Jon Talton: South Phoenix Rules

“It wouldn’t be the first time both those things were true.”

The new voice was deep, commanding, familiar. I turned my head to see Mike Peralta filling my vision. Behind him was Robin.

Vare rounded on him. “This is not your jurisdiction. You’re almost ou…” She stopped herself.

Peralta smiled slightly. “Everything is my jurisdiction, Kate. For a few more days, at least.”

The uniformed cops in the entry hall had already made room for the big man in the tan suit. His thick hair was combed straight back from a wide forehead and the years had turned it from black to charcoal. His face: carve it into a mountainside. You had to know how to watch his eyes and mouth to see what was really going on inside him. Now he walked into the room with his deliberate tread. His dark eyes ignored mine, taking in the scene even as his head barely moved. Robin stood beside him, her hand on his arm. Two of her could have fit inside him.

“Is this him?” Peralta spoke with uncommon gentleness. Robin nodded.

“What’s that, Miss Bryson? I need a positive identification.” Kate Vare took Robin by the arm and led her close to the body, waving an outstretched arm as if she were showing off a new car. “Was this the man you had been seeing?”

Robin wrapped her arms tightly across her sweatshirt, pushing up her breasts. Vare kept hold of her. “Yes.” Her eyes were wide and wet. “It’s Jax.”

“How do you know?”

“We were lovers.” Robin’s skin grew pale.

“Accomplices, maybe?” Vare held her close to the corpse.

Robin shook her head adamantly. “You don’t know anything.”

Vare released her grip. “Now I want these civilians outside.”

Peralta held up a hand. “Robin can sit in my car. Mapstone is still a deputy sheriff.”

Vare’s face dropped in dismay.

“I haven’t put through his papers yet.” He reached in his suit-coat pocket, produced my sheriff’s office identification card, then pinned it onto my shirt like a shabby medal. Peralta said, “I think we’ll both see what you’ve got.”

“Well, Mapstone’s history won’t do any good here,” Vare sulked. Peralta might have been the outgoing sheriff, but he was still close friends with the police chief, so she was stuck with us.

“La Fam?”

“Looks that way,” Vare answered.

Peralta grunted. I stood back, trying to keep up.

He produced a set of latex gloves and snapped them on, then stood over the kitchen island like a surgeon examining the work of a demented colleague.

“So did you track the package?” He already knew what had happened. It had only been twenty-four hours since I had last seen him, but somehow it seemed longer. I couldn’t tell whether I was glad to see him here or not. Considering Kate Vare was the lead investigator, I decided I was delighted.

Vare spoke reluctantly, pausing to give me the cop eye. “It was sent from the FedEx Office store on Central, uptown, you know, the old Kinko’s. Fake name and address of the sender. We’re going to interview the employee who saw the sender later this morning.”

Peralta nodded and went back to the corpse.

I heard one young uniform whisper to another: “Jax in the Box. May I take your order?” Another: “It gives a whole new meaning to giving head.”

Peralta’s voice overrode them. “They tortured him with the drill…” He pointed to the dark craters on his legs and the top of one hand, then he stepped lightly in a counter-clockwise circle, his eyes scanning, his head momentarily shielded by his back and broad shoulders. “Slit open his scrotum. That was probably late in the game.”

He turned back to the rest of us and pointed. “See his left hand? That’s from being dipped in boiling water repeatedly. Make sure crime scene gets that shot.”

Vare just had to stand there and take it. Her tight frame was almost humming with tension. I wondered if the black pants suit would burst into flames. I loved it. She said, “Yes, Sheriff.”

Emerson said there is no history, only biography. If that’s true, Mike Peralta encapsulated much of what was worth knowing about the best of law enforcement in Phoenix, not to mention more of my life than I cared to dwell on at that moment. I’d first met him when he was a trainer at the academy, then he had broken me in as my first partner.

We remained friends for the years I lived away from Phoenix, teaching in Ohio and San Diego. He never stopped saying that it was a mistake for me to be anything but a cop, and when I came home after my first marriage broke up he gave me a job. A pile of old cases-clean them up, he said. So I did, using the historian’s techniques married to my cop knowledge. It became a full-time job, working the crimes that ran from the 1960s all the way back to statehood. I didn’t fool myself: It had been good publicity for the sheriff to have an egghead on staff. I also solved some major cases. The old ID card hung familiarly from my pocket.

“La Fam,” I said. “I didn’t think they had a big presence here.”

I heard the naiveté in my voice even before I finished the sentence. La Familia was one of the most notorious gangs in Mexico and Southern California. Its signature execution was beheading. I cleared my throat. “But it wouldn’t be surprising to see them expanding with all the destabilization caused by the recession.”

Peralta’s eyes fixed on me. They said, shut up. I looked down at the blood spatter on the floor. Gangs were nothing new to Phoenix. Contrary to the local feel-good spin, Phoenix had been a Mafia hangout for decades. Some old cops told me that it had more mobsters per capita than New York City in the 1950s. It was close to the mob’s operations in Vegas, close to the border, easy to be anonymous. They hung out at places like the Blue Grotto, the Clown’s Den, Durant’s, Rocky’s Hideaway, and the Ivanhoe. Old Phoenix had been a paradise with snakes, indeed. It’s what kept my nostalgia for what had been lost from slipping into the lie of sentimentality. But I admitted to myself that I was way behind on the gangs of today, aside from knowing they were large, sophisticated, and deadly. That knowledge rarely penetrated my office in the old courthouse, where the crimes were as old as the architecture around me and where Peralta deliberately kept me segregated from the rest of the Sheriff’s Office.

“Did you know this subject, Sheriff?” Vare asked, tilting her sharp chin toward the corpse.

“I met him once. Seemed nice enough.” Peralta slid off the gloves and handed them to one of the young cops. There’d been a time, when the Arizona Dreams case was busted open, when I thought Peralta and Robin might actually become an item. It had never happened and I didn’t know why. That was fine with both Lindsey and me. It would have led to too many complications. And we still missed Peralta’s ex-wife Sharon. Mike as chief deputy and then sheriff, Sharon as a psychologist and best-selling author: They were a power couple without airs. It seemed impossible to imagine him with anyone else. Knowing him, I suspected he didn’t want anyone trying to get close now. The cops, that was what he was all about, and now even that was gone. Of course, he didn’t lack for job offers, all of them paying more than the post of Maricopa County Sheriff. I wondered for a few seconds where he might end up. It helped shave the edge off my emotions.

Peralta stepped back and thrust his hands into his pockets, pushing back his wide-cut suit coat enough so that I could see the.45 in his shoulder rig. He faced Vare. “So why would Professor Delgado here have ended up with La Fam? Unless he wasn’t who he claimed to be…”

“That’s the whole deal!” Vare’s voice trembled in agitation. I felt my chest grow tight. “He’s a fraud. There’s no Jax Delgado on the NYU faculty, contrary to what Mapstone and the girl keep telling me.” She glared at me. “Oh, you’re surprised?”