Arizona Dreams (David Mapstone Mystery 4)

“That night,” Robin said. “We went to First Friday, dinner at Cheuvront’s, toured some of the galleries. But we’d been fighting all night.”

“What about?”

“Why? I can’t even remember.”

“You’d better because the police and the prosecutor will want to know. Fighting can be a motive.”

“I didn’t!” she shouted, then pulled her voice down. “I didn’t kill him. But when we were leaving Paisley Violin, this big pickup truck stopped by the sidewalk and the guy inside called Alan by name. So Alan walked over and talked to him. I couldn’t hear, but it obviously upset Alan. I didn’t even go home with him that night. I crashed with a girlfriend.”

“What did the man in the truck look like?” I asked, feeling as if someone with cold hands was brushing against my neck.

“He was big, a white guy, shaved head,” she said. “He had an amazing tat on his arm.”

We turned to watch Lindsey returning from the slope of the butte.

“Look at this, all these plants,” she said. “You walk up there and look in the distance and it doesn’t look this way. There’s a distinct change when you get within maybe three-quarters of a mile of this land.” My wife was a gardener. She noticed things. She planted white flowers and oleanders so the blossoms would be the last things you saw in the twilight. But my darling was also a cop. She went on: “It came to me: this isn’t about some pickpocket at a casino, or protection money for a check-cashing outlet, or Dana being blackmailed. It’s not about any of that. Everything in this case started here, with this patch of desert. Now I know why somebody murdered to try to get this land.”

I am so proud of my brilliant wife, and I should have let her go on. But suddenly the scales fell from my eyes, too, and I blurted it out: “There’s an aquifer.”

Robin said, “Holy fucking shit.”

33

The next day I ran down Jack Fife, the security consultant who had hired the two goons that welcomed me to the Bell property back in February. It was an overdue visit. With a little badge persuasion, his secretary told me where I would find him. It was one hundred ten outside, and I was on my own. Lindsey was baby-sitting Robin—“the prisoner” as she called her behind her back—at the house, using the Internet to work on our case. Lindsey said she didn’t want to talk to Robin, because she would no doubt be called to testify against her. Instead, she spent hours going through real estate, tax, and court records related to Arizona Dreams and Jared Malkin. “He may act like a dumb-ass,” she said. “But he’s not dumb. Not with this complicated a paper trail.”

So she had already armed me for my meeting with Jack Fife. I was on my own with Peralta. My reflexes wanted to report to him, especially tell him our hunch about the underground water on the Bell property. But it wasn’t time yet. We didn’t have it tied up. And if I caught him in the wrong mood, he might just shut us down and send the case to Pima County. Don’t even send him an e-mail, Lindsey said: It could become public record if the case blew up into a political scandal.

I had little of the Machiavellian in me. I was onto something more elemental. Instead of intriguing as advised by The Prince, I was following one of the oldest dictates of the West: “Whiskey’s for drinking, and water’s for fighting over.” Maybe, killing over. The sense grew in me each time I drove over a bridge that spanned one of the canals that are like the exposed arteries of Phoenix’s lifeblood. This utterly unnatural city was the product of many water fights: whites against Indians, Arizona vs. California, Lower Basin battling Upper Basin, and everyone against the desert. Growth and prosperity in the West came with water. And far from the myth of rugged individualism, the water often came thanks to grand federal projects. Without them, Phoenix would have been nothing but a village. Donald Worster wrote about this ably in his book Rivers of Empire. I was only a little envious. And yet, history indicated the desert was a tenacious adversary if you chose to fight it. For proof, you only needed to recall the vanished civilization of the Hohokam, who built the first canals. Or the dropping water table in Pinal County. The desert repaid.

The noon rush was already thinning out when I arrived at La Perla. It was one of the oldest restaurants in town, wedged into a little block of downtown Glendale on the other side of the Santa Fe railroad tracks. Jack Fife was a squat man with a comb-over and wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and a wide blue tie. He didn’t seem surprised when I slid into the booth across from him.

“My name’s David…”

“I know who you are, Mapstone,” he said. “Chips?” He pushed a basket toward me and went back to a giant plate of cheese enchiladas. “You’re Peralta’s history boy.”

“You provide security people for the real estate business,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s part of what I do. Developers and property owners hire me. You know, keep away the tree huggers, the environmental terrorists, the thieves.” He chewed and talked, a string of cheese suspended from his lower lip. “How ’bout those gas lines, huh? I hear some guy shot a gas station attendant in Mesa last night. Doesn’t take much to turn people to animals, especially in this hick town. When I came here from LA thirty years ago it was a hick town, and it’s still a hick town.”

“Why do you stay?”

“I’m here for the lifestyle,” he said, dabbing hot sauce on his food like an inattentive priest sprinkling holy water.

“Last February, your boys got a little zealous with me, out west of Tonopah.”

“Look,” he said, wiping his mouth, then his forehead, with a napkin. “I cleared all that up. They were protecting another property. It was all a mistake. I fired the assholes, and you guys put them in jail for assault.”

He wadded up the napkin and put it on the table. “Why are you bothering my lunch, Mapstone? I already got that reflux thing. Wakes me up in the middle of the night with this acid coming out of my throat. Getting old sucks.”

His entire face seemed to press in on itself from top and bottom as he gave a grimace of pain.

“Getting old sucks,” I agreed. I watched him, played a hunch. I made no claim to being a great detective. Kate Vare didn’t think I was a real cop at all. I was just the history shamus, taking a leave from writing Peralta’s book. I would have been happier researching a crime from 1920. But this case had acquired its own internal propulsion. Too many people had died already. And Lindsey and I were stuck in the middle of it. I tightened my abdomen, as if expecting a punch. In a business voice, I said, “You have the right to remain silent.”

“Wha…?”

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you.”

He laughed and coughed. “What the fuck are you Mirandizing me for? Have some chips…”