Concrete Desert (6 page)
Early the next morning, I grabbed a bagel and diet Coke and got on the road to Sedona. I’ve spent my life in coffee-swilling professions, but I’ve never caught that addiction. Patty, whose bone-jolting French roast I would brew every morning when we lived together, said I was missing one of life’s most sublime pleasures. Maybe it will be like golf: something I’ll take up at that ever-receding point in my life called “older.” Bagels were something I had discovered, and even if you couldn’t find a “real” bagel in Phoenix, I munched contentedly on one as I headed the Blazer north on Black Canyon Freeway, Interstate 17.
Sharon Peralta was on the radio, always “Dr. Sharon” to her listeners (why hadn’t I gotten my Ph.D. in psychology?), giving brisk advice to a man who didn’t know how to keep his career and meet his obligations to his seven children; a woman who didn’t understand why her lovers kept leaving her; and another woman who had seduced her brother-in-law. Dr. Sharon handled every caller deftly. She was funny. She was sexy. She had the answers. She was promoting her newsletter and her new book. Hard to believe it was the mousy Sharon Peralta I first met twenty years ago.
It was a good summer day for a drive, provided you were headed in the right direction. In the southbound lanes, the traffic headed toward downtown was a gridlocked disaster. I drove for miles through the new city sprawl, ever spreading—an acre an hour—out into the desert floor and around stark, barren mountains that once stood in splendid isolation. After passing Carefree Highway, the interstate started to climb. Over the next hundred miles, it would vault nearly six thousand feet into the Arizona high country and Flagstaff. My destination was not quite that far, but no matter how many times I drove this route, I was struck by the dramatic changes in the land.
You can drive all the way from the Mississippi River to Denver without encountering more than the undulating sameness of the plains. In the West, the country changes from pines to deserts and mountains to flatlands with amazing suddenness. So the flat cactus-covered desert gave way to sage- and chaparral-covered slopes, ravines and crevices, all pushing upward toward the high peaks to the north. In a few minutes, the massive blue emptiness of the Bradshaw Mountains appeared off my left. This had been mining country a hundred years before, with lots of abandoned shafts to stick a body in. I felt an involuntary uneasiness and checked the mirrors, checked the .357 in the glove compartment.
In about an hour, I took the highway that splits off north into Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona. Another ten miles and the country changed again from the three-thousand-foot high desert to a landscape from another planet, an idealized Mars of exalted red-stone buttes rising above scrub pines and intricate, blown-apart rock formations, all encased by a gigantic, endless cobalt sky. Here was the next Santa Fe or Taos. Sedona, which had not been much more than an isolated artists’ colony when my grandparents would bring me up here as a little boy, had become as rich and exclusive an oasis as you can find in the country. There was now a traffic light below Cathedral Rock and expensive houses sprinkled into the foothills. It all made me vaguely sad.
I stopped at a convenience store where a sign told me Sedona was the home of the annual Jazz on the Rocks Festival, and also that it was at the center of four “vortexes” that provide mysterious, healing energy. I had a vague recollection of a “harmonic convergence” of New Agers here a few years before, when I was still in San Diego and Patty’s wicked wit insulated me from inanities. I asked about the address Townsend had given me, and the clerk pointed me down the highway to a turnoff.
The Blazer’s odometer turned over 2.4 miles as the asphalt road turned to red gravel and finally to dirt, climbing up into Bear Hollow, a narrow upland canyon overlooking Sedona. Greg Townsend’s place was completely concealed in pines and rocks, a modern adobe with the kind of rustic look that can only be had for a lot of money. I parked inside a gate, just behind a silver Porsche 911 turbo. I wondered about strapping on the Python, then decided against it and stepped out onto the pinecones and rocky ground.
“You don’t look like a cop,” came a disembodied voice from a distance. Then, coming closer, he said, “You look more like a college professor.”
