Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

“And the badge just floated away,” I said. “Somebody picks it up, and it begins this wondrous journey around the pawn shops, junk drawers, and secondhand jackets of Phoenix.”

“That could be just what happened,” Pham said.

“Don’t you think that if the average person found an FBI badge, he would call the police and report it?”

“Maybe he thought it was a toy,” Pham said, unconvincingly. “Anyway, Kate says the homeless man might not have even known the badge was in his jacket. Kate says he probably got the jacket second- or thirdhand.”

Ah, yes. Kate. Bonnie Kate. I said, “The homeless men I notice are very aware of any fungible wealth they might come into contact with They check every pay phone coin return. And they’re not going to feel something sewn into a Levi’s jacket? The detectives found it first thing when they examined the body in Maryvale. Maybe George Weed had carried that badge around for years. Maybe Weed somehow came in contact with John Pilgrim. He would have been ten years old when Pilgrim was shot.”

“Look.” Pham said. “I don’t like this any more than you do. That’s why I said it sucks.”

I let the waiter take my plate away. “Fine,” I said. “End of story. Maybe Pilgrim doesn’t even have family left, anybody who would care what happened.”

“There is still family,” Pham said.

“Maybe I can talk to them,” I said.

“Impossible.”

“What about his partner, Renzetti?”

“No way, Mapstone,” Pham said. I had lost first-name status.

“So Renzetti is alive?”

Pham’s eyes widened when he was exasperated. “You don’t know when to quit,” he said quickly.

“Let’s just say I have a very demanding boss. He’s not going to care that the Bureau has changed its mind about me being on this case. Pilgrim and George Weed were both found dead in Maricopa County. I think he’d say that you don’t have a say in my involvement.” David Mapstone, doing his part for interdepartmental relations.

“Eric,” I said, forcing a slower, easier tone in my voice. “I don’t want to cause you trouble. But you won’t let me see the FBI files on the case. You don’t want me on the case. What harm would be done if you called retired Agent Renzetti and asked if he might speak to me?”

Pham said nothing. He faced his plate and absentmindedly ate the bread from the remains of his club sandwich.

Chapter Fourteen

The carousel at Encanto Park was empty. But, at the command of a maintenance crew, it spun around to calliope music, dispensing old-time joy for a PlayStation and DVD world. This was another part of Phoenix that up-and-comer professionals like Eric Pham never saw: the lovely old city park nestled into the Palmcroft neighborhood about half a mile from my house. What did it say about me that I preferred a habitat from the jazz age rather than the sprawl age?

On Tuesday afternoon, the park was nearly empty. Instead of families picnicking under the stately old trees, lovers lingering on the foot-bridges or kids fishing the lagoon, a few homeless men lounged on the grass. I lingered at the locked gates of Enchanted Island, watching the workmen at the carousel, remembering a ten-year-old’s memories in this park. Then, the little train ran every day, the lagoon was stocked with fish, and no one seemed afraid.

My legs and middle were still giggly sore from loving Lindsey two hours before. Somehow all the uncertainties and worries of the past two weeks had made us hornier, and we were in the process of having sex in every room, and on every piece of furniture, of our unknown host’s elegant tree house. Pictures of memory kept rerunning deliciously in my head. I came into the living room to find her sitting in a big leather chair. She wore a black summer dress with a quiet flower print and dainty black shoulder straps. I’m sure it was a demure dress, until Lindsey wore it. She was drawn up in the chair reading, a paperback propped on her naked knees, the dress riding up on her thighs, falling just right in the front to show a hint of cleavage. I put down whatever forgotten work I was doing and knelt down in front of her. Then, my hands stroking the soft, warm, taut skin of her leg. Her giggles turning into soft moans. Sliding the fabric slowly up her thigh, kissing her perfect smooth knees, pulling off the black flip-flops, sucking her toes. Gently, slowly, removing one tiny strap from her pale shoulder, then the other. The exquisite construction of her shoulder blades, her collarbones, her breastbone, her slender form. Dark tresses of hair fell into her face as she looked down at me, one renegade black strand trying to get in the side of her sweet mouth. She was wearing very white cotton panties.

“David Mapstone.” The voice was tough, metal on metal, familiar. I turned to shake hands with Harrison Wolfe. He was as tall as me, with a long ruddy face and thick white hair combed back from a sun-etched forehead. His unblinking cornflower blue eyes lacked any hint of warmth.

“So what mess have you gotten yourself into?” he asked.

You didn’t just call Harrison Wolfe to arrange a meeting. Since he had retired from the Phoenix Police back in the ’70s, he had done everything he could to stay away from the cop world. He was just another anonymous old man in a city park, if the man looked twenty years younger than his eighty-some years, and if he moved with a vague sense of coiled menace. You didn’t just make a phone call to a legend, the homicide detective who worked every major case in Phoenix from the 1950s to the 1970s. So I had left a message with a guy I knew at the Police Museum, and waited for Wolfe to call me.

We walked to a quiet spot overlooking the lagoon while I laid out the Pilgrim case as I understood it. I started with the body found in Maryvale. Finding the badge. Identifying George Weed. I ended with w

hat I knew about dead FBI agent John Pilgrim. When I was done, Wolfe worked his lean jaw and stared out at the golf course, and across the trees at the Central Corridor skyline. Lindsey was in one of those buildings. Yuri could be riding the carousel at Encanto Park and the cops wouldn’t know it.

“So the Bureau sent Pilgrim here to get him clean.” Wolfe said, and snorted without humor. “Fat chance. Phoenix brings out the worst in people.”

He turned back to the lagoon, picked up a stone, and skipped it across the water-one, two, three, four skips before it gave up to gravity. “Pilgrim was ancient history when I joined the department in 1955,” he said. “Detective bureau didn’t consider it an active case.”

I asked why.

“You’ve been dealing with the Fucked-up Bureau of Instigation, so you know the answer to that. Mapstone. They don’t want local law enforcement sticking its nose in. Scuttlebutt was that Pilgrim shot himself. Yeah, it was the only unsolved killing of an FBI agent in Arizona history. But that’s just interesting for civilians. The cops know what really happened, and they move on to the next mayhem. What really happened was that Pilgrim shot himself.”