Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

So I took him into the little study and he took over Grandfather’s desk chair. With the tube on ESPN, he became a contented self-contained unit. I went back into the living room and read for a while, James Morris’ Pax Britannica , immersing myself in the adventures, characters and follies of the British Empire. It was the kind of book I wish I could write, but now, at forty, I knew I might never have the time or the talent. Still, Lindsey gave me a bookmark with George Eliot’s quote: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Later, when I could hear Peralta snoring, I went to the linen closet, pulled out a comforter, carefully spread it over him and shut down the house for the night.

The trill of the phone pulled me out of a hard, dreamless sleep into a sun-filled room. I was just in my bedroom, seven forty-six on the digital clock next to the photo of Lindsey from the San Diego trip.

Lorie Pope’s voice jumped at me. “David, did I wake you?”

“No,” I groaned and swung out of bed onto unsteady feet.

“You always needed at least seven hours of sleep, as I recall,” she said. “So last night must have been interesting.”

“Not the way you think.”

“Really?” she said. “Isn’t that a wonderful word? Interesting. May you live in interesting times.” She laughed her fine, crystal laugh.

I pulled on some shorts and walked to the kitchen, where I poured orange juice and drank it in one long swallow.

“I don’t have anything new to leak, my dear.” I pulled aside the blinds and looked into the yard. The oleanders and bougainvillea needed trimming, the joys of a nine-month growing season.

“I’m calling to make a deposit, my love,” Lorie said. “It’s only fair.”

I could hear computer keys clattering in the background of her voice.

“Remember your skeletons in the wall? And the man who was executed in the kidnapping? Jack Talbott? Remember he had a girl with him?”

“Right. Frances Richie.”

“She’s still alive,” Lorie said.

I sat at the wicker kitchen table, my heart pounding a little harder. “Really?”

“I shit you not,” she said. “She is still at the women’s unit at Florence, where she has been since 1942.”

“How did you find this out?”

“I’d like to say it was terrific shoe-leather reporting, but actually, somebody called and left the tip this morning. One of the clerks passed it along to me.”

I thanked her and hung up. Frances Richie had been twenty-four when she was arrested with Jack Talbott in Nogales. That would make her about eighty-two now. A true life sentence.

My head a little clearer, I went to see if everything of the night before had merely been a strange dream. The living room was sunny and serene behind the picture window, the ceiling-high bookshelves familiarly pleasing. I walked into the study and there was no Peralta. But the comforter was left folded on the chair with military precision and the newspaper was set precisely in the middle of the desk.

May you live in interesting times.

Over at the Starbucks at Seventh Street and McDowell, I stopped to buy my usual vente, non-fat, no-whip mocha. I sat outside at a round table surrounded by trim, young white professionals, all attractive, all well off, all unsure whether they really want to live in this wonderful little historic district of stucco homes surrounded by the inner city. They clutched their lattes and the alarm buttons to their Range Rovers and hurried in and out.

And why not be afraid? Look at this morning’s Republic . In addition to another story about the discovery of the skeletons, it was chock-a-block full of post-modern mayhem right here in paradise. The centerpiece was about the pressure to catch the Harquahala Strangler. There was more in the B-section: some teenagers in Gilbert thought they were vampires and murdered a twelve-year-old girl to prove it; a visiting nurse was raped and killed in Mesa; some gangbangers tried to ambush two Phoenix cops out in Maryvale. And a string of shootings on the west side had been tied together and now police were seeking one suspect. He now had a name, too: the Grand Avenue Sniper. Otherwise, the Cardinals were losing, the big Indian casino south of town was booming, everything with a “dot-com” attached to the name was making millions and the desert was disappearing into the city at the rate of an acre an hour.

I finished the sports section when the cellular phone rang. I hoped it would be Lindsey. It was Peralta.

“Progress,” he demanded.

“What? It’s not even nine in the morning.” I was cranky. “I could have briefed you at the house last night. Or this morning, I mean, at two o’clock.”

“You’re a tragic fucking figure,” he said.

“Fuck you. I’m sure we’ve found Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell, but PPD is going by the book. DNA tests and all.”

Peralta grunted through the cellular system.

“The case was initially investigated by Joe Fisher. He was a legendary detective on the Phoenix force. That’s cool.”

“If you say so, Mapstone.”

“Why do you care?” I asked.

“Because you’re my project.”

Before I could respond, he said, “I see your old girlfriend had a big story about the Yarnell case. Funny how that happens.”

“Well, Mike, we work for America’s Toughest Sheriff. Theater and all that.”

“Why do they keep using that bad photo of me?”

“I want to go out to Arizona State Prison,” I said. “Can you grease the skids?”

“What? You teaching history to the cons?”

“I’ll laugh when I wake up. Frances Richie is still alive out there. She was the woman arrested with Jack Talbott in the Yarnell case.”

“Jesus. We have judges letting murderers out in seven years. What the hell is she still doing in prison?”

“One of many questions I want to ask.”

“What questions?” I could see him sitting back at his big desk, shaking his head. “We know who did it. What else is there to know?”

“Hey, you want me to work the case. Let me work the case. I want to know how the bodies got into that old warehouse. I want to know where that pocket watch came from. I want to know why the chief deputy doesn’t seem to have enough to do so he has to micromanage me.”

“All right, let me call the warden,” he said. Then, “I put your Lindsey on the Harquahala case.”

“So I heard,” I said. “I don’t know if she’s ‘my’ Lindsey, though.”

“Really?” His voice changed. “Why is that?”

“Because these are the nineties. At least for a little while longer.”

Now it was his turn to search for a comeback. I said, “Three years is a long time to come up dry on a case like the Harquahala Strangler.”

“Yeah,” he said, “and you haven’t had every law enforcement agency and media outlet in the West second-guessing you, either.”

“You’re a tragic fucking figure, Chief Peralta.”

He ignored me. “It’s a serial killer: some nerdy, unemployed, impotent white guy with a rage, like Kirk Douglas in that movie they show on cable.”

My mind went blank for a moment. “I think you mean Michael Douglas.”

“Whatever. We’ll catch him.”

“So let me drink my mocha.”

There was a long pause. “Mocha?” Then the line went dead.

The highway from Phoenix to Florence once traveled for miles through citrus groves until it hit Apache Junction, then turned south into the desert. Nothing but two lanes through the cactus and hard cracked earth for another hour or more. Now the highway was a freeway. The citrus groves were gone, replaced by closely spaced subdivisions and trailer courts, shopping centers and fast-food restaurants. The only familiar sights came from Superstition Mountain looming in the east and the desert at the end of the urban pipeline, and these seemed at risk. I’d always been an Arizona libertarian, reared on Barry Goldwater values of individual freedom and cussed independence. But every day that Phoenix ate another twenty-four acres of desert I was turning into an environmental extremist.