Cactus Heart (21 page)

Epilogue

Peralta didn't come home that night. The next morning, I found out why.

STRANGLER KILLED IN GUNFIGHT WITH DEPUTIES, the headline said. Photos showed Lindsey—it was a mug of her in uniform that was at least two years old—and Patrick Blair, looking gorgeous. And the strange, round-faced man who followed me that night in the Ford Econoline van. “Alleged serial killer,” proclaimed type under his face. I looked at Lindsey's face and was suddenly afraid to read more. I felt a deep stab in my stomach.

I made myself read:

A 38-year-old Mesa man about to be arrested as the notorious Harquahala Strangler shot it out with sheriff's deputies Tuesday night. One deputy was wounded. The suspect, Mark Wayne Bennett, was fatally wounded.

The firefight took place at the suspect's apartment on North Val Vista after sheriff's detectives attempted to serve an arrest warrant. After the suspect opened fire, Det. Patrick Blair was wounded. He was listed in guarded condition at Desert Samaritan Hospital.

Chief Deputy Mike Peralta praised Deputy Lindsey F. Adams, for saving Blair's life and preventing the suspect from escaping. Peralta said “substantial evidence” links Bennett to the slayings of 26 women in the Phoenix area. The alleged murderer had become known as the Harquahala Strangler because most of his victims were left in the Harquahala Desert west of the city.

On Christmas Eve, Peralta walked in the door just before six. I shook his hand and congratulated him on solving the case.

“From your new buddy.”

He handed me a box with blue gift-wrapping. It was a bit smaller than the kind of hatboxes Grandmother once favored.

“Who?”

“Bobby Hamid,” Peralta sneered. “You know, he closed the purchase on the Triple A Storage Warehouse today. Says he wants to preserve the building. He's even going to excavate the tunnels.” He eyed the package. “You going to open that or am I going to have to call the bomb squad?”

I slipped off the wrapping and opened a box filled with Styrofoam worms. I reached in my hand and caught the edge of something smooth.

“Good Lord, Mapstone,” Peralta said.

It was a piece of Santa Clara pottery that glowed blackly in my hand.
He bought the building and he's going to excavate the tunnels, and take whatever might be hidden down there…

“I'll be damned,” I said.

Peralta looked at me a long time, then he just shook his head and walked into the living room.

“What I really want is a well-made Gibson,” he said. So I hobbled to the kitchen and made drinks. When I came back out, the tree was lit and the picture window open to the street. Out on Cypress, the other Christmas lights glowed merrily back at us. I put on the
Messiah
again, the Boston Baroque recording. Peralta settled into the big leather chair, and I closed my eyes, reflecting on a year of so much change, so much loss, so many close calls and blessings.

Peralta wanted to read from the Bible, from the Book of Luke, because that was the way his father did it on Christmas Eve. Peralta had his formal occasions, and deviation was unthinkable. It had been the same tradition with Grandmother and Grandfather. I retrieved the heavy King James Version from the bookshelves.

Peralta drew himself up in the chair and read, “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus…” He really had a beautiful voice, rich with intonations and possibilities.

Then he passed the book to me.

My voice was still raw from the talk with Gretchen, and all the wide-awake hours after that.

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people…”

Fear not. Be not afraid. When the
Pastoral Symphony
came around, I went to get Peralta's presents. Then I got him on his feet and took him by the shoulder. He glared at me uncomfortably.

“Merry Christmas, Chief,” I said. “You need to be with Sharon, and she needs to be with you…”

He started to speak.

“No, that's the way it is on holidays,” I said. “This is for Sharon.” I put a package with avant-garde wrapping in his hands. “And this is for you.” A traditional wrapping, with the box of Anniversario Padrons I knew he would love.

“Call me tomorrow,” I said.

He started to protest. He wasn't accustomed to being bossed around. But a small change softened his eyes.

“You'll be the next sheriff,” I said. “I'm honored you're my friend.”

