Camelback Falls

Chapter Twenty-five

Monday morning. It was two hours later in Boston, and my call caught Lorie Pope just as she was going out the door. I asked her if she could talk.

“If you’ll give me about thirty minutes to get all these coats off me,” she grumped. “Every time I start to miss the East and think I want to live back here, I remember how cold it is in January. What’s the temperature in Phoenix now?”

“Probably 75,” I said. “But I’m in Denver right now, so I feel your pain. Actually, I kind of like the cold. I just don’t have a good coat.”

“Well, you’re a native Zonie,” she said. “You probably thought snow was fallout the first time you saw it.”

It was true. I asked her what she was doing on the East Coast. It had only taken several days to find out where she was.

“I’m at Harvard, a Neiman Fellowship.” She paused. “It’s a journalism thing.”

“Sounds like an honor,” I said.

“It gets me out of the newsroom for a few months,” she said.

“And that keeps me from pissing off the bosses with my daily rebellions.”

I told her about my daily rebellions, and she let out a squeal of delight. I could just see her tossing her hair back out of her eyes, smiling that wide white smile and lighting up a Marlboro. “You’re the sheriff! I don’t believe it! I’ve been skiing the past week in New Hampshire and I haven’t even read the paper online. God, I wish I were there to write that story!” Then she knocked her voice down. “I’m sorry about Peralta. I know he’s your friend.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But as usual, I need your help.”

“Anything for my old boyfriend the sheriff.”

“Remember that big shootout in Guadalupe in 1979? The two deputies?”

“I covered it, David,” she admonished. “Remember, we met when I was covering the police beat?”

“I remember everything,” I said “So, what about that case never made the papers?”

“Oh, David, now the bargaining side of my personality is coming out. It’s not my best side. Why do you want to know, my love, and what’s in it for me?”

“A well-made martini when you get back to Phoenix,” I said. “Anyway, you’re on a junket.”

I knew from the expectant silence that it wouldn’t fly. So I told her my story as economically as possible.

“Holy shit,” she said. “Are you safe?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

“Well, the thing that never got in the paper was the degree of influence exerted by the girl’s father, Bill Watson. He was loaded with oil money. And I’m convinced some heavy campaign contributions came to the judge and the county attorney in exchange for the light sentence for Marybeth.”

“But she was just a kid, and the record indicates she wasn’t directly involved.”

“Mmmmm,” Lorie said. “So how do you explain the prison sentence for her boyfriend?”

“Daddy’s money?”

“Exactly.”

“So what do you know about Camelback Falls?” I asked.

She let out a little whistle. “I haven’t heard that name in years. It was Jonathan Ledger’s house. You know, the sex guy?”

“Did you ever go up there?”

She laughed. “Oh, I had an adventurous youth, but not that adventurous. I did get an invitation to a party there once, but I was busy or had to work or something. It was apparently quite the swinger’s place back then.”

“I never got those kind of invitations,” I said.

“You were too ponderous, my love. All those books and big thoughts.”

“So what kind of people went up there?”

“My invitation came from a doctor, a sports medicine guy I was dating. I think I was dating about five men at once then. No, you weren’t one of them. Anyway, I got the sense it was a crowd with a lot of money and not much sense. You know, it was the seventies. Anything goes. Ledger kept a salon of beautiful people, and they had legendary parties. That was the rep.”

“So no lowlifes, or prison escapees? Or runaways from Tulsa?”

She paused. “David, this is getting way too interesting. Maybe I’d better get on the next plane back.”

“What if I told you I’d seen a photo of Marybeth and Jonathan Ledger, and they weren’t posing at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.”

“I’d say that’s news,” she said.

I asked, “What were the River Hogs?”

“This is memory lane. The Hogs were cops, deputies. They were bad news.”

“Bad news, how?”

“I’ll tell you what I heard, and then I’ll tell you what I saw. Remember, I was a twenty-two-year-old kid reporter. If the cops were friendly, they usually just wanted to try to get me into bed. Usually, they were outright hostile. Not only was I the press, but I was a woman.”

She went on. “What I heard was that this group of deputies was a kind of force above the law. They looked the other way on things like drugs and prostitution in exchange for protection money. They had the reputation of tough guys, and there was talk they were somehow tied into the Vegas mob. Real muscle. You didn’t want to mess with them. You never knew exactly who they were. That added to the mystique.”

“They were the River Hogs?”

“Yes and no. The River Hogs were a joke at first. A bunch of guys would get off duty, buy a few cases of beer and go drink themselves silly down in the riverbed. Big time in the city, huh? When the department brass got wind of it, they tried to shut it down, but the drinking parties always just moved somewhere else. I heard they got really out of hand sometimes, drunken target shooting, bringing along prostitutes and cop groupies, that kind of thing. But there was also this kind of understanding that the way into this shadow group of dirty cops was through these parties. So were they one and the same? I never found out.”

“Why didn’t I ever know any of this?”

“Oh, David,” she said. “You were always in your own world. It was endearing.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling not so endearing. “You said you also saw something.”

