Concrete Desert

Chapter Nineteen

The newsroom of the Arizona Republic, on the ninth floor of the paper’s brand-new downtown tower, looked more like an insurance company office than a scene out of The Front Page. No stogie-chomping city editor. No screaming eccentrics in green eyeshades. No clattering typewriters, jangling phones, or reporters in fedoras yelling, “Get me rewrite, sweetheart.” Just decorator-driven corporate blandness against picture-window views of the mountains. The subdued background sound of computer keystrokes was the only noise. Men in beards and women in sensible shoes walked briskly past me with notebooks in their hands and sour looks on their faces. I gave my name to a receptionist who looked about twelve years old and waited for Lorie Pope.

The first time I saw her was on a murder scene in 1980, when I was a green deputy standing watch out in the heat and she was a young reporter intern, just arrived from Jersey, who couldn’t get past the police line. Maybe we were both rookies kept on the outside and maybe she just took pity on me, but, with eighties female assertiveness, she asked for my phone number. I was on the rebound from Julie, so Lorie and I ended up dating for a few months. After that, we remained friends, and after I moved away, I tried to look her up when I came back to visit. I knew she’d been in and out of two marriages, converted in turn to Buddhism and Judaism, and wrote an award-winning book on organized crime (I even got a brief mention in the acknowledgments). She left Arizona to work at newspapers in Seattle and L.A., then came back to the Republic as the head of its investigations team.

“David! My God!”

We hugged, a long, genuine hug. Lorie Pope was lean, tall, and tan, with dark hair cut fashionably short. Although she had changed over the years-grown into her face, is that the expression? — she looked at least ten years younger than I knew she was. And her laugh was just as I remembered it: uninhibited, infectious, wonderful.

She patted the holster on my belt. “Things have gotten tougher in the classroom, no?”

“I could have used it there, actually.” I laughed, and she led me out of the building, walking her brisk, purposeful walk.

“You’re quite the hero,” she said. “Uncovering information about a forty-year-old murder case, and one involving a relative of the next governor no less.”

“Is that the prediction for Brent McConnico?” I asked.

“If not this next election, then the one after.”

“He took me to lunch,” I said. “Seemed nice enough, for a politician.”

“I think he’s slimy,” Lorie said.

The heat of the sidewalk was burning my feet. I asked her why she didn’t like McConnico.

“When you want an afternoon’s primer on Arizona politics, and if you’re making the martinis, I’ll tell you. For one thing, he’s married and he’s tried on more than one occasion to pick me up.”

Five minutes through the midday hell and we were in a cool, dark booth in a restaurant at Arizona Center. She ordered a Bloody Mary. Wearing badge and gun, I settled for a diet Coke.

“So you’re really back at the SO?”

“I don’t know where I am,” I said. “I thought I was picking up a little consulting work from Mike Peralta while I tried to find a new teaching job. But universities aren’t exactly clamoring to hire me. I got a letter from a dean at Arizona State last month, and he actually said I wrote too clearly to be taken seriously as an historian today.”

“You’re equal opportunity-challenged in these politically correct times, my love,” she said.

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s no better in the news business; plus, we’re run by these profit-driven corporate dickheads with their focus groups and readership surveys. We keep making stories shorter and dumber, and we wonder why nobody wants to read newspapers today. At least you know there will always be crime.”

We ordered fish tacos, and I asked Lorie about Bobby Hamid.

“You tell me,” she said. “Surely the Sheriff’s Office intelligence files are piled high with Bobby Hamid information.”

“You can give me a different perspective, as an award-winning reporter writing about organized crime.”

“Yeah, shit,” she snorted, then added, “He’s a major, diversified scumbag. Tied in with new organized crime.”

“Old organized crime-the Mafia-played by a code of sorts. For instance, they wouldn’t murder cops or reporters. New organized crime-the Colombians, the Dominicans, the Samoans, the Russians, guys like Bobby Hamid-they’d just as soon kill you as look at you.” Lorie spoke fast, talked with her hands. She was in her element now.

“Bobby has all sorts of alliances, keeps his hands in different products. Like he’s tied in with the Aryan Brotherhood, distributing drugs in the Arizona State Prison. He uses the Mexican Mafia to terrorize competitors to his porno bookstores. I’ve heard he has his hands in reservation casinos, maybe through the old mob. He’s an operator.”

“Is he tied into flying drugs in from Mexico?”

“If he’s not, somebody close to him is,” Lorie said. “Bobby Hamid is like a Harvard Business School case study. He’s a genius in maximizing the value of different enterprises-only these are illegal enterprises.”

“So why has nobody ever shut him down?”

