Judson Lee. Attorney at law. Except that a call to a friend at Snell & Wilmer that morning taught me a few things. This veteran lawyer at the city’s most prestigious firm had never heard of Lee. Nor was he listed in the Martindale-Hubbell directory going back more than twenty years. Just a charming old killer who had played me like a green rookie.
When it came time to pay the bill, I saw the server’s name—Lisa—and told her it was beautiful. She smiled at me, but I was a few decades shy of being able to come off as the harmless old guy and my flirting skills were rusty. Oh, I wished that I still had my badge, which made it easy to ask questions, especially of citizens who want to do the right thing.
“Well, you tell Mr. Lee I said hello when you see him,” she said. “I don’t see him anymore.”
“He’s a busy man, Lisa. I’m sure he’ll be in soon with another group of friends.”
“Oh, you were special,” she said. “He almost always dined alone.” She paused, decided my Canali tie made me trustworthy, and went on. “I get the sense he’s kind of lonely. Once he had a woman guest, but she seemed uncomfortable here, if you know what I mean.”
“I do. Was this her?” I opened up the composite police sketch and slid it over so she could get a good look.
“Yes.” Her voice was faint. “Am I in trouble?”
It was interesting to live in such an insecure-feeling America, where a man in a suit in possession of a piece of paper with official Phoenix Police logos on it had instant credibility. I asked her if she knew where I could find Judson Lee. Her eyes processed a response: Go get the manager? Say nothing? Risk losing my job if I don’t cooperate?
“I swear, I don’t know.” She bit her lip, eyes heavily lidded. “I will tell you that he told me a story once. Kind of creeped me out, you know? How he had visited a strip club the night before. ‘Gentleman’s club,’ he called it, but it was clear what he meant. Said he went there all the time. And he had to tell me the name, the Stuffed Beaver. Ick.”
I folded up the composite and put it away, thanked Lisa, and signed the receipt. I gave her a big tip.
The Stuffed Beaver. It was the same place on Indian School Road where Barney the gun dealer had lost his glass eye in the stripper’s stomach. At home, I drew a line from Judson Lee to the new box, the strip club, and another line that connected to Barney.
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The Stuffed Beaver sat in a building facing north on Indian School Road a little before 24th Street. It had been built recently as a Washington Mutual office, a ty
pical ugly freestanding structure, then shut down by the mortgage bust and remodeled as a strip club. The name was proclaimed with a blazing blue-and-red sign, accompanied by a smiling cartoon creature that took up the entire street-facing facade. I wondered how it got past the city code. In smaller letters: “18 to cum, 21 to swallow.” Wednesday was amateur’s night. This was not amateur’s night. The parking lot sat on the west side and extended behind the structure. Entry was through the back. That made surveillance problematic.
I couldn’t go inside and hang around—both Barney and Lee knew me. While the parking lot was spacious, a man sitting alone in a car for hours might attract the attention of club security. Fortunately for me, the biggest beneficiary of Phoenix’s bust was an outfit named “Available.” Its signs were everywhere, including on the vacated older building directly west of the club. Behind it were five covered parking places with a direct view of the parking lot. I backed into one and waited.
My days were monsters, shooting me full of panic attacks that were only alleviated by trips to the shooting range. The nights saved me. The darkness covered me and made the city look less hideous, made me less aware of all that had been lost, the losses I carried around inside and ones that never occurred to the people who moved into a new “master planned community” on the fringes, only wanting the sunshine and cheap housing. Fewer were coming now. I had seen a story in the newspaper a few months ago that population growth might have even reversed. For seven decades, all Phoenix had to do was build houses and people came. Now the reliable old growth machine was flat busted. The “available” signs proliferated everywhere. The promising downtown condo towers were in foreclosure. The million-dollar faux Victorian condos on Central Avenue near my house were unfinished. Subdivisions rotted and were stripped of their building materials from Maricopa to Surprise.
For three nights I sat in my covered parking space, watching the men come and go. I had never understood the appeal: for me, sex was not a spectator sport. I saw the otherwise unremarkable young women walk through the parking lot wearing normal street clothes, carrying gym bags, heading to another night of work. Which one was named Destiny? I slowly worked my way through Lindsey’s blue pack of Gauloises Blondes, trying not to see Robin’s face hovering before my eyes. The club was open twenty-four hours, beyond my ability to cover. Considering the Jesus Is Lord Pawn Shop closed at six p.m., I decided to watch from six-thirty to eleven.
On the first night, I got a call back from Nick DeSimone, the Scottsdale chef. He told me things that didn’t surprise me. He had never heard of Judson Lee. He had no roots in Phoenix and both his grandfathers had died peacefully in Chicago. I thanked him, hung up, and for the thousandth time cursed my naiveté.
