Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

I hadn’t been asked that question in a while. “America in the Progressive era and the Depression.”

“To each his own,” she said. “Pardon my sexist language. I specialized in eighteenth-century England.” The merry eyes reasserted themselves. “But my dad also made me learn to type. So you’re lucky you have a skill to fall back on.”

She waddled over to a bookshelf filled with file boxes labeled in old-lady-scrawl. “Can you believe the newspaper wanted to throw all this out?

“So,” she said, “which one of you wants to know about Hayden Yarnell? The history teacher, or the lawman?”

She pulled out a large file box, blew the dust off and set it on a Formica table. “The year was 1941. Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened yet. Phoenix was still a small farming town, with some dude ranches and tuberculosis sanitariums-they called the patients ‘lungers’ then. Hayden Yarnell was the richest man in the state. He had a big house on South Mountain. It burned in 1942, not long after the kidnapping. He died soon after that. Talk about a string of bad luck. The ruins of the foundation are probably still out there. He also kept an apartment at the Hotel Westward Ho, like the rest of the Phoenix elite. Rumor had it he kept a mistress there, too. Back then, they called the big men in town the ‘summer bachelors.’ When it turned hot, they’d ship their wives off to someplace cool, and their summer girls would show up.”

All this was before she even looked into the files.

“What if I told you we found the skeletons of two children, entombed in a basement wall in a downtown warehouse owned by the Yarnell family? And somebody is now killing off the remaining Yarnell brothers.”

She exhaled from somewhere in her ankles. “I’d say I need a drink.” She took my mason jar and banged into the small kitchen. “You need one, too. Bourbon is the house specialty.”

“Easy on the dose for me.”

She returned and leaned on the table, watching me intently. “You found the Yarnell twins? Holy crap. Maybe I’ll have to subscribe to the newspaper again.”

“What do you remember about the time of the kidnapping?”

“Well,” she eased herself into a chair, “everything. It was Thanksgiving, an unusually cold autumn. Do you know we used to get hard frosts in Phoenix before they paved everything over? Anyway, I’d been at the paper for about three years. We all had our eyes on the war in Europe, and we knew it was just a matter of time before Japan jumped on us. But Phoenix was so isolated then, and things were very quiet.”

“Morgan Yarnell waited a week before reporting the kidnapping to the police.”

She nodded. “Strange, huh? He was the father of the twins. But the fact that they waited to call the cops was never very widely reported. The family had pull with the newspaper publishers, so no surprise there. I assume they figured they could handle it themselves, and any publicity might make the kidnapper kill the twins. Remember, the Lindbergh kidnapping was still very fresh in everyone’s minds. Talk about a media circus. The Yarnells were very well known, much more so than today.”

“But did Morgan get a ransom note, or what? It’s not clear from the record.”

She opened the file box and leafed through some yellowed papers. She produced some reading glasses from her pocket and angled them on her nose. “He told the police that the twins were taken from their rooms at the Yarnell mansion on South Mountain on the night of November 27, and their nanny discovered them missing the next day. He received a telephone call that day demanding a hundred thousand dollars be put in a locker at Union Station. He complied, but after a week the boys still weren’t returned, so he went to the police. No mention of a note or any communication beyond the call.”

“Did they have direct dial in town then? Maybe an operator helped the kidnapper place the call. I wish somebody had tried to find where that call came from.”

“Honey, I wish I was twenty years old with a cheerleader’s body, still with my IQ, of course. Nobody was asking these questions. When Jack Talbott was caught, everyone was convinced justice was done. Wait.” She leafed through a file of yellowed newspaper clippings and paper. “Maybe not everyone. Here, look at this.”

It was newspaper copy paper, flimsy and brittle with age. It was datelined Florence, Arizona, July 20, 1942. I read the lead aloud:

“‘Convicted kidnapper John Henry “Jack” Talbott was executed in Arizona’s gas chamber early this morning, but not before his last words accused Hayden “Win” Yarnell Jr. of masterminding the kidnapping of his four-year-old nephews.’”

I sat up straight. “I never saw this story.”

“That’s because it didn’t run in the newspaper. The publisher himself spiked it. The publisher was a good friend of the Yarnells, remember, and this Talbott character was hardly the most reliable witness. So the account of his last words never ran.”

Another Marlboro flamed to life. She swept away the smoke with an incantatory wave of her bony hand.

“As I said, Mapstone, it was a small town. People talked. They knew Win Yarnell-that’s the name Hayden Jr. went by-they knew he was the black sheep. He drank, womanized. His wife left him. He had a terrible gambling habit. Used to gamble in the old Duece-they bulldozed it in the ’70s to make that horrible Civic Plaza. He gambled with Bravo Juan.”

“Great name.”

“Bravo Juan ran the numbers in the Deuce. He had an arrangement with the sheriff and the police chief, and kept everything in order. But the story went that Win Yarnell was deeply in debt to him. How do you like that, Mapstone? A loser named Win? Anyway, it all made the old man so mad, he disowned him, cut him right out of the business and the will.”

I asked when that happened. “The late 1930s,” she replied. “Everybody talked about it. It was a little town. People felt sorry for Mr. Yarnell, ending up with the sons he did. I guess Morgan was okay, but never that bright. And Win was a lost cause.”

I gingerly sampled the bourbon. “So was Win enough of a lost cause to kidnap his nephews?”

“Maybe.” Her voice became momentarily precise and delicate. “People are capable of anything. Didn’t Solzhenitsyn say that the line separating good from evil doesn’t run between nations or parties but through every human heart? Maybe it was Dostoevsky.”

“Solzhenitsyn, I think.” I thought of Lindsey, my Russian literature expert.

Zelda exhaled a plume of smoke. “What if Win stole Morgan’s children to get a ransom to pay Bravo Juan and something went wrong? Nobody thought Win was a killer, much less of his own nephews.”

I thought about that. “On the other hand, it might make more sense that Bravo Juan or somebody like him snatched the kids to put pressure on Win or the family to repay the gambling debts. Why didn’t the police ever do any checking?”

“Oh, even a college professor can’t be that naive. This was the most powerful family in the state. Phoenix was a corrupt little town where the elite got what they wanted. Look at the way they had railroaded Winnie Ruth Judd just a few years before that. Anyway, in this case the cops had a man caught red-handed with the ransom money, or part of it at least, and with the pajamas. Why would they need to do more?”

I just let the bourbon and information burn my throat.

She fished out a brown file folder and handed it to me. Yellowed papers bulged out from the sides. “Here’s Jack Talbott’s police record. Do you have it?” I shook my head. “You can add it to your collection.”

I slipped off the rubber band and leafed through the papers. Talbott had received a suspended sentence for burglary back in Elwood, Indiana. In Phoenix, he served a month in the county jail for assaulting a fellow drunk. That was in June 1940. Another arrest came in November 1941 for public drunkenness. I slowed down my reading. I read it again.