Cactus Heart

12

The worst sound in the world is a ringing telephone after midnight.

“Dave.”

Lindsey. “Are you all right?”

“Did you read the fourteenth Canto without me?” she asked. We’d been reading Dante to each other, a little bit at a time in bed. I said, “I’d rather wait for you.”

“That’s why you’re my History Shamus.”

A minute passed by with nothing but the electronic buzz of the phone line.

“Are you okay, Lindsey?”

“I guess I’m not.”

I sat up in bed, awake with worry, the house silent and dark around me.

I waited for her. She said, “So how was your day?”

Something bad. Lindsey is the most direct person I’ve ever known. When her conversation turns elliptical, it is a bad sign.

“I tried to call you,” I said. “I figured you were tied up.”

“Tell me about your day, Dave.”

I imagined the bit of frost that came into her dark blue eyes when there was only one path she was prepared to take.

“I found Frances Richie, the woman arrested with Jack Talbott in the kidnapping? She’s still alive. Still in prison.”

I could hear her faintly breathing. Steady, shallow.

“She didn’t have much to say. She remembered a slouch fedora that was taken from her by a jail matron after the arrest. I want to know how the bodies got in that wall, and she remembers the hat.”

“Do you remember what you wore the first time we ever made love?”

“I remember more what you were wearing,” I said. “And then not wearing.”

“You wore chinos and a light blue shirt,” she said softly, “and you looked impossibly preppy. But I knew inside you were a bad boy.”

I felt myself smile against the cool plastic of the phone.

I waited a moment, hearing the line buzz emptily, and went on. “I learned that the building where the skeletons were found is owned by the Yarnell family.” Thanks, Bobby. “I also tried to find out something about the pocket watch you noticed.” I paused. “I guess it’s all a fool’s errand. When the DNA profile comes back, we’ll know for sure. PPD is testing the DNA found on the skeletons against a sample from the surviving brothers. Then the case can be closed. I’m just trying to keep Peralta off my back.”

“Why is El Jefe so freaked out by me?”

“Oh, he’s that way with everybody. Even his wife.”

“Well, she doesn’t like me, either,” Lindsey said. “But that I can understand. It’s that thing with older women who are insecure about their husbands.”

“Dr. Sharon? The highest functioning woman in Phoenix?”

“Trust me,” Lindsey said. “I know.”

She had distracted me just enough that I launched into a story about Mike and Sharon from years ago, when he was just a deputy and she was a mousy housewife. It was a funny story. An illuminating one.

“Dave.”

I stopped talking.

“Linda died today.”

Her mother.

It took about fifteen minutes to drive through the deserted streets to Lindsey’s apartment in Sunnyslope, an eclectic neighborhood strewn across the high ground rising up to North Mountain. I had a leather jacket over a sweatshirt and jeans: It was colder outside, a definite chill from the High Country. I was wide awake.

She had about a dozen candles burning in the book-filled apartment and music on the CD player from a band that I had learned from her was called Pavement. I’ve lost enough people in my life, hell, I started with losses even before I was out of diapers. So it’s second nature to know there are no words that really give comfort and many that can make things worse. I’d be worthless as a writer of sympathy cards. So I just made her a martini, dry with Bombay Sapphire, and held her, slowly stroking her soft, straight hair. She didn’t cry.

Then we ended up making love on the hardwood floor in front of her sofa. Clothes halfway off, her miniskirt bunched up around her waist, her heavy black shoes still on and cutting into my back. It didn’t seem right, appropriate, whatever. But I lost myself in it. She came with an angry, anguished screaming, clinging so tightly to me I thought my neck would snap. But I let her hang on, and she did for a long, long time. She says I am a “dark, sensual creature.” But that’s really a description of her.

We’d been together for only five months. She was my ally on that first case last summer, when I was newly back in Phoenix, a year out of the divorce with Patty and still feeling my way back into the cop world. Lindsey was the one holding my hand when I woke up in a hospital with a bullet hole in my shoulder. We read books to each other, made love with an athletic joy, and shared a rebellious sensibility that verged on the misanthropic. But she was also an unfolding mystery and I liked that.

She wanted me to teach her history and we shared a love of literature. But she drew the line at jazz. Her musical tastes tended toward indy rock, a campy love of 1970s disco and even some rap. So we carried on an uneasy truce across a green line of music and love. Neither of us had spoken that word yet, “love.” We hadn’t had the conversations that once were a given at certain points in what our age calls “relationships”: the “where are we going?” talk, the “what do you mean to me?” talk, the “forever” talk.

That was fine with me. Maybe it was a naive hope that if we didn’t abandon the mystery of early courtship we wouldn’t lose its passion. Maybe some of it was our age difference, but not the way people would think. Most of it was the knowledge that comes after you realize that love doesn’t last forever, that lovers move on, parents grow old, children die. That we live in a time of disconnection and abandonment. Maybe people in her generation seemed to come to that knowledge sooner. I didn’t know.

“She killed herself.”

I stroked her hair and said quietly, “Oh, baby.”

“She used a gun.”

I had never met her mother. Another of the rituals of courtship we never consummated. I knew her parents were divorced. Her father had been killed in Vietnam when she was a baby and her mother became a hippy-she was a true child of recent history. Lindsey and her mother weren’t close. I could remember no visits or phone calls, just a passing reference to her mother living somewhere in the suburbs, Chandler, I think.

I felt her swallow hard. “Women usually use pills,” Lindsey said.

Then, in a different voice, “Tell me about your case, History Shamus. What did we find down there under that warehouse?”

“Lindsey, tell me about your mother.”

I could feel her tense a little, then let it go.

“Oh, Dave.” She sighed. “God, I wish I hadn’t given up smoking.” She drummed her fingers on my calf. “I hardly knew her.”

She flashed the blue eyes at me. “She heard voices. It scared me when I was little. I didn’t know what it was all about. She took us from place to place. I used to see the different men she’d bring home, and she’d moan and screech behind the bedroom door. I thought they were hurting her. And she’d go into rages. She’d just walk away for days at a time. It was years before she got help, and she didn’t always take her drugs. The legal ones, I mean. She did really well with the illegal kind. My upbringing wasn’t Leave It to Beaver.”

I just listened. She stroked my leg with a light, detached touch, making my leg hair stand up straight.

“It was all properly seventies and absurd,” she laughed low and humorless. Then, in another voice, “I don’t hate her. She was younger than I am now and she had a thing for drugs and booze and bad men. She sure didn’t want to be a mother. It’s just that I couldn’t bring myself to love her, and if that makes me a monster, fuck everybody. Fuck everybody.”

The room was as fragile as old crystal. I looked around for some reassuring signs of Lindsey as I had known her, realizing that everything had changed somehow. Shelves and shelves of books: fiction, poetry, philosophy, a little history. Photos of Mayan ruins from a trip she made three years ago. Photos of us on the beach in San Diego from earlier this year. Mexican Day of the Dead art, one of her many eccentric enthusiasms. Two personal computers, CD-ROM, printer, scanner and modems on a butcher block suspended on a pair of old filing cabinets. X-Files calendar. A large print of Emily Dickinson. A barrel cactus with a blue ribbon around it. Her big tomcat Pasternak fell against me and purred loudly.

“The more you know about me, the less you’re going to want to be with me.” She leaned in against me.

“That’s not true,” I said. “And you’re not a monster, Lindsey.”

“You wouldn’t know, Dave. You love my legs.” I needed to laugh and we both did. There was a fundamental kindness in Lindsey and she would always let me off the hook.

“Just hold me,” she said softly. “Don’t try to make any sense of things. Just hold me all night.”