South Phoenix Rules (14 page)

20

We carried the copied case files home and laid them out on the big desk in the study. I was tempted to give Robin the trial transcript, but didn't want her to get bored. She was excited by this historical sleuthing. So I divided the work, taking the transcript myself and giving her a small stack of police and arson reports.

It was tempting to look back on 1940 as a more innocent time, and that's probably true. Wars always change nations, coarsen them; Woodrow Wilson had known that on the eve of World War I. And the Arizona and America of 1940 had yet to go into World War II, much less the Cold War, and our current imperial adventures. Advanced communications consisted of dial telephones — the police radio system was only eight years old. Social networking was done at barber and beauty shops, the railroad depot, and the American Legion hall. But human nature persists in all its darkness, and even the little town of Phoenix had its share of violent crime back then. It also had a disproportionate amount of corruption.

The city commissioners themselves were said to control some of the local rackets. The Mafia was beginning to discover Phoenix, a town where cops and judges could be bought, where the banks could be used to launder money. On the outside, it was just a sunny farm town, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of citrus groves and fields. My grandfather's dental practice was downtown. But Phoenix was also segregated, this place that had been settled by plenty of ex-Confederates. The relatively large black population, which came west with the cotton crop, went to separate schools. The Mexican-Americans were set off in their barrios. The main places everyone mingled were in the produce warehouses along the railroad tracks and in the red-light district on the east side. That was also the scene of Phoenix's worst race riot, when soldiers went on a rampage during World War II. The official death count was three, but probably was much higher. It was history the chamber of commerce didn't want you to know.

“Are you bored?”

“Yes.” I was honest.

“It's fun to watch your face,” she said. “See your mind wander.”

“I just don't know how much we're going to be able to help Nick DeSimone clear his grandfather. I wonder why he even cares that much. I probably have several horse thieves and worse in my woodpile.”

“You're just afraid of getting pulled into Peralta's orbit. Becoming a private dick.” She said the two words with lewd glee. And it was true enough: I could see Peralta using this project as the “point of entry” drug to get me in his new game.

“What would be so bad about that?”

“I'm just tired of it.”

“He's very entertaining,” she said. “I remember the first time he said he wanted to tell me his philosophy. That's exactly what he said, ‘my philosophy.' I was ready for something heavy and wise.”

I quoted Peralta from rote: “ ‘If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.' Don't get me wrong, Peralta probably saved my life when I came back to Phoenix. I really enjoyed the job. But I'm ready for something new.”

“What?”

I just put my lips together and shook my head.

“There's no more market for history professors than there is for private art curators.” Her face assumed a half-smile. “It wouldn't be bad. I'd work with you. We could make him fix that old neon sign.”

“You're a dreamer,” I said. “You could find work outside Phoenix.”

“Do you want that?”

“No.” I said it too fast.

“If you're done with the job, why did you bring home all those boxes of case files?”

“Maybe I'd write a book.”

She gave me a disbelieving smile. “You were going to work those old cases. Admit it. I admire you for it.”

“A few of them. I thought, in my spare time.”

“That's the David Mapstone I know and love.” She stopped and we looked at each other, not sure what to say next. Finally, she said, “For now, why don't we try to fight for Paolo? It doesn't sound like anybody did it when he was alive. This Harley Talbott sounds like a total creep, a big man with power. I know you want to be the objective historian, so I'll be the little cartoon creature on your shoulder, whispering in your ear, ‘fight for Paolo.' It's a matter of simple justice.”

“Fair enough.”

I went back to the transcript.

“This is a funny name.” Robin ran her fingers down one Xeroxed page. “Detective Navarre. Sounds like something out of a Bogart movie.”

I slapped down the sheaf of papers. “You have got to be shitting me.”

Frenchy Navarre. Sometimes it was spelled “Frenchie.” I told Robin what I knew. He wore two guns and was one of the most brutal and dangerous cops the Phoenix force ever produced. If there had been a Bad Phoenix Cops blog in the forties, Frenchy would have generated a post a day. The worst Frenchy story was from 1944, when he was off-duty and given a ticket by another officer, one of the few African-Americans on the force, a man named David “Star” Johnson. Frenchy went into one of his rages, shot and killed Johnson right on Second and Jefferson streets. A jury acquitted him and he went back to work. Johnson's partner caught him at headquarters one day and shot him to death in revenge. The legend was that Frenchy went down shooting and the bullet holes remained in the stationhouse—then located in the old Courthouse—for years afterwards.

Now here was Frenchy Navarre as a detective on the DeSimone case.

Robin handed me the paper. It was a typed confession signed by Paolo DeSimone, given to Detective Navarre. Paolo said he was drunk and mad because Big Sam McNamara wouldn't sell him liquor. Later that night he came back with a can of gasoline and set fire to trash at the back of the building. I could imagine Frenchy beating the confession out of him. But that would be letting my prejudices get the better of me.

