Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

In another hour, I rolled out of the desert into Florence. It’s a typical one-industry town, but instead of coal or textiles, it depends on the forcible detention of human beings. Some of them are bad-break losers who never connected with the Franklin Planner map of life, others are as feral as the guys we met on the street Monday night, who’d literally just as soon kill you as look at you. Either way, they were the commodity that allowed these desert Florentines to scratch out a living.

Not too many years ago, the Arizona State Prison was a tough joint cut off by bleached walls and miles of arid wasteland from the fine people of the Grand Canyon State. Now it was one of many facilities run in the area by the corrections department. But if humanity regained its virtue tomorrow, the entire non-convict population of Florence would be out of work.

Frances Richie was neither in the big central prison nor in the women’s unit. A guard directed me past a half dozen one-story modern buildings-they were right out of the Cold War missile silo school of architecture-until I came to one with a sign that said: UNIT 13. An appropriate sign of bad luck for what had been a twenty-four-year-old woman who fell in with the wrong kind of man. I checked in, showed credentials, signed papers, and was shown into a large, sunny room stocked with institutional tables and chairs. In a moment, a door buzzed and a woman in a loose denim jumper and clogs came in and shook my hand.

“I’m Heather Amis,” she said. “I’m a social worker here.” She was in her thirties and so tan that her skin, lips, hair, and eyebrows were varying shades of brown. Only her eyes stood out a bit, two green orbs amid the brown. She had a learned calm, but her words weren’t: “I have to tell you, I was hoping you wouldn’t come.”

“It’s always good to be wanted,” I said.

“You were very insistent on the phone that you come today,” she said. “I read the Republic. Finding the bodies of the Yarnell twins.”

She motioned me to sit and I folded into a hard plastic chair made for a midget with a strong back.

“Miss Richie is in her eighties. She has diabetes and a heart condition. She can’t be in the general population at the women’s units. She’s senile. So she’s here.”

“What is here?” I asked. “It’s not exactly prison-like.”

“We’re kind of a nursing home,” Heather Amis said.

“Why not just release her?”

“She was an accessory to a capital crime and for years the Yarnell family opposed it. Yarnell money has elected a lot of governors and legislatures. Parole boards pay attention.”

“Do they still oppose it?”

“I don’t know, Deputy.” A flush of anger crept into her tan cheeks. “She’s been left to rot in the system for decades. I may be the first person who ever took an interest in her.”

Then she kind of deflated. “Anyway, Miss Richie has nowhere to go. She was an orphan. No family. No friends outside the walls. What would she be released to?”

She shook her head and ran slender brown hands through curling brown hair. “You’re a cop, so you have no reason to cut anybody a break. And most of the people I see in here, I can understand that. But, Jesus, the state of Arizona has taken this woman’s entire life. Can’t you just let her die in peace?”

We sat in silence for a moment. There was nothing to debate. The truth is, cops routinely deal with the marginal, the ignored, the alone, the people who fall through the cracks, as Lindsey says. But Frances Richie was all that in the extreme. Finally, I said as gently as I could, “May I see her?”

“She’s not really responsive,” Heather said. “I’ve been working in the unit for six months, and she’s never said more than five words to me. But, whatever.”

She walked out in a whirl of loose denim and clopping clogs and came back in about ten minutes, backing in the door, pulling a wheelchair.

Somebody said a great novelist could see the beautiful young girl inside the old woman. It would have been difficult with Frances Richie, even though the old news photos showed a young woman who was somewhere between cute and beautiful. Now her face was dominated by an enormous double chin, bulbous nose and battleship gray eyes poking from bony temples-the skull starting to come out at last-all mounted on a body long since overtaken by starchy food, inactivity, and disease. Heather Amis turned her toward me, knelt down and told her who I was.

She just stared and nobody said anything for a long time. In the silence, the room’s smell of Lysol covering urine became apparent. Somewhere in the background, an electric something-or-other hummed.

Finally, I said the only thing that seemed to matter. “We found the bodies of Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell.”

Frances Richie just stared that watery, unfocused stare, her eyes fixed on a place we couldn’t see.

I went on: “We found them bricked up in a wall, down in a tunnel in a building near Union Station in downtown Phoenix.”

Heather shot me a nasty look. I could see Frances Richie breathing harder, her bulky chest laboring to fill her lungs.

“Miss Richie,” I said, “tell us how those boys got in that building.”

“Is this really necessary?” Heather whispered, looking at me like I was the vilest man alive. “I’m going to get some coffee. I can’t listen to this.” She clopped off down a hallway, and I was alone with Frances Richie. But the old woman looked out into the sunlight, her face an unreadable ruin of wrinkles and fat. I stood and walked maybe ten feet, to a grimy window.

Outside, brand-new sidewalks cut across the flat brown earth of the desert, heading to other buildings past barbed wire, elaborate gates and security cameras perched like electronic vultures. On the other side of the parking lot, a group of male convicts wearing orange jumpsuits were doing something in a cotton field. What was the tunnel into Frances Richie?

I said, “I saw the photo of you in the dark dress the day you were brought back to Phoenix. Seemed like a very pretty dress.”

I continued to look outside, just like she was doing.

I heard a word that sounded like “blue.” Then she said, very clearly and not in an old-lady voice, “It was navy blue. It was the first store-bought dress I ever had in my life.”

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to break the spell.

“You bought it in Phoenix?”

“It was a present. From someone very dear to me.”

I spoke carefully. “From Jack? Jack Talbott?”

I turned to face her and she merely shook her head. Then her voice seemed to gather strength and timbre from being used again. “Jack Talbott. I haven’t thought of him in years.”

Now it was my turn to be silent.

“He was just a boy, really. We were so young then. He had a hard life and didn’t know any other way of getting by in the world, so he drank, he ran with women, he fought, he had a very quick temper.” She paused.

“He was your lover?”

She strained to hear. “Lover?” she asked loudly. “They told me never to talk about that, never.”

“It’s okay.”

She inhaled loudly. “He always treated me like a lady, like a queen.”

“How did you meet him?” I leaned against the wall. Maybe the distance between us made her feel safe.

“I worked at the Owl Pharmacy on Adams Street,” she said. Her sentences had a very even cadence until the last two words, when they felt an emphasis whether they needed it there or not. “Is it still there?”

I shook my head.

“We’d come from Oklahoma in 1936 and papa worked off and on in the produce sheds down by the railroad tracks. But a truck backed over him one day and he died.” She paused and breathed heavily. “So mother worked as a maid, but she died of TB, and I got a job at the drug store. I could eat lunch for free at the soda fountain.”