“You're a good cop, Mapstone,” he said. Then he gave me a rough
abrazo
and walked out to his truck. After he drove off, I stood for a long time on the quiet street. The sidewalks were marked with luminarias from Central to Seventh Avenue, gentle, warm footlights for the vault of metropolitan sky. They made me feel less alone.

***

It was the way it should be. Holidays are for family. Mike should be with Sharon. Lorie Pope was back in New Jersey at her mother's. Kimbrough and his wife had a three-year-old at home this year. Carl the courthouse guard took the train to Los Angeles to be with his daughter. Hawkins was off in his soccer suburb, with his wife and his kids. Even Bobby Hamid had a wife and children and home.

And I was at home, in the house my grandparents had built, home to me and too many books, in my city, in the last week of the last year of the last decade of the last century of the millennium. I fixed a martini, limped back to the living room and willed myself not to cry alone. The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice. If that is so, then why did I feel such a hole inside me?

The doorbell rang.

I was ready to be angry at Peralta for chickening out. But when I swung open the heavy front door, Lindsey was standing on the step.

“History Shamus,” she said. “You alone?”

I nodded.

“No snow and jingle bells?” she said.

“The first Christmas was in the desert,” I said. “The desert never forgets that.”

She took my hands. “You've been beaten up,” she said.

“You've had some adventures, too. I read about you in the paper.”

“You're right about one thing, Dave. Patrick Blair is a beautiful-looking man.” She smiled. “A crappy shot, too. I found myself missing a man who would read me the classics in bed…teach me history and bring it alive…make me a martini…”

She started talking faster, trying to outrun the tears filling her eyes. “It's Christmas Eve. It's the time when we want to be home with our family, with the ones we love. The people who connect us to everything good we can be. And the one person in my life, the only person, who fits that description…” She almost didn't get it out. “…is you, Dave.”

I was beyond words, so all I could do was take her in my arms and swear to God I'd never let her go. Take her in my house, in our house. Make peace with our individual histories and try to write a new one together. Hope for all the luck in the world. Let her into my cactus heart. It was cold in the desert that Christmas Eve, and it was enough that we could hold each other all night long.

1

We wore our uniforms the day Mike Peralta was sworn in as sheriff of Maricopa County. It nearly made me late to the ceremony.

In the quiet of my forgotten office in the old county courthouse, behind the plastic doorplate that reads “Deputy David Mapstone, Sheriff's Office Historian,” I fiddled with the tribal fashion of cops. The tan uniform blouse with epaulets and pocket flaps, the opening above the pocket made for a cheap Cross pen, and the gold-plated “MCSO” letters running parallel on each side of the collar. In one of his moments of cruel whimsy, Peralta gave me two gold book pins for my collar. I refused to wear them.

The shirt had a reinforced grommet to hold a badge. I slipped my gold star out of its wallet case, gave it a last polish, and pinned it on. The five-pointed star proclaimed me “Deputy Sheriff…Maricopa County,” on scrolls cut into the metal surrounding the Arizona state seal.
Ditat Deus
, the seal says: God enriches. The ACLU is suing to have the words removed.

Dark brown uniform slacks were pressed crisply, and the legs draped to a slight break over the hand-tooled leather cowboy boots, glistening with a regulation spit shine. An off-white felt Stetson sat on my desk. We might be one of the largest urban counties in the United States, but we kept our Old West traditions.

Finally, I pulled on the heavy belt, also highly polished, that held handcuffs, flashlight loop, Mace canister, keyring, Speedloaders, and the holster that housed my Colt Python .357 revolver. I loudly snapped the leather keepers that held the gunbelt to the pants belt. Ready at last.

I usually dressed like a civilian, although I liked nice clothes more than the average Arizonan and way more than my paycheck could handle. But that day I stood before the mirror and looked something like the young deputy I had been twenty-three years before, when I was a rookie, out on the street for the first time with a veteran named Peralta. I'm six-foot-two and broad-shouldered, with wavy dark hair that goes any way it chooses. Lindsey likes my brown eyes. They don't look like cop's eyes, she says. But that day everything else about me looked cop. I tilted the Stetson at a slight angle and locked up the office.

