Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

I opened the cover and a half dozen color photos were inside, eight-and-a-half by eleven, lots of skin. Kimbrough was right. The images were extremely explicit. Full frontal nudity and penetration were just the beginning. Check your imaginations at the door for all will be revealed.

“Tryouts for the gymnastics team?” Lindsey said, looking over my shoulder.

It was an orgy. The top photo showed several couples in various copulatory positions. I hadn’t been a porn aficionado since we had the secret stack of Penthouse at the substation when I was a twenty-year-old deputy. Spectator sports were not my thing. But these photos stood out as, well, real. They had none of the retouched bodies and professional lighting of sex industry images. The people looked average, the moments carried the edge and flaws of the spontaneous.

The scene wasn’t some sleazy motel room with a pizza-colored bedspread and velvet Elvis on the walls, either. Take out the writhing bodies and the room could have been in Architectural Digest. White marble stairs and levels flowed out of a roomy conversation pit, which contained expensive-looking sectional sofas and spare, modern tables. African sculptures, with stone erections to match the flesh ones of the orgy, stood on one set of shelves. A large abstract painting, hot colors and geometry, dominated one wall, and another wall was all glass. The real eye-catcher, though, was what looked like an indoor waterfall, cascading down from a second level into a pond in the center of the room. But this, too, was not quite a “done” room-you could see the reefers, pills, and cocaine scattered around various tables.

The second photo stopped me. It centered on a man with Mark Spitz hair, naked except for dirty white socks. He was upright, on his knees, connected doggy-style to a curvy brunette who had matted hair and wore a black merry widow. Her face was buried in a cushion. The man had turned his head to face the cameraman, giving a goofy-drunk grin and looking so young I didn’t recognize him at first.

“That’s Nixon,” I said.

“Holy shit,” Kimbrough said. “So much for stereotypes about the relative physical endowments of white men.”

“That’s how he got his nickname,” I said. “He was very popular with women.”

“Oh, please,” Lindsey said. “Men with giant cocks are bad lovers. They think they don’t have to do anything else but show up.”

How did she know that? A tremor of insecurity swept through me. But turning back to the picture, I felt the same dizzy, intrusive feeling as when we talked to Lisa the night before. We weren’t meant to see these photos. They were Dean’s trophies, from when he was virile and desirable and the world existed in a happy teacup of youth and promise.

I set it face-down. The next photos showed a pretty young girl fellating an older man. He sat Buddha-like on an Eames chair with the girl on her knees. His skin was leathery brown, but he had an old man’s spidery stretch lines around his stomach. They were in the same room, but closer to the waterfall, the spray sluicing off white marble behind the two lovers. A display of red, black, and orange pills was splayed across a nearby tabletop. Next to that was a hand mirror with neat lines of what might have been baking soda, but wasn’t.

The girl was truly beautiful, with a heart-shaped face, flaxen hair parted in the middle, and an exquisite young body, lightly tanned. She looked languidly at the camera.

Something kicked my memory. I knew her.

“What?” Lindsey said.

“That’s Marybeth,” I said. “Marybeth Watson. The girl who was with Leo that night in Guadalupe. She was his girlfriend.”

“Not when this picture was taken,” Lind

sey said. “You know who this is with her?”

I studied the man’s face. He wasn’t looking right at the camera. Something about his wispy white rim of hair contrasted with dramatic black eyebrows looked familiar. But I had to shake my head.

“That,” said Lindsey, “is Jonathan Ledger, the author of The Sex Instructions.”

I sat back in the chair and pointed at the photos. “So this must be Camelback Falls.”

Chapter Eighteen

Draw me a map of the human heart. Show me the roads in and out. Where does Eros take the turnoff from love, darkness from passion? Destiny, fate. Nixon, Peralta, and me, we were all just cops together. Men with easily pierced skin and breakable bones. Men with hearts. But all along we were connected by invisible strands that ran to right now: Nixon dead, Peralta in a coma, Mapstone the sheriff. Badge numbers in the logbook. Photographs on my breakfast table.

Draw me a map of the human heart. The back roads of jealousy and rage. It is no coincidence that cops get killed during family fights. At the point of conjugal connection the mask of civilization is always shaky, our mastery of nature most personally at risk. Love and lust are dangerous things, and every civilization tries to control them, whether through ancient commandments or the latest dating code on campus. Nature is always ready to slip the leash, go mad again. We Phoenicians should know this most of all, living in our artificial city with the desert seemingly subdued for our pleasure and recreation. But beneath us are the ruins of the Hohokam city that preceded us. They were men with hearts, too, who dug the canals, unlocked the rich soil, vanished. The desert is really in control, merely biding its time.

These thoughts tried to find purchase inside my head as we drove the speed limit through the pleasant streets of northeast Phoenix two hours later. Lindsey was lost in her own thoughts and we didn’t talk much. We were in her Honda Prelude, with its bumper sticker that read, “Keep honking, I’m reloading.” But the message was lost on our tail from the previous night-no cars appeared to be following us. I was on an errand I most dreaded.

Judge Carlos Peralta lived in a rambling ranch house off Lafayette Boulevard in the city’s Arcadia district. The houses had been built in the 1950s where citrus groves stood. The judge’s house was guarded by lush grapefruit and orange trees, oleanders and desert honeysuckle. Down the freshly cut front lawn was a magnificent view of Camelback Mountain. Lindsey parked in the driveway and kept on her seatbelt.

“You’re not coming?”

“Dave, this is definitely an interview that should be one-on-one.” She patted my hand.

So I walked up a long sidewalk framed by ornamental lights and flowerbeds. The walk was enchanting at night, like the Thanksgiving five years ago when we all came over. The judge had been a widower here for ten years, but he refused Mike and Sharon’s yearly suggestions that he move to a condo. He had been the first Mexican-American on the state appeals court, and the first to move to Arcadia. This house also held his memories and his books. I understood that much.

His housekeeper, Mrs. Sanchez, a large woman with happy black eyes, greeted me and showed me into his study. The room was dark in the way that comforts the old or the grieving. It was a vast repository of books: on the walls, on tables, on the desk that looked out-of-place modern, even in stacks on the thick cream carpet. Amid a table full of family photos was a large picture of his son as an Army Ranger. Another showed him as chief deputy, his expression barely changed across three decades. Gas logs glowed in a fireplace. It was about 70 degrees outside, so they had to run the air conditioning to have the illusion of winter inside. And at the far end of the room, swallowed up in a leather armchair, was the frail figure of the judge.

“Come in, David.” I could hear his wheezing across the room.