Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“Then make it this Friday,” he said, and turned his head toward his paperwork. I started out.

“You know who she’s related to?”

I stopped and turned back to him. “Phaedra?”

“No, no, Stokes, Rebecca Stokes. She was the niece of John Henry McConnico.”

“The former governor?” I said. He nodded. “So that would have made her-what, a first cousin to Brent McConnico?”

“The majority leader of the Arizona Senate,” Peralta said. “He’s seen as the next governor.”

Peralta was always working the angles.

Chapter Three

I crossed Jefferson Street against the light and made my way through Cesar Chavez Plaza, deserted in the early-afternoon heat. It was one of those big sky-beautiful days in Phoenix, when the bare desert mountains in every direction were sharply defined by the intense light of the unencumbered sun. That same sun felt like a radiation gun on every exposed pore-the temperature was supposed to top 105 degrees today. A lone ragpicker started to hit me up for money but did a quick retreat when he saw my Sheriff’s Office ID. I took the thing off and stuffed it into my pocket.

When I was twenty years old, that ID card and gold star had been my most prized possessions. They represented the law, the public trust-that was what Peralta said the first day I met him. It took four hard years to get it through my head that law enforcement wasn’t for me. And yet, here I was. I could call this part-time, temporary, research, whatever. But I was carrying a badge again-and working for Mike Peralta.

The millions of dollars in computers at the main Sheriff’s Administration Building were little help with a forty-year-old murder case, so I headed over to the old City Hall-County Courthouse, where forgotten records were stored in the attic. When Rebecca Stokes was murdered, this five-story burnt-brown building was where justice was dispensed in Maricopa County. When Rebecca Stokes was murdered, Eisenhower was president, trains still arrived at Union Station, and a small police force rarely had to deal with homicide.

Carl, the security guard, had spent thirty-five years with the Arizona Highway Patrol. But his perfect posture and fluffy, snow-white mustache reminded me of a retired British army officer. He spent fifteen minutes talking about how an arsonist was at work in his neighborhood, and how the easterners and Californians were ruining Phoenix. He showed me an article that said Phoenix was growing so fast that an acre of desert every hour was being swallowed up by the city. It was written by an old friend of mine, Lorie Pope at the Republic. The city had changed, gotten bigger, dirtier, and more dangerous. I didn’t know whom to blame. Then Carl went away and left me alone in the musty, high-ceilinged clutter.

Sometimes, I feel like I’ve spent half my life in libraries, but this place was something else again. Historians dream of coming across old diaries from the Civil War in some attic, and this was my attic of treasures: fifty or sixty years of records from the city and county. I doubted if ten people even knew they were up here. It was like an overgrown vacant lot that, instead of being littered with old tires and washing machines, had accumulated decades of cast-off files as the old building went from its original use as a combined city-county building to being Phoenix Police Headquarters to finally housing a mishmash of government offices. There was no order to any of the hundreds of dusty cartons, rusty green and gray file cabinets, and rotting ledgers. But after a few trips, I had begun to find a few caches I might need someday.

I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but whatever it was would begin to fill in some of the pieces about Rebecca Stokes. My ex-wife, Patty, told me that every woman has her secrets. My time in law enforcement had taught me that every case contains threads that nobody has the time or inclination to pull. I would be satisfied to find just one of them.

Peralta had some of the finest evidence technicians and detectives in the country to help him with a state-of-the art homicide investigation. I was here to “think outside the box,” as he put it-he read too many business magazines. So I spent an hour reading the case file. Then I opened my old Mac PowerBook and began to make some notes.

What did I know? A twenty-one-year-old woman gets off a train at midnight and takes a cab home. Then she disappears and turns up dead. The file Peralta had given me said the body was in fairly good shape when it was found by a power-line crew. But the forensic techniques of 1959 were fairly primitive. The autopsy report had disappeared, but I did have a letter from the medical examiner, saying Rebecca died of strangulation, and noting that some residual bruises around the genitals and the presence of semen indicated sexual assault. She was naked except for a bra, and there were no fibers or hairs found on the body, nothing but the dust and burrs from the desert. No tire tracks, either.

