Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

“Are you a cop?”

“I’m a sheriff’s deputy,” I said.

The room congealed again into silence. I could barely hear the fan turning. Then the voice told me to come to the back of the room. Bill made sure I found my way. Finally, I was presented before a broad-chested man wearing a white, open-collared shirt. A rough, dark cross hung around his neck with a leather strap. He was sitting at a folding card table lined up with white Styrofoam cups. The man shook a cup at me, put it in my hand.

“Ice,” he said. “Ice is important.”

His eyes were gigantic, and buttressed with deep sockets and soaring brows, high arched cheeks and strong nose, as if cathedral builders had constructed his face. Above a generous forehead, he combed lead-colored hair straight back. His skin was the color and texture of cordovan leather.

“Bill is right,” he said. “You don’t belong here. And I wonder if you’re telling me the truth. You don’t have cop’s eyes.”

I held out my ID and star, and he squinted at them across the rows of white cups.

“You look like a professor,” he said.

“In another life,” I said. “I’m looking for someone called the Reverend.”

He stuck his large hands in his pockets and regarded me. “I was a pastor in another life,” he said. “So for shorthand, they call me the Reverend. You can call me Quanah Card.”

“You’re Comanche?”

“No,” he said. “Tohono O’odham. But my mother, she was a reader. She loved the stories of heroic Indians. And when I came along, she was reading about Quanah Parker.”

“I’m looking for somebody, Reverend Card.” I pulled out my Polaroid and a computer-generated sketch of the homeless man, perhaps nicknamed Weed. But Card looked at my cup of ice. He picked up another cup and handed it to Bill. Then he took a third cup and held it up to his full lips. He and Bill ate the ice, as if showing a primitive tribesman that it was safe to consume. I sucked on the ice. It felt like everything that room was not: cool, clean, and fresh.

“They would not give Jesus water on the cross, much less ice,” Card said, a dreamy look in his eyes. “So you are a very blessed man, Deputy.” Then he fixed them on me again. “How did you find this place?”

“A woman on the street,” I said. “She said her name was Karen.”

“Karen…” the Reverend said. “She’s got a crack problem. On top of mental illness. She won’t take her medicine.”

He finished his ice and handed the cup to Bill, who went away. “It’s a goddamned mess, this world.” Card said. “What did you profess, Professor?”

“History.”

“History,” he repeated. “Well, David Mapstone, what do you know about the history of homelessness in America?”

I knew that if I let my natural impatience take over, I would get nowhere with the Rev. Quanah Card. So I said a little about hobos during the Depression, about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s, about how urban renewal tore down so much affordable housing. It was nothin

g brilliant, the kind of stuff I picked up from the Sunday New York Times. The homeless were without much of a voice in history, or so the faddish new historians would say. Dan Milton didn’t have much use for fads.

“Very good, professor,” Card said. “But you make it sound so goddamned nice and academic. Look around you. What do you see? Addicts. The mentally ill. People with HIV. The disabled. The elderly. Young runaways. The ones who live paycheck to paycheck, and then the paycheck is cut off. Weather’s nice in Phoenix, so they come here. They hang out downtown, sleep behind billboards, camp down at the riverbed or beside the freeways. The kids go to Mill Avenue. The saddest of all come here.”

As he talked, I pulled up a wobbly folding chair and sat at the table. He handed me another cup of ice, and I dutifully ate the crystals.

“I give them ice,” he said. “It doesn’t make them want to work a nine-to-five job, or take away the years of abuse and neglect, or end the hallucinations. I do what I can.

“They’re not really like you and me,” he went on. “That’s why it’s easier for society to abandon them. The homeless problem got worse under Reagan. Then it got worse again under Clinton. Here in Arizona, we refuse to fund social services, and the homeless haven’t gone away and gotten jobs. Nobody knows what to do.

“And yet…” He swept his arm to take in the humanity seated and standing around us. “Christ is in them. ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’” He let his arm drop. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Professor. Bible quoting is an occupational hazard where I come from.”

“So this is your church?” I asked.

He laughed without humor, his huge eyes closing into slits of artificial mirth. “I was a United Methodist minister for thirty years,” he said. “For the first five years, I was a street preacher in the Deuce. You know what that was?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t feel like I did a damned bit of good. So I ended up pastoring rich, white churches-and they thought it was so goddamned exotic to have an Indian minister. ‘Native American.’ I could have been a bishop, but I couldn’t stand the politics. Every Sunday, I’d try to get them to care about people like this. But I couldn’t push too hard. That would have made people uncomfortable. Shit, thirty years. I felt like such a failure.