Concrete Desert (9 page)
I was watering the hedges and palm trees the next morning, thinking how for the first time in my life Julie Riding had said she loved me, when an old Honda Prelude pulled up. My first jumpy thought was that the gun was inside the house. But out stepped Lindsey, looking very cool in a cotton print skirt and carrying a bag and some files. She called out, “Hey, History Shamus,” and we went in out of the heat.
“I have the day off, and thought you might like a bagel,” she said, then, surveying the living room, added, “You’re kinda messy, Dave, not to be judgmental or anything. It just seems at odds with that orderly Virgo mind of yours.”
“Somebody paid me a visit yesterday, looking for something. They went through every drawer and cabinet and closet, even looked under mattresses and in the crawl space of the attic. I’ve also learned the Rebecca Stokes case is still wide open.”
She took my hand and led me into the kitchen, where she pulled out bottles of champagne and orange juice. “You put the nova lox spread on the bagels, and I’ll make mimosas,” she said. “Where were your case files?”
“Safe. I had my briefcase and PowerBook in the Blazer.”
Lindsey tossed her dark hair a little and popped the cork. “You are jumpy, Dave,” she said, putting a hand on my wrist. I told her about the conversation with Julie and the warning phone call—and the encounter in the carport a few weeks ago.
“Cheers,” she said, handing me a mimosa. “You’ve landed in some bad shit somehow. Who is this Julie?”
“We went together back in college.”
“Did you, like, disco dance and wear platform shoes?”
She made me smile. “I didn’t hear from her for twenty years. Then she turns up on my doorstep a few weeks ago, asking me to find her sister.”
“Phaedra? I read your report. How did Julie even know you were back in the city?”
“She ran into Peralta one day, and he told her. My bad luck.” I explained about Julie and the cocaine, the behavior swings and now the disappearance.
Lindsey sat demurely on the butcher-block table and sipped thoughtfully, the bubbles tickling her nose. “Dames is trouble, History Shamus,” she said in a lower voice.
“I’ve been doing some checking on my own into some things,” she went on. “I started running this Greg Townsend through some databases, and, surprise, there’s a DEA file on him.”
“You can get into the DEA?”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Confidential informants say he was flying in drugs from Mexico for Bobby Hamid.”
“Julie said he had his own plane,” I said. “Tell me about this Bobby Hamid.”
“Whoa, Dave, you have been gone from Phoenix for a while. Let me see, Ruhollah Hamid, son of a wealthy Iranian family, came here to study at Arizona State; then the revolution changed things and he stayed. Opened a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise with family money, did reasonably well. Then he opened a topless club. But in the late 1980s, intelligence reports start linking him to drug running, mostly small shit back then. But over five years or so, he becomes a real player: drugs, prostitution, guns. He has some major alliances with the Crips to run methamphetamines, the Mexican Mafia for heroin. Some people believe Bobby Hamid is the godfather now.”
“Jeez,” I said. “You miss a little, you miss a lot. Has he done time?”
“He’s been arrested about a dozen times—he’s one of Chief Peralta’s pet obsessions—but no convictions. Can’t find anybody to narc on him. He keeps his distance from the operating side of the business. He’s also got three fast-food franchises that are totally legitimate; he gives away lots of money, even serves on boards and charities. Whenever he gets busted, he claims he’s a victim of anti-Iranian prejudice.”
“Lindsey, how do you keep all this in your head?”
“Same way you do, Dave. We’re both weird. By the way, do you know what Julie’s married name was? I want to run her.” I gave it to her.
“Understand about Bobby Hamid: He wears two-thousand-dollar suits and has a pretty blond beach bunny wife, but he’s a killer. He wouldn’t have risen this fast without being one.”
“And Townsend was flying for him?” I asked.
“Apparently. You know these CI reports can be unreliable. But when he ends up dead, that gives it credence. Bobby Hamid would have a guy shotgunned in his bed, five rounds of double-ought buckshot, including one in the mouth. That’s his style.”
“So if Townsend got on the wrong side of this guy, maybe Phaedra did, too. And that’s what Julie knows but never told me.”
Lindsey bit her lip thoughtfully. “Maybe. Maybe, but it doesn’t quite add up. Phaedra looks like she was quite a beautiful girl. If she pissed off Bobby, he would have just sold her into slavery.”
She saw my look.
“Oh, yeah, there’s quite a market in the Middle East and Asia for pretty young American redheads. A sheik or the boss of a drug cartel would have paid thousands of dollars for her. And we strongly suspect Bobby has been behind some of that.”
