Arizona Dreams (David Mapstone Mystery 4)

Little things. In retrospect, I should have wondered more about them. Robin was an art student without art books or art. The garage apartment had remained nearly as bare as the day she moved in. She had come back to Phoenix because a rich man in Paradise Valley wanted her expertise in WPA-era art. Where were her Social Realism posters? Why had she never mentioned the restored WPA murals in the old downtown Post Office? I was afraid to find out if she really worked for this rich man, or if a boyfriend named Edward ever existed. We walked with Robin to the curb. The streetlight illuminated tracks of spent tears. Bend down. Watch your head. Swing your legs in. The prisoner section of patrol cars is cramped and smelly, the seat invariably sticky. The cars drove west on Cypress, then their taillights swung onto Fifth Avenue toward downtown and disappeared into the night.

When I stepped inside the door and closed it, Lindsey turned on me, a furious light in her eyes.

“Did you fuck my sister?!” she screamed, and gave me a hard, line-of-scrimmage shove.

She screamed again, “Did you fuck Robin? You did, didn’t you! You fucked her!” She battered my shoulder with her fists. “God, I knew you would! I knew it!”

The woman standing before me was a stranger, a snarling bully who seemed capable of any cruelty. “You fucked Robin!” she screamed again. She rammed her arms toward me again, and I caught them, as gently as I could. I was saying “no,” but her eyes told me she wasn’t listening. For a moment, we wrestled arms and hands. Lindsey shrieked half words and obscenities. This banshee’s face flushed a vivid red, something close to murder in her eyes. She was also strong as hell. I tried to pull her close, to hug her, calm her down. She pulled away and one hand cuffed me sharply on the right cheekbone. It was enough to break the rhythm of rage.

“Oh!” she moaned. “Oh, Dave, oh, baby…I hurt you…”

“I’m okay,” I said, unconsciously backing away. My cheek throbbed, my breath came rapidly and I was tamping down my own surprise. And anger. The whole room seemed alien and hostile. It was a feeling that lasted until she took my hands. We ended up on the couch, and for a long time she just clung to me and cried. I looked at us a couple of times, reflected in the picture window. For a few minutes my watchful, poetic lover had been annihilated, and someone else was there. I let my eyes search for answers in the vaulted ceiling. I only found a couple of spider webs.

“Lindsey,” I finally said. “I want to tell you what happened with Robin…”

She shook her head adamantly. “Later. Not now. Just forgive me and love me…”

“I do,” I said. “There’s nothing to forgive…Robin and I…”

“No,” she said. “Don’t. Just forgive me.”

I assured her, but I’m not sure if she was really listening. She seemed elsewhere, as if she might just drift away if I weren’t hanging on tightly.

“I heard Linda’s voice coming out of my mouth,” Lindsey said. “I heard her yelling, just now. It was just as vivid as if I were twelve years old, and listening to her fight with her boyfriend, or me or Robin for wanting to stay out. But it was me, my voice. Oh, my God…”

I stroked her dark, straight-as-a-pin hair, pushed it back from her face.

“I can’t believe Robin could kill someone,” she went on. “But I don’t know anything. Look what people do when they’re crazy on meth or something else. She was such a sweet little girl…I didn’t like what she became as a teenager. I thought I saw all Linda’s bad traits in her. Linda’s destructiveness. What a fool I was. Linda’s bad traits are all in me, too. And I thought I spent my whole life trying to get away from that…Oh, Dave, your poor face…”

“Do you want to go down to the jail? The deputies would make an exception for you.”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Let’s go to bed,” I said. “They won’t arraign her until the morning. We’ll call Peralta. He’ll line up a good lawyer.”

“I can’t sleep,” she said. She sat up and looked at me, her eyes a tangle of red. “I really thought I had escaped my upbringing. Then I thought Robin had done the same thing, and I was so proud. It seemed possible. I hadn’t seen her in nearly ten years. And on the surface, I thought, ‘I’ve walked away from someone who would drag me down.’ But I never stopped hoping that one day, I might be walking down a street, maybe with the man of my dreams, and I would run into Robin, and she would have had a happy ending, too. You must think I am such a fool.”

“You’re the most sensible person I know,” I said. “You changed my life, Lindsey. Everything was different and better after the first time I saw you. In Records. In that black miniskirt.”

She smiled at me, that familiar treasured face. She stroked the good side of my face gently.

“So things can change,” I said. “I’ll never fault you for loving someone and hoping…”

“Let’s get out of the house,” she said. “Let’s just drive. Distract me—now that I’ve committed spousal battery. Let’s go spy on your soccer mom, Dana.”

“She lives behind a gate, unfortunately. I’d love to find the hydrologist, Earl Rice.”

“No forwarding address,” she said. “So what about Jared Malkin, managing partner of Arizona Dreams? You drive, and I’ll find his address.”

She read out an address in north Scottsdale, so we sailed on rubberized asphalt north on the Piestewa Parkway, rising through the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. Traffic was light. The city looked best at night. The car was quiet except for the tapping of Lindsey’s fingers on her keyboard. When we turned east on the 101, Lindsey spoke.

“Here’s a story in the Republic archives about Jared Malkin. He’s fifty-five years old, worked for his old man, who was one of the biggest developers in Orange County. Lucky Sperm Club kid. Had his share of trouble, though. County records show he had two hundred lawsuits against him back in the 1990s over a development in Surprise. He’s connected to East Valley Republicans, especially County Supervisor Tom Earley. Lucky again. Did some housing in Gilbert and Chandler. Arizona Dreams is by far his largest project. Major homebuilders, big capital from real estate investment trusts in New York. Sounds like a big shot. I?

??ll save this for you.”

“What about arrests?”

“You are so suspicious, Dave. But I already checked. No IRS liens, either. I want to do some snooping on Arizona Dreams LLC. It’s not as shut-tight-secret as Miss Battle-Axe thinks. But for now, I’ve got to give my eyes a break.” She shut the machine off, and the cabin of the car fell into darkness as we got off the freeway and made the long drive north on Scottsdale Road.