Outside, the miracle of a winter day in Arizona. The palm trees and paloverdes lining Cesar Chavez Plaza sat lush and spring green. The spare modern towers of downtown Phoenix looked puny under the bright blue firmament of dry desert sky. It was nearly perfect: You could barely see some pockets of yellow-brown smog skulking up against the rocky head of Camelback Mountain. The temperature was in the sweet zone of the seventies. Tourists paid high-season prices for days like this.

I crossed Jefferson Street and went through the metal detectors into the County Supervisors Auditorium. Then I saw no way to get to my seat but to cross the stage, shaking hands with the cluster of family and friends of the new sheriff. Sharon Peralta looked ten years younger in a stylish navy pinstripe suit, her shoulder-length hair expensively done. She'd taken a rare morning off from her radio show to be here at her husband's big day. She smiled to see me in uniform. Their daughters, Jamie and Jennifer, lived in the Bay Area and practiced law. I remembered when they were babies, and I didn't feel old. Judge Peralta, Mike's father, courtly and ancient, grasped my hand strongly in both of his and held me before him for a long time, saying nothing. For just a moment, I felt a strange flutter below my breastbone.

Peralta himself had yet to make his entrance. I shook hands with the department brass, most of them not so sure why I should even be up there. Bill Davidson looked, as always, like the Marlboro Man, tall and craggy with a lush mustache turning steel gray. He was the longtime patrol boss. Jack Abernathy, short legs attached to a beer-barrel chest, was in charge of what was now called “the custody bureau”—the county jail. Both wanted to be chief deputy now that Peralta was in the top job. E.J. Kimbrough, his head shaved like an ebony bullet, clapped me on the arm. He was the captain of the major crimes unit, and he was an ally, maybe a friend. I hoped Peralta would make him the new chief of sheriff's detectives. Last, the outgoing sheriff, controversial and wildly popular. He brought back chain gangs and housed inmates in tents. I'd been a little part of his show. Now he was off to Washington as the new administration's drug czar.

“The history professor,” he said, his tone ambiguous, his icy gray eyes unmoving.

I passed the color guard of Boy Scouts and took my place at the end of the stage, where Deputy Lindsey Faith Adams had saved a chair for me. Lindsey favored black miniskirts or jeans. But today, she too wore MCSO tan, her straight black hair parted in the middle and pulled back demurely, her small gold nose stud nowhere to be seen. Even so, Lindsey didn't look like a cop. And if she weren't the star of the cybercrimes task force, she'd probably be making big bucks at a dot-com company. She gave my hand a discreet squeeze. I squeezed back and felt the engagement ring I had given her three months before.

It was 11
A.M.
on the second Monday of January.

***

“So, Mapstone, you ready to take a real job in this department?”

I had to lean over to hear Peralta. The well-worn gymnasium at Immaculate Heart Church must have been filled with a thousand people, all there to wish the new sheriff well. A line of them was snaked around us. The governor, the county supervisors, and the mayor of Phoenix had already come through. But I bet another hundred were lined up behind me. I noticed a bigwig from Phelps Dodge, the managing editor of the
Republic
, the head of the Phoenix Symphony board. Peralta held me by the arm in a nearly painful grip and repeated his question.

“How about it? Are you ready to take a real job in the department?”

“I like what I'm doing, but you could give me more money,” I said.

“I'll ask the new sheriff about it,” he said. “I'm sure we could get you an off-duty gig as a security guard at Bashas'.”

He didn't smile. He never smiled. But he looked happy today. As happy as he could look. Peralta had the surprising bulk of a Victorian armoire. He stood six-foot-five, and if he could have fit into a 48-long coat I would have been surprised. Little of his bulk appeared to be fat. His broad, brown face carried the same impassive expression as always. But his large eyes, where all his emotions congregated, held a little gleam, just like the light hitting the four stars freshly pinned on his uniform collar.

