Cactus Heart

8

I got back home late, feeling a little guilty about my appreciation of the way Gretchen Goodheart filled out her blue jeans, and a little edgy for reasons I couldn’t exactly define. I was working on a dull headache that I ascribed to too many hours spent reading old records about an open-and-shut case that was actually growing more complex with every scrap of paper that I accumulated.

Central Avenue was a river of impatient lights headed out of downtown, but Cypress, my street, was dead. I crept along past the neat, darkened houses, the palm trees tall and soldierly in the narrow parking lawns between the sidewalks and the street. This was my old neighborhood. When I was a kid, I knew everybody on the block. There were the eccentric heirs to the railroad fortune on the corner; they moved away to the fancier Palmcroft district when I was ten. There was the old hound-dog in the backyard two houses down who barked if anything was wrong in the night. I knew a story for every house, and every notch in a hedge or passage between fences held a memory. The city was smaller then.

Now there were new neighbors to know. Most of the old owners had left or died in the years I had been away from Phoenix. Many of the houses had been restored beyond any former splendor, pools added, and all in all Willo was much more affluent than it had been. Yet the neighborhood had gained a self-conscious quality, too: It was a historic district, an urban homesteading success story. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. I felt a constant sense of familiarity and strangeness, and tonight the block just felt empty and sad.

Lindsey’s old white Honda Prelude was parked in front of my house and Lindsey was sitting inside. She had a key to the house but didn’t use it. I parked and met her on the sidewalk, where she held her hand gently against my chest as if she were taking some internal reading, then she ran an index finger down my nose, across my lips, into my mouth. She wore baggy jeans and a gray sweater, and her pale skin glowed from the street light. Without a word she led me up the walk and we went inside.

Later, we sat on opposite ends of the sofa, our bare feet resting on each other’s laps, easily naked together, sipping the Macallan from shot glasses. We were in the living room, the grandest room in an otherwise small house, with a twelve-foot ceiling and bookcases rising behind a wrought-iron staircase. Sometimes I could feel Grandfather and Grandmother in the room, not as ghosts but as missed beloveds. It was a room that put me in a mind to realize the fleeting preciousness of our connections.

“How was your day, honey?” She arched an eyebrow in parody.

“Oh, the usual, dear. Returning to the scene of the crime. Picking through old bones, serving the public trust. The Phoenix cops don’t like me, but they also don’t have much interest in old bones.”

“I read today that in ancient China the historian held an honored place in the emperor’s court,” she said.

I smiled. “Born in the wrong time and place, I guess.”

“History Shamus.” She stroked my leg. “What time and place would you be born in?”

“Oh, I’m greedy. I’d want to see everything: Rome, the time of Christ and Mohammad, ancient China. I’d want to swap stories with Dr. Johnson and serve with George Washington. Live in the thirties and forties, ride the great old trains, see Arizona before we spoiled it.”

“You could stop by and prevent the Yarnell kidnapping,” she said.

“But I wouldn’t want to live in another time because I couldn’t be with you.”

She smiled and looked away. “You’re a romantic, Dave. I like that.”

“And I wouldn’t want to live in the past because I’d give up the benefit of modern dentistry.”

She laughed out loud, a wonderful sound. “Spoken like the grandson of a dentist.”

I told her what I had learned today about the kidnapping. Then we sat in silence, listening to the house breathe and, outside, sirens run down Seventh Avenue. I studied her face, a face so different from the battalions of fresh-eyed, tanned sun-bunnies that Phoenix seemed to produce like General Motors produced Chevys. Hers was a face of contrasts: dark lipsticked lips, full but set in an economical mouth; creamy skin and precise dark brows; cheek-bones appealingly wide; a classical tapering toward the chin; her dusk blue eyes too far apart to be considered conventionally beautiful. All this was framed by the stunning black hair parted in the middle and falling with the barest hint of a curl down to where her neck met her shoulders. And that gold stud in the left nostril-someday I would ask about that, if we had enough time together. The first time we met, I was a year out of my divorce. I watched that face as she did her computer magic for me. And then one day I found her watching me.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Important things,” I said. “How was your day?”

“A new assignment, actually,” she said. “And I am so glad to get away from Y2K.”

“If I had your skills, I’d be rich.”

“You’re good looking.” She smiled. “You’re great in bed, on the floor, whatever.”

God, she made me feel lucky. “All because of you,” I said.

“It’s the Harquahala Strangler case,” she said, her voice half an octave lower. “El Jefe”-her secret nickname for Peralta-“has assigned me to help. I’ve been teamed up with Patrick Blair.”

“Whoa, the alpha hunk detective of the sheriff’s office?”

