Concrete Desert

Chapter Thirty-five

Lindsey and I are not beach people. She does not tan. I become bored too easily. But the gentle San Diego sun feels so good on my shoulder, on the nickel-sized scar just below my collarbone. We lie on a clean, little-used beach I know in the Sunset Cliffs neighborhood, our legs entangling. She is rereading Anna Karenina. I am halfway through John Keegan’s history of the way battles and war shaped America. It is a good book, and I can almost hold it in my left hand now without pain. The Pacific is the color of Lindsey’s eyes, and it is beginning to show the cold restlessness that warns summer is almost over.

The vastness of the ocean reminds me of that night in Sedona, of one of the last things I remembered before passing out. I was found by Deputy Taylor, who summoned help. They carried me out of the cabin to a waiting ambulance, in which I’d be driven to a clearing to meet a medevac helicopter. And the stars-my God, the stars. Billions and billions, uncountable, unimaginable. Pain and shock do strange things. I remember thinking of all the centuries and all the history those pinpoints of light represented. The suns of unimagined civilizations perhaps? Light that had originated when the Declaration of Independence was signed, that had been someone’s day and night when Caesar was subduing Gaul. I remember thinking how, back in college, Julie loved for me to drive her into the desert to see the stars. The next thing, I was lying in a hospital bed, groggy. Lindsey was holding my hand tightly, and Peralta was snoring softly in a chair at the foot of the bed.

The next day, Peralta told me what he thought I should know: Townsend was dead, of course. His DNA matched him to Phaedra Riding’s murder. The case was closed, “which is more than I can say for the Harquahala murders,” Peralta said ruefully. I would have to appear before a board of inquiry, but Peralta assured me it had been a “clean kill.” What a strange phrase. I had gone forty years without taking a human life. I wished I could have gone a lifetime.

Sam Larkin confessed to killing Rebecca Stokes. He still claimed it was an accident. His association with Dennis Copeland, a cop killer, would be harder to portray as accidental. Lorie Pope wrote a great Sunday story on the case-hell, I even looked okay without my beard in the photograph. Peralta didn’t charge McConnico, who abruptly announced he was retiring from politics.

“Maybe the next governor is Mike Peralta,” I said.

Peralta laughed. It was a nice sound.

“You know,” I said, “he offered me a professorship if I’d just go along. One old Arizonan to another.”

“You have a job,” Peralta said.

Now, hard by the sea, Lindsey and I don’t talk about all that has happened. We talk about art, literature, jazz, and, of course, history. We read to each other out of a rucksack of books we lug along. We laugh a lot. After we make love, we never talk: The silence and all that has gone before it are too important. And all of this helps. Only occasionally do I think of Julie. Only every now and then do I wake from dreams about her bleeding to death in my arms, so cold, so cold.

I have spent my life with books and ideas. I am a trained historian. But I’ll be damned if I understand the devils that destroy human beings, that cause them to destroy themselves. The itches we can’t scratch. The dark cells waiting for the right switch to turn on and consume us in a hungry confusion of longing and revenge and rage. Lindsey once asked me if I believe in good and evil, and I do. But I can’t bring myself to think of Julie Riding as evil. And that is my failing, for she surely flirted with evil, took it home for a onenight stand, and it moved in for good.

History is an argument without end, as one of my professors used to say. Historians and detectives build cases, believing in the justice of our endeavors. I was trained to sit in academic detachment, take the full measure of time, and formulate arguments that will carry the day in articles, lectures, and books. I expect to know. But detectives don’t usually have time on their side. In my new job-or maybe it is my old, old job-there is much I can never know. I am the historian of Rebecca and Phaedra, and I can’t say I did a good job.

At night, we walk into Ocean Beach and eat Mexican food and wander through the kitschy shops along Newport Avenue. Lindsey collects postcards and giggles at the tourists, and I adore her more than I should dare.

Just before we came here, I got an E-mail from Patty. She said she was moving back east, to Virginia, and intended to get married again. It didn’t bother me. San Diego is no longer a city of demons for me. So maybe some history has been settled.

School has already started, and my internal clock, set by years of teaching, is a bit askew. But no universities are clamoring for me. So I will stay on at the Sheriff’s Office as a deputy and a consultant, working the old cases, wearing my star a bit more comfortably, trying not to aggravate Peralta too much. The sheriff, always looking for publicity, wants me to write a history of the department. It’s money I’ll need.

I never got around to listing the house with a realtor, and now Lindsey is too fond of it. She can hardly wait to get back and take control of the gardens that Grandmother so loved. I will unpack my books. I will throw the boxes away.

The storms don’t come into the city anymore. But maybe they will return someday. There is so much I do not like about Phoenix now: It is too big and too dirty and too dangerous and too hot in the summertime. Behind its dramatic beauty and opulent wealth lie violence and decay made more stark and ugly by the desert. But we grew up together, Phoenix and I. It is the only root, the only touchstone my life has. It is the keeper of my history, as surely as it is the keeper of the Hohokam’s. It is my city. It is, for all of this, home.

It is good to be home.