Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

After half an hour, an amazing time for a beat-up Honda to go unnoticed in Paradise Valley, I slid it into gear and slowly coasted out onto the street, then turned north toward Lincoln Drive. I kept my headlights off and drove slowly. Two hundred yards ahead I pulled on the emergency brake and stopped the car without showing taillights. And yet: nothing. If anybody was behind me, he was running without headlights, too.

He could also be a mile away, tracking me on a laptop or a tablet. He didn’t have to show himself. But it was better to pretend I was worried about a tail that had me in sight. That way, he could continue to assume we hadn’t found the tracking device. So I went ahead with the game.

Lights on again, I sat at the intersection of busy Lincoln Drive. I checked in with Peralta who saw no signs of anyone following me.

“Should we call it off?”

“No,” he said. “The guy is out there. He’s good. Keep going.”

Keeping going meant a drive to Tempe, some ten miles away through heavy traffic. Getting over to the Pima Freeway and zooming south would have gotten me there much faster. But Peralta wanted me on surface streets. So I turned right on Lincoln and took it to Scottsdale Road.

If Central Avenue had been the main commercial thoroughfare from territorial days through the early nineties, Scottsdale Road-and miles of loop freeways containing office “parks”-had taken over that title since then. When I was a child, the intersection with Lincoln had been out in the desert. Now it was deep in the metropolitan blob.

Scottsdale itself was a long, narrow slice between the city of Phoenix and the Salt River Indian Community, the renamed and, thanks to casinos and development beside the freeway, very rich rez. But Scottsdale, oh, Scottsdale, sang of new money, especially up north where it spread east into the McDowell foothills and the people bragged of never coming south of Bell Road, much less to “the Mexican Detroit.” Meaning, Phoenix.

Scottsdale was exclusivity and championship golf, celebrities in the wintertime and the weirdness that comes with having more money than brains. It was the capital of plastic surgery: Silicone Valley. City leaders would never allow anything as plebian as light rail. As a result, its traffic was a nightmare, even with most of the wealthy hitting the summer lifeboats for their other homes in the San Juan Islands or other cooler climes. And Scottsdale Road was full of the same schlocky development as the rest of Phoenix, only with some expensive faÇades and more expensively done traffic berms.

Once Scottsdale had been a sweet little add-on to Phoenix, part faux cowboy tourist trap-the West’s Most Western Town-part artist’s colony. Now it sucked up capital, development, and retail sales from the center city like an Electrolux. Yet it never seemed like a happy place. The politics were poison. Every section and street seemed to vie for the power to look down on everybody else. Scottsdale wanted to be Santa Fe or South Beach, but it was neither artistic nor sexy. Nobody would set a cop show in Scottsdale. A golf or plastic surgery show, maybe.

I suffered the unending traffic jam south past hotels, expensive shopping strips and restaurants, Fashion Square, across the Arizona Canal, and dropping down to Fifth Avenue and Old Scottsdale. Here, a little humanity showed in the scale of the streetscape. A block away was the wonderful Poisoned Pen Bookstore.

South of Old Town, the shopping strips became more downscale and behind them were ordinary tract houses built in the sixties. At Roosevelt, I crossed over into Tempe and the street changed names: Rural Road. It had once been rural. Now all the fields were long gone. The main Arizona State University campus loomed on the right, including the stadium where Larry Zisman had thrown his legendary passes. Then the big new Biodesign Institute. Who knew what they were working on?

By then, I was ready to chew my arm off from the traffic. The average Phoenician made this kind of drive or even longer every day. How did they stand it? The only place I felt comfortable was in the old city. This was my hometown, but it didn’t feel like home any more. The Japanese Flower Gardens were gone. The miles of citrus groves were gone. Why did I stay here? I would miss my friends in the old neighborhood, the familiar diorama of mountains, the smell of citrus blossoms in the spring, not much else.

Larry Zisman lived at The Lakes, a series of subdivisions that took over the farm fields south of Baseline Road starting in the seventies. The tract houses were built around little lakes, hence its namesake. Tempe had made a fetish of artificial lakes, most notably Town Lake, contained within dams on the Salt River.

After some wandering along the curvilinear streets, I found Zisman’s house. Unlike some of the houses in The Lakes, it lacked any old-growth shade trees. One pitiful little tree was planted on a small, square lawn. Beyond that stood a stucco house with one window, a door through an arch, and the mandatory large garage door and driveway. Above the garage was a second story.

The lights were off. Modest and relatively small, it seemed like an odd home for a one-time football star, but maybe he lost most of his money. Maybe he preferred it here, not far from his college glory days. I pulled directly in front, shut off my lights and engine, and checked in with Peralta. My stomach became a sea of acid. This was as risky as Paradise Valley. Everything about Lindsey’s old Prelude screamed “Does Not Belong Here.” Signs proclaimed a neighborhood watch. I didn’t know how long I dared sit.

Not long.

The Tempe Police cruiser slid in behind me and a spotlight swung white light into the Prelude.

I put my hands on top of the steering wheel and tried to mentally untangle my internal organs. The officer or officers would be looking me over, typing my license plate in for wants and warrants, wondering if the driver was armed. That was my first problem. My second problem: if the person following with the GPS tracker had me in sight, he might misinterpret this interaction. He had ordered me on Sunday to bring no law enforcement. Now here I was, with law enforcement come to me.

“Turn on the overhead light please.” A female voice. She was right behind me, in a proper protective stance. I flipped on the dome.

“David Mapstone!”

She came into sight and slid her flashlight into her equipment belt.

“Hey, Amy.”

Amy Taylor had been a patrol deputy for the Sheriff’s Office. I had worked with her on a number of occasions before she left for a better-paying job in Tempe. She looked the same, attractive and strawberry hair in a tight bun. I glanced over at the truck-stop phone sitting on the passenger seat, willing it to not ring at this moment.

“How’s the Sheriff’s Office?”

“It sucks.”

“That’s what I hear. What are you doing?” Her tone was friendly.

So I told her part of the truth. I was working with Peralta now as a private investigator. A young woman had fallen from Larry Zisman’s condominium in San Diego, handcuffed and nude, and we have been engaged to find out whether it was a suicide or something more.

“Holy crap!” She put her hands on her hips. “Zisman’s married. You know he’s a reserve officer in Phoenix?”

“I do. He also owned the handcuffs.”

A burst came over her radio and she keyed her mic. I was being saved by a call: a burglar alarm a mile away.

She touched my shoulder. “Gotta roll, David. Call me sometime and we’ll catch up. Good luck with Larry. Good guy in my view. Not so much his son.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m surprised the Army accepted him. Don’t tell Larry I said that.”

All my senses kicked to a higher gear. The Army. “Of course not. Stay safe, Amy.”