Dry Heat

Chapter Eleven

Now I was armed. Armed with a name. I could do the thing that had allowed me to make a living in the years after I quit being a history professor: bring in new information on the county’s most notorious unsolved cases. That history was written in names: Rebecca Stokes, my first big case, the woman who took a train home to Phoenix in 1959 and turned up dead in the desert. The Yarnell twins, the grandsons of a great rancher, kidnapped in the Great Depression and never found. Jonathan Ledger, the famous sex doctor who gave birth to the brave new world and ended up in a nasty drug deal and cop killing. In each case, I saw something the cops had missed, connected the dots in a different way, stumbled onto the fortunate clue. All from names that had found a bad end in Maricopa County.

Now I had a new name: George Weed. And an age, if what he told Card could be trusted: sixty-six. The data went with a man who had been coming to the Reverend’s shelter for three summers. Sometimes he would sleep there three or four nights a week. Other times he might camp behind the rocks in the vacant land just outside the boundary of Hance Park. He didn’t talk much. He never took off his jacket. One of the few things he told Card had stayed in his memory. “He said he was a native Phoenician,” Card had told me. “There are so few of them, you almost never see that.”

After I left Quanah Card, I drove to the sheriff’s headquarters on Madison Street. I avoided Peralta’s office until I had more to report. After the tension the week before in Scottsdale, it seemed better to avoid the sheriff for a while. My errand was to the computers, where I checked the local databases and the NCIC, the National Crime Information Computer. Even though the old vagrancy laws had been overturned in the ’60s, someone living the life of George Weed could still have found dozens of ways to become a violator. Public drunkenness, trespassing, sleeping in a park after sundown, soliciting. Shoplifting was a favorite. Any of those and sundry other offenses could land a name in the system, never to be forgotten. A different database gave me county social services clients, whether for food stamps, health care, or the paltry mental health and drug and alcohol rehab programs. But George Weed was not in any of the databases.

Next I walked six blocks in the brilliant April sun to Phoenix Police Headquarters. Unmolested by Kate Vare, I spent two hours picking through other records, especially the field interrogation cards of the patrol officers. Here the information could be more haphazard, the continual budget shortfall cutting into the technology and clerical help necessary to make sense of hundreds of thousands of lower priority records. I found someone named Carlos Wong and a young man known only as Winston. But no George Weed. For someone who had been on the streets of Phoenix, who was carrying a stolen FBI badge, and was headed toward a bad end in an abandoned swimming pool, he had assiduously avoided the law.

Was that possible? I heard Dan Milton’s voice in my head, warning against the limitations of governmental records, against the biases of observers. I was hearing his voice a lot. Back in Portland, toward the end, he had been so weak he couldn’t hold up his head. Am I reporting the truth or betraying my friend to say he was close to raving the days before he died? The pain was so intense, his sense so keen that time was running out. Outside his window, the Oregon spring was gorgeous, mocking us all. He refused drugs, not wanting to lose time in a haze of pain medication.

I should have been wondering about the pain that brought George Weed to the abandoned pool in Maryvale. But my thoughts were too much still back in Portland. Anyone who expects the old to pass gently into that good night didn’t know Dan Milton. He was angry with Plato, furious with Rousseau. His age-old antipathy for Lenin had not abated at all. “Ideas with a body count!” he shouted. Other times his voice would calm and his eyes regain some of their old gleam. “I don’t want to go out a madman, like Wilson,” he laughed. His head was nearly all skull, covered by a tent of sickly skin and the rough whiskers that wouldn’t stop giving his face hope of fresh life. “It’s a new dark age,” he said at one point. “Nobody reads anymore. People are losing the ability to think. Television has destroyed us. I’m glad I won’t live to see the worst of it.”

When it hurt the worst, he would whisper through gritted teeth. That last night, I heard him whisper, “Drop by drop upon the heart.” He had whispered it twice, from a pain-laced half drowse.

“What is that?” his young amour Kathleen had asked. She was holding his hand, wiping a cool cloth on his bony forehead.

I recalled Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

His voice was still in my head when I went out to the county’s records storage warehouse on Jefferson Street, a few blocks east of the baseball stadium. I avoided decades of property tax assessments, voter records, court documents, and jury rolls. Now I was playing hunches. Digging in cardboard boxes, shockingly un-state-of-the-art manila file folders and paper reports. Getting paper cuts, sneezing at the dust from the space age and the disco era. Exhuming microfiche reels from heavy metal cabinets and praying the old dried-out film wouldn’t break in the creaky old reader. Taking chances in bottom drawers, in card files and leather-bound registers. After two more hours, just when I thought the Rev. Quanah Card had played me for a fool, I again picked up the trail of George Weed.

***

That night I grabbed Thai takeout at Wild Thaiger. I swapped cars and made my circuitous way home, believing I could still smell the last sweet vestige of citrus blossoms in the streets of Willo. Then I slipped down into the underground garage of our hideaway and took the elevator past a watchful deputy to the eighth floor.

Lindsey was in the back bedroom, which had been converted into a home gym. She was in gray spandex, an oval sweat stain darkening the fabric from her breasts down to her belly. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her fair skin was flushed, and she sat cross-legged on the floor. Her old tomcat, Pasternak, watched her from a chair. Liz Phair was coming out of the stereo, “Johnny Feelgood.” Lindsey’s fine head was lolled back against the wall. She was mouthing the lyrics and smoking, greedily inhaling from a cigarette.

“Sorry, Dave, you caught me.”

I bent down and kissed her. Even in her smoking bouts, she had the sweetest breath. I noticed the pack on the floor, Gauloises Blondes. An indulgence she had picked up on our trip to Paris two years ago.

