Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

“So what about our young woman?” I asked. “Suicide?”

“You’ll have time for light reading.” He pointed at the stack of case files, in case I had forgotten. “The short answer is they believe it was a suicide.”

“What do you believe?”

He shrugged the big shoulders. “I’ll wait for your report. Kimbrough brought along the night detective who was the first to respond to the call.”

“Night detective?”

A quarter of one side of his mouth attempted a smile. “I’m showing my age, Mapstone.”

I looked at the rumpled sheets and doubted that.

He continued, “Departments used to have night detective bureaus to cover the late shift, so the investigation into a major crime could begin immediately. Now it’s almost all in-house with each unit, so, for instance, homicide has its own people on call. That’s the case here. I was using old-time cop talk. Did I ever tell you about the night detective I met when Miranda bought it?”

He was being so uncharacteristically loquacious, and actually talking about himself, that I stifled my impatience.

“It was 1976, and Miranda was out of prison. He actually went around signing Miranda warning cards. Somewhere I have one he signed for me. Anyway, I was a green deputy and was serving a warrant down in the Deuce. The old La Amapola bar. Means ‘little poppy.’ I must have gotten there the second after Miranda got in a fight and was stabbed. People were scattering. The first PPD unit was a night detective. This tall guy named Cal. They called him the Red Dude on account of his hair. He marched my ass out in a hurry. We became friends later. Never did find the suspect I was trying to arrest.”

If I had my geography right, the bar where Ernesto Miranda died was located where the Phoenix Suns arena now stood. Mike Peralta, historian. It made me wish he would talk more about his past, but we had business and he moved right along. I tried to imagine a time when he had ever been a rookie and uncertain of himself.

Night detective. It had a nice ring.

“Anyway, I talked to the detective. You would have liked her. First name Isabel. Cute little chica. Make you forget about Patty.”

“Will you stop that shit!” I pulled off my suit jacket and threw it on the floor. It would have to go to the cleaners anyway.

His eyes followed the garment’s flight, then fixed his gaze on me again. “Grace’s body was found on the concrete by the pool. It was a straight fall and she landed on her head. Massive trauma, loads of blood. She was handcuffed from the back, nude, and no real note was left, like our guy said in the office yesterday.”

“What do you mean ‘real note.’ ”

“I want you to read the reports. Hang with me and I’ll give you the overall run-down. So the uniforms that initially respond go upstairs and the door to the condo was locked. The manager lets them inside.”

He folded one brawny brown calf over the other and told me the cops found no sign of a break-in. The lock was a deadbolt, so nobody could simply close the door behind them and cause it to automatically lock. It had to be secured from the inside, as if Grace had done it, or from the outside with a key. The only ones with keys were Zisman and his wife. She wasn’t in San Diego on the twenty-second. There were no signs of struggle. Grace’s purse was there with a hundred dollars in it, her keys, and a brand-new cell phone.

I said, “The handcuffs didn’t arouse suspicion?”

“Sure. But sometimes people who want to kill themselves bind their hands so they can’t change their minds. I’ve seen those calls in Phoenix. That was the case with that girl in Coronado, although she used rope and not cuffs. SDPD thinks the same was true here. Kimbrough had Isabel demonstrate how a person could do it. Then walk to a balcony and go over.”

“Where’d Grace get the cuffs?”

“Apparently the former quarterback likes bondage. They used them during their playtime.”

I tried to ignore his bulk in a bathrobe lying in a bed where he had had some “playtime” of his own. This was something I did not want to visualize or even contemplate.

“Does he own this condo?” I asked.

“He did. It’s for sale now. He was away at his boat when Grace killed herself and the alibi’s good. The owner at the slip next door saw him there during the time of the suicide. Zisman told the cops she was his girlfriend and she’d been feeling depressed, but he had no idea she might do something like this, yada-yada-yada.”

“And they believed him?”

“Zisman is a reserve police officer in Phoenix,” Peralta continued. “He showed his badge and identification. That might have bought him a little professional courtesy the night Grace died. He cooperated fully. I’m sure he was scared shitless this would make the papers or television and the missus back in Arizona would find out.”

I told him newspapers usually didn’t report suicides out of concern that there might be copycats. Grace had died at night, with no television news choppers in the air.

“So Zisman walked?”

He nodded. “There was no evidence of his involvement. No probable cause to hold him, much less get an indictment. If they arrested every Arizonan who had a mistress stashed in San Diego, they’d have to build a new jail.”

It was nearly five but Peralta wanted to go out again. He had scheduled a meeting with a real-estate agent to see the condo.

I changed into casual clothes, a light-blue shirt and cargo shorts. The Python was too big to carry, which was why I had invested in a Smith & Wesson 340PD Airlite, an eleven-ounce, snubnosed.357 magnum that slipped easily into the right-side pocket of the shorts. I stashed the Glock that I had confiscated from America’s Finest Pimp in a drawer. Who knew how many unsolved shootings or homicides it was connected to? I would deal with that later. Peralta was out of the robe, thank goodness, and in tan slacks, dress shirt, and blue blazer.

We walked ten blocks down Broadway toward the waterfront. The condo was hard to miss: more than forty stories, right across from the beautifully restored railroad station, with its blue Santa Fe railroad sign on the roof. In the lobby was a watchful concierge and, sitting on the edge of a chair with perfect posture, an auburn-haired, middle-aged woman who exuded perkiness. The Realtor. We made introductions and she took us up the elevator to the nineteenth floor.

We must have looked like the oddest gay couple she had ever dealt with.

“I have so many clients from Phoenix,” she chirped. “This is the place to be.”

The deadbolt turned with decisive effort and opened onto an empty living room. The condo hadn’t been staged for the sale. What most stood out was the handsome hardwood floor. And then the view, of course. Asking price: $599,000.

I let her walk Peralta through the rooms and wandered off by myself to the balcony. It was amusing to hear her calling him “Mike” in nearly every sentence. Nobody but Sharon called him Mike. But he was as convivial as could be, a skill he had learned over the years while wooing voters. Not that he had needed to put on a front. His record as sheriff was spotless, with crime down, jail conditions excellent, response times across the county top-notch, and his history professor solving high-profile old cases. All that didn’t matter when his opponent ran against him claiming he was soft on illegal aliens. I pushed that out of my mind, opened the glass door, and stepped outside.

The view of downtown and the harbor was not as stunning as you could get for one or two million bucks on the upper floors, but it would do. If you had the money to escape the summer hell and dust storms of Phoenix, San Diego would be about as close to heaven as you could get.