Jon Talton - Cactus Heart

“This is strange. Jack Talbott was arrested for public drunkenness outside a bar on Second Street on November 27.”

She reached for the report. “Let me see that. I never noticed that before.” She stubbed out the Marlboro and scanned the page with her finger.

“Mapstone, that was the day of the kidnapping. Could he really have been set up, just like he claimed?”

“Maybe not.” Peralta’s skeptical voice was in my head. “The booking record shows he was arrested at one-ten a.m. that day. He could have been released in a few hours. The kidnapping was later that night. Maybe he got just sober enough to steal those little boys. It’s impossible to know without the jail release record. What about the art collection that disappeared? Could that have played into this?”

“Oh, you know about that. It was another thing the newspaper never reported. Supposed to have been quite a collection. But it disappeared after the kidnapping. Let me think…after the kidnapping, and before the old man died.”

“Maybe you can take it with you.”

She gave a wheezy laugh and slugged down the remains of the bourbon.

She walked me out to the rocky drive and we talked again of Hayden Yarnell.

“I met him, you know. It was around 1938. He came by the newspaper one day. He was very formidable. I’ll never forget his handshake-firm and honest, and for a nobody like me, a young girl working as a clerk. He was a legend, and it was a more innocent time. We were taught to venerate men like Hayden Yarnell.”

The wind had come up and I couldn’t help a little shiver. “What do you think from the perspective of a less innocent time?”

She put her hands on her ample hips and stared out toward the High Country. “The republic is founded on a noble lie,” she said. “Plato, as you know. When Hayden Yarnell came to Arizona, it was a wilderness. Men like him made it a state. They dug the mines and took the wealth out of the earth. They killed the outlaws and forced the Apache to make peace. Then they mortgaged their land to build the dams that allowed that city down there…” She gestured angrily toward the dirty air. “All in all, I think it was a mighty achievement. They created a civilization so comfortable and safe that now they can be portrayed as exploiters and oppressors. Isn’t that the history you teach now, Mapstone?”

“I…”

She really didn’t want an answer. “But they were only men, and they had their flaws. Hayden Yarnell was a builder, but he was greedy, too. He was this engine that never stopped. You could see that even when he was an old man. Maybe the qualities go together. And he wanted to build a family that would carry on everything he built. Make his name immortal, if you will. He was an orphan, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“He wanted sons of strong character more than anything, more than the Copper Queen Mine or the largest ranch in the state. And it was the one thing that was out of his grasp.”

I thanked her and started the BMW.

“Cops must make a lot more money now.” She eyed the car.

“It’s a long story.”

“That’s what they all say,” she said. “Did you find anything else in that building with the skeletons?”

Damn. I had nearly forgotten. “A pocket watch was with them. Does that mean anything to you.”

She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “Anything else down there?”

I shook my head. “There were tunnels under the building, but they didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Why?”

She stared toward the brown metropolitan cloud.

“I don’t know. Just thinking. Sometimes I think too much.”

I drove back to the city against the outbound afternoon rush, but the traffic was still miserable. The city limits went nearly to New River now, a good twenty miles north of where they sat when I had been in high school. I played the Heather Nova CD Lindsey had given me last summer. Now I was pricked by the lyrics of longing, love and regret. I had to stop midway through Avalanche . So I took it off and slipped in Sinatra. He got to “One More for the Road” as I blew over the Stack and into downtown. I shut the music off. I would rather have been thinking of Gretchen again, wondering about her next appearance.

I stopped off at the courthouse, where a plain envelope was sitting on the floor in front of the door. At least it wasn’t one of those damned dolls. I took it in, put it on the desk as the phone was ringing. It was James Yarnell.

“How are you?”

I told him how I was.

“I’m no worse for wear,” he said, his voice a little raspy. “The good ladies and gentlemen of the Scottsdale Police are keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on me.”

“No problems?”

“No, everything’s fine,” he said. “I should thank you for saving my life. I was three sheets to the wind last night.”

“Not a problem.”

“We’ll talk more,” he said and hung up.

The phone again. I was suddenly a popular guy.

“They didn’t find another doll.” It was Peralta. I muttered an obscenity.

“They checked two blocks around the Yarnell Gallery, even where the shooter probably stood.”

“Maybe he didn’t have time to leave the doll.”

“Maybe this attack isn’t connected to the Max Yarnell murder,” Peralta countered.

My own hands were shaking when he hung up. My heart was hammering in my chest. What the hell was wrong with me? I was alone in the room with my heartbeat and worries. It made me wonder why I had come into the office at all. I took out a legal pad and made more notes from my visit with Zelda Chain. Then I turned out the lights and locked up.

I drove through Ramiro’s, where you can eat like a king for five dollars, and ordered a chorizo burrito and a Diet Coke. Then I went over to Encanto Park and walked to the lagoon. In the distance, the late-afternoon sun was painting gold into the folds of the South Mountains.

Encanto was the classic city park, green and lovingly manicured, built when Phoenix was smaller. It was about half a mile from my house, and as a kid, I had fished in the lagoon on lazy, lost spring afternoons, watched the sky from the empty old bandshell, and ridden the little train in the miniature amusement park. Encanto was still a beautiful oasis, but most days now it was largely Latino. Maybe the sounds of Spanish frightened away my yuppie neighbors. Today, with a cool wind whipping in from the west and only an hour’s sun left, the place was nearly deserted.

I wanted to eat my burrito and try to clear my head of murder. I was about halfway through dinner when I heard lovely Castilian Spanish behind me. Then I turned and saw Bobby Hamid.

“I said, ‘History is a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth…’”

“I have a few phrases in Spanish for you, Bobby,” I said.

He ignored me. “Have you ever read Cervantes in his native language, Dr. Mapstone? It is a true epiphany. Rather like the difference between learning Shakespeare in Farsi, and then learning him in English. Or discovering for the first time the real Dante in Italian…”

I set aside my burrito. “Why are you here?”

“It is a public park. I actually bring my children here sometimes. They love riding the little train.” He pointed across the lagoon.

He studied me carefully. “Does it surprise you that I have children, David? Make it a little harder to see me as evil incarnate, as Chief Peralta believes?”

“Stalin had children,” I said. “Anybody can reproduce.”

“Not you, apparently,” he said. “You and Patty had no children, as I recall. Maybe she instinctively knew something.” For a moment I felt strangely stung by this man who mattered nothing to me at all, except as a threat to the community.