Dry Heat (David Mapstone Mystery 3)

So I drank, too fast, and told him what I knew. George Weed was sixty-six years old when he died. He’d been born in 1938. He had a Social Security number. All this came from a county hospital card he held in the early 1980s, when he was being treated for stomach ulcers. He was a native Phoenician. His birth certificate said his parents were Aimee Jones Weed, sixteen years old, and Homer Weed, twenty-five, whose occupation was listed as “laborer.” In between birth and his death in the green swimming pool, Weed worked as an elevator operator and a janitor. He rented an apartment for years just north of downtown. The apartment was now a vacant lot. He had been on the streets for years, at least a decade. The Reverend Card had watched him for three summers, said he was “paranoid.” Peralta asked, “Any family?”

“No one has claimed the body,” I said. “We’ve run his photo on TV and the Sheriff’s Office Web site. As far as the ol

d county hospital card, I couldn’t find any corresponding records listing next of kin.”

I knew what that meant: soon the sheriff’s chain gang would take George Weed and put him in the potter’s field by the White Tank Mountains, a desolate desert graveyard with numbers denoting the dead buried at the county’s expense.

“Not bad, Mapstone,” Peralta said slowly, speaking around the cigar in his mouth. “Pretty good detective work.”

“I know it doesn’t tell us how he came to have an FBI badge.”

Deep in my head, I was only wondering where Lindsey was, how she was. I glance back in the house, half expecting her to come out with chips and salsa and join us. But Lindsey wasn’t there. I felt her absence more painfully as we talked hour after hour, through three drinks.

“I have an offer, to go back to teaching,” I said.

He stared into the night while I told him about the job at Portland State.

“It rains all the time.” he said.

“Not that much, and I like rain.”

“You’d be bored,” he said. “Sitting around with Volvo drivers, using nonsexist language and hugging trees. Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians-I could never work in a university.”

“I believe that.”

“You won’t go.” Peralta said, hurting my feelings that he didn’t try harder to talk me out of it.

Finally, Peralta rose to go. He looked steady as a tree trunk. “You’re dumb to stay in this house,” he said, his posture showing no evidence of having consumed a trio of sizable cocktails.

“You’re here.” I said.

He motioned to the east. “I have a security detail waiting for me over there.” A pair of car headlights came on.

Peralta stared into the dry black sky, where you could see stars even against the city lights. He said softly, “You and I go back, don’t we, Mapstone?”

I agreed we did.

He produced an envelope from the cargo pants and set it on his chair. “Those are tickets to San Francisco. On the county’s dime. In that envelope you’ll also find a name and an address. It’s the son of Special Agent John Pilgrim. Why don’t you go talk to him about his father?”

I stood, a bit unsteady. “What will Eric Pham have to say about that?”

“Leave him to me.”

I didn’t pick up the ticket.

“Lindsey is going to be fine,” he said, “And you’ll be climbing the walls.”

“Why do you care?”

“About Lindsey? You must really think I am a bastard.”

“You are a bastard,” I said, draining my martini and setting down the glass. “But I mean the Pilgrim case, George Weed in the swimming pool. Why do you care?”

Peralta said nothing. The skin on his face hardened until, in the meager light reflected from city sky, he seemed to take on the countenance of a stone idol. Waiting for worship or sacrifice, I thought unkindly. I said, “You go to San Francisco. You can see Sharon.”

“Not my kind of place,” Peralta said. “Can’t you just trust me for once? We go back, remember? Old partners?”

“Old partners are straight with each other.”