Arizona Dreams (19 page)

38

I got to my feet and walked back to Lindsey. She took my hand. “All right?” she asked. I nodded my head. I said, “Let's go outside and call the sheriff.” My tongue tasted vile. My thirst was consuming—I was thirsty enough to kill for water. We crossed the huge room walking in our safe small cone of light, for otherwise everything else was black. It was impossible to sense space, whether the ceiling was three stories above us, or three miles, and the far wall was only a destination we held as a belief in the undiscovered country. For just a few moments I had lost the composure that had always been my gift in tight situations. If Lindsey had not been beside me, I think I might have gone mad with fear and rage. The world was dark. My thoughts were dark. “Death solves all problems,” Joseph Stalin said. “No man, no problem.” Somebody had been doing a hell of a lot of problem-solving for a piece of desert real estate in Arizona, even if it did have an aquifer under it. The hundred or so steps we took before we could make out the wall were not enough time to provide answers, or even the right questions.

And we weren't alone.

“That's far enough.” The voice was Jared Malkin's and suddenly an intense light was in our face. I directed the small Maglite at him but it was no competition.

“Get your hands where I can see them!” he barked. I kept my right hand at my side, holding the Maglite with my left. There was no way to see if he was armed. Where the hell did he come from? Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Lindsey had retrieved her baby Glock and was holding it at her side, partly concealing it inside her fingers and palm.

“Don't fuck with me, Mapstone!” Malkin shouted. “I've got a gun and I will use it!” To make his point, he pulled the beam of his light off us and put it on the semiautomatic pistol in his other hand. Thank God for stupid criminals. By the time he returned the beam to me, I had the Python in my right hand and he was on its business end.

“Shit,” he whispered. I couldn't see his face, only a flashlight beam. I went through the usual commands, so the suspect has no doubt what you're saying, and my nerve returned. I decided I would fire first directly at the light, then a pattern around it, just in case he were smart enough to hold it away from his body. So far, smart was not his MO. I decided I would give him five seconds to comply and then squeeze the trigger.

Something buzzed in the ceiling and a bank of overhead fluorescent lights came on. I nearly shot right then, but I hesitated. Then everything was clear. Malkin was standing ten feet away, his flashlight suddenly impotent. Lindsey was still beside me, now in a combat stance. Dana was here, too. She was standing nearer to us, beside an electric panel and some boxes. Now her hands were holding a shotgun. This was no hunting gun, either. It lacked a stock, and was made for close-quarters use by the police, or the bad guys.

“David,” she said, “you are such a disappointment.”

“Put your weapons down slowly, now,” Lindsey said, shifting her stance toward Dana.

“Shut the fuck up, bitch,” Dana said, and rather expertly worked the shotgun's slide action to chamber a round.

“Dana.” This from Malkin. “Dana, we can't do this. It's gone too far already.”

“Don't you get weak now, you son of a bitch,” she hissed. “It's way too late for that. We wouldn't even be here if you hadn't been afraid that the body had been found. Your fear made that happen, Jerry. But we can fix it. They don't know anything.”

“They knew enough to come here!”

“They don't know anything, baby.” Dana's voice became reassuring, motherly. “So I was wrong about Mapstone being too stupid to catch on. But I also had the gut feeling we'd better come back in through the side door and make sure we hadn't been followed. It's going to be fine, baby. Nobody will figure this out. It's too complicated. We made it that way. So when they're dead, it's all tied up.”

“You said that the last time,” Malkin said.

We were in a mess, inside an isolated warehouse, in a Mexican standoff. Part of my mind wondered whether that was a politically incorrect term now. I tried to weigh the chances we had against the shotgun if all hell broke loose, and they didn't look good. I could fight fear and panic. Worry about Lindsey was harder. That's why married cops aren't partners. I tried to keep them talking.

I said, “It won't work, Dana. You'll have to kill a lot more people. We know from Jack Fife that it was you who wanted to hire serious muscle to intimidate Louie Bell into selling. That's how you got Adam Perez. And then you sent him to my office to kill your husband and me, and make it look like I murdered your husband and then turned the gun on myself.”

Dana's mouth came open.

“That's right,” I said. “Perez isn't dead. We withheld that from the media. And he's talking. He wants to avoid the death penalty. It won't be easy.”

“David…” she began in a softer voice that chilled me.

I shouted her down: “Why did you have Perez kill Davey Crockett?”

“Who?” Malkin said.

