for the city lights—we used to come up here in high school to make out. Then off to the left was a road named Cheryl. I took it and climbed deeper into the foothills until I reached a gate of black steel.

I slipped the car into park and it purred at idle, just the way the engineers in Munich intended. All around me, hills and mountains stood out black against the night sky, and beyond them the city glowed with a ghostly sheen. A small black communications box stood by the gate. I pressed a glowing red button. I waited and nothing happened. I shut the car off and listened. The hum of traffic on Shea, and farther away on Beeline Highway coming down from the Mogollon Rim. Closer in, the desert sounds: the breeze in the palo verde leaves, a rustling in the mesquite, the indescribable but very real sound of the emptiness. You could even see the stars out here. But I couldn't see what was on the other side of the gate, and the communications box failed to return my affections. I gave another couple of tries and turned back toward the city. Apparently the booze had answered whatever questions Max Yarnell had for me.

He was right: It took about half an hour at this time of night. I exited off the Red Mountain at Third Street and turned toward home. It was around eleven-thirty, and I was suddenly feeling jumpy. The vastness of the city felt claustrophobic. I was too aware of every breath. I raised the top and didn't feel better. When I turned onto Third Avenue and headed into Willo, I swear I saw that damned Ford Econoline van again, making the turn with me, on my tail. When I checked the mirror again, crossing Palm Lane, the street was empty behind me. Time to call it a day.

Back at home, Peralta was snoring contentedly in the guest bedroom. I closed his door, got undressed for bed and slid in the sheets naked to read. That's when the phone rang.

I thought it might be Max Yarnell. But it was Gretchen.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

“Nope, I was just reading.”

“I'm glad I didn't wake you. How is your quest going?”

“Oh, not so good. There don't seem to be any answers.”

“There are always answers, David. You just have to know where to look.”

“Well, you have the patience of the archaeologist,” I said.

“I'm not always patient,” she said. “In fact, I can be very impulsive.” She paused and I was very aware of the softness of the sheets against my body. “In, fact, I was calling to ask you if I could come over and be with you.”

“I would like that very much,” I said.

“I hoped you'd say that. That's why I took the chance.”