Camelback Falls

Chapter Seven

Lindsey wrinkled her nose as if something smelled bad. “The seventies,” she said. “Yuck.”

“I thought you liked the music,” I challenged. A light band of freckles spread across her nose. You’d miss it in most lights. Her tiny gold nose stud gleamed in her left nostril. She was out of uniform, wearing black jeans and an oversized gray sweater.

“I like the music, sometimes, because it’s campy and fun. I also like Sleater-Kinney and Beethoven, Dave. I’m unpredictable.”

“I love that.”

She studied her shot glass, bent down close to the table, and sipped off the golden meniscus of Glenlivit, her winter drink. “But the seventies seems pretty gross.” She arched her eyebrow. “You baby boomers.”

“Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, baby.”

She brushed back a strand of dark hair that had fallen over her right eye. “I bet you had a pair of polyester pants.”

“I’ll deny it. But I also had a pair of platform shoes. Made me six-foot-eight.”

“It’s all coming back in style.” She curled her lips slyly.

“OK, I agree. Yuck.”

We sat at a back table in the My Florist Cafe, a neighborhood bar that had taken over a former flower shop on McDowell. The Willo Historic District started to the north, where a neighborhood of 1920s houses somehow had survived Phoenix’s destructive ways. Below McDowell Road, lovely old neighborhoods had been obliterated by an underground freeway in the 1980s and for years it looked like the victim of a small-scale nuclear war. Now the area was slowly coming back. New upscale apartments and condos were going up next to Margaret Hance Park. The bungalows in the palm-lined streets around Kenilworth School were being rehabbed. Even the stark coppery box of the city library-everybody called it “The Toaster”-was looking more appealing.

I was just grateful for a place to relax close to home. I was working on my second martini, feeling light and calm for the first time all day, retelling the twenty-one-year-old story of the Guadalupe shootout. It was the easy unwinding when we told each other of our day. We never made it to the Suns game.

Lindsey said, “And you were how old when this happened?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three.” She looked me over. “I bet you were hot stuff, History Shamus.”

“Nobody thought so,” I said.

“I doubt that, Dave. But if the shootout ended with the dirtballs getting killed, how does that tie into the shootings of Peralta and Nixon?”

I said, “It wasn’t over yet.”

I again walked her back twenty years and through what happened next. With the second suspect down, I pulled myself off the gravel and checked the two deputies on the ground for pulses. They were both faceup dead. Then I looked toward this old blue Chevy, still idling directly ahead of the sheriff’s cruiser, and a head bobbed above the seat and disappeared. I drew down and ordered them out. Peralta came up on the other side of the car and chambered a new round in the shotgun. Then Nixon and his partner rolled in. A woman’s voice begged us not to kill them.

They slowly crawled out of the backseat. The woman looked like the girl next door, if you stuck the girl next door right in the middle of a multiple homicide: surfer-girl blond hair, straight and parted in the middle, prom-queen face. Her companion was a small man with very long black hair. They were younger than me. She started crying and talking. I told her to shut up, Mirandized her, and pushed her down into the gravel and burrs. I cuffed her to await a search from a female deputy. Then the guy. Peralta had him on his knees, the shotgun not six inches from his face. I cuffed him and pushed him face-down next to her, ordered him to shut up, too.

“You guys didn’t just beat confessions out of suspects back then?” Lindsey smiled darkly.

“We were very professional,” I said. “I didn’t want them to get shot in all the confusion and adrenaline. Cops get nervous trigger fingers when two of their colleagues have just been shot down like dogs.”

Lindsey finished her scotch. “These two in the backseat. They were involved?”

I nodded. “The guy was named Leo O’Keefe. He went to prison as an accessory. The girl, Marybeth Watson, was his girlfriend. She got probation, I think. They were all Okies, in the big city.”