Greg Townsend stepped out from behind a boulder and extended his hand. He was tall and lanky, my height, but skinnier, with a full head of graying hair, wire-frame glasses, khaki shorts, and hiking boots. His skin was a golden tan, darker than the color of his shorts. He regarded me with an easy nonchalance in his blue eyes. I pulled out my badge case with my left hand—the nongun hand—and showed it to him.
“I read about you in the
Republic
,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
“Nothing to be impressed about,” I replied, looking him over and imagining him as Phaedra’s lover. I didn’t like him.
“I went to Brown, but I never much took to the classroom thing,” he said. I didn’t respond. “So you’re a history professor? I trust you have left behind the prison of linear narrative and the Western conceit that there is such a thing as truth?”
Jesus, I thought, is this how he picked up Phaedra? “I think historical questions have historical answers,” I said. “The conceit that everything is relative has led to most of the mass murder of this century.”
“Mmm,” he said. “How did you ever get tenure?”
He extended his arm and we walked.
“Phaedra loved it up here,” he was saying as he led me around the place, from one spectacular view of the canyon below to another. “She was a restless soul. You could see that aura about her. Amazingly creative. Anyway, somehow this place calmed her a bit.”
“When was the last time you talked to her, Mr. Townsend?” I asked. We settled onto a large futon in the main room; it faced a wall of glass and another fabulous view. Around us were photos of Townsend climbing, cycling, and skydiving with various young women. I didn’t immediately see a photo of Phaedra.
“I told you on the phone, it was April, when she moved out.”
“You two had a fight? That was why she moved out?”
His blue eyes flashed for just a moment, and his face became red. “You know,” he said, “I didn’t want to invite you up here, and now you’re asking things that are really not any of your business.”
I thought about playing a tough guy, but I just let it sit for a minute. I could hear a siren down in the canyon.
“You didn’t know Phaedra,” Townsend said. “The negativity just grew in her. She was very difficult, very tumultuous. Of course, she was very bright and talented. They all go together. Such a tortured soul.
“Yes, we fought before she left. But that didn’t seem unusual, because we fought a lot. That was just Phaedra. But the next morning, she was just gone. She never gave me an explanation.”
“Why do you think she left?”
He shrugged. “Maybe she was ready for a change. She lived a very episodic life, Deputy Mapstone. She would go through phases in her clothes: hats and loose skirts one month, tight Armani cocktail dresses the next. People came and went, too, men especially. She never had trouble turning the page.”
“What did her state of mind seem to be?”
“Moody. Sometimes she seemed happy, but lonely, too.”
“And other times?”
“She never reached a oneness with herself. That wonderful state of being I tried to teach her. Why should I know why?” He sounded whiny, like he must have sounded in fifth grade.
“Oh, just because you lived with her,” I said dryly.
“Yeah,” he said, staring past me out the window. “There were times she sounded really down. She could have the blackest moods. And that sister…”
“Julie.”
He looked at me strangely and said, “Very bad news.”
“Did you ever have any sense she might be in trouble?”
He shook his head. We watched as a hawk hunted in a lonely arc down the canyon.
I asked him about how he’d met Phaedra.
“The personals, Deputy Mapstone. Or is it Dr. Mapstone? Professor? Haven’t you tried the nineties way of meeting people?”
“I answered a couple of ads in San Diego a few years ago. I can’t say I met anybody like Phaedra, at least if her photos don’t lie.”
“Oh my God, she looked much better in person,” Townsend said. “She was the kind of woman who, when you saw her walk past or in an elevator, could make your whole day if she gave you a smile.
“I’ve known a woman or two like that,” I said.
“I’ve never seen anyone who was vibrating as high as Phaedra. She was channeling unbelievable things…” He stopped and looked at me. “But I guess you don’t believe in such things, do you, Professor Mapstone?”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” I said.
“The Bible,” he said, and smiled.
I thought, Shakespeare, you dolt. I said, “But I guess I don’t channel.”
“You should. You have quite an aura about you. It would allow you to break free of all the repressiveness of Western civilization and Christianity, which, thank God, nobody believes in anymore.”
