Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“Yes, I found some new information,” I said.

A slender girl with black hair down to her waist brought him two shots of tequila and a plate of enchiladas. He downed both shots, one after another, and started eating. I drank the Negra Modelo, feeling a sour knot growing in my stomach.

“Nobody in the department even knows you’re still alive,” I ventured. He had to be at least eighty.

He looked at me sourly and mopped up salsa with a large tortilla.

“I don’t want the bastards to know where I am.” He signaled for more tequila. “I would have been happy never to see another cop in my life. Just another old man tossing bread to the pigeons at Encanto Lagoon, which is all Mexicans now anyway.”

I started to talk, but he cut me off with a look.

“I was the first full-time homicide investigator in the Phoenix Police Department,” he said. “It’s hard to believe, but nobody now can appreciate how small the town was just a few years ago. I got my start in L.A., then came over here as a sergeant in 1950. I was a personal friend of Chief Parker. I could have done anything. But my wife had tuberculosis. The dry air was better for her. Hell, there was no smog then.”

The young men had left, and we were alone with the smell of grease and tortillas and the soft clink of dishes in the kitchen.

“When those girls turned up dead, we’d never had anything like that here. The patrol officers, the brass, they didn’t know what to do. Hell, we didn’t even know what we were dealing with at first. The only thing that had happened in Phoenix up to that point was Winnie Ruth Judd back in the thirties, and that was just a love triangle. When Ginger Brocato turned up in the desert, we went looking for an old boyfriend, somebody who knew her. We looked for the obvious. It only dawned on us slowly that we were dealing with a psycho who killed randomly.”

I put the beer bottle down and studied his face. It revealed nothing.

He went on, counting on arthritic fingers. “Ginger, Leslie Reeves, and Gloria Johnson were the work of Eddie Evans. Very good.”

And that was more Lindsey’s work than anything, I thought.

/> “Betty Moran was Evans and a partner, a little two-bit burglar named Felix Hernandez, who tagged along with Eddie one night and got in over his head.”

“If you knew this, why didn’t you arrest him?”

“Look, Ivory Tower, I didn’t know. Nobody knew until Felix Hernandez got scared and came to us. I knew it was the work of one man. But he was smart, careful. No fingerprints. Not even a partial. He didn’t seem to have any patterns, except for choosing young women with fair hair who were alone. And he didn’t make any of the mistakes that solve most cases, like getting his car ticketed sitting outside the murder scene. No, we didn’t have squat until Felix started singing.”

“But Evans never went to jail.”

“Let me tell you something. We went to his place, a little apartment off Seventh Street and Garfield. Nobody home. We stake it out. And over the radio, we hear a call about a knife fight down in the Deuce. Then they broadcast the victim’s name: Eddie Evans.”

He ate a forkful of enchilada. “I guess I could have figured it was a kind of rough justice, like the God of the Old Testament reaching out to get this bastard. But I didn’t. I wanted him so bad. I wanted to know. Know why he did it. How he got away from us all those years. It was the worst night of my life.”

“Was any of this ever put in a report?”

He shook his head. “I wrote it all down and the county attorney took the reports. I never saw them again. Other cases came along. Life goes on.”

“And Stokes?”

“Not connected.”

My day was getting a lot worse. “How can you be so sure?”

“I know. It sure as hell wasn’t Eddie Evans, because I had him on ice the week she disappeared.”

“That wasn’t in his file.”

“‘His file,’” Harrison Wolfe spat out. “‘The report.’ That’s why I left the cops. We were turned into bureaucrats and pencil pushers. Where some teacher”-he looked at me hard-“can walk in and claim to clear old cases, working for the sheriff no less. Let me ask you something, bookworm. Do you trust Napoleon’s Correspondence if you’re a historian?”

“No,” I stuttered, surprised. “He was writing from Saint Helena with his reputation in mind.”

“Well, there you go. And that’s what most cops are doing: covering ass. I never wrote an arrest report on the little creep because I couldn’t charge him. Today, he’d have a lawyer and the ACLU down our throats. Back then, we had some discretion. Some latitude.”

“But Stokes had the same MO as the other girls.”

Wolfe shook his head. “The Stokes girl was raped and strangled and dumped in the desert. But not the way Eddie would do it.” He held up a hand. “Don’t go asking for the report. Nobody ever wrote down the way Eddie mutilated and tortured those girls before he killed them. He was a monster.”