Peralta had spent a quarter century in the department. When I left to go teach college history, he stayed as a sergeant and a comer. During the years I was gone, we stayed in touch as he rose to lieutenant and captain, and I wrote a history book that may have sold a few hundred copies. He had been chief deputy so long that the words “Chief” and “Peralta” seemed inextricably linked. And three years ago, when I failed to get tenure and came home unemployed and more than a little broken, the chief gave me a job in the department researching old unsolved cases. I worked as a consultant, using the historian's techniques but also carrying a badge. I got $1,000 for every case I cracked.

He snorted to himself, breaking me out of my reverie.

“Hell,” he said. “I may make you the new chief deputy.”

“I'm not qualified.” I laughed.

“I did the job for ten years,” he said above the din. “I'll decide who's qualified. That'd frost these fucking climbers.” He nodded toward a small cluster of brass standing uncomfortably over by the refreshment table.

I tried to change the subject. “This is a great place for the reception.”

“I know you'd rather be drinking martinis at the Phoenician,” he said. “But this is a sentimental thing.”

“You, sentimental? When we were deputies together I had to remind you to get Sharon a card for your anniversary.”

His glare hardened. I was one of the few people who dared mess with him.

He said, “I went to first and second grade here, before they had to close the school. My father went to high school here. Who knows how much longer it will be around before your yuppie friends gentrify the neighborhood?”

He added, “And holding the reception here is not a bad way to shore up my support with the Latino voters.” He arched his eyebrow, a gesture of enormous humor for him. “I'm just a simple boy from the barrio.”

“You're about as simple as quantum physics,” I said. I nodded toward the people waiting behind me. “You have lots of VIPs who want to congratulate you, Sheriff,”

He ignored me. “See, Mapstone, I know you. You can't revise your past with me like some professor's résumé. You always should have stayed in law enforcement. So you took a fifteen-year detour as a teacher? Now you're back in Arizona, back home at the S.O. Where you always should have stayed. Even if you're a pain in the ass sometimes and you read too much. Admit it, Mapstone, you're happy here.”

He was right. The “black dog moods,” as Churchill called them, came less often. I was teaching myself that tomorrow's misfortune wasn't an inevitable byproduct of today's happiness. Lindsey made me feel terrifically lucky. The turn of a new millennium had come and gone benignly, as had my twenty-fifth high school reunion. I was even feeling better about Phoenix, a place that could break your heart if you grew to love it.

The noise picked up, with a mariachi band and the sheriff's office bagpipers engaging in a merry duel.

“But we need to make some changes in the department,” he said.

“People may not like it. And I'm serious when I say I expect you to step up when asked.”

“Yeah, security at Bashas',” I said “I can also help carry groceries. I know you'll make all the right changes for the department, Sheriff.”

“I'm a lawman, Mapstone,” he said. “I'm no politician.”

“Well, you did pretty well, then. Getting 70 percent of the vote.”

“Oh, hell, I'd just have to break in somebody new as sheriff if I didn't do it myself.”

I shook my head, awash with affection for this impossible, stubborn, lionhearted man, and I couldn't suppress a wide smile.

“What the hell are you so giggly about?”

“You,” I said. “Never mind.”

He let go of my arm. “Come by my office tomorrow. I really do need to talk to you about something.”

“A new case?”

He gave his head a half nod, half shake. “Come by. You'll find out.”

I nodded, then my eyes went to a small, intense flash in the air above Peralta's left shoulder, and I remember thinking he'd be freshly annoyed that I wasn't looking him in the eye. Only later would I recall two distinct, terrible cracks sounding above the clutter. Suddenly Peralta fell into me heavily and we both crashed backward hard on the floor.

I felt the quick panic of having the air knocked out of me. Something wet shot into my eyes. My back screamed in pain from the weight that quickly sandwiched it with the floor. A woman gasped and called for God's help. As my mind refocused and my lungs refilled, I feared Peralta had suffered a heart attack. Then I saw the blood all over us.