Lindsey smiled a passable Mona Lisa impersonation. “Are you jealous, Dave?”

“No,” I lied. “Hell, I thought he and that partner of his-what’s his name? Tony Snyder-were gay. They both look like they stepped out of GQ. Remember they’re in that calendar the sheriff is selling? Beefcakes with Badges, or something like that.”

“I thought it was cute,” Lindsey said. “Anyway, Tony has a nice wife and two babies in Peoria. He’s on leave to finish his master’s thesis. I think you’re jealous, Dave.”

I felt a hotness moving across my face and knew I was busted. She gave a delighted giggle.

“So why are they teaming you with Patrick Blair? He seems about as interested in database research as he’d be in studying history.”

“They think this dirtbag gets his victims over the Internet.”

“Serial killers keeping up with the times.”

“If you tell Peralta I told you that, he’ll murder me. It’s the biggest clue we’ve held back from the media.” She gave me a mischievous smile. “And no leaking it to that old girlfriend of yours, Lauren.”

“Lorie.”

“Whatever.”

“I think you’re jealous, Lindsey.”

We made love again, a slow, wordless, carnal thing that was the basis of us, as much as the books and the dry humor and the cynicism that hid some shocking hopefulness. Like home: that’s how it felt.

Then she was up and sliding back into her clothes, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. I was half asleep and reached out a hand.

“Stay with me, Lindsey.”

“I can’t, Dave,” she said. “I’ve got to go to work.”

“You always worked bankers’ hours.”

“New job, new hours.”

I stood and cinched up the robe. “Peralta’s degrading my quality of life. I can’t believe he’s making you do this.”

“I volunteered, Dave.” She pulled me toward her for a kiss. “No lectures, History Shamus. I don’t want to just be seen as some propellerhead nerd girl doing computer systems.”

“I think you proved that Monday night.”

“Dave, don’t worry. I’m a deputy sheriff, too. And this murderer is out there, right now.”

And then she was gone, the front door echoing hard after her.

I wanted to say, “Please be careful.”

I fell into a deep sleep, and I was hiking across huge grassy hills strewn here and there with piñon and scrub oak. A California landscape, not like Arizona. I was acutely aware of the carpet of rough grass beneath my feet and the nervous sense of height, the world falling off in every direction down hillside and arroyo. It was getting dark and a few lights were visible far down the valley, but I felt compelled to walk. I fell, grabbed a scrubby branch, pulled myself back up, set out again. I wasn’t afraid. Then there was a banging and jangling that didn’t go with the dream, and finally I realized it was the doorbell. I swung off the sofa, slipped on my old, dark-blue Nordstrom robe and walked unsteadily toward the door. I noticed it was two in the morning, and something made me go to the bedroom and get the Colt Python.357 magnum.

I opened the little wrought-iron peephole in the door, saw Peralta, and wondered if I was still dreaming.

“Mike?”

“It’s not the fucking Girl Scouts.”

I opened the heavy door and he walked in. He was wearing a rumpled suit and carrying a gym bag.

I had seen Peralta in meetings and interrogations and even gun fights. But I had never seen him with the bare hint of vulnerability that surrounded him this moment. He seemed to read me and merely held out a finger, commanding silence, as he moved into the living room and sat heavily in Grandfather’s old green leather chair.

“I need a place to stay,” he said. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Are you okay? Is Sharon okay?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. I held up my hands in surrender and we sat in silence. Finally, I went into the kitchen and came back with two beers. He took one in his massive hand, studied the label with disgust-it was a Sam Adams-but he drank.

I was suddenly aware that I was naked under the robe and my crotch was still delightfully wet from Lindsey, and all in the presence of the chief deputy. He didn’t seem to notice. I had never been good at guy talk, where everything real was submerged subtly beneath words of sports and work and women. And I was particularly at a loss in Peralta’s company, where his sheer presence overwhelmed everything like a mountain dropped into flatlands. So we sat. I thought of Lindsey, of her body and expression as she pleased herself atop me. The twelve-foot-tall bookshelves that Grandfather had built kept watch over us.

“Tell me you own a television, Mapstone,” he said at last. “Even you’d want to watch the History Channel.”

So I took him into the little study and he took over Grandfather’s desk chair. With the tube on ESPN, he became a contented self-contained unit. I went back into the living room and read for a while, James Morris’ Pax Britannica, immersing myself in the adventures, characters and follies of the British Empire. It was the kind of book I wish I could write, but now, at forty, I knew I might never have the time or the talent. Still, Lindsey gave me a bookmark with George Eliot’s quote: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Later, when I could hear Peralta snoring, I went to the linen closet, pulled out a comforter, carefully spread it over him and shut down the house for the night.