Arizona Dreams (David Mapstone Mystery 4)

At a nothing exit called Sentinel, I left our equivalent of the Roman roads and turned toward wilderness, where barbarians were, perhaps, included. The road quickly turned to dirt and gravel, rising and falling gradually with the land. Scrubby desert surrounded me, with strange mountain shapes off in the distance north and south. After a while, I came to the little hamlet of Hyder. When the mainline of the Southern Pacific Railroad was built to Phoenix eighty years before, Hyder was one more place to put a water tower, to keep the locomotives from expiring like dehydrated horses in the blazing wilderness. In more recent years, you heard stories about the desert rats, hermits, and one-time hippies out here. Back in the early ’90s, the Sunset Limited passenger train had derailed nearby—sabotage, and unsolved. The village was its own little world of forlorn trailers and folks who wanted to be left alone. This day, it looked deserted in the manner of desert towns when the temperature is over one hundred. I took a dirt road back to the east, following the old railroad. After a few miles, I found the place where the Bell brothers had lived out their last years.

It was a small trailer in a clearing between the road and the railroad, sheltered from the wind by raggedy tamarisk trees. The metal walls looked faded and ready to fall off, but the roof held a new-looking satellite dish. The entrance was guarded by a heavy security door with yellow paint peeling in potato-chip sized patches. I parked as a dust devil cut across the rail embankment and battered the car briefly before heading south. That gave me time to get the keys to the place out of an evidence envelope. As I stepped out, the heat hit me like opening the door to an oven set on high. I looked around. There was a bedraggled school bus, maybe two hundred yards down the road. Otherwise I was alone. No cars. No sound. Getting inside the trailer meant climbing a rickety wooden stairway. Underneath were years of old cans—coffee, chili, tuna, and God knows what else. I tried not to imagine the rattlesnake, Gila monster, black widow, and scorpion refuge they had created.

The lightweight inner door came open with a shove, and a hot, stale smell hit me. Old food, tobacco smoke, gym socks—something like that. The inside of the trailer went with the odor. It was impossible to tell if someone had ransacked the place or if the brothers had lived this way. Old clothes, tools, newspapers, pieces of cardboard, and beer cans were everywhere. There was too much furniture for the limited space, and all of it junk from other eras, right down to the beanbag chair that had been patched with duct tape. In one corner stood a giant plasma-screen TV, wildly out of place. A window air conditioning unit miraculously worked. I tried to be as methodical as possible. There had been no crime committed here, so the deputies had made only a cursory search. They might have come back, but they had a suspect. Their inventory of items retrieved from the Bell trailer was small and of no help to me.

I moved slowly through the confined spaces, checking my blind spots, coughing from the dust that inevitably seeped in. Even though the air conditioning worked, I couldn’t get the lights on. If not for the sunlight breaking through the ancient curtains, the inside would have been even murkier. I kept checking those curtains, to see what was outside, who was coming down the road. There was only one door in and out. When the wind hit the walls and made the old sheet-metal rattle, my hands started shaking. Calm down, Mapstone.

One thing about country living was simplicity. Atop the peeling linoleum counter was what passed as the brothers’ desk. But there were no bills for credit cards, cell phones, or water softener. Just a stack of girlie magazines, some old lottery tickets, and a letter from the county. Inside was a second notice demanding back taxes. I slipped it in my pocket, wondering if the parcel was the one where Harry Bell was laid to rest. Death and taxes, indeed.

The drawers and closets were similarly unhelpful. Old men’s clothes and underwear. Under a pile of work shirts, I found a .38 revolver that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned or fired in decades. No property records. No indication of an involvement with the Earleys. No photographs. No blackmailer kit. Behind some muddy shoes I found an old frame, the kind bought for a dollar in the kind of stores that were once called five and dime stores. Inside was a faded certificate, the honorable discharge from the Army of Harry Truman Bell, dated 1968. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. The cities were in flames. The Vietnam War was going badly. I was at Kenilworth School. Lindsey was born.

