Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

“That’s not good enough,” he said harshly. I felt a flush spread up my face, angry and embarrassed to be brought up short by him. He went on: “Max Yarnell had a stake driven through his damned chest last night right after he told you he needed to talk to you. Doesn’t that raise your curiosity a bit, professor?”

I looked at the smog. “I’ll get you some answers.”

“I want to know if this homicide had anything to do with what you’re working on. This isn’t just a little Phoenix Police matinee anymore, Mapstone. It’s a real case. Try not to fuck up.”

“I’ll see if I can measure up.” I turned and strode to the door.

“Mapstone,” he called. When I turned, a mischievous grin momentarily played across over his dark features. “Hope you got a good night’s rest.”

I shrugged and walked back into the big room. I wanted out of Max Yarnell’s big house, back into my big bed with Gretchen where all the violence of the world couldn’t reach us. I sidestepped a Scottsdale cop making a diagram and an evidence technician setting up some high-tech contraption. I made my own mental notes. The room was neatly arranged considering the physical violence that had occurred. Whoever attacked Max Yarnell did it with suddenness and precision. He was probably someone Yarnell knew and let into the house. Yarnell was dressed in slacks and golf shirt. I looked around for a glass that might have held his libations, and sure enough one sat on a table by two leather chairs on the other side of the room. A cordless phone sat nearby. The evidence technician was preparing to bag them up.

Then I saw it.

Something cold crawled up my shoulders and slithered slowly up the back of my neck. I didn’t say a word. But Hernandez, the evidence tech, was watching me, and he followed my eyes.

“Christ!” he said, and then all the cops were looking, too.

It was on one of the shelves behind Max Yarnell’s desk. You might have missed it in the sheer size of the room and the distraction of a man sprawled on the floor with a piece of petrified wood sticking out of his chest. But I knew what it was instantly. A doll. Just like the one that had been delivered to my office a week ago, only this one didn’t have a little sheriff’s star. Instead, its hands were smeared bloody red.

I sensed Peralta behind me. “What the hell is that goddamned thing?”

That was when I realized how long it had been since I took a breath.

Patrick Blair dropped me off at home a little after five. Gretchen was gone and the house felt huge and forlorn and freighted with the knowledge of how quickly life turns against human beings. I wanted to call her, but I realized I didn’t even have her phone number. And for a long moment, I was relieved that I didn’t. I couldn’t say exactly why. Then I didn’t want to be alone. Even Peralta would have been welcome.

The dusk gathered outside the picture window, a fading, unfocused, weightless part of the day. Even the winter lawns looked dead. The lights hadn’t come on in the neighboring houses and it looked as if the neighborhood had been abandoned a long time ago. I sat on the living room staircase and thumbed through the books on the tall shelves. The Price of Admiralty by John Keegan, one of my books. The House by the Buckeye Road , one of Grandfather’s. A heavily thumbed Modern Researcher by Barzun and Graff, a classic when I was being trained as a historian. Inside lurked a five-by-seven color photo of Lindsey, the desert wind whipping her dark hair. Back in the days when she was smiling at me with lust and joy.

The phone cut into the silence like a scream.

“David? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You don’t sound fine.” It was Lorie Pope. I told her I was okay, and, carrying the cordless phone, walked into the kitchen. I peered into the refrigerator, which held leftovers from half a dozen ethnic restaurants, and a fresh case of Coors for Peralta. I got out ice and started making a martini.

“Max Yarnell,” Lorie declared, as if she had spoken a whole paragraph.

I sighed and started mixing the drink.

“Are you making martinis?” Lorie demanded. “Why don’t you make one for me?”

“Because martinis blur judgment,” I said. “You told me that years ago.”

“So? It would do you good.”

“I would bore you. I was never dangerous enough.”

“Yeah, but we could have fun while I was reaching that self-destructive conclusion.” She gave a deep, sensual giggle. I imagined her too-wide smile and the toss of her short dark hair. I sealed up the gin and ice in Grandfather’s deco cocktail shaker and I gave the concoction a good workout.

I took out one of the Neiman Marcus martini glasses my colleagues had given me as a going-away present from San Diego State University when I lost the tenure sweepstakes. I had a lot of going-away presents. The clear fluid slipped delightfully into the glass, little frigates of ice cruising the surface.

“Max Yarnell,” Lorie said again.

“I honestly don’t know much. I’m as baffled as everybody else. You know, ‘police are baffled.’ That’s me.”

“David!” Her voice was suddenly taut. “He’s one of the richest and most prominent men in the state, and he’s been murdered less than three weeks after it seemed like the Yarnell kidnapping had been solved? This whole thing stinks.”

“I don’t doubt it, but how?”

“You’re the one with the Ph.D., my love.”

“Fat lot of good it’s done me.”

“Look, I’d love to play career one-downmanship, but I’ve got a deadline. What’s Peralta holding back?”

“Don’t put me in that position, Lorie.”

She sighed and said, “I’d like to put you in a position all right, but I guess you’ve got to go drink martinis out of Leslie’s navel.”

I dropped an olive into the martini like making a green wish. “Lindsey.”

“Whatever,” Lorie said. “Give me something, David. How was Max Yarnell killed? Gun? Knife? Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic ? The PIO won’t tell me a goddamned thing.”

“You know the cops always hold back details, stuff the suspect alone knows. And you know I can’t tell you that. “We’ll talk.”

“Hey,” she said. “Be careful, David. I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into but it’s pretty heavy-duty. Watch that sweet melancholy-intellectual ass of yours.”

She could always make me smile.

I put Count Basie on the stereo and went back to the staircase. From the perch of the carpeted steps, I savored the martini. Gotten myself into something heavy-duty, but what? What could a 58-year-old kidnapping have to do with a murder that happened yesterday? Hadn’t the DNA test said those skeletons weren’t even the Yarnells? Then what had Max Yarnell wanted to talk about with me? This same Max Yarnell who had his assistant pull the property records on the Triple A Storage Warehouse and then pretended to be surprised to learn his company owned it. Was he already dead as I was sitting at the gate, pushing the little red button on the communications box? Would it have made a difference if I had immediately agreed to a meeting? What was I missing?

It could all be a coincidence. Maybe he just surprised a burglar; maybe he only wanted to complain to me again about my lack of respectful behavior toward him, only this time with the liberating influence of alcohol; maybe he pissed off some environmental activists who decided to return him to the soil a little early.

That all could make sense, until you had to figure in that damned doll.

I went back to scanning book titles. All that history. The only problem was the history I didn’t know. Out the picture window, the world appeared dark and profound, my valley of low ranch house rooftops and big sky, where stranglers, snipers and killers of rich men with secrets did their restless trades. I thought about what Philip Roth said: “the terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides.” Then I heard James Yarnell’s voice in my head and I jumped to my feet.