Lindsey stared at the table, her long, slender fingers making a V around the shot glass. “And Leo O’Keefe was the name written on the back of Peralta’s business card, found in Dean Nixon’s pocket…”

“Right,” I said. “It’s weird. It’s a new card. Peralta is listed as sheriff, not chief deputy.”

“Would he have been in contact with Nixon?” she asked.

“I can’t imagine it,” I said. “He never said anything to me.”

“So where does Leo O’Keefe come in?”

Two more drinks appeared.

“On the house, for the new sheriff,” the waitress said. She looked like one of the models who sang behind Robert Palmer on the video for “Addicted to Love.” I recalled her name was Jodie.

“Acting sheriff,” I said. “And you know I have to pay. But thanks.” I suddenly felt deflated and exhausted. At the bar, people were talking like they had a future. Good-looking young people with leather jackets and cell phones. Peralta lay a few blocks away near death. I turned back to Lindsey. “Kimbrough checked on O’Keefe, and he escaped from prison two weeks ago. It’s not inconceivable that he’s out to get revenge on the officers involved in his arrest. The phone number went to a fleabag hotel out on Van Buren, but a man matching O’Keefe’s description left two days ago.”

Her blue eyes flashed alarm. “Dave, if he went after Nixon and Peralta…” She stared at me. “You were at Guadalupe, too.”

I started on the third martini, wishing I hadn’t, feeling the chill gin warm my throat. “Every law enforcement agency in the West is looking for this guy.”

“Jesus!” Lindsey leaned toward me, elbows on the table. Her sleek forearms peeked out of the sweater sleeves. “Are you packing?”

I pulled back my coat to reveal the Python in a black nylon holster on my belt.

“You and that damned revolver,” she said.

I patted it lightly. “It’ll never jam.”

She wrinkled her nose again. Like all the younger cops, she preferred a semiautomatic pistol. It was fast and held more ammunition. She unconsciously put her right hand on her backpack, which held her Glock.

“I can’t believe you,” she whispered. Her eyes did a subtle once-around-the-room. The crowd at the bar laughed uproariously at something.

We walked the half mile home, alongside streets with sparse weeknight traffic. Up Fifth Avenue to Cypress, past the big old palms and the stucco houses. The air was dry and cold. It might get down to the low 40s tonight. Lindsey had a tension in her stride, and I knew she was quietly aggravated that I had decided we should walk to the hospital, stop at My Florist, and walk home when some nut was out there who might be after me, too. I looked behind us, but the street was empty except for the shadows of the palm trees. The buzz of a helicopter-police or TV news-came from the direction of downtown.

I decided against telling her about my mysterious visitor that afternoon. After I saw the fire door open, I went back in my office and called the security desk downstairs. But the guard said he never saw anyone come out. Leo O’Keefe? It was probably just somebody who was lost and looking for the marriage license bureau in the courthouse basement. Cops could get so paranoid. So could history professors.

Finally she asked, “What about Nixon’s partner, the rookie? Is he safe.”

“He’s dead,” I said. She looked at me wide-eyed. “No, not that way. Cancer. He died in 1995.”

Time to change the subject. “Lindsey,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Camelback Falls?”

“Sounds like a new resort on Camelback Mountain. Just add water,” she said. “What is it, really?”

“I don’t know. It was a notation in Peralta’s datebook, next to my name. I saw it yesterday when I went for his insulin. But I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

She said, “David Mapstone, native Phoenician and Arizona history expert stumped? Let me write down the date.”

“I also had a run-in with Jack Abernathy, who came in Peralta’s office while I was there. He was acting strange.”

“He is strange, Dave. The deputies call him the Planet Abernathy, because he’s so far out in orbit.”

We crossed Monte Vista, one block to Cypress. She went on, “Anyway, I don’t know what Camelback Falls is. Maybe it’s like Niagara Falls.”

She stopped and gave me a kiss, all tongue and passion. She giggled, a very un-Lindsey-like action. “I’m yours ’til Camelback Falls, Dave.”

Then she took my hand snugly in hers, and we resumed our fast walk home.