“You seem pretty impressive to me,” she said, and a flush of visceral pleasure coursed through me. “So what’s he like? The famous Chief Peralta.”
I shook my head. “Beats me.”
We each had two martinis. Then I walked her to her truck, parked in a garage across from the new city hall at Third Avenue and Washington. I was feeling good and yet virtuous. That was until she turned at her truck door and gave me a hug.
“Thanks for the talk,” she said in a voice as soft as the red-brown hair that brushed across my face. “I’m enjoying getting to know you.”
“My pleasure,” I said. I watched her start up the big SUV and head down the ramp, then I walked to the stairway awash in lust and guilt. It wasn’t a particularly bad feeling.
The street was empty and the only sound was a distant train whistle, something that always reminded me of when I was a kid listening through the bedroom window late at night to the Santa Fe trains coming down from the main line at Williams Junction.
Sound is a funny thing here. It gets trapped in the dry air and bounced around between the mountains. So I didn’t hear the old white van until it was right up on me. It crept down Fourth Avenue on the lane closest to the sidewalk, exactly matching my pace. A Ford Econoline, like ten thousand others in the city. I glanced inside and was barred by heavily tinted black windows. How many times had Peralta told me to carry a gun? Now I just looked like a guy in a suit, working late, a good target. Where the hell were those PPD bicycle patrols? I got to Jefferson and the nearest car was a pair of headlights half a mile away. The lights from the Madison Street Jail looked down like the windows of a medieval castle. Otherwise, we were all alone.
I crossed behind the van and checked the license plate. It was covered with mud and the light was out. A sudden wild gush of panic came up my legs and into my belly. I fought it down with breathing. Slow and steady. I walked easy and straight across the street, moving east down Jefferson now. Another block and I could get in the sheriff’s administration building with my bar-coded ID.
The van turned on Jefferson and paced me again. Now I was on the driver’s side, but the windows were still opaque. I didn’t want to keep looking over. I started running scenarios in my head. Wondering how much of the self-defense training I got from Peralta twenty years ago was still second nature. I knew one thing: nobody was going to get me inside a van.
“Excuse me.”
The window was down now and a face peered out.
“Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?”
He was just a guy: white, thirties, doughy face, balding into a comb-over, his eyes buried in heavy lids. I stopped and looked.
“Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?” he asked again.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It’s down there at Second and Madison. Park on Madison and check in with the deputy at the front counter.”
“Thank you.” His eyes became merry slits. “Aren’t you David Mapstone?
“I am. Have we met?”
He looked at me for a moment and the window went back up. Then the van accelerated around the corner and I was alone again on the street. Just then, two bicycle cops rode by. The female officer looked like Steffi Graf.
Chapter Sixteen
Little-known fact: Mike Peralta is a fabulous cook. It makes it easy to be adopted by the Peraltas for family holidays like Thanksgiving. This year, he served the finest turkey and dressing I’d ever eaten—and I had to admit that include Grandmother’s sublime cornbread dressing from my childhood. Of course, the meal didn’t stop there. We had the usual array of Thanksgiving vegetables and side dishes, all fresh and delicately spiced. Plus there were Peralta’s trademark carnitas, just in case our metabolism dared to process any of these excesses. And liberal amounts of quality liquor: he favored Gibsons, followed by an undiscovered Sonoma pinot noir Sharon had picked up and, after dinner, a port whose taste st
ayed on my tongue like a good memory. I only thought about Lindsey every few minutes.
The two daughters were home from law school. Jamie was at Stanford and Jennifer was at Cal-Berkeley. They were luminously beautiful and very smart, and since I’ve known both since they were babies, seeing them now made me feel strangely old. I didn’t feel forty years old—I felt like I was my early twenties. Time is a real bastard. But spirits were high and the conversation tripped from football to life in the Bay Area to the big expansion the Heard Museum was planning to some catching up on everybody’s life. These people were as close to family as I had, and I was grateful for the holiday spell of belonging and well-being.
