Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

“And nothing in your years in homicide made you doubt that?”

“Never gave it a second thought,” he said. His eyes blinked rapidly, uncharacteristically. “But I never knew they hadn’t recovered his badge…”

“There’s a lot not to know,” I said. “Somebody’s gone through the local files. They’ve removed the ballistics report, God knows what else.”

“So ask your friends at the Bureau.”

I said nothing. Wolfe said, “It’s always a one-way street, running to the feds’ benefit.”

“They didn’t take everything,” I said. “I found a detective’s notebook, a guy named Dan Bird.” I watched Wolfe’s expression, but he knew he was being watched now and he just bored his eyes into me, waiting. I went on, “Bird’s notebook said Pilgrim didn’t have any gunpowder residue on his hands. That’s not consistent with a suicide. He had a single.38 slug in his heart. He was dead before he hit the water. He floated several miles in the canal.”

“Dan Bird was still in homicide when I went to work,” Wolfe said. “You could trust his report.”

“Another place in the notebook, there’s an interview with a farmer out by Seventh Street and the Arizona Canal. He says the night before Pilgrim was found dead, he sees some people up on the canal. One of them looks like Agent Pilgrim. But it’s dusk and the farmer has work to do, and he moves on. A few minutes later, he hears a gunshot and sees a car tearing down the canal bank.”

“Too bad for you Bird died in 1971, “Wolfe said.

I went on, “Here’s another thing: for a washed out loser, John Pilgrim had spent a lot of time on very sensitive cases.” Maybe I couldn’t get the FBI files, but Bird’s notes and the newspapers told me some things. Pilgrim was assigned to counterspy work during the war, and after 1945 he led successful investigations of corrupt state and city governments in New Jersey, Maryland, and Illinois. He held five citations for bravery.

Wolfe watched a foursome in the distance, lugging golf clubs. They were undeterred by the hundred-degree temperature. He said, “I guess I’d trust Dan Bird’s notes more than the say-so of some G-man.

What about PPD? Can they help you?”

“Kate Vare is their cold case person. She hates my guts.”

“She wants to be chief,” he said simply “Don’t give me that look. I keep up with the department. Talk about ambitious.”

I was surrounded by ambitious men and women. Lean and hungry looks, dressed for success.

“Mapstone,” he said quietly. I watched the sun-dug lines on his face deepen. “How much do you know about old Phoenix?”

It sounded like a trick question. I started cautiously, as if I were defending a paper before a panel of hostile-and jealous-professors. “The city had fewer than one hundred thousand people then. The industries were the Five ‘C’s-copper, cattle, citrus, cotton, and climate. In 1948, Phoenix hoped to surpass El Paso as the leading business city of the Southwest. But it was still an upstart.”

“Very good, professor,” Wolfe said. “Now, look deeper. Phoenix has always been a corrupt city.”

My chamber-of-commerce native pride made me protest. The mob had been in Vegas and Tucson, after all.

“Jesus, you’re naive for an educated man,” he said, his voice giving off no more edge than usual. “In the mid 1950s, when I came here from the LAPD, the feds had identified five hundred known mobsters in Phoenix. That was more per capita than in New York City.”

I didn’t say anything. My mind just processed this new information.

Wolfe just shook his head as if he was instructing a child. “Remember Gus Greenbaum?”

I remembered. He was the former Las Vegas mobster, living under an assumed name in Palmcroft. One day in the fifties, he and his wife were killed at home in a mob hit. The house was still there, on Encanto Boulevard. I could barely make it out through the trees.

“The Greenbaums were cooking steaks,” Wolfe said. “So after they were killed, the hit men sat down and ate their dinner. Bet you didn’t know that.”

“You ought to teach history,” I said.

“Most of the good stuff happened before I got here.” Wolfe said. “We had a good chief in the fifties. He was absolutely honest. So after he took over, things might still go on. But they had to go around the chief, do it where he couldn’t find it. But this has always been a town for strange crime. Winnie Ruth Judd, the trunk murderess. The Republic reporter who was blown up. Bob Crane killed in Scottsdale, and then all his porn videos were found. Remember the woman who cuts off her husband’s head and limbs and stuffs his torso in the dumpster? I’d rather that a lady just walk out on me. Remember the father out there in Mesa, takes his baby girl out on Christmas Eve to watch the lights, but he sets her on fire and kills her?”

“Yeah, no need to remind me.” The music from the carousel no longer sounded innocent.

“So, if you ask me, ‘Did Pilgrim kill himself?’ Until now, I had no reason to doubt it. But this town is just weird enough that anything’s possible.”

A youngish blond man walked by and paused to lean over the bridge railing. He had peroxide yellow hair, long but slicked back over his ears. His eyebrows were blond, and his lips small and curled, like the mouths in eighteenth-century portraits. He was wearing a blue shirt and a tie as yellow as his hair. We stopped talking, and in a moment the blond man walked on.

Wolfe said, “I can tell you this. I remember a guy named George Weed.”