“The cripple in the old school bus,” she snarled.

He said, “Oh, my God, what have…”

“Shut up!” she screamed, and waved the barrel of the shotgun. Her finger was inside the trigger guard. There she was, my soccer mom, the non-student who had a non-crush on me, holding that shotgun with the same natural aplomb as Patty Hearst turned Tanya the Symbionese Liberation Army girl. She said, “We had to get those papers back! He was hiding them for Bell. Adam asked nice, and then he didn't ask nice.”

Lindsey asked, “Was it the same for Alan Cordesman and Louie Bell?”

“Something like that,” she mumbled.

Lindsey said, “It seems like a hell of a price to pay for a parcel of land…”

“You have no idea,” Dana said.

Just then, Malkin put his pistol on the concrete floor. “I can't do this,” he said. “Dana, it has to stop now.”

She almost swung the gun in his direction, but kept it on us. She said, “Shut up, Jerry!”

“We can't kill two cops!”

“Baby, we're about to get everything we wanted!” she said. “Arizona Dreams, the water it has to have…”

I swallowed hard and said, “So that's it.”

“So that's it,” Dana said.

“How could you ever think you could get away with it?” Lindsey demanded.

“We will get away with it,” Dana said coldly. She propped the shotgun on a box, keeping it trained on us. I had to settle for keeping the Python on her with aching arms.

I said, “Arizona Dreams never had enough water to meet the legal requirement of a one-hundred-year guaranteed supply. I bet the investors never knew that.”

They just stared. I went on, “Alan Cordesman never knew that, at first. But the Bell property had the water, and you took it. Too bad it's not legal. The groundwater has to be on the property.”

“That's the law now,” she said. “The law will change. Among our investors are four state legislators. Arizona has to grow. That law is outdated. We'll build a pipeline from the Bell land.”

“But you were certified as having a water supply at Arizona Dreams.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “All that took was a crooked consulting hydrologist named Earl Rice. You met him back there in the water barrel. And then a lot of money for a man I know in the Department of Water Resources. Unlike Earl, he didn't get cold feet and threaten to betray us. The government is too overwhelmed by growth to pay much attention to every development anyway.”

Lindsey said, “Do you really think you can hold two deputies at gunpoint here in this warehouse at Twenty-Seventh Avenue and Van Buren and not have anyone notice?”

“We won't be here long,” Dana said. “Now drop your guns and get your hands in the air.”

“You mean here in this huge white building?” Lindsey asked. “That's nine-nine-nine.”

My neck tingled. Lindsey was giving the radio code for officer needs emergency assistance. I tightened my grip on the Python.

“Are you German or what, bitch?” Dana said. “Drop your guns!”

”That's not going to happen, Dana,” I said.

She said, “I really thought you'd let this go, David.”

“When I didn't, you sent Adam Perez to my office to kill your husband and me? The body count keeps going up, and you still can't tie it up.”

“We wanted to be together,” Malkin said, his hands in a pleading posture. “Tom lost his stake in Arizona Dreams. The gambling finally did him in. But it didn't matter, because Dana would be with me.” He wiped sweat off his forehead. “How much, Deputies? Let's end this in a businesslike way. How much would it take?”

“Forget it, Jerry,” Dana said. “These two are idealists. That's why they're broke. I was sure as hell not going to spend the rest of my life broke, or in debt married to a hypocritical politician. Arizona Dreams is going to change all that…”

“There's one thing I don't understand,” I said. My voice was raspy. Saliva refused to come into my mouth, only to evaporate in the hot air. “Why would Adam Perez still be denying he killed Louie Bell and Alan Cordesman? And when I think about it, I agree. Beating and shooting are his style; not an ice pick.” I looked at Dana. “I think that's more your style.”

She just looked at me like an insolent teenager. “Too bad I can't get close enough to you, love.” She surveyed me with the shotgun barrel. “It was really easy,” she went on. “With Alan, his girlfriend was gone, and I rang the bell and asked if we could have a drink and talk. One thing led to another—he'd always been attracted to me—and later, when he was asleep, I just did it. Once you do it, it gets easier. So I found Louie in the casino. He wouldn't talk to me. He just ignored me and started playing the slot. And I came up behind him, and gave him a hug, and held him real close. He only shuddered for a few seconds when I put it in…”

The warehouse was silent except for a drip of water somewhere. It only fed my raging thirst.

