Cactus Heart (11 page)

22

When I came awake, Gretchen was lightly stroking my hair and staring at me intently.

“You have the softest hair. Just like a baby's hair.”

Then the pounding on the door resumed. I sat up a little and groaned. My head ached like I'd finished off a bottle of red wine, but I hadn't sipped a drop. My shoulders and arms, legs and back ached, too, but I knew what that was from.

“Who could that be at this hour?” I whispered through a cotton mouth. The clock on the bedside table said one but it was bright sunny outside.

“Jesus,” I said, and sat up. Gretchen just watched me. She was wearing one of my white dress shirts and nothing else. I looked back longingly at her, slipped on my robe and limped out into the house. Peralta's bed was made and he was nowhere to be seen. Out the window was an unmarked police unit. Something bad.

“Quit screwing around,” came a voice through the little grille in the heavy wood door. The voice went to the body of Sheriff's Detective Patrick Blair.

“What the hell, Mapstone?” he said. “I've been pounding on the door for fifteen minutes.”

“What's going on?” I demanded, suddenly wide awake. I was instantly worried about Lindsey, so worried that I momentarily forgot who had been in my bed last night. Then I felt immediately guilty.

“Can I come in?”

“The house is a pit,” I said. “What do you need, Blair?”

He was as tall as me, and several light years more handsome. Just about thirty, he had luxurious black hair, merry Irish blue eyes, a perfect central casting face, a robust body. He had on a denim shirt, chinos and a Glock in a cross-draw holster, but he still looked like he just stepped out of a fashion magazine.

“What do I need?” he demanded. “What did you have going with Max Yarnell?”

I opened the door, suddenly angry. “Quit giving me the cop fuck-around,” I said. “I was doing that when you were in grade school. Give me some straight talk.” It brought out all the adolescent jerk in me, but it worked. His gorgeous face registered surprise and he said simply, “Max Yarnell has been murdered.”

We drove out to Scottsdale in silence, Blair at the wheel of a department Ford Crown Victoria, and me sitting in the passenger seat cloaked in a feeling of oppressive strangeness. Sometime after Max Yarnell had called me at the courthouse last night, he had been killed. Blair didn't know the details; he had simply been sent by Peralta to fetch me. And Blair was the guy who was seeing Lindsey every day. Jealousy is the most irrational and destructive of emotions, and I let it take a run through my mind all the way out to Max Yarnell's gated canyon living. Lindsey and Patrick Blair. Lindsey who didn't return my calls anymore. So this was why.

But almost as a backbeat was my memory of Gretchen from last night. When I had met her at the door, we had fallen hungrily into each other's arms with the telepathy of lonely people. Every centimeter on my body had been electrified as her mouth explored my lips, my ears and my neck, and then her hands had worked their way around me. I had kissed her greedily, wrestling her tongue gently with mine, stroking that miraculously lovely reddish brown hair. I had felt so lucky that she wanted me.

Gretchen Goodheart. She was very different in bed than I would have imagined. I loved aggressive women, but she had surprised me. The kind of gentle foreplay that Lindsey craved had just made Gretchen more demanding. We shouldn't make comparisons among lovers, but we all do, don't we? Lindsey had that little oscillating move when we made love in the missionary position—it was the most amazing sensation and when she started it, I could never last long. Gretchen—Gretchen had her own moves, but they were all so different. I learned quickly that Gretchen's favorite position was from behind. There's no polite, romantic way to put it. This was pure fucking, as she had clenched the sheets and screamed into the pillow and pushed back to me for more. Gretchen was a screamer. I had trusted the thick walls of the house for our privacy. I hoped she'd still be at home when I got back.

The deliciousness of the memory lost some of its taste as we pulled up into the desert cul de sac, past half a dozen sheriff's cruisers, Scottsdale Police units and unmarked Crown Vics. A TV van pulled in after us and started setting up. Blair shifted into park and said, “You're Lindsey's friend, right?”

“That's right,” I said, mindful of any ironic inflection in either of our voices. We slipped our badges onto our belts and walked through the gate.

The house was long and low, hugging the side of a hill with lots of glass and modern adobe. From one side, the McDowells towered above. From the other, the city fell off through an arroyo, the view going all the way to the Estrellas, which today were cloaked in yellow-brown smog.

I walked through the double doors into the home and Peralta met me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Just watching your ass,” he said. “Yarnell's house is in a little piece of county land. So technically, it's our case, although we'll cooperate with Scottsdale. I want every constituent served, even the dead ones.”

I followed him into a large room where evidence technicians were taking still and video photographs. The room was sparsely but expensively furnished with the kind of modern pieces you see in decorating articles in the
New York Times Magazine
. One wall was entirely glass, facing toward the city. The light show must be breathtaking. Then there was an airy chrome and wood desk, and beside that I could see a man's head on the floor.

I didn't understand what had happened until I walked carefully to the other side of the desk. Yarnell was on his back and a milky-colored stake was jutting out of the mashed bones and tissue where his breastbone used to be. There wasn't much blood dirtying up the spotless hardwood floor. His eyes stared up with the peculiar glaze of the dead.

“God,” I said in spite of myself.

