Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

“I knew the man!” Carl said. I sat up a little. “Not personally, I mean, but I worked a summer as a bellhop at the Westward Ho, and Mr. Yarnell kept a room there and would give me dollar tips—a lot of money in the Depression.”

“Wait, Carl. I thought Yarnell had a mansion of some kind. He was living in a hotel?”

“He did have a grand house. Sat on a bluff down by South Mountain. Burned in the early forties, as I recall. But he kept a suite at the Ho. Most of the big shots in Phoenix did.”

Carl went off on a story about young Barry Goldwater. I let him talk himself out, and after a while he went away. The tragedy of lonely retired cops. I told myself again I wouldn’t end up that way.

***

I wrote a list of people to interview, made a couple of calls, and had started a timeline on the kidnapping when I heard footsteps coming back down the hall. Some days the only way to disengage from Carl was to feign a meeting over at Madison Street.

But it wasn’t Carl. It was a cowgirl.

She looked to be in her early thirties, with reddish-brown hair flowing out from the brim of her hat. Large, brown eyes were set nicely atop high cheekbones in a Midwestern pretty face. Her mouth was wide and dug dimples as she smiled. Her light-blue denim shirt and jeans fit her well enough for me to indulge in several introspective lustful moments. She leaned against the door like we were old friends. Then she crossed the room with a confident stride and shook my hand, a firm shake. I was standing now, and noticed she was tall, maybe five-ten, maybe more.

“I’m Gretchen,” she said, her voice holding the unaccented tones of the West Coast. “Gretchen Goodheart. I’m with the city archaeologist’s office. I’m fresh out of business cards.”

I invited her to sit. “There is such a thing as a city archaeologist’s office?”

“Yes there is,” she said, running a hand across the stack of history books on my desk. “You read books.”

“And I’m housebroken.”

She sat in one of the straight-back chairs, instantly making it a more interesting piece of furniture. She took off her cowboy hat and let her hair fall freely. Not a trace of hat hair. “This city is built on top of its history, as you well know,” she said. “Rose from its ashes. We work with the Indian sites, the ruins and the canals. But we’re also interested in the city’s early years after modern settlement. We’ve found lots of artifacts during the building of the ballpark.” She gestured toward the window. “It’s being built where the city’s old Chinatown stood.”

“So how can I help Gretchen Goodheart of the city’s archaeologist’s office?”

“It’s how can we help you,” she said. “Sounds like you had quite an adventure the other night. That must really hurt.” She indicated my black eye, touching her cheek with an elegant finger. Then she frowned for a moment and the dimples went away; her face was wonderfully expressive. “Didn’t Lieutenant Hawkins call you?”

“Nope,” I said. “But sometimes it takes a while for word to get from the PD to the sheriff’s office.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “He said it would be all right if I offered our help.”

“We’re pretty lonely up here on the fourth floor, ma’am,” I said. “And happy for help from an archaeologist.”

“Actually,” she crossed a long, denim-encased leg, “my undergraduate minor was in history. I was a junkie about the Old West. I’ve got every book on the subject I can find. I even read your book, Rock Hard Times: The Great Depression in the Rocky Mountain West.”

“Good God, who made you do that?”

“It was a good book.”

“Sold in the dozens. I have a garage full if you want a few more copies.”

I was way too pleased. I hoped it didn’t show.

Chapter Seven

I fetched a flashlight out of the desk, and let Gretchen drive me down to the warehouse where the skeletons had been discovered. It was only a few blocks away, but my ankle was feeling all fifteen feet of that drop into the elevator shaft. She drove a white Ford Explorer that dwarfed the police evidence technician’s van sitting outside the old building.

It was anything but forbidding in daylight. It was four stories tall, with a blond brick shell and aging wooden doors and windows painted dark green. The wall at the roofline had an ornamental curve, attempting to mimic the arches of Union Station across the street, I supposed. On one wall, fading white paint announced “AAA Storage” and a phone number with the old “ALpine” exchange for the first two numbers, two-five. A relic from the time when men wore hats and rode trains. It was surrounded by lots of nothing, something downtown Phoenix had in abundance.

Downtown’s decline began in the late fifties, when Park Central mall opened a couple of miles north and the Rosenzweig brothers got the city’s permission to develop skyscrapers on nearby land they owned, the first of the “uptown” towers that march north on Central Avenue for five miles from the old city center. But in the years I was gone, the eighties and most of the nineties, the decline had turned worse as the city and landowners had cleared block after block of old buildings, including some lovely territorial-era apartments near the Capitol, hundreds of historic bungalows just south of my neighborhood, and much of the old warehouse district around the train station. Now downtown Phoenix was an odd assortment of new buildings—each year’s fresh attempt at revival—sitting alone amid emptiness. It made me ache for all that was lost.

Gretchen seemed to read my thoughts. “Not much here,” she said.

“Not now. Want to go in?”

“Is that all right for a civilian?” An officious sign proclaimed the building a crime scene and offered various punishments for trespassing.