“The arson investigator's report.” Robin held up two pages. “It says a firebomb was thrown through the front window of the store. That jibes with the newspaper accounts.”

I looked it over and handed it back to her. The transcript was incomplete but raised questions, too. There was no public defender then. It appeared that DeSimone received legal counsel from a local lawyer either paid by the county or doing pro-bono work. He introduced several motions that were denied by the judge. One was to throw out the confession as coerced.

“You're onto something, History Shamus.”

“Here's Navarre on the stand. He's asked why he arrested Paolo. Says he was given a tip by another man who had been in the drunk tank where Paolo spent the night on September 29th. Name of Eugene Costa. He told Frenchy that Paolo told him he burned down McNamara's.”

I flipped through, trying to find if Costa had testified and what he had told Paolo's lawyer on cross-examination. The pages were missing.

“The joys of historic research: more questions than answers. All the cops and lawyers are long dead. I can try some of my retired police buddies, but they were too young. I don't see the hand of Harley Talbott in any of this. If he owned the judge and jury, we can't prove it.”

“Don't give up.” Robin went back to her half of the record.

***

We kept at it for three days. The police records betrayed a slipshod investigation. McNamara himself said he believed Talbott had ordered his store burned because he wouldn't pay the extra “taxes” demanded for Talbott's liquor. The cops never interviewed Talbott. The tip from Eugene Costa and the “confession” by Paolo kept them on a single, simple theory: one drunk Italian burned down the liquor store.

At the Arizona Room of the central library, we went through old city directories and phone books. Eugene Costa was listed from 1939 through 1948 and then he disappeared. Phoenix was a city of transients. I called around to the law firms to see if they had any information on the man who had defended Paolo—it was a long shot and came back empty. The fire department's arson records from 1940 were long gone. I couldn't find any manuscripts or diaries about Harley Talbott during this period. He had probably donated a fair amount to the library.

“So give me something else to do.” Robin gathered up the legal pad on which she had been making notes. The Arizona Room hours had been cut back again and we were being told it was time to leave.

I admired her passion and persistence, saw something of myself in her. So I let her go down to the county offices to research land transactions from the period involving any of the principals we were tracking: Paolo, Talbott, Costa, Frenchy, the judges and lawyers involved. I would go home to Cypress where I would start to write a very incomplete report for Judson Lee. I would feel bad about taking his money. She kissed me goodbye beneath the shade screens of the light-rail station. She took the train south and I waited for the one heading north. I realized it would be the first time she was out of my sight since that last week in December.

21

We worked together on the computer to finish the final report. We couldn't exonerate Paolo DeSimone. We could give a history of the case, from the initial firebombing to Paolo receiving a ten-year sentence and then being paroled after five years. The report also had background on Paolo working for Talbott as a driver and the power that the big man wielded in the city, as well as some of the allegations that dogged him past the grave. Most critically, we listed the investigative errors and inconsistencies, including Paolo wanting to take back his confession—given under duress to one of the most famously nasty cops in Phoenix history. Robin had added an appendix that painstakingly listed properties that Talbott owned in 1940, and some land bought by the otherwise mysterious Eugene Costa a few years later.

Judson Lee read quickly through the report, lingering on a few pages, and pronounced himself pleased. I told him not to bother with the money—I didn't believe we had earned it. In my old job, I had actually cleared cases. Peralta wouldn't have been satisfied with this. I handed the unsigned check back and said this was on the house.

“You don't give yourself enough credit, Dr. Mapstone,” he said. “You know this city.”

I thought about our recent travels into gangland. “I'm not sure anyone knows this city.”

He scrawled his signature on the check with his small, sun-browned hand and passed it back. “Utter, ultimate, truth may be beyond the finest historian. This should be more than enough for my client to make a start to clear his grandfather's name.”

I took the check. He shook my hand. Did his old-world kiss of Robin's hand and she laughed. I continued to apologize as he left, wishing we had found more, giving Robin credit for the good stuff. He waved it off, moving with surprising spryness.

“Anyway.” He turned to face us on the front step. “Napoleon said, history was nothing but a fable agreed upon.” Then he drove away in a new cream-colored Cadillac.

“It's five grand and nothing to sneeze at.” Robin was reading the look on my face. “Let's go out and celebrate tonight.” The smile took over her face. “I'll wear a skirt even.”

I relented and felt my shoulders relax.

“You get to choose the place.”

“Good. First, give me the keys to the Prelude.”

I handed them over and asked her where she was going. It was an innocent enough question.

“Girl stuff.” She walked out of the study laughing that wonderful, house-filling laugh.

***

A little after midnight Robin wanted to go outside and see the stars. We pulled on clothes and walked into the backyard, where the oleanders and citrus trees provided dark, sheltering masses around us. We sat in the old chairs by the chiminea that Grandfather had built so long ago. She lolled her head, sending her hair cascading down the chair back.