“Who knows? Another thing about the new organized crime is how diffuse it is. The system is overwhelmed. I know your buddy Peralta has had a hard-on for Bobby for years, but…yeah, as I recall, the county attorney screwed the pooch a couple of years ago on a prosecution and Bobby walked. Had a very high-priced lawyer.”

“Well,” I said, “Bobby Hamid seems to keep turning up on the edges of my life.”

She arched one eyebrow. “Is that why you ended up in a gunfight at Metrocenter last night?”

“You don’t miss a thing, Ms. Pope.”

“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, Deputy Mapstone.” It was one of our old routines from years ago.

I filled Lorie in from the beginning. I needed someone to talk to, someone I trusted. When I was done, she shook her head slowly and said, “I should have known Julie Riding was involved in this somehow.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Ironic my ass,” Lorie said, munching on a taco. “So let me get this straight: You go looking for your old girlfriend’s missing sister, who ends up murdered in the desert, a dump arranged to look like the 1959 homicide you’ve been investigating. Little sister-Phaedra? That’s a name-has a drug-mule boyfriend who also gets dead. Now you find out Phaedra was on the run for a month. And somebody with a large gun doesn’t want you to find out why.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“I don’t like it, David,” Lorie said. “Something stinks.”

I asked her what.

“Julie, for one thing,” she said. “Your major source of information is addicted to blow, and now she’s disappeared.”

“I know she’s all screwed up.”

“In my business,” Lorie Pope said, “we say, ‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out.’”

“In my business, too,” I said, and thought about what Harrison Wolfe had said about never confusing your prejudices with your instincts.

Lorie shook her head. “You’re living quite the historical psycho-drama, aren’t you, Professor?” she asked. “Deputy in the old West-a paladin, if you will-fights for former lady love’s honor.”

“That’s not it,” I replied a bit too testily.

We finished our food in silence, surrounded by the din of the business-lunch crowd talking deals, sports, and gossip. At the next table, a trim middle-aged man was holding forth on the new roster for the Suns, how things had never been right since they traded Barkley. He said he’d played golf with Charles only yesterday. At another table, three women were talking about a shooting in one of their neighborhoods. Then Lorie picked up the tab and we walked back slowly, drifting past the tourist shops-flags, hot peppers, t-shirts, Indian art, Arizona Highways-staying in the shade.

“I was going to ask you how your love life is going,” Lorie said finally, “but I guess I have my answer.”

“I’m not sleeping with Julie,” I said. Technically true. Haven’t slept with her for a week. Why was I covering up? “I don’t even know where she is.” Too true.

“Mmm.”

“I have a friend,” I volunteered. “Kind of a work friend. We’re not even dating, really. But it feels nice to be with her.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“And you?”

She paused by a shop window and studied us reflected in the glass. “Oh, I don’t know.” She walked on. “We never really know anybody. And our expectations for forever are so out of place. I mean, when humans needed the family unit to survive and only lived to be forty, monogamy made sense.”

“You’ve drunk deep at the social science well,” I said.

She smiled. “I’ve been in love so many times, or at least I thought I was in love. Next time, I’d like to find a friend, maybe, before I get all obsessive and self-destructive. Remember how that is?” She laughed.

I thought about that and said, “I guess I have love vertigo. Ever since my marriage ended. If I get too high up, I just get dizzy.”

“Why did Patty leave you?” Lorie asked. “Sorry. Asking uncomfortable questions at the most inopportune time is an occupational hazard.”

We were at the door to the Republic.

“It’s okay,” I said. “My occupational hazard is getting shot at. I don’t know why. Maybe she fell in love with her boss. He owned a sailboat. Maybe the thought of being married to me for the rest of her life was too boring to contemplate. Now she’s living with a twenty-two-year-old tennis pro. She never gave me an explanation. She was a millionaire’s daughter, and I was just me.”

“I guess that’s the way it was for me with Richard,” she said. Husband number two. “I never knew why. I eventually made myself realize I’ll never know why. And I know I’ve probably done as bad or worse to my lovers. We live in an age of so much disconnection.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Here I am, one of the killers and one of the dead.”

“I don’t want to grieve for Patty,” I said earnestly. “I wouldn’t want the falseness of that life again.” Lorie looked at me. “But,” I said, “she had a way of getting under my skin that I miss, that I still seek elsewhere.”

“So you don’t want nice girls?”

“I was always a nice guy.”

“Yes, you were.” Lorie gave me a hug and said, “I’ll do some sniff work on this, David, and call you in a couple of days. But Phaedra is the key to your mystery. You’ve got to get into her last days. Her recent history, you know? Not what Julie says happened. But what really happened.”

Then she pushed through the door and was gone.