Cactus Heart

15

“Now I am entranced, David Mapstone,” she said. “A martini man? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cop drink a martini. I am shaken and stirred.”

“I picked it up in another life.”

“Ah, this was the life in the federal witness protection program?”

“How did you know?”

“So you lost the girl but kept the vice?”

I smiled. “Something like that.”

She set aside her chardonnay and caught the barmaid’s eye-not hard to do, since we were the only people in the bar. “I’ve decided I must have a martini, too.”

“Bombay Sapphire,” I instructed, and the barmaid went away, her black tennis skirt swinging saucily behind her.

Gretchen said, “When I was twenty three, I dated, well let’s say he was the youngest son of one of the richest men on the West Coast. He was a total idiot, but, oh, how I loved his toys.”

The crowd noise from the basketball game on TV drifted over our way and then the server did, too. Gretchen sampled the martini.

“Oh, my,” she said.

“So how does one get to be the city archaeologist?” I asked and heard her story.

Gretchen Goodheart grew up in Tempe, where her dad was a teacher. She was a tomboy, and excelled at track and gymnastics in high school. She went to UCLA and then worked four years as a smoke jumper, fighting forest fires around the West. “I survived,” she said. But she also loved history. “I decided archaeology was a good mix of the outdoors and the past. But it’s not like you can take that degree and open an archaeology shop on Mill Avenue.”

So she came home to Phoenix, worked in several dead-end jobs. Then she answered an ad for the city archaeologist’s office. For fun, she rode horses and hiked in the desert. She wanted to collect Santa Clara pottery but couldn’t afford it. She read Montini in the Republic because he made her mad and she was a Big Sister to an eleven-year-old girl in the barrio.

Gretchen was safe, pretty, athletic. She’d probably never had anything really bad happen in her life. She’d never sat up with a lover through a dark night of the soul. She had none of Lindsey’s edge or surprises. She would never dig black platform heels into my back as we made love. I had that thought and then wondered why I would presume to think it. I imagined she had a pleasant-looking boyfriend who worked at Bank One.

“So what’s your story?” she asked. “You don’t seem like the other cops I’ve met.”

“Oh, I’m a bona fide graduate of the Sheriff’s Academy.”

“David Mapstone keeps his mystery up.” She smiled. “I know you left law enforcement to teach history. You were a professor. A friend of Mike Peralta. And you came back to Phoenix this year and took a job with the Sheriff’s Office again.”

“Gretchen, you don’t miss a thing.”

“I read about you in the newspaper, solving old crimes. It must be very satisfying. Who said, ‘The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice’?”

“Martin Luther King, Jr. Although his words were ‘arc of the moral universe’ and he was quoting an abolitionist preacher named…” I let the sentence trail off. My flirty nervousness with her was turning into pedantry.

She smiled and touched the top of my hand. “I’m interested. Just from reading about you, I kind of felt like you were a kindred spirit, a refugee from the social sciences trying to make a living in the real world. I’m afraid I don’t have a Ph.D. in history, though.”

“Well, then you’re more employable than me,” I said. “I’d like to think I bring something special to all this, but mostly I think Peralta had pity on me and gave me a job.”

“You seem pretty impressive to me,” she said, and a flush of visceral pleasure coursed through me. “So what’s he like? The famous Chief Peralta.”

I shook my head. “Beats me.”

We each had two martinis. Then I walked her to her truck, parked in a garage across from the new city hall at Third Avenue and Washington. I was feeling good and yet virtuous. That was until she turned at her truck door and gave me a hug.

“Thanks for the talk,” she said in a voice as soft as the red-brown hair that brushed across my face. “I’m enjoying getting to know you.”

“My pleasure,” I said. I watched her start up the big SUV and head down the ramp, then I walked to the stairway awash in lust and guilt. It wasn’t a particularly bad feeling.

The street was empty and the only sound was a distant train whistle, something that always reminded me of when I was a kid listening through the bedroom window late at night to the Santa Fe trains coming down from the main line at Williams Junction.

Sound is a funny thing here. It gets trapped in the dry air and bounced around between the mountains. So I didn’t hear the old white van until it was right up on me. It crept down Fourth Avenue on the lane closest to the sidewalk, exactly matching my pace. A Ford Econoline, like ten thousand others in the city. I glanced inside and was barred by heavily tinted black windows. How many times had Peralta told me to carry a gun? Now I just looked like a guy in a suit, working late, a good target. Where the hell were those PPD bicycle patrols? I got to Jefferson and the nearest car was a pair of headlights half a mile away. The lights from the Madison Street Jail looked down like the windows of a medieval castle. Otherwise, we were all alone.

I crossed behind the van and checked the license plate. It was covered with mud and the light was out. A sudden wild gush of panic came up my legs and into my belly. I fought it down with breathing. Slow and steady. I walked easy and straight across the street, moving east down Jefferson now. Another block and I could get in the sheriff’s administration building with my bar-coded ID.

The van turned on Jefferson and paced me again. Now I was on the driver’s side, but the windows were still opaque. I didn’t want to keep looking over. I started running scenarios in my head. Wondering how much of the self-defense training I got from Peralta twenty years ago was still second nature. I knew one thing: nobody was going to get me inside a van.

“Excuse me.”

The window was down now and a face peered out.

“Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?”

He was just a guy: white, thirties, doughy face, balding into a comb-over, his eyes buried in heavy lids. I stopped and looked.

“Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?” he asked again.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It’s down there at Second and Madison. Park on Madison and check in with the deputy at the front counter.”

“Thank you.” His eyes became merry slits. “Aren’t you David Mapstone?

“I am. Have we met?”

He looked at me for a moment and the window went back up. Then the van accelerated around the corner and I was alone again on the street. Just then, two bicycle cops rode by. The female officer looked like Steffi Graf.