My stomach felt very cold. “Don’t be squeamish, Dave. It’s the new millennium. This is the world we’re left with.” She gave me that sardonic smile. “God is dead, remember?”
“Another thing people kept telling me was that Phaedra hated drugs,” I said. “So it doesn’t add up, if I was being told the truth, which would be a first.”
“Oh, poor Dave,” Lindsey said, teasing me. “He’s back with the cops, and everybody lies to him.”
“So that leaves us—where?” I asked. “Is Bobby Hamid the one behind these threats or not?”
“If he’s not, he’d probably know who is,” Lindsey said. “What, are you going to walk in and ask him?”
“I might want a couple of chocolate doughnuts.” I smiled.
“Be very careful, Dave. I think the city has changed a lot more than you realize. But for your professional perusal…” She handed me a sheaf of files on Townsend and Bobby Hamid.
“Now,” she said, “tell me about the Stokes case still being open.”
John Rogers was dozing in his hospital bed when we walked up, but he quickly roused himself and took Lindsey in.
“The deputies look a hell of a lot better than when I used to see ’em,” he muttered. I guess I was surprised he remembered me. He was still looking Lindsey over. “What the hell’s that gold thing in your nose?”
“This is Deputy Adams,” I said.
“Lindsey.”
“Sit, sit.” The big man waved his hands. “They told me yesterday this cancer in my prostate has gone too far. Sorry, miss. Anyway, they tell me there’s nothing they can do that won’t just kill me outright. I say, just keep me from the damned pain.”
“I’m sorry, John. I didn’t even realize—”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Wish I could see my son and daughter. Wish we hadn’t all gotten so far away from the old ways. Never mattered to me when I was younger. Hell, it’s all over. Red folks, white folks, black folks. The whole goddamned thing is falling apart.”
“John, we hate to bother you, but we had some more questions about the Creeper cases.”
“I saw the newspaper. You did okay.”
“I talked to Harrison Wolfe.”
John Rogers visibly stiffened. “My God, Mr. Wolfe is still alive?” I nodded. “I always wondered if he was really human.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, don’t matter. Mr. Wolfe always respected Indians. He was a friend of mine, as much as anybody ever was his friend.”
“He said the women killed by the Creeper were mutilated. True?”
Rogers looked at Lindsey and back at me. He nodded slowly.
“But Rebecca Stokes wasn’t?”
“As I remember it, she wasn’t. It wasn’t my call, but you know how the guys talk about cases.”
“So her murder wasn’t related?”
He sighed and splayed his big hands.
“Cops always talk, Officer Rogers,” Lindsey said softly. “What did you guys think?”
Rogers smiled a toothless smile at her. “My first sergeant said, ‘You ain’t paid to think here, chief.’ Let me put it to you this way. It was an embarrassment to the Phoenix Police that the Stokes case was never solved. But we wasn’t exactly beating the bushes. All my snitches on the street were totally dry. There was no talk about it on the street.”
“Wolfe said her luggage was found inside the apartment door. So she wasn’t snatched between the taxi and the front door, even though that’s what had always assumed.”
“Don’t know that.”
“Wolfe said the county attorney took the reports.”
Rogers stared at me a long time, his eyelids steadily drooping. “You’re a smart fella,” he said finally. “Why would that happen?”
“Because she was the governor’s niece,” Lindsey observed, “and they were hiding something.”
Rogers snored softly and we watched him for a while, hoping for more, knowing we wouldn’t get it. We walked out quietly, and I told Lindsey about a surviving witness to Rebecca’s life.
***
Opal Harvey insisted on getting us iced tea and cookies. We waited in the cool dimness of the living room as Lindsey picked at the doilies on the furniture arms and looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “Frozen in 1930 middle-class earnestness,” she said softly. “Kill me if I ever do this.”
“I promise,” I said.
“I sent a copy of the newspaper to my granddaughter,” came the mechanical voice. “I said, ‘I was part of that.’”
“I appreciate your help, Mrs. Harvey. There’s just some loose ends we’re tying up.”
I led off half a dozen times with questions about Rebecca’s habits, family, friends. About the neighborhood. About the Creeper. Nothing.
Finally, Lindsey asked, “I bet she was pretty lonely, Rebecca. Living so far from home. Only twenty-one years old. Back then, everybody was supposed to be married by that age.”
Opal Harvey started to put the wand to her voice box and then stopped, looking out the blinds for long minutes. “Oh, honey,” she finally said. “Rebecca had a lover.”
