Camelback Falls

Chapter Eighteen

Draw me a map of the human heart. Show me the roads in and out. Where does Eros take the turnoff from love, darkness from passion? Destiny, fate. Nixon, Peralta, and me, we were all just cops together. Men with easily pierced skin and breakable bones. Men with hearts. But all along we were connected by invisible strands that ran to right now: Nixon dead, Peralta in a coma, Mapstone the sheriff. Badge numbers in the logbook. Photographs on my breakfast table.

Draw me a map of the human heart. The back roads of jealousy and rage. It is no coincidence that cops get killed during family fights. At the point of conjugal connection the mask of civilization is always shaky, our mastery of nature most personally at risk. Love and lust are dangerous things, and every civilization tries to control them, whether through ancient commandments or the latest dating code on campus. Nature is always ready to slip the leash, go mad again. We Phoenicians should know this most of all, living in our artificial city with the desert seemingly subdued for our pleasure and recreation. But beneath us are the ruins of the Hohokam city that preceded us. They were men with hearts, too, who dug the canals, unlocked the rich soil, vanished. The desert is really in control, merely biding its time.

These thoughts tried to find purchase inside my head as we drove the speed limit through the pleasant streets of northeast Phoenix two hours later. Lindsey was lost in her own thoughts and we didn’t talk much. We were in her Honda Prelude, with its bumper sticker that read, “Keep honking, I’m reloading.” But the message was lost on our tail from the previous night-no cars appeared to be following us. I was on an errand I most dreaded.

Judge Carlos Peralta lived in a rambling ranch house off Lafayette Boulevard in the city’s Arcadia district. The houses had been built in the 1950s where citrus groves stood. The judge’s house was guarded by lush grapefruit and orange trees, oleanders and desert honeysuckle. Down the freshly cut front lawn was a magnificent view of Camelback Mountain. Lindsey parked in the driveway and kept on her seatbelt.

“You’re not coming?”

“Dave, this is definitely an interview that should be one-on-one.” She patted my hand.

So I walked up a long sidewalk framed by ornamental lights and flowerbeds. The walk was enchanting at night, like the Thanksgiving five years ago when we all came over. The judge had been a widower here for ten years, but he refused Mike and Sharon’s yearly suggestions that he move to a condo. He had been the first Mexican-American on the state appeals court, and the first to move to Arcadia. This house also held his memories and his books. I understood that much.

His housekeeper, Mrs. Sanchez, a large woman with happy black eyes, greeted me and showed me into his study. The room was dark in the way that comforts the old or the grieving. It was a vast repository of books: on the walls, on tables, on the desk that looked out-of-place modern, even in stacks on the thick cream carpet. Amid a table full of family photos was a large picture of his son as an Army Ranger. Another showed him as chief deputy, his expression barely changed across three decades. Gas logs glowed in a fireplace. It was about 70 degrees outside, so they had to run the air conditioning to have the illusion of winter inside. And at the far end of the room, swallowed up in a leather armchair, was the frail figure of the judge.

“Come in, David.” I could hear his wheezing across the room.

“Please don’t stand, sir.” I crossed the room quickly and took his hand. I could feel bones barely covered with skin. His expression was concealed in the half shadow. The room smelled of Mentholatum. I felt like a nightstick had repeatedly been jabbed into my abdomen.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, Judge…”

“Why don’t you call me Carlos?”

“Carlos,” I said. But it was no good. “I can’t, Judge. It just goes against my grain. The way I was raised, I suppose.”

“Understood,” he said. “When I was your age it was inconceivable that I would address an older person by his first name. Now every stranger talks to me like I am four years old.”

“We’ve had a development in the case,” I said. He was silent, so I went on, speaking through the acid I could sense creeping up my throat. “A former deputy was found murdered, a man who used to work with me and Mike in the East County.” I watched his weathered face, but no expression registered. “We’re not sure if he was killed by the same person who shot Mike last Monday. But this man, whose name was Dean Nixon, left some evidence…”

I just let it hang there for a minute as my eyes were drawn into the conjuring flame of the gas fireplace. I looked away, scanned some of his books. There was Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, several volumes of Plato and Locke. The judge said nothing.