“It's petrified wood,” Peralta said. “Looks like it came from over there.” He indicated a minimalist bookshelf off to the left. “A good Arizona kind of murder.”

“Somebody must have been strong as hell,” I said.

“This thing looks pretty heavy, so all you'd need is gravity,” said an evidence technician named Hernandez. “Especially after you cracked him on the jaw. Look at this.” He knelt and ran a gloved finger over the bottom of Yarnell's face, which was discolored but not quite bruised. “Somebody hit him good,” Hernandez said. “You'd see a hell of a strawberry if he still had a heart beating.”

“Maybe he was a vampire,” said a uniform and everybody laughed.

“That's enough,” Peralta said. He caught me by the shoulder and steered me out on the broad stone terrace.

“Tell me why your phone number is on the note pad on the dead man's desk.”

“He called me last night and said he wanted to talk. He sounded like he'd had a few too many.”

“What did he want to talk about?”

“Beats the hell out of me. I told him I'd call today. Then I thought about it—he hasn't been cooperative and now he wanted to talk—so I drove out here. No answer at the gate. So I drove home. You were already asleep.”

“This was what time?”

“Maybe ten-thirty.”

“Did he want to talk about the skeletons, or what?”

“He didn't say. He said he'd only talk in person, not on the phone.”

Peralta shoved his hands into his pants pockets and stared down at the brown cloud enveloping the city.

“He had enough enemies,” he said. “You've heard about this new copper mine? He had the environmental whackos on his ass.”

“I don't get the sense there are very many environmentalists in Arizona, much less whacko…”

“Well, the neighboring property owners aren't too happy, either. They wanted to develop subdivisions.”

“When I first interviewed him, he said the company had received threats. He had some major-league bodyguards in the office.”

Peralta crooked his mouth down as he mulled it over. “Well, he was all alone out here last night. But he had a state-of-the-art alarm system, and a .38 in his desk drawer. When the housekeeper showed up this morning he was like this.”

“Maybe it's the Yarnell curse.”

“I only worry about bad luck that shoots back, Mapstone. I want to know what progress you've been making on this case.”

“Not much,” I said. “The pocket watch belonged to Hayden Yarnell, according to his son, James. I can't find any other twins who would have been missing and buried in a basement in downtown Phoenix during that same time. Yarnell's businesses were having cash problems…”

“That's not good enough,” he said harshly. I felt a flush spread up my face, angry and embarrassed to be brought up short by him. He went on: “Max Yarnell had a stake driven through his damned chest last night right after he told you he needed to talk to you. Doesn't that raise your curiosity a bit, professor?”

I looked at the smog. “I'll get you some answers.”

“I want to know if this homicide had anything to do with what you're working on. This isn't just a little Phoenix Police matinee anymore, Mapstone. It's a real case. Try not to fuck up.”

“I'll see if I can measure up.” I turned and strode to the door.

“Mapstone,” he called. When I turned, a mischievous grin momentarily played across over his dark features. “Hope you got a good night's rest.”

I shrugged and walked back into the big room. I wanted out of Max Yarnell's big house, back into my big bed with Gretchen where all the violence of the world couldn't reach us. I sidestepped a Scottsdale cop making a diagram and an evidence technician setting up some high-tech contraption. I made my own mental notes. The room was neatly arranged considering the physical violence that had occurred. Whoever attacked Max Yarnell did it with suddenness and precision. He was probably someone Yarnell knew and let into the house. Yarnell was dressed in slacks and golf shirt. I looked around for a glass that might have held his libations, and sure enough one sat on a table by two leather chairs on the other side of the room. A cordless phone sat nearby. The evidence technician was preparing to bag them up.

Then I saw it.

Something cold crawled up my shoulders and slithered slowly up the back of my neck. I didn't say a word. But Hernandez, the evidence tech, was watching me, and he followed my eyes.

“Christ!” he said, and then all the cops were looking, too.

It was on one of the shelves behind Max Yarnell's desk. You might have missed it in the sheer size of the room and the distraction of a man sprawled on the floor with a piece of petrified wood sticking out of his chest. But I knew what it was instantly. A doll. Just like the one that had been delivered to my office a week ago, only this one didn't have a little sheriff's star. Instead, its hands were smeared bloody red.

I sensed Peralta behind me. “What the hell is that goddamned thing?”

That was when I realized how long it had been since I took a breath.

23

Patrick Blair dropped me off at home a little after five. Gretchen was gone and the house felt huge and forlorn and freighted with the knowledge of how quickly life turns against human beings. I wanted to call her, but I realized I didn't even have her phone number. And for a long moment, I was relieved that I didn't. I couldn't say exactly why. Then I didn't want to be alone. Even Peralta would have been welcome.

The dusk gathered outside the picture window, a fading, unfocused, weightless part of the day. Even the winter lawns looked dead. The lights hadn't come on in the neighboring houses and it looked as if the neighborhood had been abandoned a long time ago. I sat on the living room staircase and thumbed through the books on the tall shelves.
The Price of Admiralty
by John Keegan, one of my books.
The House by the Buckeye Road
, one of Grandfather's. A heavily thumbed
Modern Researcher
by Barzun and Graff, a classic when I was being trained as a historian. Inside lurked a five-by-seven color photo of Lindsey, the desert wind whipping her dark hair. Back in the days when she was smiling at me with lust and joy.