All that time Barney never appeared, but after ten on the third night a familiar cream Caddy zipped into the back lot and parked in a handicapped space. Judson Lee got out and strode inside. Following him, quick-stepping to keep up, was a tall Anglo man, young, muscled, military haircut. He had a hawk’s nose, as if begging for a pair of glasses, but there were no glasses. He was long-limbed and wide-hipped. The night was warm but he wore an oversized black windbreaker, just the kind of garment that might conceal a firearm.
I sat up straight in the car seat, a blend of rage and fear sending prickly signals through my legs. I unconsciously touched the butt of the Colt Python on my belt and ran my hand over the towel that covered the TEK 9, taken from the gang member who had been sitting on my street, resting on the passenger’s seat. Its thirty-two-round magazine was full of nine-millimeter ammunition. I cursed Judson Lee aloud, my voice a strange companion in the silence of the dark parking nook. Another ten minutes passed before a Dodge Ram truck glided into the lot and Barney got out.
After six hours that the clock said were forty-five minutes, the three men came out again. Judson Lee and Barney talked animatedly, the slightly built lawyer gesticulating, Barney nodding and nodding. They seemed like an unlikely pair. Then Lee walked to his Caddy, turned to say one more thing to Barney, and got in the car. The man who looked unmistakably like a bodyguard drove. I started the Prelude and slowly slipped down the driveway with the lights off. When the Cadillac turned east on Indian School, I followed, letting a car get between us, maintaining a quarter-mile distance.
This was the point where the old David, so valued by everyone in my life for good judgment, would have called the police. Called Peralta. But the idea never occurred to me. The prickliness was gone from my legs. I felt comfortably frosty.
They turned south on Thirty-second Street and accelerated to fifty. The speed limit was thirty-five, but nobody in Phoenix paid attention to such niceties, so I was able to keep up and still blend in with the moderate traffic. That’s what I told myself.
Much of this had been groves when I was little—Phoenicians drove out the two-lane roads and bought oranges and grapefruits from little stands—then it had been remade into middle-class, single-family ranch houses. Now it was going down, miles and miles. The well-off Anglos called it the “Sonoran Biltmore” and laughed. To me it was a haunted landscape.
The Caddy made the light at Osborn. Then it turned hard red. I cursed, made a quick right, a U-turn that barely missed an oncoming Chevy, then swung south again on 32nd and soon caught up, a safe quarter mile between me and Lee’s taillights.
They caught the Red Mountain Freeway and sped east, all the way across the Salt River, past downtown Tempe with its new, derelict forty-story condo tower and the In-N-Out Burger at Rural Road, then swung south onto the Price Freeway, running fast now that the four-hour rush hour was over. Of course, this, too, had once been wide-open agricultural land. Most of it was built up in the years I was away from Phoenix and I barely knew it now. Knowing it didn’t take genius: wide avenues every mile lined by the entrances to newer subdivisions of curvilinear streets and houses with tile roofs. Shopping strips anchored by a Fry’s or Safeway sat on the major corners, along with huge gas stations. There were far fewer payday loan stores. The tableaux passed with numbing regularity. Better-off white families, the better-funded schools; the Intel semiconductor plants that provided a dash of diversity in the region’s economy. Totally car-dependent. Except for the proliferation of brand-new Mormon and evangelical churches, this land was Maryvale half a century ago and didn’t know it. I wondered how many of the husbands of the East Valley had stopped at a strip club on the way home.
I was four cars behind them at the red light for Chandler Boulevard when the feeling first bobbed against me. I set it aside when the light changed. Couldn’t lose them now; wishing I could get close enough to make out the license tag. We whipped across the overpass and drove east again. Then the Caddy signaled left and entered a subdivision. I slowed down and waited, then followed them in with my lights off. The place was damnably well-lit, but I risked it, staying with the red tail-lights as they went straight, made a gentle curve, then a hard right turn onto another street. I approached the street at five miles per hour, nosing just enough beyond the edge of a house to see a large garage door opening in the middle of the block and the Cadillac disappear inside. The door came down.
It was a pleasant block, if suburbia was your thing. Yet it had all the charm of an empty cereal box. Newer houses were jammed together with postage-stamp lawns, wide driveways, three-car garages, and walled-in back yards. The entrances were small because the developer expected people to come and go through the garages. Those varied little more than the two or three styles of stucco tract houses, all painted to a palette ruthlessly enforced by the homeowners association. This was a place where people were supposed to blend in. If I had looked away for a second, I couldn’t have recalled which house they had entered. But I didn’t lose that second. I turned on the headlights and drove by at a normal speed, noting the address. Lights were on inside. No other vehicles were visible on the street.
But the feeling was still there: that cop’s sixth sense that I was proud to have acquired despite my itinerant law-enforcement career. It was the awareness of being followed.
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