“Yes,” she said. “There was this nasty strip of bars down between Tempe and Scottsdale. You remember? Bobby Hamid got his start there. Lots of other sterling citizens. There was one place called Lacey’s Lounge. It was totally scummy, but no more so than any other place there. Then one night, just after closing, the deputies raided the place. They shot and killed the owner, a guy named, uh, Jimmy Nance. They said he pulled a gun on them after they identified themselves. And they found a bunch of pot and cocaine.”

“So?”

“So, I had done a story on those topless bars a few months before, and I spent some time with this Nance. He was totally neurotic, about guns. Said he’d never own one because he was afraid it would be used on him. David, they planted that gun on him to make the shooting look righteous. He must have backed out on paying his protection money. It’s not like the other places got raided. And they got away with it! My editors had zip interest in my pursuing the story.”

“So who were the bad cops?” I felt my gut tighten involuntarily.

“I never knew, David.”

“Come on, Lorie,” I pressed. “There must have been talk. Somebody I know? Somebody I worked with?”

“I swear to God, I don’t know.”

“What about the two deputies in Guadalupe?”

“Heroes killed in the line of duty,” she said. “They were close to retirement. Left behind families. It was the hook for the story for weeks.”

“Was it true?”

“David.” Her voice tightened with irritation. “I generally try to write the truth.”

I said, “Did you know one of them had a failing business on the side? He was really strapped for money when the shooting happened.”

She didn’t say anything, so I went on. “And did you know those same photos from Camelback Falls show another East County deputy involved in an orgy? That’s the same deputy who was murdered last week.”

“No, I didn’t know any of that,” she said. “You’re making me feel like an idiot here.”

“Welcome to the club,” I said.

I finished up on the phone, then showered and locked up the hotel room. Lindsey had already gone to the public library in search of a T-1 line. We had slept nearly nine hours, snuggled like spoons against the cold world just out the window, interrupted around 3 A.M. for a fierce and satisfying lovemaking. When we woke up, there were six inches of dry powder snow on the ground.

“How did you know Beth had been in touch with Leo via the Internet?” I asked as she dressed and I read the Rocky Mountain News in bed.

“I didn’t,” she said. “It was a bluff. And she fell for it.”

Beth had given away something, amid a conversation that seemed to be leavened with lies, shadings. If she wouldn’t cooperate, we were stuck. I could go to the Denver cops and begin the process of wrapping her up as a material witness. But there was no time. There was a time deficit. I was a time debtor, and foreclosure was imminent. A week had gone by since Peralta’s shooting. It seemed like a year.

I had my own errand. I drove the three miles through plowed streets to Cherry Creek, where the self-help and sexuality section of the Tattered Cover bookstore held several paperback copies of The Sex Instructions and More Sex Instructions, by Jonathan Ledger. I sat on a bench and leafed through with only mild embarrassment. Hey, I was a kid of the ’70s, I had no inhibitions.

Like the other sexuality books of the time, Ledger’s books used the trappings of science and liberation to tear down bourgeois hangups and have a grand old time talking about screwing. More than most, however, his books were notable for their frankness and explicit photographs. These were good-looking models in clinical settings, though, not the drugged, flawed, fleshy convivialists at Camelback Falls. Written before the age of AIDS, Ledger’s books were evangelical tomes for promiscuity-one chapter was entitled “The Pathology of Faithfulness”-and doing what felt good.

I snapped shut the book as a little girl skipped by. On the back was a photo of Ledger, cropped so you could see only his dramatic black brows and sharply chiseled face rather than the wispy white hair hanging on around his bald pate. “Jonathan Ledger was a researcher, teacher, and lecturer on human sexuality,” the type read. “He was born in Utah into a large Mormon family, but broke away from the church as a teenager. Ledger received his Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton, where he conducted pioneering research on female sexuality. As an author, his books spent a total of 87 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. He died in 1984.”

I opened the book again and flipped through the photos. Three sets of lovers, attractive sexual artists, demonstrating various positions and flavors. I noticed that the couples didn’t stay together. To get Ledger’s deeper point of pleasure across, the men and women played musical chairs in different pictures. It would have all been very naughty and forbidden in 1975. Now, it just seemed banal. When I thought of the photos from Camelback Falls-more pioneering research? — it seemed kind of pathetic.

Now I didn’t feel deprived. When I was living through those years, I felt like I was missing the greatest party in the history of the world. I could hear my neighbors screwing on the other side of the walls. I could get the sex stories from my friends, male and female. I was so out of it. Now, I didn’t miss that past. Now I reveled in the positions and flavors with Lindsey, a woman who loved with enough freshness and sometimes awkwardness that I didn’t feel as if she had practiced on dozens of men before me, with the burnout and scars to go along with it. Maybe that was naive on my part. But whether we made love or just fucked, sex with Lindsey always felt new, and always felt like home.

I looked at the photo of Ledger again. “Tell me something, Jonathan,” I said aloud, oblivious to the people around me. Ledger stared at me like a backwoods preacher out to save my soul.

I opened the front pages. A list of his other works. No dedication page. I flipped forward, where it would tell me the copyright dates, the printing history, the ISBN number. The business of publishing. The stuff nobody ever reads.

Then I saw it.