“Yeah. The Sedona vortex is certainly more plausible than the Trinity.” He didn’t smile. “Phaedra,” I coaxed.
“She didn’t like to climb. Heights scared her. She read books. Lots of history. You might have liked her.”
He was needling me, but I let him. There was something wrong with Greg Townsend, but I couldn’t tell if it was that vague misfit neurosis that seems to migrate west or if it was something more, something to do with Phaedra.
“I had a place down in the Valley,” he said. “So we started dating down there. It got serious, and we moved in together. Then we moved up here full-time.”
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Townsend?”
“I’m a trust baby, Deputy.”
“Must be nice.”
“Yes, it allows me to do the things I love. I climb at least a dozen fourteeners every year; I fly my own plane; I travel. And I can attract women like Phaedra Riding, to put a fine point on it.”
He smiled a smile of perfect white teeth.
“Did you care about her?”
“Sure,” he said. “We had a lot of fun.”
“I can see you’re broken up with worry about her disappearing,” I said.
He looked hard at me for a long moment. The veins and tendons in his fine neck rippled minutely. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you don’t seem too concerned.”
He just stared and gave a little sigh. “I don’t have to justify myself to you,” he said. “She’s an adult, and one with her own mind, let me assure you. She liked being on her own. I have no reason to believe she won’t turn up.”
“Did Phaedra have a drug problem?”
“Fuck you!” he said, rising and stalking to the end of the room. He walked over to a bar set into the wall and clinked some ice into a glass. It seemed out of character; I expected him to be swilling Evian. “I really didn’t have to let you in here, and I don’t have to let you pry into my life.”
I stayed seated. “Well, that’s true, sir,” I said. “So I can call the Sedona sheriff’s substation and get a search warrant and really fuck up your afternoon. To put a fine point on it.”
He downed his drink. I said, “Or we can keep having a friendly conversation.”
“She hated drugs,” he said quietly, staring out the window again.
***
I drove back to Phoenix in the full heat of the day, the sun burning into the Blazer despite the air-conditioning being on high. My sunglasses were pressed tightly against my face. I missed San Diego. I missed the Spanish stucco house a block from the Pacific in Ocean Beach. I missed the familiarity of lecture classes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and office hours Wednesday afternoons, and lunch with Patty in Mission Valley, where the air was cool and salty-smelling.
Here, I had a missing woman who had a taste for rich men, couldn’t keep a job, and played the personal ads. She had red hair and a blue Nissan Sentra, and I didn’t have a clue where to find her. Who would have thought it would be easier to solve a four-decades-old murder case than to find my old girlfriend’s missing sister?
I didn’t know what to think about Greg Townsend, aside from my visceral dislike of him. He was like so many middle-aged men you meet in the West, grown-up boys who have left behind the privileged Ivy League backgrounds, but not the perks. Men who try to fill up what is missing inside them with mountain biking, rock climbing, and New Age philosophy. They populated the resorts and the tennis ranches, looking like they’ve stepped out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad in
Esquire
magazine. They have a finely tuned sense of ironic scorn, but it’s impossible to say if they ever feel anything real. And what Townsend felt about Phaedra, I couldn’t say.
There was a screeching in the console, and I remembered the cellular phone Peralta had given me last week. I pulled it out and activated it.
“Mapstone.” It was Peralta. “Where the hell have you been? What’s your ten-twenty?”
Nobody had spoken radio code to me for fifteen years. “I’m just south of Black Canyon City on I-Seventeen.”
“Get on I-Ten,” he commanded. “Head out past the White Tanks to Tonopah, then follow the dirt road three miles.” I told him to slow down, then grabbed a pad and wrote it down.
“What’s up?” I asked. But somehow I already knew.
“We found your girl,” Peralta said, his voice cutting in and out. “Phaedra, like Phoenix.”
I knew what he meant. But he said it anyway.
“Body dump.”
