Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

“Stay on the case,” he said, sipping reluctantly from my loathsome yuppie brew.

“And do what?” I was getting cranky from lack of sleep.

“What’s the next step in a case like this?” Peralta the academy instructor.

I threw my hands in the air and walked out. “I’m too fucking tired to employ the Socratic method on the chief fucking deputy.”

He appeared in the bathroom doorway as I was preparing to brush my teeth.

“Did you hear from your little friend today?”

“Lindsey. No.”

I didn’t answer beyond that.

“Sharon and I are having problems.”

I just started brushing, nice circular strokes that would make Grandfather happy.

“Do you know what it’s like to be in the spotlight all the time.” he said. “No, you don’t. It’s not like I can just go check into a hotel, without this showing up in New Times next week.” That was the alternative paper that had waged war with the sheriff for years.

He went on, “They’ve already got me as the next sheriff. Shit, I haven’t even decided to run. Anyway, my personal life is none of their business.”

I would leave the First Amendment arguments to Lorie Pope. I just kept brushing. Circular strokes. Rinse. Spit. Floss.

“I guess I should get a place of my own, quietly,” he went on. “I just…Hell, it seems like such an irrevocable step. I can’t figure out what she wants. How the hell can any man figure that out nowdays?”

I was a silent poster boy for dental diligence.

“Goddamn it, Mapstone. This isn’t easy for me. You know what I mean?”

I looked at him. His face seemed heavier and more careworn than I could remember. I looked back in the mirror for some vain reassurance.

“No, I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “It’s fine for you and Sharon to fuss over my personal life for fifteen years, and I don’t get to be let in to yours?” I wanted to say: You demand to know other people’s weaknesses but never show yours . But I was just dragging. I said, “Stay here when you want, for as long as you need.”

I cleaned up and turned out the light. “You know where the guest bedroom is. There’s an extra door key in the black pot on the kitchen counter. I’ll buy some Coors and try to keep the noise down from my reading.”

“Fuck you,” he called after me as I went in my bedroom. Then, very quietly: “Thanks.”

So began the strange life we fell into that season. Peralta and I acted like two bachelors sharing an old house. Most of the time, we barely saw each other. He was in no mood to cook grand dinners. One night we got takeout from Hong Kong Gourmet and rented two Dirty Harry movies-Peralta was contentedly critical of the actors’ combat shooting stances. We didn’t talk about love and women. He was neat and nearly invisible as a roommate, but a steady beachhead of Peralta’s clothes and county reports built up in the guest room.

I was grateful for the company. As the days went by without word from Lindsey, I grew tired of leaving clever, unanswered messages in her voice mail. The conviction grew on me that I might never see her again, at least as a lover. Or maybe I knew that at an instant when the phone rang at midnight, when she told me of her mother’s suicide. I put the copy of Dante back in the bookshelf. I kept the rose she left me in a little vase on the bedside table as the leaves turned black.

I grieved to myself, without the poleaxed pain that lived in my middle for the first year after Patty said she was leaving. That first time Lindsey made joyous love with me, I saw her as such a miraculous appearance in my life that I vowed not to jump into the vortex of hope and fear that breeds possessiveness. I just let her and us unfold, and I would never regret that. Maybe I always knew it was temporary, and if she didn’t run away first, well, maybe I would. So I grieved to myself and tried to create a world of small forward motion.

For the next few days, the Phoenix Police went away. I was the sole investigator on the Yarnell case, a sign that they saw me as both incompetent and harmless-not a bad place to be in a large bureaucracy. The only stipulation: I check in with Hawkins once a week. The skeletons case quickly departed from the minute-long attention span of the Phoenix media. Christmas was coming and a new Nordstrom was open in Scottsdale.

I did what I could.

I spent hours looking over old missing-persons reports from the 1930s and early 1940s. I hooked up with an FBI cold-case expert in Washington. I went through reams of old police logs. Anything to figure out whether twins other than the Yarnell brothers could have ended up walled into the basement passage beneath the Sunset Route Hotel.

James Yarnell gave me permission to examine the Yarnell family papers that were boxed up in the archives of the Arizona Historical Foundation and the Arizona Collection at the Burton Barr Central Library. So every morning I stopped off at my office, made myself not look for an e-mail or voice message from Lindsey, and then drove to the library for at least two solid hours’ work. It was like grad school all over again.

The papers told me that the Yarnell family enterprises were complicated even back in the 1940s. The Yarnell Land and Cattle Co. included ranches around the state, citrus, cotton, mining, even development of a “new subdivision outside Phoenix,” which was about half a mile from where my neighborhood sat in the inner-city today. Hayden Yarnell had been about seventy-five years old in 1941, but he had still managed his empire with precise notes and direct orders: when to move a herd to the High Country, how much to price some land near Bisbee, why he thought the company’s offices in the Luhr’s Tower were too expensive. His scrawl across yellowing memos and creaky ledgers was loopy with age and carried the flats and edges of an old fountain pen.

Yarneco was very much a family business back then. Morgan Yarnell, Hayden’s son and James and Max’s father, was a regular cast member in the corporate records. In the 1930s, it looked like he took over the cattle business. Then in 1939, Morgan was named vice president, putting him directly below the old man. Loan documents for farm land around the Valley and railroad shipping contracts were routinely signed by Morgan after 1939. Occasionally in a board document I saw the name Emma Yarnell Tully, Hayden’s daughter, but she seemed to have little to do with the company.

Those same documents might name Hayden Winthrop Yarnell, Jr., Morgan’s brother. His nephew, James Yarnell, called him the “bounder of the family.” But he was a cipher in the corporate records, and appeared little more in the family photos. I looked at a man with a long, weak face, hardly the face of a bounder. He was two years older than Morgan, and as far as I could tell he never married, had no children, and lived off the family fortune.

One afternoon, I came across a slender, vanity-press volume to commemorate Hayden Yarnell’s seventy-fifth birthday. He’d come a long way from the gunfight at Gila City. My finger slid across grainy black-and-white images of the patriarch with the snowy, full head of hair. The fierceness was still in his eyes, undimmed by the stiff white collar and heavy wool suit and decades of comfortable wealth. He looked so out of place, standing in the foyer of his mansion, fingering his watch chain. I wanted to see him as my mind’s eye did-the cowboy, the miner, the quintessence of pioneer Arizona.

The watch chain. My eye lingered.

Here was a family photo, with a caption identifying Morgan Yarnell and his sons, Andrew, Woodrow, Max, and James. It put me back in my chair for a moment, to see the actual faces. The twins were dressed in Western shirts, boots, toy guns, staring menacingly at the camera. Innocent little faces with that long Yarnell nose. Disappeared for half a century, little boys lost.