The phone cut into the silence like a scream.

“David? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” I said.

“You don't sound fine.” It was Lorie Pope. I told her I was okay, and, carrying the cordless phone, walked into the kitchen. I peered into the refrigerator, which held leftovers from half a dozen ethnic restaurants, and a fresh case of Coors for Peralta. I got out ice and started making a martini.

“Max Yarnell,” Lorie declared, as if she had spoken a whole paragraph.

I sighed and started mixing the drink.

“Are you making martinis?” Lorie demanded. “Why don't you make one for me?”

“Because martinis blur judgment,” I said. “You told me that years ago.”

“So? It would do you good.”

“I would bore you. I was never dangerous enough.”

“Yeah, but we could have fun while I was reaching that self-destructive conclusion.” She gave a deep, sensual giggle. I imagined her too-wide smile and the toss of her short dark hair. I sealed up the gin and ice in Grandfather's deco cocktail shaker and I gave the concoction a good workout.

I took out one of the Neiman Marcus martini glasses my colleagues had given me as a going-away present from San Diego State University when I lost the tenure sweepstakes. I had a lot of going-away presents. The clear fluid slipped delightfully into the glass, little frigates of ice cruising the surface.

“Max Yarnell,” Lorie said again.

“I honestly don't know much. I'm as baffled as everybody else. You know, ‘police are baffled.' That's me.”

“David!” Her voice was suddenly taut. “He's one of the richest and most prominent men in the state, and he's been murdered less than three weeks after it seemed like the Yarnell kidnapping had been solved? This whole thing stinks.”

“I don't doubt it, but how?”

“You're the one with the Ph.D., my love.”

“Fat lot of good it's done me.”

“Look, I'd love to play career one-downmanship, but I've got a deadline. What's Peralta holding back?”

“Don't put me in that position, Lorie.”

She sighed and said, “I'd like to put you in a position all right, but I guess you've got to go drink martinis out of Leslie's navel.”

I dropped an olive into the martini like making a green wish. “Lindsey.”

“Whatever,” Lorie said. “Give me something, David. How was Max Yarnell killed? Gun? Knife? Sunday edition of the
Arizona Republic
? The PIO won't tell me a goddamned thing.”

“You know the cops always hold back details, stuff the suspect alone knows. And you know I can't tell you that. “We'll talk.”

“Hey,” she said. “Be careful, David. I don't know what you've gotten yourself into but it's pretty heavy-duty. Watch that sweet melancholy-intellectual ass of yours.”

She could always make me smile.

I put Count Basie on the stereo and went back to the staircase. From the perch of the carpeted steps, I savored the martini. Gotten myself into something heavy-duty, but what? What could a 58-year-old kidnapping have to do with a murder that happened yesterday? Hadn't the DNA test said those skeletons weren't even the Yarnells? Then what had Max Yarnell wanted to talk about with me? This same Max Yarnell who had his assistant pull the property records on the Triple A Storage Warehouse and then pretended to be surprised to learn his company owned it. Was he already dead as I was sitting at the gate, pushing the little red button on the communications box? Would it have made a difference if I had immediately agreed to a meeting? What was I missing?

It could all be a coincidence. Maybe he just surprised a burglar; maybe he only wanted to complain to me again about my lack of respectful behavior toward him, only this time with the liberating influence of alcohol; maybe he pissed off some environmental activists who decided to return him to the soil a little early.

That all could make sense, until you had to figure in that damned doll.

I went back to scanning book titles. All that history. The only problem was the history I didn't know. Out the picture window, the world appeared dark and profound, my valley of low ranch house rooftops and big sky, where stranglers, snipers and killers of rich men with secrets did their restless trades. I thought about what Philip Roth said: “the terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides.” Then I heard James Yarnell's voice in my head and I jumped to my feet.

The garage-apartment behind the house was where I was building an HO-scale model railroad, a scene of Phoenix in the 1950s. It was a place to store boxes of books, old clothes and things headed for Goodwill. I guess I could have rented out the upstairs to a boarder if I wanted to clean out about forty years of records stored from Grandfather's dental practice.

I opened up the musty apartment and stared at the boxes and filing cabinets. Old patient records from my grandfather, the dentist. James Yarnell had said Grandfather had been their dentist way back when. Could it really be this easy? I started looking through files, getting a sense of how things were organized, or not. For decades, it seemed, Grandfather had an assistant named Mrs. Hill. I could barely remember a large woman with steel-wire stiff gray hair and thick fingers. Now I detected her steadfast handwriting on files before the 1950s, when typewritten labels took over. Her filing was quirky, made more so by the move of the records from Grandfather's old office on McDowell after he had finally retired. It took some time. I mixed another martini, came back to the garage apartment and dug in again.

In about an hour, I heard the door from the house open and Peralta's heavy tread came over the walkway to the apartment.

“What are you doing, Mapstone?” He stuck his head in the door.

I held up the files.

“Finding the Yarnell twins,” I said.