Jon Talton - Dry Heat

On a Thursday, I came back to my office to find the door open and Kate Vare sitting primly at my desk. I was hot, sweating, feet aching, and shouting at her as I crossed the threshold into the room.

“What the hell are you doing in here? Who the hell do you think you are?”

She came up out of my chair as if she was launching herself as a missile with overdone shoulder pads.

“Mapstone, you son of a bitch! You arrogant, lying bastard!”

“You ought to know about lying, Kate. Breaking into somebody’s office.”

“Break in, you asshole, you’re lucky I’m not here with an arrest warrant!”

“What the fuck are you screaming about?” I demanded. We were nose to nose across the desk, both armed. She opened her black leather City of Phoenix portfolio, pulled out a jail mugshot, and slammed it on the desktop.

“This is what I’m screaming about, bastard! As if you didn’t know!”

The photo was of the homeless woman from the parking lot, what seemed like months gone by. Her name was Karen, or so she said. She claimed she knew George Weed. She said she wanted help with visitation rights to her daughter.

Kate studied my face. “Don’t you play dumb, you bastard. You know who this is.”

“Of course I do. She came up to me one night, and asked about George Weed.”

“What are you talking about? Who is George Weed?”

“The guy in the pool, the guy with John Pilgrim’s FBI badge sewn into his coat.”

“Lying bastard!” she shouted, exhaling so exuberantly I could feel her breath tousling my hair.

I started to say something but she grabbed the photo and waved it in my face.

“Heather Heffelberg!”

“That’s her name? She said it was Karen.”

“You stupid bastard, that’s the fourteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped out of her own bedroom in Paradise Valley six weeks ago. It’s only been the biggest case to hit this city in years. The media are on it. The brass are on our asses every day about it. The FBI has entered the case. This woman, whose name is Karen Barshevsky, was seen in that neighborhood the night before Heather disappeared. Karen is the common-law wife of Jake Roberts, aka Jake English, aka Randy English. Five years ago they kidnapped a teenage girl and raped her and held her captive for a month. Both of them walked on a technicality. Tell me this is really all news to you, bastard!”

I sat in one of the straight-backed wooden courtroom chairs that faced my desk. I said, “It is news. And my name is not ‘bastard.’”

Kate’s tense body looked as if it was ready to leap over the desk. She sputtered, “I can’t fucking believe this! This…You…The fucking sheriff’s office is more incompetent than I ever believed. You…you’re not even a real police officer!”

“Kate, I’ve had nothing to do with your disappeared girl case.”

She started to speak. But she just glared and fell into my desk chair with a heaviness that belied her slender frame.

“So you were in here rummaging around with Peralta last week because you thought I was holding out on you?”

“I’m still not sure you’re not holding out,” she said, although in a calmer voice. “You’re always trying to claim credit. You write a book report, and Peralta goes ‘ooh, ahhh’ and you’re on TV as this big crime buster.”

“I never sought that out-”

“Oh, spare me,” she said. “If you are telling the truth, and you’ve really been wasting your time with this dead vagrant.” She shook her head as if she were trying to dispense with a bad dream. “I just can’t believe it. Karen just walks up to you?”

“In a parking lot, one night about a month ago.”

“Every cop in town has been trying to find this woman.”

“She found me,” I said.

Kate’s usually tan pallor was now the color of a cranberry. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “Look at you. Look around you.” She swept her arm to take in my bookshelves and historic photos. She stood, walked over, and rapped her knuckles on the bulletin board that held photos from the Pilgrim case. “You live in this dream world. In the real world, I have to go on calls. I can’t just work one case because my friend is the sheriff. So earlier today, I went on a call. A woman had been dumped by her lover. So she went home and drowned her son and daughter, and then tried to kill herself. That’s the real world, Mapstone! Tell me what your history says about that.”

“Oh, Kate,” I said, trying to be the calm one.

She leaned over my desk and shouted, “Tell me! You can’t even see what’s in front of your face!”

“I live in the same world.” I shrugged. “It sucks. But human nature is unchanging. I was reading a newspaper clipping from 1948 about a woman, right here in Phoenix, who tried to murder her children. It sounded like what you’re-”

But she was gone. I was surprised that the glass in the door didn’t shatter when she slammed it.

The big Oldsmobile took me home through the streets of the historic neighborhoods north of downtown. I avoided the seven-lane speedways of Central or Seventh Avenue. Up comfortingly narrow Third Avenue, where the Roosevelt district had been lovingly restored. Stately bungalows and new city condos and apartments sat on streets lined by eighty-year-old Mexican fan palm trees. Margaret Hance Park had a few picnickers and walkers, even on a hot afternoon. You’d never know a freeway pulsed beneath the park. I took in the familiar mountains and skyscrapers that ornamented the park’s vista, and closer, old Kenilworth School with its classic columned entrance to the west and the new postmodern Burton Barr Library to the east. The Mission Revival Mormon Church had been saved from the freeway and now housed a puppet theater. A little farther north, Third crossed McDowell and entered Willo, with its trees and front porches baking sweetly in the 105-degree sun. This was my Phoenix, a lovely sanctuary that also held my personal history, even if the millions in their cookie-cutter subdivision pods never saw it and complained that Phoenix had no soul.

I noticed the car in the rearview mirror, so close I couldn’t even see his front bumper. Then he switched lanes and roared next to me. My stomach tightened. Down came the passenger window, and I could see the face of a thirtyish man in a polo short.

“Get out of the way, you asshole!” he screamed with a bucket-shaped mouth, his face suddenly crimson. Then he sped north on Third and soon disappeared. His back bumper held an American flag sticker with the words, POWER OF PRIDE.

I used to like this town. Phoenix was a sunny, dull place with no culture or ambition, but it had a sweetness and a good heart. Now we’ve got malls stuffed with people from Iowa and Wisconsin, low-wage workers in the call centers and landscape outfits and service joints, Indian casinos, mass-produced subdivisions, bigger money than you could imagine in Paradise Valley and North Scottsdale, 250 golf courses. But it’s a big hardboiled place where ordinary guys carry around their rage like an overstuffed wallet and everybody calls someplace else home.

I made it home with the horizon turning white and the wind picking up. A FedEx envelope was leaned up against the stucco wall. Lock the door behind me, feel the blessed air-conditioning, make a sweep of the house…back door locked, courtyard doors secure, closets clear, nobody hiding under Grandfather’s mahogany desk in the study. Out the picture window, the wind began slapping the palm trees insistently. I coughed instinctively, sat on the staircase with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and stared out at the familiar old neighborhood. The envelope showed a return address from the University of California at Berkeley.