Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

“So,” he continued, “I took my savings and I bought this old warehouse. I open it every year from April through the end of October. It’s the worst time of year to be on the street. I lean on some rich old bastards who owe me a favor to give a little money to keep it going.”

“No soul saving?” I asked, trying to avoid falling out of the barely serviceable chair.

He narrowed his dark eyes, boring into me. “You believe in an unseen world, Mapstone?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

He snorted. “In my services, everybody prayed, ‘Thy will be done.’ But nobody wanted that. I want my damn will to be done. We don’t want God loose in the world…That would scare the shit out of us.”

He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, loudly drawing in the smoke. “When I was ordained, I was twenty-five years old and it was the happiest day of my life. I felt called, Mapstone.” Card’s face was remade with emotion. Canyons cut their way into his cheeks. His eye sockets deepened further. “I would preach the forgiveness of my Savior and Lord to penitent sinners. I would comfort the heartbroken and the dying.”

He studied the orange tip of the cigarette and added, “I didn’t know how perilous the borderlands would be…”

“Borderlands?”

He gave a sacramental wave of his Marlboro. “It’s where we all live, Mapstone.”

I cautiously asked about Weed.

“The old man with the Levi’s jacket,” he said, half to himself. “I haven’t seen him in awhile. He used to come by here. Said his teeth hurt too much to take ice.”

“Did you know his real name?”

“George was his first name,” Card said. “George Weed. Mapstone, you lapsed into the past tense. Has something happened to our brother Weed?”

Chapter Eleven

Now I was armed. Armed with a name. I could do the thing that had allowed me to make a living in the years after I quit being a history professor: bring in new information on the county’s most notorious unsolved cases. That history was written in names: Rebecca Stokes, my first big case, the woman who took a train home to Phoenix in 1959 and turned up dead in the desert. The Yarnell twins, the grandsons of a great rancher, kidnapped in the Great Depression and never found. Jonathan Ledger, the famous sex doctor who gave birth to the brave new world and ended up in a nasty drug deal and cop killing. In each case, I saw something the cops had missed, connected the dots in a different way, stumbled onto the fortunate clue. All from names that had found a bad end in Maricopa County.

Now I had a new name: George Weed. And an age, if what he told Card could be trusted: sixty-six. The data went with a man who had been coming to the Reverend’s shelter for three summers. Sometimes he would sleep there three or four nights a week. Other times he might camp behind the rocks in the vacant land just outside the boundary of Hance Park. He didn’t talk much. He never took off his jacket. One of the few things he told Card had stayed in his memory. “He said he was a native Phoenician,” Card had told me. “There are so few of them, you almost never see that.”

After I left Quanah Card, I drove to the sheriff’s headquarters on Madison Street. I avoided Peralta’s office until I had more to report. After the tension the week before in Scottsdale, it seemed better to avoid the sheriff for a while. My errand was to the computers, where I checked the local databases and the NCIC, the National Crime Information Computer. Even though the old vagrancy laws had been overturned in the ’60s, someone living the life of George Weed could still have found dozens of ways to become a violator. Public drunkenness, trespassing, sleeping in a park after sundown, soliciting. Shoplifting was a favorite. Any of those and sundry other offenses could land a name in the system, never to be forgotten. A different database gave me county social services clients, whether for food stamps, health care, or the paltry mental health and drug and alcohol rehab programs. But George Weed was not in any of the databases.

Next I walked six blocks in the brilliant April sun to Phoenix Police Headquarters. Unmolested by Kate Vare, I spent two hours picking through other records, especially the field interrogation cards of the patrol officers. Here the information could be more haphazard, the continual budget shortfall cutting into the technology and clerical help necessary to make sense of hundreds of thousands of lower priority records. I found someone named Carlos Wong and a young man known only as Winston. But no George Weed. For someone who had been on the streets of Phoenix, who was carrying a stolen FBI badge, and was headed toward a bad end in an abandoned swimming pool, he had assiduously avoided the law.

Was that possible? I heard Dan Milton’s voice in my head, warning against the limitations of governmental records, against the biases of observers. I was hearing his voice a lot. Back in Portland, toward the end, he had been so weak he couldn’t hold up his head. Am I reporting the truth or betraying my friend to say he was close to raving the days before he died? The pain was so intense, his sense so keen that time was running out. Outside his window, the Oregon spring was gorgeous, mocking us all. He refused drugs, not wanting to lose time in a haze of pain medication.

I should have been wondering about the pain that brought George Weed to the abandoned pool in Maryvale. But my thoughts were too much still back in Portland. Anyone who expects the old to pass gently into that good night didn’t know Dan Milton. He was angry with Plato, furious with Rousseau. His age-old antipathy for Lenin had not abated at all. “Ideas with a body count!” he shouted. Other times his voice would calm and his eyes regain some of their old gleam. “I don’t want to go out a madman, like Wilson,” he laughed. His head was nearly all skull, covered by a tent of sickly skin and the rough whiskers

that wouldn’t stop giving his face hope of fresh life. “It’s a new dark age,” he said at one point. “Nobody reads anymore. People are losing the ability to think. Television has destroyed us. I’m glad I won’t live to see the worst of it.”

When it hurt the worst, he would whisper through gritted teeth. That last night, I heard him whisper, “Drop by drop upon the heart.” He had whispered it twice, from a pain-laced half drowse.

“What is that?” his young amour Kathleen had asked. She was holding his hand, wiping a cool cloth on his bony forehead.

I recalled Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

His voice was still in my head when I went out to the county’s records storage warehouse on Jefferson Street, a few blocks east of the baseball stadium. I avoided decades of property tax assessments, voter records, court documents, and jury rolls. Now I was playing hunches. Digging in cardboard boxes, shockingly un-state-of-the-art manila file folders and paper reports. Getting paper cuts, sneezing at the dust from the space age and the disco era. Exhuming microfiche reels from heavy metal cabinets and praying the old dried-out film wouldn’t break in the creaky old reader. Taking chances in bottom drawers, in card files and leather-bound registers. After two more hours, just when I thought the Rev. Quanah Card had played me for a fool, I again picked up the trail of George Weed.

***

That night I grabbed Thai takeout at Wild Thaiger. I swapped cars and made my circuitous way home, believing I could still smell the last sweet vestige of citrus blossoms in the streets of Willo. Then I slipped down into the underground garage of our hideaway and took the elevator past a watchful deputy to the eighth floor.

Lindsey was in the back bedroom, which had been converted into a home gym. She was in gray spandex, an oval sweat stain darkening the fabric from her breasts down to her belly. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her fair skin was flushed, and she sat cross-legged on the floor. Her old tomcat, Pasternak, watched her from a chair. Liz Phair was coming out of the stereo, “Johnny Feelgood.” Lindsey’s fine head was lolled back against the wall. She was mouthing the lyrics and smoking, greedily inhaling from a cigarette.

“Sorry, Dave, you caught me.”

I bent down and kissed her. Even in her smoking bouts, she had the sweetest breath. I noticed the pack on the floor, Gauloises Blondes. An indulgence she had picked up on our trip to Paris two years ago.