Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

“They probably can even read the little card that has the Miranda warning.”

He laughed once, high and breathy and alien. “You’re a clever one.”

“Well,” I said, “Lucky for you I don’t hold a grudge.”

“Nixon would go crazy, you know.” Abernathy didn’t meet my eyes. He stared over my shoulder, at the early lunch congregants at Patriot’s Park. “One time I saw him nearly beat a suspect to death. Would have, if I hadn’t stopped him. He was drinking all the time. Probably taking drugs, too. Then he fell in with those bounty hunters…”

“Jack, what do you think this logbook means?”

He kept his gaze over my shoulder. “How the hell would I know that?”

“You brought it up, Jack.”

“Shit.” His face reddened, evening out the patches of red and white. “I don’t have a clue what it means. I don’t know what you’re getting at.” He fixed me with his little eyes. They were liquid gray. “Don’t you know what this kind of thing can do to this department? Look what’s happened over in L.A. with the Rampart scandal. Months and months of allegations, careers ruined. Politicians make hay over this. And in the end nothin’ changes. I tell you one thing, the only people it helps is the politicians and the bad guys.”

I started to speak but he cut me off. “You ain’t never gonna get cops to roll over on each other.” His voice had changed. Never polished, it had dropped into a rougher clone of itself. I could almost imagine him interrogating a suspect back when he was on the streets. “There’s a code of silence, Professor. You think anybody’s going to talk about this log, even if it’s true?”

I said, “I guess if we have badge numbers, that might lubricate some memories.” He worked his heavy jaw again. Maybe he didn’t know that detail. I went on. “This isn’t some petty-ass IA investigation, like over

in Mesa where the male and female officers were taking breaks on duty to go off and fuck. We’re talking about murder and attempted murder.”

“You don’t know that,” he squealed. A pair of young women walking by stared at us. “You got your suspect in both shootings. This O’Keefe character. And, hell, with Dick Nixon, nothin’ he was involved in would surprise me.” I hadn’t heard someone use his nickname in years. “Bad things have a way of comin’ back around.”

“What were the River Hogs, Jack?”

“Bunch of idiots drinkin’,” he said, no hesitation. “When they’d get off duty, they’d drive down into some deserted spot in the riverbed, drink and party all night.”

“Did you ever go with them?”

His mouth puckered and he shook his head. “I know you’re tryin’ to get the old white guy. I’m not ‘with it’ in this department. I don’t read the same books as you. I’m not politically correct. But I’m sure as hell not a dirty cop.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I supported you for acting sheriff.”

Thanks, I guess, I thought.

Suddenly, he calmed down. “OK, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll get moving on those prisoner transfers. That oughta help. We wouldn’t want a jail riot your first week in office.” He added, “You looked good on television Wednesday. We need somebody like you, clever.”

He clapped me on the arm and walked away.

“Jack,” I called, and he turned to face me, all belly and jowls. “What about it? You ever go out with the River Hogs?”

He just gave me a little smile, raised a fat finger to his lips-shhhhhhh-then turned and walked on.

There was a disturbance off to my left, and my involuntary muscles sent my hand reaching for the Python under my coat. But it was just some domestic thing, woman and man and their lawyers arguing. A pair of burly young deputies intervened. The male deputies like their hair cut close these days. When I was a young deputy, the fashion was just the opposite: The old guys like Abernathy had crew cuts and the young cops tried to get away with hair as long as possible. I had lived long enough to see a cycle.

So I jaywalked and caught up with Lindsey.

“What did he want?” she asked.

“I guess to tell me I’m clever.”

Chapter Sixteen

Friday afternoon skulked by, passed in difficult meetings. The most difficult of all I postponed a day. After I left Abernathy, I drove out to the capitol and went into the mud-colored modern tower that looks very much like the Madison Street Jail. Inside, however, are offices for the governor, attorney general, and other high honchos. The thing looms like a bad hangover behind the lovely little capitol building, built in celebration of statehood in 1912 and crowned with a dome of copper.

I was there to meet the attorney general, and she saw me alone in a small conference room lined with new lawbooks and smelling of copy-machine toner. The AG was a popular Democrat in a Republican state, and she listened intently as I briefed her on the Nixon logbook. She wanted to have her office enter the investigation at once, of course. I should have expected that. These were dirty cops, not some garden-variety Arizona real estate scam. And if my theory was true, they were dirty cops who had murdered Dean Nixon and attempted to murder Peralta. I was more surprised by my reaction: defensive, testy-as if I’d been a bureaucrat in the Sheriff’s Office for years, as if I were Abernathy.