“Everyone here will have to be interviewed before they can leave,” Peralta said.
“But that could be two hundred people.”
“Everybody,” Peralta said. He looked around. “I don’t see anybody taking offense. Anyway, it’s a tribal and federal case…”
I left them talking and walked ten feet farther.
“So the professor didn’t tell the sheriff about his little adventure…”
“Fuck you, Blair.” I was all out of devastating one-liners.
Our dustup was threatening to disturb a man who was sitting before a big slot machine called Damnation Alley. The machine was still making sounds of gunfire and action-movie music. It informed us that it could take every kind of bill up to twenty dollars. The man looked frail inside a check
ed short-sleeve shirt and old blue jeans. Some gamblers are so dedicated they will sit for hours before the slots. It’s understandable they might even fall asleep on one. Unfortunately, the small man slumped backward in the seat was merely perfectly balanced by some odd combination of gravity, body mass, and the onset of rigor mortis. When I saw the ice pick handle protruding from his right ear, I’m sure the whole casino could hear the catch in my throat.
Blair watched me. “His wallet’s gone. But I met him a while back, with Snyder, when we interviewed him about his brother’s body being found in the desert.”
“Louis Bell.”
13
The small, worried manager conveyed us to an office that overlooked the casino through a darkened, one-way window. I followed Peralta inside and the casino manager went away. The office was large, with a highly polished wood floor, and ornamented with Indian pottery and baskets. A bank of television screens showed different angles of the casino. Out the window, I could see the detectives and crime-scene technicians still gathered around Damnation Alley, as if they expected the corpse of Louis Bell to hit the big payout. If so, it would give the manager yet another reason to worry. Or maybe celebrate. I could imagine the billboards around town: “Casino Arizona, Where You CAN Take It With You.” Peralta had moved to the large leather chair behind a long modern desk with a bare top. The chair barely contained his bulk. He just stared at me.
“Well?” I said.
He just shrugged, turning down the corners of his face so he briefly had bulldog jowls. The room was silent. The miniature city of lights out the window gave a sense of the symphony of odds and desperate hopes that lay beyond the thick glass. I walked along the wall, touching the window. The glass was cold. I was cold, and felt fifty pounds heavier from the gathering oppression.
I started talking. “The last time I saw an ice pick used that way was on the Willo home tour. It was stuck in the ear of a man who was lying naked in his bedroom. He owned some check-cashing outlets. Apparently clean—you told me this. Maybe somebody was trying to muscle in, take protection money.”
Peralta was swinging slowly in the chair, a heavy pendulum of fate. He said nothing.
“I don’t know how that gets us to Louis Bell,” I said. “And so ballsy, taking him out in a crowded casino. That’s sending a message, right?”
Peralta was looking at the ceiling. I went on, “All I know about Louis is that he honored his brother’s last request, to be buried on his own land. This is Arizona, property rights as God and all that. Harry’s property was way the hell out beyond the White Tank Mountains. It’s good for nothing, unless you want to wait fifty years for Phoenix and LA to grow together. Otherwise, Harry was retired. He lived in a trailer near Hyder. The autopsy came back clean, I guess. So we have two desert rat brothers, and now one gets an ice pick in the ear. I was trying to stay out of this, remember? Follow orders and write a book.”
The room was large and without sound again. The floor made weird ghosts of the light coming from recessed positions in the ceiling. I didn’t meet his eyes. The bank of television monitors on the other wall got my attention—whoever sat here could watch everything from the blackjack dealer’s hands to the parking lot. Maybe one of them would reveal who scrambled Louis Bell’s brains. I was growing angry with Peralta for the silent treatment, and at myself for feeling like a kid who was in trouble. What the hell did I do wrong? What was it about his moods that bred paranoia?
“You know about the woman named Dana,” I said. “I don’t need to go into that again.”
I sat on a hard leather loveseat. Maybe the furniture was intended to make whoever sat there uncomfortable, be he employee facing dismissal or unruly customer. I knew the routine. I could feel the anger radiating off him. He didn’t like surprises, especially ones that embroiled the Sheriff’s Office in other jurisdictions, especially when he might not be able to run the show, as would happen with the feds. Soon he would explode—his rages were always frightening, even if you had lived through a dozen of them, even if you knew the generosity he was capable of in other circumstances. My stomach was tight. My mind was bouncing around the room, down to the slot machines, glancing off the corpse of Louis Bell, and ricocheting back to the glass office. I wondered what Sharon would say. I missed her. They had been married for thirty years, and now she was his “ex-wife.” That construction was still foreign. For all the years I knew them it was Mike and Sharon, never just Mike. She had been his awkward young shadow when Peralta and I were first partners. Even then, I like to flatter myself that I could detect a spark, a curiosity. Then she had gone back to school, eventually earning her Ph.D. in psychology. Later she would become the famous radio psychologist, the best-selling author. That seemed like a long time ago. Now she was in San Francisco in a new life. And I was cooped up in this glass cell with her ex-husband.
I said, “It doesn’t seem to me that this is our problem. The guy in Willo is a Phoenix PD case. This one is tribal cops and the FBI…”
I was talking to myself. Talking myself out of the obvious. All the ways human beings hurt each other in Maricopa County, Arizona, and I’m just the egghead who paws through the old records, clears out the old cases. So what if I’m bracketed by homicide by ice picks. What’s the connection between Alan Cordesman, check-cashing king, and Louis Bell, old fart at the casino? Not my problem. Murder in the next block of my neighborhood? It can happen anywhere. Same MO used for the brother of a dead man I discovered courtesy of my mysterious former student? Coincidence. Hell, maybe it was the new killing method being shown in gangsta videos or wherever the pathologies of our civilization are passed on today. It wasn’t my problem. Unfortunately, that’s not what the worry pain in my middle told me.
Out of a dry mouth I said, “I need to find this woman, Dana. She’s a connection somehow.”
“I agree,” he said evenly. He stopped swinging in the chair.
I stared at him. “You agree? What about me being chained to your book, trying to be a real historian—I think that’s how you put it—not being a hot dog, and not interfering with a PPD investigation?”
His large eyes filled with innocent surprise. “Why are you so upset, Mapstone…?”
Movement drew our eyes to the big window. The crowd surged like disturbed water, and we saw several uniformed officers pushing through. They appeared to be chasing someone. I looked at Peralta, but he was already halfway to the door. We walked quickly down the steps. Getting across the casino floor was easy by following in the jetstream of Peralta. Then we burst out the door into the blinding sunshine. Four tribal cops were handcuffing a slight Hispanic kid. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, with a razor cut and dramatic thick eyebrows. He had that odd look of the newly arrested, part confusion and part defiance. One of the tribal cops explained what had happened.
“He tried to make a run for it, and when we caught him he had this in his pocket.”
Peralta pulled out a handkerchief and took the wallet, then carefully opened it.