“That’s me.” The voice didn’t go with an old man. It was a powerful baritone. The man stood, unfolded himself, and looked me over.
“You don’t look like the man who’s supposed to be delivering my dirt.”
I held up my badge and ID card and told him who I was.
The man who took my badge case certainly didn’t look in his nineties. He looked like one of those heroic comic characters come to life: muscular chest sprouting out of a tiny waistline, thick jaw, gray hair combed in a Brylcreem pompadour. Only his hands seemed old: mottled, bony, arthritic walnuts where the knuckles used to be. And where his upper arms disappeared into his T-shirt, pale crepey skin draped down. He was tall and stood with an officer’s bearing. His eyes were a strange yellow-green-was that called hazel? — and they didn’t like what they saw.
“Maricopa County?” the baritone boomed. He held his garden shears as if he might use them on me. “What’s your business here, deputy sheriff?”
“I’m investigating the John Pilgrim case.”
“John Pilgrim?”
“I understand he was your partner, when you worked in Phoenix in the 1940s.”
“That’s an FBI matter,” he said. His lips barely moved when he talked. It was more a gentle bobbing of the jutting square jaw. “I can’t talk to local law enforcement about that.”
He handed back the badge case and turned back to his work, the comic book hero body kneeling down to a flower bed.
“Agent Renzetti, we found his badge.”
He stopped, then the bony hands resumed their snipping, picking up each dead stalk as he worked. “What are you talking about?”
“The missing badge. We found it a few weeks ago, on a homeless man who had died. I was hoping you could give me some insight into what Agent Pilgrim was working on when he died.”
“How the hell did you find me?”
I told him about Pilgrim’s son.
He turned his head toward me. The eyes studied me with disinterested hostility.
“What’s your name again?”
I gave it to him.
“Badge number?”
“I’ve been working with the Phoenix FBI.”
“Then you won’t mind giving me your badge number.”
I gave it to him. I was wasting my time in this pleasant little neighborhood a long way from home.
The hero turned back to his flowerbed. He just let me stand there. I watched a hummingbird, just over his shoulder, levitate amid some yellow trumpet-shaped blossoms.
“Good day, deputy.”
“Let me give you my card, with the number where I’m staying in San Francisco.” I pulled a card out of my blazer pocket and dropped it on a nearby potting bench.
As I walked away, I heard, “Please don’t bother me again.”
When I got back to the hotel there was a message from Eric Pham. Please call. I thought about calling-maybe it was about Lindsey. But I knew it was about Renzetti, as in, what the hell was I doing? If there were trouble with Lindsey, Peralta would call. I could count on that, couldn’t I? I ignored the message and called Sharon Peralta. We agreed to meet for dinner.
We met at Tadich Grille, a walk down a hill from the hotel on busy city streets. After a long enough wait in the noisy bar for me to finish a martini and for Sharon to sip a cosmopolitan, we were shown to a secluded booth in the back. Sharon was turned out elegantly, as always, in a black pantsuit with a simple turquoise pendent dangling from her neck. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon. Those huge, lovely dark eyes looked as they had when she was twenty-five. I hadn’t seen her for months, since she began commuting to San Francisco.
“So how is Mike?” she wanted to know. It was an odd question coming from his wife of, what, twenty-nine years? But, as she had said before, I had been his partner on the streets, and partners sometimes knew more than spouses did.
I settled for, “OK, I guess.” I wasn’t going to engage in special pleading with the sheriff’s wife, even if we had known each other for what seemed like forever. I had known her when she was my partner’s shy young wife. But her gradual transformation hadn’t surprised me. From persisting in getting her degrees, to establishing her practice in Scottsdale, to her debut on radio and writing the self-help book that was to become her first best-seller-I’d like to say I always knew it would happen. Sharon had grit.