It is more than a hundred miles from the edge of the Valley’s civilizing sprawl to the Colorado River and the border of California. Today, Interstate 10 runs through it like a straightedge, connecting Los Angeles with its ambitious New West offspring, Phoenix. But on both sides of the freeway is some of the most desolate territory on the planet. The La Posa Plain, the Ranegras Plain, the Kofa Wilderness. The abandoned bed of a long-lost inland sea. Bounded on both sides by bare, ragged mountains with names like Eagletail Peak, Signal Mountain, and Fourth of July Butte. Until the mid-1970s, even travelers between Phoenix and L.A. avoided these badlands. The railroad ran south and west, through Yuma, or north and west through Wickenburg. The old highway took an out-of-the-way route north, for otherwise there would have been no towns and no water for travelers. And even now, with all our mastery of nature, with all of Phoenix’s seemingly invincible growth, the Harquahala Desert is a forbidding place.
I drove for an hour on freeways, first south into the city and then west into the sun. I slowed down to let a dust devil twist across the interstate, knowing these whirlwinds were capable of overturning tractor-trailer rigs. At the little hamlet of Tonopah, I got onto surface streets and then dirt roads as the last subdivisions gave way to scattered ranch houses and then trailers and finally nothing but chaparral and cactus amid the endless cracked blond dirt of the desert. I played the CD Lindsey had given me and then I sat in silence. A sheet of sweat would not evaporate from my skin.
I tried not to think, but of course I did. By the time I’d left the Sheriff’s Office years ago, I had built the necessary nonchalance about finding dead bodies. But it hadn’t always been that way. There was the night I was a twenty-year-old rookie serving a warrant with Peralta to an old hotel in the Deuce and finding a forgotten dead man instead. Peralta called it a “stinker.” I stumbled back down the stairs and onto the street, vomiting my dinner onto the hot sidewalk. For years, I had been ashamed of that, but at least it was human.
There were dusty sheriff’s cruisers on both sides of the trail. I parked behind the last one, adjusted my sunglasses, and stepped out into the heat. It was like walking into an oven set on high, under a brilliant blue sky, with a cactus wren cooing off in the distance.
“You Mapstone?” a young deputy asked. I said I was and showed my ID. She nodded and led me off into the desert. We walked maybe a quarter of a mile, over soil hard and ancient, down a wash and back up into a thicket of mesquite and cholla, which was now roped off with crime-scene tape that looked weirdly out of place here. Tall uniformed men in sunglasses milled around. I pulled out my badge and hung it on my belt, feeling strangely at home.
“She hasn’t been here long,” Peralta said. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the logo
MSCO CHAIN GANG
—one of the sheriff’s marketing coups—his Glock 9-mm pistol restraining his belly. He led me under the tape. We were careful to walk single file in case other footprints might be found around the scene.
“What do you mean?” I said. “She disappeared a month ago.”
“Look,” he said. Suddenly, we were there, beside a small bluff, under a creosote bush, pulling back a plastic blanket, looking at a pale, red-haired young woman.
Peralta read my mind. “Nobody looks that good if they’ve been in the desert six days, much less six weeks. I think she was dumped in the last few hours.”
I asked, “Who found her?” but I was hardly listening when Peralta said, “Anonymous call to the nine-one-one operator.” I was looking at Phaedra. Her eyes were still staring, dead now, at whoever had killed her and brought her here. I did not know her. And yet I did.
“David.” Peralta was next to me. “You okay?”
I nodded.
He pulled down the plastic sheet. “Looks like strangulation of some kind. Note the marks on the neck—may be consistent with a utility cord or some kind of climbing rope. Only wearing a bra when she was found. Her purse had ID and fifty dollars inside. Sexual abuse not determined. Crime lab is on the way from Phoenix.”
“What about her hands?” I said. “Check under her nails.”
“Thank you, professor,” Peralta said, annoyed.
I stood a bit uncertainly and stared off at a mountain in the distance, a redoubt for the apocalypse if you could only get water to it. “It’s like Stokes,” I said.
“Huh?” Peralta said.