She sipped some tea and went on slowly. “I’ve never told anyone that. I didn’t want to hurt the family. I didn’t want anyone to think she was cheap, because she wasn’t. She was a good girl.…” The thought trailed off.
“Who was he, Mrs. Harvey?” Lindsey asked.
“I never knew.” She studied her hands. “Rebecca kept him a secret and I never intruded on that. I think he was married, because he only came at night, and he never stayed with her. It was still a small town back then, and people would have talked. I know this: He was older. He dressed well and drove a nice car. I always wished he would have picked her up at the train station that night—I guess I assumed he would, since Rebecca said she didn’t need a ride from us.”
“Did you ever see him again after she disappeared?”
Opal Harvey shook her head.
Afterward, out in Lindsey’s Prelude, waiting for the air-conditioning to cool things down, I felt the rush of discovery, however slight. But Lindsey was quiet, her eyes unreadable. “Most murder victims knew their murderers,” she said.
“The lover?” I said. She nodded.
“But we know she was picked up at Union Station that night by a taxi. The driver was a moonlighting Phoenix policeman.”
“Maybe the lover was waiting for her at home. Maybe she went to him.”
“Motive?”
“Who needs a motive when you’re in love?” Lindsey said.
I should have gone to see Peralta Wednesday morning. Instead, I called his secretary to put off our meeting. She said he had been called to a meeting with the county supervisors and was in a very bad mood. “So it’s probably just as well,” she said. Just as well: She didn’t know the half of it.
The morning paper had news of a gunfight between rival gangs in Maryvale, which once upon a time not so long ago was a neighborhood synonymous with suburban safety and blandness. And there was the obituary of the veteran TV anchorman who had read the evening news when I was growing up. My grandparents would let me watch the ten o’clock news, and this man with a blond pompadour and black plastic glasses had been a figure of reassurance, a bookend on the days. He had been retired for years, of course. But I had been away. Little by little, everything in my past in this city was passing.
I tried to act normal. I went over to Phoenix College and lectured to my students in the survey course on the origins of the Civil War. Faces—hot, eager, bored, distracted. Most of the younger students were hearing this for the first time, so rotten is the teaching of history in high schools. Once, that would have motivated me or depressed me, but that day I just wanted to get through it. Slavery, states’ rights, the passing of the compromisers from the scene. “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.” I kept seeing the faces of Rebecca Stokes and Phaedra Riding. I am the keeper of murdered souls.
All I had wanted was a summer at home to get my bearings and some easy work from Mike Peralta. Instead, I was in the middle of—what? Three unsolved murders. Two warnings to quit looking into something. Thoughts of Lindsey—too many thoughts. Too many questions. You wouldn’t think anxiety and paranoia would grow so much in a city of endless sunny days, tanned goddesses, and opulent resorts. You would be wrong. It was a concrete desert and this was high summer.
I went to a gun shop and bought two sets of speed loaders for the Python and three boxes of rounds heavy enough to drop a gorilla. I wore extra-extra-large shirts, attempting, with little success, to conceal the bulk of the gun on my hip. So I just started clipping my star on my belt all the time and carrying openly.
I finished cleaning up the mess at home. After work, Lindsey came over and we drank Bloody Marys and listened to Billy Strayhorn and Charlie Parker CDs. It would have seemed reassuring if I hadn’t felt the constant heavy tug of the Colt Python on my belt. Lindsey carried a baby Glock 9-mm automatic in her purse, nine rounds compactly held in the magazine, “ready to rock ’n’ roll,” as she put it.
That night, we sat out in the garden and defied the heat, listening to the cicadas and the city noise. We swapped life stories. I learned that she was a another Virgo, born twenty-seven years before—“on Labor Day,” she deadpanned.
She was an Air Force brat. She came to the Valley when she was three, when her dad was stationed at Williams Air Force Base. Her middle name was Faith. “Hey, it was the seventies,” she said.
After high school, she tried college but was bored. “No offense,” she said. Hell, I’d been bored with it, too. So she enlisted and went into the Air Police. After four years, she knew she hated being told what to do, so she came home and tried college again. “Still boring.” She went to work for the Sheriff’s Office. That was five years ago. She’d been fooling with computers since she was fourteen. No training, but, she said, “I know how computers think.” There was an unhappy love affair with a lawyer named John. She lived in Sunnyslope with a cat.
She stretched her legs out onto my lap and I massaged her feet, nice feet with long, athletic ankles and delicate toes. I told her more about my life.