“So why didn't you use an ice pick on your husband?” I asked. “Why trust Perez with the job?”

“For the children,” she said evenly. “He is their father.”

“Do not move!”

The sound made me jump a little, but then I felt salvation. This was a new voice, but I couldn't see where it came from at first. I kept the Python's dual sights on the middle of Dana's bilious orange blouse. Then I saw men in dark uniforms moving into the light. Jared Malkin raised his hands high into the air.

“All over, Dana,” I said. “Don't be a fool.”

She looked at me with something strange and cruel in her eyes, and then she blinked and lowered the shotgun. Instantly there were half a dozen Phoenix cops on top of her.

I looked at Lindsey. She smiled and indicated the small headset under her hair, and the cord running to her cell phone. “It's a good thing you're married to gadget girl,” she said. “
Cherchez la femme
, right?”

Later, after I had consumed two cold bottles of water and Peralta had arrived, I walked over to the squad car and leaned down to the passenger window. Dana stared at me from behind the prisoner screen, her hair glowing dark red from the adjacent streetlights.

“Why me?” I asked. “Why pretend to be a former student? Why concoct the story about your late father's note?”

She stared straight ahead, and then said, “You're a dinosaur, Mapstone. There with your books and your history and your cases that nobody cares about. I heard enough from Tom to know if anything happened to you, nobody would care too much. The idea was to get Louie Bell out there, and make it look like he shot a trespasser, and then saw it was a deputy and killed himself. And we'd buy the land when it was all over.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Bell never showed up. Perez got stuck in traffic on the 101.” She smiled. “You just can't depend on people nowadays.”

39

“There's going to be hell to pay,” Peralta said.

No one disagreed. Lindsey, Robin, and I were arrayed around the kitchen on Cypress Street as the sheriff prepared his signature carnitas for dinner. The room smelled of garlic, onions, chili powder, and whatever mysterious ingredients went into his alchemy. Lindsey and I were nursing Beefeater martinis, while Peralta was on his second Gibson. Robin sipped white wine. Sinatra came from the stereo, overruling the sheriff's preference for country music or the Beach Boys. I half listened to “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

“Hell to pay,” Peralta repeated. “When it all shakes out, you're dealing with the biggest scandal in Arizona since Charlie Keating and the savings and loan blowup. Maybe even worse. We arrested a guy at the Department of Water Resources today. Malkin had paid him half a million dollars and secret shares in Arizona Dreams LLC to falsify the water certificate. We're looking at other departments in the state and county. How this development got approved is beyond me. Hell, there may be more like this out there. It may take months to find all the limited partnerships where assets were stashed. More cumin, Lindsey.”

“It won't be the first time speculators tried to dupe innocent Easterners,” I said. “It was common in the nineteenth century to promise land that was fertile and well-watered. People got to the West and found the land they bought was really nothing but desert.”

“I knew you were going to try to teach, professor,” Peralta said.

“I have a captive audience.” I toasted him with my martini. “Tales of the water rustlers.”

“What about Enron?” Robin said. “This was kind of like Enron with land and water, all smoke and mirrors and crooked accounting.”

“It'll take years to sort it out,” Peralta said. “Arizona Dreams is in bankruptcy court, and the creditors will end up owning land that's worth a lot less than they thought. Nobody will be building forty thousand houses there.”

“Thank God,” I said. “What about Tom Earley?”

“That'll come,” Peralta said, sampling loudly from a wooden spoon. “He claims he's a victim—that Dana lied to him about Arizona Dreams, persuaded him to buy out the Bell brothers. She did all the bad stuff. He wants to testify against her. Give it time. The county attorney will take it to a grand jury. In the meantime, Earley's resigned. He's been repudiated by the Republican Party. Everybody who was his buddy last week has a knife out for him now. Suddenly the sheriff's office is the favorite department of the county supervisors. So I guess we'll just have to keep you employed, Mapstone. Hell, I'm even going to give you two love birds a vacation in October to take your train trip through the Rockies.”

“I hear the manuscript of the book is finished,” Lindsey said, rubbing my shoulder with a free hand. “And the title is, History Shamus?”

“I'm going to let the sheriff decide,” I said. “When he finishes reading it, and micromanaging.”

Robin said, “I think you ought to call it just that: ‘History Shamus.'”