What is the sum of a life? What will the cops find if misfortune comes calling? Lindsey and I have a house full of the personal and peculiar. They would find her Oaxacan carvings and Day of the Dead art; her hardback collection of Russian literature and everything written by and about J.R.R. Tolkien. There would be my collection of suits that were usually too hot to wear in Phoenix, too many ties, a bag full of old presidential campaign buttons that was probably worth something, files of my old publications in history journals and background material for the two obscure history books I wrote. Books and books and books. And photographs by the boxful, from one showing Grandmother and Grandfather on their wedding day to another, taken nine decades later, of Lindsey and me on our day. Life is stuff. Most of Robin’s things were in a storage unit on Thomas Road; I had lived that way once. Peralta and Sharon had yet to fully divide their household, the accumulations of thirty years of marriage. Yet here in this dusty trailer, I was most struck by the absence of much that was personal. When I stepped through the outside door half an hour later, I still didn’t know the Bell brothers. I didn’t know if they were blackmailers or victims or nobodies.

Someone was waiting for me.

22

“Whatcha doin?” he called, in a friendly enough voice.

I showed my star to a man in a wheelchair. He was parked in the dirt maybe ten feet from the bottom of the steps.

“I live over there,” he said, indicating the school bus. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. He had a small face th

e color of the desert dirt, with hundreds of brown freckles. It was a face marked off by long brown hair, parted in the middle, and it carried a pleasant expression. Those were sometimes the ones who killed you as they smiled. But his frame was tiny, barely taking up half of the wheelchair, and I was happy to see his hands were free of firearms.

“Terrible thing what happened to Louie,” he said. “And on top of Harry dying last winter…”

I asked him if he wanted to get out of the sun and talk. He said he liked the sun. I slipped on my sunglasses and started sweating. Leaning up against the car wasn’t such a good idea, either.

“I live over there,” he said again. “It’s cheap. Got this way ’cause I fell off a roof. I used to do construction, up in Phoenix. One time, I thought I might like to be a deputy, like you. Help people. But I fell and can’t work anymore. The contractor wouldn’t pay workman’s comp.”

“I don’t think that’s legal,” I ventured.

“He’s my dad,” he said, “the contractor. We was working on some houses out in Surprise. He said I wasn’t legally on his payroll. It was just me and the illegals, the Mexicans, working for him, and none of us was covered. Course, I never thought I’d get hurt. Nineteen and you feel immortal. It’s okay out here. I like the quiet. Train doesn’t even come by much anymore. Every now and then the illegals come through on foot, heading north to the city. I just let ’em be. Sometimes, if the wind’s right, you can hear the bombing down on the gunnery range. Louie and Harry was good neighbors. It’s lonelier without them.”

I opened the car and pulled out two bottles of water, giving him one. Then I wheeled him into the shade of the tamarisks. He didn’t protest. From behind, I could see his hair pulled back in a ponytail and braided like a kite’s tail. On his forearm was a tattoo of an eagle—was I the last person in America without body art? He said his name was Davey Crockett. He spelled it. I asked him to tell me what Harry and Louie were like.

“Didn’t know Harry real well. He was pretty sick the whole time I was out here. So I’d come over and check on him. He could get out here in front, and we’d just sit and watch the world go by, which isn’t much out here. But it’s peaceful, you know? Harry’d been married once, and he’d talk to his ex-wife occasionally on the phone. Then he’d go off on the worst cussing jag…”

“Ever meet the ex?”

“Nope. She never came out here, far as I can tell. Harry was a hard one to get close to. Full of piss and vinegar, as my mom would say. He hated the government, sure they were going to come get him.”

“What for?”

“Beats me,” Davey Crockett said. “He listened to talk radio for hours. He’d smoke and drink and listen to his radio. Louie, now he was more personable. He was a good guy—helped me get groceries and stuff when my mom and sister couldn’t make it out here. He loaded me up in his pickup a few times and took me to the casinos. It was nice to get around people for a while.”

I asked him where the brothers got their money.

“Social security, I guess,” he said. “They didn’t have much, as far as I could tell. I think each one only had two or three pairs of pants. See I notice things. I might have made a good deputy.”

“I bet you probably would have been. You knew the brothers how long?”

“I’ve been out here for three years this July.”

“And they didn’t seem like they had much money. How about cars? What did they drive?”

“Just an old Chevy pickup, 1978, Scottsdale trim package,” he said knowledgeably.