“The bra. Only wearing a bra. Strangled. They’ll find she was raped, too. Like Rebecca Stokes and Leslie Reeves and Ginger Brocato and Betty Moran and Gloria Johnson. It’s the same way those homicides were done.”
Peralta pulled me aside, pulled off his sunglasses. His brown eyes were rimmed with red cracks. “This is now and this is another Harquahala murder,” he said.
I felt like he’d kicked me in the stomach.
“What are you saying?” I said. “The Harquahala murders have been prostitutes, dumped in the desert. This isn’t that.”
He only looked at me. I grabbed his shoulder.
“This isn’t that, Mike. This is Phaedra Riding.”
“You don’t know who Phaedra was,” Peralta said. “You didn’t know her secrets. From what you told me, she sounded like a flake.” It was too hot for long sentences.
“She wasn’t turning tricks.”
“You don’t know. You’re too close to this.”
“I know that much.”
“You need to let the homicide guys handle this now.”
“I was the only one who cared about this case until today.”
He looked down at my hand on his collarbone. I didn’t even realize it was there. I let it fall.
“You are not on the case,” he said. “This is now going to the Harquahala task force.” He pointed to some men in white polo shirts and tan chinos walking the perimeter and looking at me with some hostility. “You stick to the historic cases, partner.”
I walked away from him and knelt down by Phaedra, a rag doll on the dry ground. I tried to make myself look at her as an investigator. I covered her up too gently. Peralta’s hand was on my shoulder.
“If you want to help, you can tell her sister and then drive her downtown to make a statement,” he said. “And I want a report from you on what you know about her.” I stood.
“But that’s it. Otherwise, I want you to stay away from this.”
***
I appeared in the posh marketing office of the Phoenician covered with sweat, my badge still hanging from my belt. I was wearing the kind of grim expression that caused a graduate assistant a few years ago to call to me “ponderous.” Julie came out to meet me, and I’m sure she knew immediately. But I silently led her out to the opulent lobby.
“You know, Charlie Keating built this place,” she said, talking a little too fast. “That was all while you were away. Then the feds took it over in the S and L crash. Then they sold it to a Saudi sheik.” She waved her arm vaguely. “It’s like a palace. First-class all the way. The finest hotel in Phoenix. Even better than the Biltmore, I think.”
The room felt very large around me. I said, “I have bad news.”
“We’ve won five stars from the
Mobil Guide
every year, you know,” she went on, smiling. “That’s very hard to do. God, when it comes time every year to announce the rankings, I get so nervous.”
“It’s Phaedra.”
She stopped talking and stared into her lap. She did a double take and her eyes filled with tears, which she anxiously rubbed away. Then she just seemed to collapse in a heap of choked sobs and melting mascara.
“I’m sorry, Julie. We found her body. I am so sorry.”
She was silent, rigid, and she stayed in my arms until my back began to ache from being turned the wrong way, but I didn’t move. Then I drove her downtown in a silence broken only by the strained noise of the Blazer’s air-conditioning on high. First to the morgue, then to the station. While she met with the detectives, I wandered around the building. It was after 5:00
P.M.
now, and the place had that feel of weekend institutional abandonment that I remembered from universities. Closed, dark offices. Peralta’s door was closed and locked. Lindsey wasn’t in Records. I left her a note saying hi; I don’t know why. I bought a diet Coke and went back to CID to cool my heels.
How do we arrive at life, real life? Would Dr. Sharon have the answer? For years, I imagined Julie had found a neurosurgeon and was making perfect babies in a house overlooking the Bay in San Francisco, working on her tennis swing and managing the family portfolio. But that didn’t take into account life’s misfires, did it? Like how I was going to be the great writer of popular history, the next Simon Schama or Paul Johnson. Inspire people. Make money, too. Live on a hillside in La Jolla with my beautiful, witty wife and my books and my big thoughts. Live as far away from crime-scene tape and body bags and next-of-kin notification that I could ever get. Like how Phaedra Riding came home to Phoenix to start her whole life over and ended up dead instead. This was real life, straight up.