The vault of sky overhead had been degraded when they built the big freeway ten blocks south and by the pollution of four million people, but it was still clear and dark enough to make out the Big Dipper and dozens of companions. There was no moon and the scent of orange blossoms lingered for probably its last week this year.

“There's Polaris,” she said. “Regulus…Arcturus.”

I told her about my Boy Scout merit badge in astronomy, how I had forgotten nearly everything. How one year we came out at night and watched one of the Gemini capsules soar over us. This was before she was born.

“You must have been an adorable little boy.”

“I felt like a freak.” I smiled about it now. “Always had my head in a book. They made fun of me about my last name. I didn't have a mom and dad like the other children. My little friends always told me how ugly I was.”

“I've seen the photos, David. You were a beautiful little boy.” She laughed, the slight breeze carrying her big, happy sound. “Handsome, I should say. Adorable. I love those pictures of you.”

She asked if I had played in this yard and I told her stories. We fought in the alley: oranges and dirt clods if the conflict was among friends, rocks if things got serious.

“Your own little street gang,” she said.

We played in the yard. One year we spent the spring assembling discarded wood and building a boat that we intended to sail to India. I was nine and have no idea how the destination was chosen. But the map told us we could sail down the Salt River to the Gila, then into the Colorado and out into the sea at the Gulf of California. I was a child map nerd. The only catch was that the rivers here were dry, so we would have to wait for a flood. My grandparents were indulgent with our enterprise, even if the boat never touched water. Robin laughed and held my hand.

“So no play dates, no bus to school, no mini-van…”

“Nope,” I said. “It seems like another country.”

“It sounds like an idyll, even if your friends were mean to you.”

“I learned to fight in seventh grade,” I said. “So I owe 'em.”

“I learned to fight, too,” she said. “But not that way. I always envied the kids who could walk to school, live on a street with sidewalks, go to the same school for more than two years straight.”

I squeezed her hand. “You turned out good.”

We stayed out there for at least an hour, sometimes talking, often enjoying a communion of silence. The dull whoosh of the freeway and the occasional bell of a light-rail train were the only intrusions. The stars and planets seemed comfortingly fixed, whatever the reality of our orbiting world and expanding universe. A couple of airplanes circled toward Sky Harbor, but not one police chopper or siren disturbed our little universe.

“I've always loved the stars,” she said. “Looking at infinity. Wondering why we're here, what's our purpose and destiny…”

Only for a few seconds did I imagine the child that might have survived to play in this yard just as I once did. I said, “We'll go to the desert sometime, get away from the city lights. It's incredible.”

She pulled herself up and reached for me.

“Come on.”

I stood and she stepped close, putting her arms around my waist. I tousled her hair and embraced her.

“You,” she said with mock accusation in her voice. Then, “You have so surprised me. I didn't even like you at first, that day on the home tour when I came back into Lindsey's life. And you're thinking, who the hell is this? You didn't like me, either. Right?”

I tipped my head. “True enough.”

That big smile remade her features. I had never seen her smile so. “Remember when I told you that it would be trouble if I got under your spell?” Her eyes were bright and merry. “Well, Dr. David Mapstone…”

She stopped herself, swallowed hard. My heart was very full at that moment and I said nothing.

“Come here.” She pulled me close, nuzzled against me. “I want to tell you something.”

“Your middle name?”

“Better than that.”

I felt her warm breath, heard her whispers. Just a few words. I held her so tight, one arm around her waist, the other grasping her shoulders and back, feeling her body totally a part of mine.

Finally she whispered, “Are those happy tears?”

I held her away from me just enough to look at her and nod. I spoke her name and started to pull her close again. The next sounds were barely audible, more of an odd annoyance.

Thup…thup…

She bobbed sideways in my arms. Turning, I looked straight at a woman standing five feet away, no more. She held a pistol with a long silencer.

“Robin!”

She went heavy in my arms and I laid her gently on the grass. Her hair fell out around her face, which was already unnaturally pale. She stared at me, her eyes wide with shock. Her mouth was working words and nothing was coming out. Her left arm was bloody. More blood was coming out of her left side.

“Stay awake!” I yelled, barely conscious that the woman with the gun was gone. I screamed for help, kept calling her name, and held my hands behind her head, as if they could keep her from the ground. “Stay with me, Robin.” I cried for help again.

She locked her eyes on me. I bent closer to see if she was breathing.

“David…” It was a hoarse whisper. Her eyelids fluttered and closed.

***

The dispatch logs would show that the police and fire response times were within three minutes of the first neighbor's calls.

The first cops that came through the gate later told Peralta that they found me over Robin trying to resuscitate her, holding her, crying, and screaming. I don't remember the last part.

They told him that I was screaming, over and over, “Kill me!…Why didn't you kill me?!…” until they forcibly pulled me away from her body.