The obvious suspect was the cabdriver. But the report and the attached news clippings said he w

as a decorated Phoenix cop who was working a second job driving a taxi. He voluntarily took a polygraph and passed. And that was it. No suspects were ever even questioned in the case.

Rebecca was what was called in the fifties a “career girl,” well liked by her coworkers, no steady boyfriend. She’d come to Arizona to study at the state college-now Arizona State University-and took a job as a secretary in the law office of Larkin, Reading and Page. Now I also knew she was the niece of the governor-something the police reports and newspapers had omitted.

I found a carton with old radio logs from the late 1950s and paged through them. I wanted to know what else was going on in Phoenix when Stokes disappeared. An hour later, I didn’t have much more than an appreciation for what a difference a mere four decades can make. The Phoenix of 1959 was less than a quarter of the size it is today-in many ways, it was just an overgrown farm town, although the postwar growth was at full throttle-and the police calls reflected it. It was a city with clear demarcations between “good” and “bad” parts of town. There were fights and disturbances in the Deuce-the old skid row, leveled years later to make room for the Civic Plaza and America West Arena-and the poor Mexican-American neighborhoods, where I’m sure the police administered their own rough justice. But around Rebecca Stokes’s apartment near the Phoenix Country Club on Thomas Road, life had seemed almost surreally safe. I thought of my own neighborhood at that time, neat and dull, where the night held only the fragrance of citrus blossoms and the sound of train whistles.

One thing did catch my eye. A week before Rebecca Stokes disappeared, PPD responded to a prowler call from a house two blocks away from her apartment. It wasn’t much, but I needed a place to start. I made note of the officer’s names. Maybe they were still alive, which was probably more than I could hope for the detective who had led the Stokes investigation.

I replaced the radio logs and crossed the room to a shelf containing old city directories and phone books. The 1959 city directory was missing, but I found 1960 and turned to the section that showed residents by address. I made note of the families and individuals living along her block and the street immediately to the south. All the lives, reduced to lines on old sheets of paper. I also checked the listings for the railroad, just to see if they listed a station agent or anybody in charge at Union Station, but I came up with nothing. But it gave me another idea, and I went back to the logs. Sure enough, a handful of police calls to Union Station yielded a complainant’s name, J. T. Smith of the Southern Pacific.

I asked Carl if I could borrow his telephone and phone book. It was all a long shot, but I was motivated and wanted to have something to show Peralta, whose impatience was legendary. I checked the names from the city directory against the new phone book, a fool’s errand in a city of transients. Sure enough, name after name led me nowhere. Forty years was ample time to die, move, or remarry. I made note of a J. T. Smith in Sun City, but odds were he wasn’t my railroad man. Of all the leads it had to be a “Smith,” I muttered to myself. Then I hit one: There was still a George Harvey listed on Twelfth Street, just around the corner from Rebecca Stokes’s old apartment.

***

The area around the old North Phoenix High School had been one of the nicest in town back in the fifties. Now it was part of miles of declining east side neighborhoods marked by the stately palm trees of better times and the hieroglyphic gang graffiti of now. But the Harvey address belonged to a pleasant prewar home surrounded by lush oleanders and flowers. After the third knock, a small woman with uncombed white hair and a purple housedress pulled open the door and peered out at me. The house seemed totally dark behind her. I showed her my star and MCSO identification. She placed a wandlike object against her throat and invited me inside in a mechanical voice. “You don’t have a cigarette, do you, honey?” She walked ahead of me into a sitting room. “Ruined my larynx, but I can’t quit. I bum ’em from neighbors, and my granddaughter takes ’em away. Why the hell is it worth living? I always told George he’d survive me because he didn’t smoke. But this is God’s revenge. Been without my George for ten years now.” She sounded like the voice of a computer from an old sci-fi movie.

I told her I didn’t smoke, and she sighed, waving me to a dusty overstuffed sofa.

“I’m looking into a very old homicide case,” I began.

“It’s that girl,” she said matter-of-factly. “Rebecca.”

“What makes you say that?” I fell automatically into cop mode.

She blinked at me. “Well, it is, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”