Peralta and I weren’t allowed to discuss work, and that was fine. I had little new to report on the Yarnell case. Now we were just waiting for the DNA results, and that would be the end of it. Gretchen would go on to greater things and I would go back to my Philip Marlowe office in the old courthouse, writing a history of the Sheriff’s Office and taking whatever forgotten workaday mysteries Peralta cared to pass my way.
I seemed to be the only one bothered about the neat bow being tied on this case, and I couldn’t even tell you why. Maybe it was the pocket watch. Why had it been entombed with the little boys? Maybe it was talking to the endlessly incarcerated Frances Richie, or the way Max Yarnell was so cagey about the ownership of the old warehouse. Or maybe it was Bobby Hamid’s visit the week before—about which Peralta was strangely passive, by the way. He didn’t even threaten to get the warehouse condemned and turned into a Super Fund site.
So that was Thanksgiving. Except for the strangeness of the unsaid: whatever marital battle sent Peralta to find shelter at my house that night was carefully cleaned up for the holiday. Mike and Sharon didn’t even fuss at each other with their usual gusto. Sometimes my mind wandered, imagining Mike and Sharon as I didn’t want to imagine them: Bitch! Prick! Slut! Bastard! Diminuendo for a drowning marriage. I was aware of my presence keeping a brittle peace. Or maybe I imagined that, too. For just a moment, I recalled the last Christmas Patty and I were together. We had given each other expensive gifts and no cards. Lindsey was big on cards, and I had kept every one she had given me. The dusk came up early and I declined Peralta’s invitation to smoke cigars and watch the big game on TV.
***
The new freeway system took me from Peralta’s place, nestled into the bare mountainside overlooking Dreamy Draw, to central Phoenix in less than ten minutes. Traffic was light, traveling fast. Charlie Parker was on the BMW’s CD player. I got off at Seventh Street but didn’t feel like going home yet. The house would be too damned empty. I drove slowly through Margaret Hance Park, which sat atop the Papago Freeway and concealed the highway’s ugly gash through several blocks north of downtown. It was once a fine old neighborhood of bungalows and period revival houses, but all that remained was my old grade school, Kenilworth, the new city library, and the nearly new park, which sprawled uninvitingly amid the empty land.
South into downtown. Bobby Hamid was right about a building boom. After years of abandonment, downtown Phoenix was coming back at least a bit. The ballpark loomed massively amid the skyscrapers. A big federal building was going up near the city and county government centers. Some nights there were even crowds on the streets. Not tonight, though. Phoenix reverted to its small-town roots on holidays. The sparse traffic cruising Central disappeared entirely as I turned down Monroe, then went south again on Fourth Avenue. I could see the pale stucco facade of Union Station at the foot of the street and I let the BMW slowly slide down the block toward it. I interrupted Charlie Parker and listened to the echoes off the buildings, the tires scraping across the old railroad tracks.
I slowed to a stop just ahead of the old Triple A Storage warehouse, which stood forlornly off to the left. A couple of homeless men looked me over and scuttled off. Preservationists wanted to make these old warehouse blocks into an entertainment district. But that would require Phoenix to show an uncharacteristic sense of its past. When these old buildings were thriving with commerce, when premier streamliners like the Sunset Limited and Golden State Limited called at Union Station, when the graceful little mission-style building was the center of life here—most of today’s three million Phoenicians weren’t even born and their roots were thousands of miles away. This was a new-start, tear-it-down city that gave it up for the first developer who said we were pretty.
The old brick warehouse had really been a railroad hotel, right at the foot of the street that led into town. Thanks to Gretchen, I knew it had still been a hotel in 1941 when Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell were somehow taken inside and left in a wall in a hidden basement. Franklin Roosevelt was president, Nazi tanks were rampaging through Russia, and this street in the little farm town of Phoenix, Arizona was busy night and day with train travelers. So how did the twins get in there unnoticed? And why would Jack Talbott pick such a very public place to hide his victims? The street radiated only silence and gloom back at me.