Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)
Gen. Omar Bradley did algebra problems to relax. I was never any good at math, so I drove. East on Dunlap into Sunnyslope. Count Basie in the CD player. Why had I never learned to do anything useful, like play jazz piano? South on Seventh Avenue, past sleeping neighborhoods of large, well-landscaped houses. The guy on the phone was right: Nobody would miss me. Hell, the cops didn’t even believe me. Left turn on Glendale Avenue, through the thinning traffic of a late Thursday night. Eyes checking the rearview mirror more than usual. Did he follow Susan to the mall? Or did he follow me?
Across the Arizona Canal and up Lincoln Drive into the foothills of Paradise Valley. The lights gave way a bit as the city neighborhoods were replaced by acre lots and privacy walls. A black Saab whisked past me at eighty and disappeared into the distance. My stomach reflexively tightened. Phaedra landed in the middle of a drug rip-off. By Greg Townsend? So they kill them both? It had the terrible thoroughness of drug-related homicides. South on Tatum Boulevard, saguaro cactus and palm trees flashing in the headlights. Basie cooking. Camelback Mountain looming gigantic, straight ahead, a necklace of lights around its base that predated the prohibition on building on the mountains.
Except-why was Greg Townsend so calm when I showed up at his house? Why was he even at his house if he had ripped off a dope dealer and was hiding out? And why did he call me in the first place? Could it be as simple as Peralta was hinting? That Phaedra ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time-with the wrong man? Just like we thought about Rebecca Stokes. No, no.
 
; I made a U-turn and headed back to Lincoln, then took Twenty-fourth Street back toward downtown. I needed the view and it didn’t disappoint me: a vast sea of lights stretching west and south to the horizon. Off in the distance, the dark form of South Mountain and the Estrellas contained the brightness. TV towers on the South Mountains blinked red. City of American refugees, fast money and fresh starts. City of uneasy memories. City of lost sisters. My city.
Phaedra. She wasn’t murdered with shotgun blasts or a Colombian necktie or any of the usual gruesome killing methods of the drug world. She was killed in a way that resembled a high-profile murder from forty years before, which had recently been in the newspapers again-a story involving a certain unemployed history professor turned deputy sheriff. None of it made sense.
I dropped back down into the city neighborhoods below Camelback Road, heading south on Twenty-fourth Street, thinking about what the detective had said. No, I wasn’t a real deputy. But I had never been a “real” anything. When all my little friends had siblings to fight with, I was an only child. Later, when they played student radicals, I became a deputy. I was too left-wing for the cops and too right-wing for the ivory tower. When the sexual revolution was at its peak, I couldn’t get a date. I could never stop thinking and just go along with the crowd. I could never fit that one-dimensional, sound-bite mold of late-twentieth-century man. In a postliterate society, I read books. In an age of moral relativism, I chased after things like truth and honor. As people obsessed about their health, I enjoyed Mexican food and liquor and good cigars. When Mike Peralta told me to keep out of a murder case, I remained mired in it.
Predestination or free will? A fellow named Erasmus couldn’t settle the issue, so I wouldn’t even try. Basie might have known the right answer, lodged somewhere in that tight congress of piano and brass and drums.
I drove through the empty streets of downtown, past skyscrapers lighted only for the janitors. Past the new baseball stadium and the new science museum. The America West Arena preened glamorously on the corner of Jefferson and Third Street, THE SHOWPLACE OF THE SOUTHWEST, a massive electric sign proclaimed to a deserted street. Basketball season was over, and it had been a bad one for the Suns.
I turned down Fourth Avenue and drove past the charming Spanish mission-style Union Station, which sat dark and abandoned. Rebecca Stokes had stepped off a train here in 1959, when the building was the center of the city’s life. I could imagine the stainless-steel passenger cars and the rush of people under the lamps of the station platform. Catch a cab home and…
“What happened to you, Rebecca?” I asked aloud. “Whom did you go meet? You must have been thinking about him as the train pulled in.”
Now the trains were gone from Union Station. Nobody home. All alone in the desert. All alone in the world. I thought momentarily of Patty. Two Phoenix PD units sat across from the new City Hall, distracted by a traffic stop, happily unaware of me. I had come within a heartbeat, a moment’s judgment, of killing a man tonight. I had come within a mechanical malfunction of being dead myself. Basie was done. I continued north in silence, over the underground freeway, past my old grade school, slowly driving toward home. The rearview mirror was dark and empty.
Chapter Nineteen
The newsroom of the Arizona Republic, on the ninth floor of the paper’s brand-new downtown tower, looked more like an insurance company office than a scene out of The Front Page. No stogie-chomping city editor. No screaming eccentrics in green eyeshades. No clattering typewriters, jangling phones, or reporters in fedoras yelling, “Get me rewrite, sweetheart.” Just decorator-driven corporate blandness against picture-window views of the mountains. The subdued background sound of computer keystrokes was the only noise. Men in beards and women in sensible shoes walked briskly past me with notebooks in their hands and sour looks on their faces. I gave my name to a receptionist who looked about twelve years old and waited for Lorie Pope.
The first time I saw her was on a murder scene in 1980, when I was a green deputy standing watch out in the heat and she was a young reporter intern, just arrived from Jersey, who couldn’t get past the police line. Maybe we were both rookies kept on the outside and maybe she just took pity on me, but, with eighties female assertiveness, she asked for my phone number. I was on the rebound from Julie, so Lorie and I ended up dating for a few months. After that, we remained friends, and after I moved away, I tried to look her up when I came back to visit. I knew she’d been in and out of two marriages, converted in turn to Buddhism and Judaism, and wrote an award-winning book on organized crime (I even got a brief mention in the acknowledgments). She left Arizona to work at newspapers in Seattle and L.A., then came back to the Republic as the head of its investigations team.
“David! My God!”
We hugged, a long, genuine hug. Lorie Pope was lean, tall, and tan, with dark hair cut fashionably short. Although she had changed over the years-grown into her face, is that the expression? — she looked at least ten years younger than I knew she was. And her laugh was just as I remembered it: uninhibited, infectious, wonderful.
She patted the holster on my belt. “Things have gotten tougher in the classroom, no?”
“I could have used it there, actually.” I laughed, and she led me out of the building, walking her brisk, purposeful walk.
“You’re quite the hero,” she said. “Uncovering information about a forty-year-old murder case, and one involving a relative of the next governor no less.”
“Is that the prediction for Brent McConnico?” I asked.
“If not this next election, then the one after.”
“He took me to lunch,” I said. “Seemed nice enough, for a politician.”
“I think he’s slimy,” Lorie said.
The heat of the sidewalk was burning my feet. I asked her why she didn’t like McConnico.
“When you want an afternoon’s primer on Arizona politics, and if you’re making the martinis, I’ll tell you. For one thing, he’s married and he’s tried on more than one occasion to pick me up.”
Five minutes through the midday hell and we were in a cool, dark booth in a restaurant at Arizona Center. She ordered a Bloody Mary. Wearing badge and gun, I settled for a diet Coke.
“So you’re really back at the SO?”
“I don’t know where I am,” I said. “I thought I was picking up a little consulting work from Mike Peralta while I tried to find a new teaching job. But universities aren’t exactly clamoring to hire me. I got a letter from a dean at Arizona State last month, and he actually said I wrote too clearly to be taken seriously as an historian today.”
“You’re equal opportunity-challenged in these politically correct times, my love,” she said.