After about an hour, Julie came out grim-faced and red-eyed. One of the detectives, a guy named Grady, I think, told me they were done with her, and then he closed the door in my face when I started to follow him back inside. It could have pissed me off, but I was concerned about Julie. We walked out in silence. When the elevator reached the first floor, she said, “Please buy me a drink.” I needed one, too.
***
“That detective kept asking me whether Phaedra had ever been involved in prostitution,” Julie was saying. “He wouldn’t tell me why; he just kept coming back to that. What’s going on, David?” She was more angry than hurt, nervously swirling the ice around in her scotch.
“And Peralta wonders why I don’t want to be a cop again,” I said half to myself. “Phaedra was found in the desert west of the city, where they have found the bodies of several murdered prostitutes over the past eighteen months. Those detectives are part of a task force working on the Harquahala murders.”
“Wait a minute!” Julie nearly shrieked, causing some people at nearby tables to look up. We were at a restaurant in the Arizona Center, a tony commercial office development a few blocks away from the Sheriff’s Administration Building office. Then, in a lower voice, she said, “What are you talking about? Phaedra was not a prostitute!”
“I know that.”
“Then why are you letting them do that?”
“Well, they’re not exactly clamoring for my input, Julie,” I said, nursing a martini. “They have to assume the worst because of where the body was found.”
It was as if I had physically struck her; she recoiled.
“‘The body.’ That’s my sister.”
“I’m sorry. It’s an old habit. A bad one.”
Julie excused herself for a long trip to the rest room. I sipped the martini and looked out at the palm trees swaying. A storm was coming into town. Maybe we would get an hour’s break from the monotonous heat.
When she returned, I asked, “Julie, I need to know if there’s more to this than you’ve told me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, have you told me everything?” Like when you slept with Jim Ellis after that party when we were juniors but never told me. “We don’t know yet for sure, but it seems obvious that Phaedra was alive until very recently. So where was she? Had she been in danger all this time? Had she disappeared voluntarily, or was she kidnapped? What about those men who were watching you? Is there anything you haven’t told me?”
She shook her head, then said, “Sometimes Phaedra would just go away for a while, but never like this. It was her way of just shutting down when relationships or whatever got too intense. She might not let Mom and Dad know, but she’d always let me know.”
“Should you notify your mom?”
Julie’s eyes darkened and she shook her head vehemently. “You know, in a weird way, you’re lucky you never knew your parents, David. And I know how alone you must feel now that your grandparents are gone. But they did love you. I can’t say my folks ever loved any of us.”
She swirled the golden liquid in her glass. “We were the perfect family.” She laughed unhappily. “Once, when I was about fifteen, I was out with some friends and we ran into Dad with his girlfriend. He’d screwed around for years, I guess. But that’s kind of hard to handle when you’re fifteen. Finally, he just left and never came back. Moved to Florida. Married a bimbo. Not that it really mattered, because when I was growing up, he never had anything to offer but slaps and criticism. Nothing I ever did was enough to earn his love.”
I let the waitress refill our glasses. It had been years since I’d heard Julie talk about her father, but the bitterness was undimmed. Hers was a ghost-ridden family drowning in what Sharon Peralta would call “unresolved sorrows.” A brother killed himself when he was seventeen.
“Mom was useless,” Julie said. “Pills and booze. She was worse after the divorce. And”—she choked a bit—“Phaedra got the worst of it. Phaedra always felt that abandonment, so she was determined never to trust, always to be the first to leave.”
Outside, a sparse rain was starting to fall, hitting the palm trees with big dusty drops. It made me feel a little better. Even a little change from the constant oppression of the heat was welcome.
“I’m so tired, David,” she said, and she looked it. “I don’t know what else to tell you right now.”
We drank in silence. Then we walked through the dust and lightning back to the Blazer and I started to drive her to her car. Instead, we ended up at my place, where we drank too much. She cried a long time, then finally came to my bed, where we made love with the peculiar frenzy of the lost and the grief-stricken.