Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

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.

Chapter Seventeen

I should have gone to see Peralta Wednesday morning. Instead, I called his secretary to put off our meeting. She said h

e 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.