Peralta grimaced and took a pull on his Gibson. “All right,” he said. “Let's do it.” He looked at Robin with mock sternness. “And you, whatever your name is, you could have ended up in a shitload of trouble…”

“It's Robin Bryson,” she said in mock indignation. “That was my dad's name. Lindsey Faith can vouch for it. The other name, well, I was married for a year. It didn't work out. That's a story for another time.”

“We have time to listen,” Lindsey said, giving an ironic smile. “Anyway, I'm glad you're going to rent the garage apartment here, even if you're a pain in the butt sometimes. Your escape from the jaws of the criminal justice system certainly ruined Kate Vare's day. Why doesn't Kate like you, Dave?”

“I'm getting hungry,” I said.

“Patience,” the sheriff intoned. “Mexican food is serious business.” He was chopping vegetables, looming over the cutting board like a fairytale giant.

Lindsey said, “I'm just amazed that Jared Malkin thought he could get away with it. The water fraud would have been discovered sooner or later.”

“Probably,” Peralta said, wielding a kitchen knife. “But the idea was never to build Arizona Dreams. It was to cash in on the housing mania. Anybody building housing here can get money. All Malkin had to do was convince investors he had land with a hundred-year supply of water. He scammed some of the biggest banks and real estate investment trusts in the country, and some of the biggest homebuilders. He didn't care. By the time the roof fell in, he'd be long gone. At least that's what he hoped.”

Peralta was transferring the shredded beef into Lindsey's largest All-Clad saucepan. I tried to grab a piece, but he threatened me with the knife in a very convincing manner. He handed a piece to Robin, then Lindsey.

“To die for,” Robin pronounced.

Luckily, it hadn't come to that. Things were getting back to normal in Maricopa County. It was the usual run of summer mayhem: dead immigrants in the desert, suburban bank robberies, meth lab busts, and children drowning in green swimming pools. Enough villainy and heartbreak for any place. Things were getting back to normal on Cypress Street, too. I sat back and watched the scene in our kitchen. There were ghosts, of course: Grandmother preparing bacon for breakfast; Grandfather reading his newspaper, and a boy who grew into me. We Americans have become so disconnected from our dead. I would have been no different if I hadn't come back home.

Now, Peralta was being his lordly self. He was one of two people left in my life who had actually known Grandmother and Grandfather. Sharon Peralta was the other. I would never stop missing Sharon, but she had moved on and was happy. How could I deny her that? Friends come and go, and if you're lucky you can hang on, even at a distance. The next time Lindsey and I visited San Francisco, we could count on seeing Sharon, and a friendship universe would be even wider. I still didn't know if I could view Robin as a friend. But she was here and she was making a heroic effort to tamp down her drama queen moods.

She took Lindsey and me out to Paradise Valley last week, where we met her wealthy employer. So at least part of her story was real. I watched her cock her head and saw some of Lindsey in her. Somehow, it mattered to Lindsey to keep this sisterly connection, with all its flaws and raw nerve endings. I saw Lindsey watching me, then Robin, and her expression was unreadable. When I took the two of them out, Lindsey would rib me about “my harem.” In bed, she would quip about being territorial. Irony and humor were her defenses. She gently rebuffed my efforts to talk about those weeks when she was away. And no part of me wanted to admit that for a few inebriated minutes one night I had been tempted by Robin. I had my own questions and insecurities, too. If Lindsey had been a teenage mother, would I love her any less? But if it were a secret that excluded me, one I didn't intend to probe, then would it be an itch I couldn't scratch? All this would take time. Sinatra sang “I've Got You Under My Skin.”

“Mapstone,” Peralta said, “what the hell are you doing?”

“Drinking and fiddling.”

“What is that?”

I held out the wooden carving in my hand. “It's one of Lindsey's matruska dolls. There's a smaller doll inside this one, see, and a smaller one inside that, and so on.” I disassembled it for him. “It's like the Arizona Dreams scam. A double-cross concealed inside a double-cross…”

Lindsey said, “Makes me wonder if we found all of them.”

“Well quit being a liberal academic parasite,” Peralta said. “Get the tortillas out of the oven. We're ready to start serving.”

Later, we sat in the living room and talked more about the case. Peralta puffed happily on a Cuban Cohiba, sharing it with Robin. She lolled against him, and he didn't complain. He said, “It would be nice to think this would make the entire state take a deep breath and slow down and stop being so greedy.” He watched a plume of blue smoke rise in the high ceiling. “But it won't.”

“Someday soon the real estate bubble will burst,” I said.

He contemplated the cigar. “Maybe that will be for the best.”