I gave her the short version: I am a Phoenix native born at Good Samaritan Hospital. An only child. My parents were killed in a plane crash. Little kids play that “orphan game” when they get mad at their folks. But it was real for me. My mom’s parents raised me. Grandfather was a dentist, named Philip—I carried that as my middle name. Grandmother sold real estate; her name was Ella. It was a good childhood. In college, I thought I’d be a lawyer and save the world. But I didn’t like the idea of defending bad guys, and I didn’t want to stay in school forever. So I got my B.A. and went to the Sheriff’s Academy. When I knew I didn’t want to be a cop, I went back to college part-time, studied history, and grew to love it. So I got my Ph.D. and, in those ironies life springs on us, stayed in school, teaching in Ohio and California. Got married. Got divorced. No kids. It all sounded neater than it was.
When I was done, she asked, “Why are you attracted to emotionally unavailable women?”
“I didn’t see it that way at the time. I saw brilliant, creative women who had suffered and wanted so desperately to be loved.”
“Maybe I’m emotionally unavailable,” Lindsey said.
I said, “Maybe I am, too.”
***
I got back from class a little after 2:00
P.M.
Thursday and the phone was ringing. I expected it might be the Realtor I had called about listing the house, but it was a woman’s voice.
“We’ve met,” she said. “We met in an apartment a couple of weeks ago. But please don’t say my name.”
“Okay.”
“I need very much to talk to you. There are some important things you don’t know.”
“Are you—”
“Be careful, Dr. Mapstone. If you know what I mean.”
I did. “How should we proceed?” I asked.
“Go to the place where you get your messages when you’re working,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”
I had to think about it for a minute, but then I remembered that I had a mailbox in the Social Sciences Department at Phoenix College. I drove back up Nineteenth Avenue and got there between classes. In the box, aside from two weeks’ worth of mindless administrative drivel, I found an envelope with my name on it, and inside that a folded sheet of stationery with the message: “Metrocenter. Ruby Tuesday, 8:30 tonight.”
I tucked it in my pocket and wondered why Susan Knightly wanted to talk to me.
***
Back at home, the answering machine was empty. I picked up the phone and called Lorie Pope at the
Republic
. It had only been about two years since we’d spoken.
“Lorie, it’s David Mapstone.”
“David,” she said. “My God, what a surprise. I read about you and was going to call.”
“I guess I should ask if you’re on deadline?”
“No,” she said. “But thanks for asking.”
“Remember when I helped you with that Latin American history paper senior year?”
“You saved my life, David. Of course I remember.”
“Well, I’m callin’ in favors. How about lunch tomorrow?”
“I’m intrigued,” she said. “Okay. Come by the newsroom around eleven-forty-five, and then we’ll go somewhere.”
I needed the comfort of books, so I drove over to the public library and took the glass elevator up to the Arizona Collection. The building—popularly dubbed the “copper toaster” because of its abstract design—was nearly new, with an atrium pool that you would walk into if you weren’t careful and a stunning view of the skyscrapers of the central corridor—as if you were suspended above the year-round green of palm trees and oleanders and the concrete and glass monuments that marched north and south between the mountains.
An indulgent librarian pulled me the papers of John Henry McConnico, twelfth governor of Arizona, as well as a couple of Ph.D. dissertations on microfiche from the U of A on the McConnico years in Arizona. I popped open the PowerBook and set up some files: names, chronology, family history, things to check later. I picked through the dusty books and started making notes. And then I asked for something else: a small history of the Phoenix Police Department, written in 1965 by a former professor of mine. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but perhaps something would get me moving again on Rebecca Stokes—or maybe give me the inspiration to start writing another history book I couldn’t finish.
***
A little after 8:00
P.M.
, I pulled into the vast parking lot of Metrocenter, Jim Morrison on the radio singing “L.A. Woman.” City at night. Arizona doesn’t go on daylight saving time, partly out of libertarian cussedness and partly because if it did, the sun would still be out at 10:00
P.M.
, a source of misery nobody on the political spectrum wanted to contemplate. So the sun was gone, but the heat remained god-awful. The mall was something like the biggest in the world when it opened, on the outskirts of Phoenix, in the mid-1970s. Most people back then couldn’t figure why they built it so far out. But now, of course, the Metrocenter was deep inside the city and even starting to show its age. I found a parking spot within a hundred yards of the entrance to the food court and walked slowly toward the doors, watching cars and people.
