Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

The garage-apartment behind the house was where I was building an HO-scale model railroad, a scene of Phoenix in the 1950s. It was a place to store boxes of books, old clothes and things headed for Goodwill. I guess I could have rented out the upstairs to a boarder if I wanted to clean out about forty years of records stored from Grandfather’s dental practice.

I opened up the musty apartment and stared at the boxes and filing cabinets. Old patient records from my grandfather, the dentist. James Yarnell had said Grandfather had been their dentist way back when. Could it really be this easy? I started looking through files, getting a sense of how things were organized, or not. For decades, it seemed, Grandfather had an assistant named Mrs. Hill. I could barely remember a large woman with steel-wire stiff gray hair and thick fingers. Now I detected her steadfast handwriting on files before the 1950s, when typewritten labels took over. Her filing was quirky, made more so by the move of the records from Grandfather’s old office on McDowell after he had finally retired. It took some time. I mixed another martini, came back to the garage apartment and dug in again.

In about an hour, I heard the door from the house open and Peralta’s heavy tread came over the walkway to the apartment.

“What are you doing, Mapstone?” He stuck his head in the door.

I held up the files.

“Finding the Yarnell twins,” I said.

“I don’t hate all men,” Gretchen was saying. “Maybe I’m wary of the species in abstract. When your name is Gretchen Goodheart, it brings out the predator in some men.”

When she spoke, her mouth animated those double lines that became dimples when she smiled. They were like double parentheses etched into the smooth skin around her mouth.

“A good heart is good to find,” I said.

“I like a few individuals of the species very much.” She touched my arm.

It was Monday night. We were sitting in a booth at Los Olivos, the oldest Mexican restaurant in Scottsdale and one of my favorites. It was our first real date and the place was overflowing with winter visitors. Max Yarnell had been dead for a little more than two days.

We had been talking about Frances Richie, about the bad sense and bad luck to fall in with somebody like Jack Talbott. Gretchen had said he represented a type of man that made women hate all men.

Philosophy and enchiladas. I was glad for a break. Sunday had been nonstop for fourteen hours, as I trailed along with sheriff’s and police detectives as they interviewed people in the homicide of Max Yarnell.

He had been one of the richest men in the Southwest, and one of the loneliest. He had divorced his wife of thirty years back in the early 1990s and then had gone through a string of pretty young trophies, none of the women in the picture recently. His children lived out of state; one lived in London. He and his brother, James, hadn’t spoken in seven months. His assistant, the lovely Megan, was on vacation in San Diego. So apparently on Friday night, Max Yarnell had worked in the midtown skyscraper until around four, then had driven home. He lived alone, with a housekeeper and cook who only worked as needed. With business dinners and travel, Max Yarnell didn’t seem to have much time to enjoy his sweeping views.

All that work had produced enemies. The defense company owned by Yarneco had faced government investigations into alleged contracting fraud. Another Yarneco subsidiary had terminated an employee who had vowed to come to Phoenix and personally kill Max Yarnell. It was a promising lead until the man was found with a new job and a tight alibi in Seattle. But the biggest trouble came with the company’s ambition to open the first new copper mine in Arizona in years.

Yarneco was not only being sued by environmental groups, but also by its erstwhile partner, a giant mining conglomerate from Australia. The Aussies’ lawsuit claimed Yarneco had misrepresented key geologists’ reports about the site. Yarneco counter-sued for breach of contract. Only thirty million bucks were at stake.

And that was the gentlemanly part of the troubles. Earlier this year, the Gila County sheriff had investigated two arsons at the site office of Yarneco near the Arizona town of Superior. Then Yarneco headquarters started getting phone calls threatening worse if the project wasn’t stopped. The most recent phone call came the previous week. Unfortunately, with the too-smart-by-half mentality of corporations, Yarneco didn’t report this call to the cops. It just hired more bodyguards. On Sunday afternoon, I had listened to the tape on the twentieth floor of the Yarneco Tower.

“This is your last warning.” The voice had sounded strangely altered, like putting Harry Connick’s voice track through a blender. “If the mine isn’t stopped within a week, the criminal Max Yarnell will be executed.”

“That’s it?” Peralta had asked. One of the tough boys I first noticed in the oversized suit coats had nodded. Peralta had nearly spat on the carpet.

“And you didn’t think this was worth telling us about?”

He had just stared, slightly cross-eyed. “I was following orders, sir.”

How many times had we heard that in this bloody century?

I had thought the voice sounded male. Peralta had been sure it was a woman. He had it sent off to the FBI to be analyzed.

Yet outside of the security boys at his office, Max Yarnell wasn’t acting like someone who was afraid. Alarm company records showed the system at his house was not armed the night he was killed. Yarnell only armed it each night around midnight when he turned in, and while he was away. He left work early that day, saying he was going to work from home, but no, he hadn’t mentioned that he expected visitors that night.

All these thoughts kept replaying themselves as we sat in the restaurant.

“In a way,” Gretchen said, “it sounds like Frances had bad luck with men all her life.”

I savored a mouthful of cheese crisp.

“I mean, after Jack Talbott, she was kept in prison her entire life by the Yarnell brothers. That’s what you’re saying.”

“I guess so,” I said. “I guess one might take it personally if somebody kidnapped his brothers and they were never seen again.”

“We don’t even know they did it!” Gretchen shouted, holding my wrist tightly enough that it hurt.

“Sorry.” She let go. “When I drink, I get passionate.”

She was on her second margarita.

“Do you doubt they did it?”

“I don’t know, David. I don’t know.”

“The newspaper articles made it sound pretty open-and-shut.”

“The newspapers,” she said, her tone neutral. Then, “So what do you think happened with Max? Are you allowed to tell me?” The rich brown eyes fixed on me intensely. “Do you trust me, David?”

“You’re helping me on the kidnapping, so of course I trust you. On Max, we just don’t know much.”

“He sounded so powerful. So much money.”

“Didn’t do him much good in the end.”

Gretchen sipped her drink. “Do you wish you could have that kind of world? All that money? And you didn’t even have to work for it. It just seems like a madness nowadays. Twenty-five-year-old kids with millions in stock options. And here we are, two civil servants.”

“I envy the rich their options,” I said.

The waitress brought our check. One other couple came in and sat at the opposite end of the room. They weren’t talking to each other.

Gretchen said, “My dad’s a teacher, so I’ll never inherit much money.”

“Well, my grandfather was a dentist before dentists made big money.”

“And your parents?”

“They died in a small-plane crash. I was just a baby. Dad was a lawyer for the state. Mom was a music teacher. I didn’t really know them.”