“How’d you get a deputy to find French cigarettes for you?”

“I asked nicely,” she said. “Now I’m on the road to hell.”

“I found the name of the homeless guy,” I said, eager to share my triumph. “George Weed. A preacher knew him. Then I found he had a county hospital card from the 1980s. But he was hardly in the system at all.”

“He couldn’t escape my History Shamus,” she said softly, a small smile.

“It doesn’t tell us how an FBI badge ended up sewn into his coat,” I said. “But it’s a start.” After a long silence, I said, “You’re working out, at least.”

“I’m going nuts, Dave.” A long plume of smoke left her lips, on the way to the open window.

I had seen Lindsey smoke twice under pressure. Then she could stop again. It was a neat trick for a vice. I didn’t smoke cigarettes, but I knew that wasn’t because of moral greatness. It just wasn’t one of the itches I couldn’t scratch. Otherwise, my vices were my virtues. So I saved my judgments for major historical questions and tastes in different Mexican cuisines. Hell, I didn’t know what I was missing-the sensual cigarette after sex, humanity’s dance with death captured in a strange looking paper-wrapped consumer product, fire harnessed for our pleasure. We were all going to die-that was reinforced again by the fate of Dan Milton the health nut.

I took her hand, pulled her up, and walked her into the living room for another vice, a fine martini.

“I know you’re bored,” I said, once we were settled on a long, deep sofa that gave a magnificent view of the city and the Sierra Estrella.

“I’m shit,” she said, her voice darkened with anger. “I’m a piece of shit.”

“Because you’re here?”

“Rachel’s dead.” She gulped her drink and lit another Gauloise. “I’m the one who told her she should loosen up and come to the party that night.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, too hastily perhaps. Her eyes drilled into me. I shut up and we watched a muted sunset accumulate over the mountains.

“I keep imagining what she must have been thinking going down that freeway,” she continued. “She was a gentle nerd girl, not some hero type. But in a nanosecond, there she is, being dragged into a car by people who are capable of anything.”

Lindsey studied the blue smoke drifting away to the window, and said in a low voice, “They were going to rape her. Then they were going to torture her.”

“There’s no point-” I began.

“You know what happens in the world,” she said, a hard edge in her voice. “They were going to rape her. And if they didn’t kill her, they’d sell her into slavery. You know that goes on. She’d end up drugged in some…place…in Russia or the Middle East, where an American girl is a prize. Then in a few years, she’s worse than dead.”

I sipped my drink and stroked her hand. It took me a minute to notice the tears filling her eyes.

“I miss my garden,” she sobbed. “I miss seeing you in your library, and us reading to each other in bed. I miss our old life.” I put my arm around her and pulled her close, feeling the warmth of her body through the thin fabric of the workout togs. I once favored fair-haired women just this side of voluptuousness. But Lindsey was dark-haired, long-limbed, and undeniably leggy. Her breasts were handful sized and perfectly shaped, which I could feel rubbing pleasantly against me. With my free hand, I took her cigarette and deposited it in an ashtray. She whispered, “Oh, baby, I’m afraid I’ve gotten us into something really bad.”

Lindsey rarely called me “baby.” She never called me “honey,” much less “hon.” Mostly, she called me Dave, as she had since we first met, and sometimes, with affection, she called me History Shamus. I called her Lindsey. My wife was kind and wise, smarter than her husband in most ways. She did not have a college degree, having escaped from her family to the military when she was eighteen and the PC revolution was taking off. I had enough degrees for the whole family.

Lindsey managed her demons with a discipline that made it seem effortless. But I knew her better than most people. She had been born in 1968 to hippie parents, had been forced to raise herself, had seen her mother destruct under schizophrenia. This made her afraid to have children, which was OK with me-I didn’t handle noise and chaos well. But she didn’t believe me, knowing I was an only child, the last of my line. It was one of our few uncomfortable topics.

We rarely fought, and when we did one or both of us were tired or scared. We had built a good life, our “old life.” It revolved around the house my grandparents had built before the Depression, a house Lindsey loved even more than I did. We didn’t have the money to keep up with the exquisite restorations going on up and down Cypress Street. But Grandfather’s house had good bones and wore well.

Our old life was walks in the neighborhood, on the narrow palm-lined streets with the sunset bursting across the horizon, the enchanted metropolitan twilight of the New West. We might stop by Cheuvront for a glass of wine, or the Thursday night event at the Phoenix Art Museum. I had learned to ride a bike on these streets-spent all my young years there. The ghosts were mostly benign.

Lindsey had taken over Grandmother’s gardens and brought them to new glories. I worked intermittently on a history of the great Central Arizona Project, which brought water from the Colorado River to the desert of Phoenix, and I taught a class at Phoenix College every fall. We cooked on the chiminea in the backyard and celebrated with cocktails in the courtyard that filtered out the sun on even the worst days of August.

My old friend Lorie Pope, who wrote for the Republic and knew me in my restless years, had remarked more than once on the change in me. “I never imagined you living such a domestic life, David,” she had said. I didn’t take it as a criticism.

I pulled Lindsey close and kissed the top of her head. I said, “You didn’t get us into anything. You were just doing your job.”

I added, “Peralta can fix this.” I wasn’t sure if I really believed it. “It might take more than two weeks.” That was closer to reality. What we did for a living was inherently dangerous, and all over the world-Colombia, Sicily, Bosnia-cops were killed as a political statement or a business expense. A New Economy of borderless evil. Another manifestation of Dan Milton’s new dark age.

I felt an involuntary shudder. The absentminded professor lost in his reveries of archival research jolted back to reality. Lindsey held me closer as the sun slipped behind the mountains.

She said, “I know these people. This will never be over.”