Inside, it was cool, bright, and crowded. Phoenix nearly invented the indoor shopping mall and had elevated it to something like a lifestyle. So here on a Thursday night, away from the empty sidewalks and parks, was humanity’s ocean, retail-style. I wound my way through the food court, past families with twofer prams and saw teenage girl mall rats, full grown on the outside, wearing the briefest short-shorts and deep in conversation with one another. I found refuge in Ruby Tuesday, and waited by the bar.
At 8:45, a woman in black jeans and a linen shirt leaned on the rail beside me.
“I’m sorry for the cloak-and-dagger routine,” she said. “But I think you’ll agree it’s justified.”
It was Susan Knightly. She looked very different from the well-coiffed Susan I had first met. Her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair was concealed under a black Nikon ball cap. We went to a back booth of the bar. I could imagine the calls Peralta would get for me being in a bar with my badge hanging from my belt. I ordered a martini anyway. She ordered a chardonnay.
“You know about Phaedra?” I asked. She nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”
“I assumed you were busy,” she said. “Let me get right to the point, Dr. Mapstone, or is it Deputy Mapstone?”
“How about David?”
“David.” She gave a small smile. “I don’t trust the police in this matter. I don’t really know why I am trusting you, but I guess I’ve got to trust someone, or else go on living this way.”
“Why don’t you trust the police?”
“Phaedra told me not to,” she said.
“When did she tell you this?” I asked.
“Two weeks ago.”
Susan looked at me straight on with those green eyes. Her face was a scrimshaw of freckles and soft laugh lines.
“Phaedra wasn’t kidnapped,” she said. “She was on the run.”
I felt another kick in the stomach.
“I am getting so tired of being lied to.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Susan said. “I promised her. God, I wanted to go to the police every day, but Phaedra made me swear I wouldn’t. And the more that happened, the more I got paranoid.”
“So when you found me in her apartment…”
“I was getting her some clothes.”
“I might have been able to help her.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” Susan said in a low, desolate voice, and her eyes filled with tears.
She looked around the room—tan young men and women clustered close to the bar, lost in an unintelligible jabber—and leaned close to me. “One night in June, it was the twentieth, I got home and got a call from Phaedra. She said someone was trying to kill her, and that she couldn’t work for me anymore. That was all she would tell me then. But she called back in a couple of days, and I made her let me give her some clothes and money.
“That’s where I got her apartment key, so I could get her some clothes, look after her stuff. Although, God knows, I realize in retrospect that it was foolish of me to go to her apartment. At the time, I guess we figured they were looking for her, and that nobody would think anything about me going to the apartment complex.”
“You better hope they’re able to discriminate between their red-heads,” I said. “Who is ‘they,’ by the way?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Susan said. “It was a dope deal gone wrong. Phaedra’s boyfriend was a pilot who did dope runs from Mexico. He just decided to take a shipment, I guess. Rip off his client. Phaedra got caught in the middle of it.”
“Bobby Hamid?” I asked.
“I didn’t hear that name.”
“Who, then?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said she overheard things she wasn’t supposed to hear, so they wanted to kill her. She was afraid to tell me too much. She did say they had paid off DEA and the cops, and that if she went to the police, she was as good as dead.”
“So she hid out for a month?”
Susan nodded. “She crashed with friends here and there. She never wanted to stay anywhere long; she felt she might be endangering her friends. Sometimes she was afraid she was being followed.”
“What about her sister or her mother?”
“I don’t know.” Susan shook her head. “She said she didn’t know whom to trust. She didn’t want to talk about her sister. It always upset her.”
“And you believed her?”
“I’ve been followed,” Susan said. “I had my studio broken into last week, but nothing was taken. Probably two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cameras, computers, and equipment—and nothing taken. Just files rifled, that kind of thing. A couple of threatening phone calls, said I needed to mind my own business.”
“So what happened to Phaedra? Whoever was after her just caught up?”
“I don’t know.” She silently drummed slender freckled fingers on the bar. “The last time I talked to Phaedra was a week ago Monday. There was something she wasn’t telling me. She was very agitated. I offered to give her a thousand dollars so she could get out of the state, and she agreed. We were going to meet the next night, here. But she never showed up. Then I read about it in the
Republic
two days later.”
I asked her if she would go downtown and give a statement. I guaranteed she would be safe.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, and rose to go.
“Susan.” I stood. “If you’re in danger, let me help you.”
She looked back at me and adjusted the ball cap. “I’m good at taking care of myself, David. I’m not sure I’m ready to trust anybody else just yet. I’ll call you tomorrow.”