“The evidence is a logbook that may show payoffs to sheriff’s deputies from years ago, from the 1970s.”

“Is my son among them?”

The words were spoken with no emotion. I could imagine the cool litigator of a half-century ago. I said, “Yes, he appears to be. But we are very early in the invest-”

“I didn’t want him to be a policeman, do you know that?”

I shook my head.

The judge inhaled loudly and said, “From the earliest, I wanted him to be a man of the law, a lawyer. I suppose that guaranteed he would rebel against me.”

“I know he always revered you,” I blurted.

“We didn’t speak for years,” the judge said. I didn’t know that either, although I had always sensed a distance between father and son, like magnets repelling. He went on. “I was severe. I had worked very hard to make it in the Anglo world, and here was my son making common cause with men who, in my memory, would stop and beat a Mexican-American for sport. I told him, ‘You will be nothing but the token beaner, the one they call spic behind your back.’ He never listened.”

The judge raised himself up. It looked painful. But after all the effort, his body seemed even deeper in the chair. “Don’t get me wrong,” he went on. “I detest today’s Balkanization and victim-mongering. My brother always says he is a Chicano. I am an American, of Mexican descent…” He looked toward a small side table, where his hand found a teacup.

“Your evidence doesn’t surprise me,” he said, sipping from the cup. “Law enforcement always grows corruption.”

I shivered a little in the sudden coolness of the room, amazed at the clinical tone of the man opposite me.

“Judge, I’m not saying he was involved.”

“When I was elected to the bench in 1965, Maricopa County Superior Court, it was common to see cops plant evidence that damned a suspect, suppress evidence that might exonerate him.”

“Common?” I challenged, losing some of my fear of the man.

He ignored me. “In the 1970s, drugs changed everything. The money just added to the opportunities for corruption. I presided over a dozen trials involving law enforcement that had stolen drugs or fallen in with dealers. And that was nothing compared with what the federal judges heard.” He smacked his lips loudly. “I always wondered, if these were the stupid ones getting caught, what must be going on that we never even knew?”

My mouth had turned to a dry riverbed. “Are you telling me you suspect your son was involved in corruption?”

“Who do you think shot my son, Sheriff?” he demanded. He didn’t wait for an answer. In a higher, softer voice he said, “Policemen make a lot of enemies. Good ones and bad ones. Just like lawyers. I know I did. And when all this comes out, they won’t hesitate to crucify my son, just like they tried to do me. Whatever the truth.”

“What do you think the truth is, Judge?”

His breathing fell back into a wheeze. He said evenly, “Lawyers and history professors, both wordsmiths. Both truth-seekers. When we’re young we think truth is something that can be bottled and preserved, like some specimen in biology. Now, they tell us everything is relative, that there is no truth, and that’s crazy. What do I think? I think a revolution happened in the 1970s, and if that’s where your evidence comes from, then all the rules were off.”

“This is your son, Judge! Give me something that can help him.”

He didn’t speak for a long time, just seemed to shrink more into the big leather chair. I finally rose and prepared to go.

“I knew your grandfather Philip, you know.”

“Yes.”

“He was a good man,” the judge said. “He took patients from the barrio when Anglo Phoenix still treated us like dogs. He respected Mexican Americans, understood the dilemma, assimilation versus identity. He always struck me as the epitome of cultivated manliness.”

He sighed. “Cultivated manliness, our age doesn’t even know what that means.” The fireplace glowed yellow-blue, suddenly orange. I half expected to hear a log fall and crackle, but the room was dark silent. “I see some of him in you. David. So I think the best and only help for my son is you.”

I retreated. “Thank you, Judge Peralta.”

He said, “Do you have the courage to face the truth you find, David?” But he didn’t want an answer. In the dimness, I could see he had picked up a book and started reading, his breathing a steady squeezebox wheeze. I quietly let myself out.