Dry Heat

Chapter Twelve

Friday, eight days since George Weed’s body was found and a week after the shooting in Scottsdale, I was in my office on the fourth floor of the old courthouse. I was leaning back in my chair, feet up on the big wooden desk. Downtown sounds were filtering through the expansive, arched windows-this place had been built to last in 1929. I was thinking about Lindsey. Across the room was the black-and-white photo of Carl Hayden, sheriff of Maricopa County a century before. Sheriff Hayden looked back at me across time from beneath his Stetson. The future senator from Arizona had met his wife at Stanford, I recalled. She had never been threatened by the Russian mafia. When a knock came on the pebbled glass, I called out that the door was open, and the security guard stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

His name was Carl, too, and he had been a highway patrolman for thirty years before retiring. But he had a white pencil-thin mustache and an erect bearing that always made me envision him in the uniform of a British army officer at a remote post. After exchanging pleasantries, I was about to ask him what he knew about the John Pilgrim murder, when he said, “This is my last day, Mapstone.”

“You don’t want to be bothered protecting the sheriff’s office historian anymore?” I beckoned him to sit, and he did.

“It’s been fun to know you, Mapstone. But Marcia and I are leaving Phoenix. We’ve got a little piece of land in southern Arizona, about an hour from Tucson. We’ve built a house.”

Sometimes I get stir crazy, alone with my records and my idle thoughts. I was glad for the company, and made obligatory small talk about Carl’s milestone, wishing him well. I’d probably talked to him every day I came into the courthouse over four years, but I never knew he and his wife were thinking of moving.

“It’s this damned place, Mapstone,” he said. “It’s been ruined. Too many people, too many cars. They’ve paved over the citrus groves and the Japanese flower gardens. The whole damned Midwest moved here, but nobody really wants to be here. Nobody knows anybody else, or wants to.” He stared past his hawk nose, through the windows at the hazy shape of the South Mountains. “The heat, the damned smog…”

I wasn’t going to try to defend Phoenix. Everything he said was true. It broke my heart. Carl was about to continue when a mountainous shape appeared beyond the office door, and Peralta burst into the room.

“Sheriff,” Carl said. About to say more, he noticed the foul storm massed over Peralta’s brow and withdrew in silence.

When the door closed, Peralta slapped a cassette on my desk.

“The noon news,” he snarled.

“What?” I pulled my feet off the top of county property and sat up.

“Play it,” he said. “I want you to have the full experience, just like I did when it came on an hour ago.”

I took the cassette, rose warily and slid it into a player attached to a small TV on a nearby bookshelf. TV news logos flashed across the screen.

“What am I watching?”

“Turn it up,” he ordered.

It was the top story. “A dramatic break today in a fifty-six-year-old murder case!” the blond anchor chirped. I felt the subbasement drop out of my stomach. The voice continued, “For details, let’s go to Melissa Sanchez, who is at a special briefing at Phoenix Police Headquarters.” Peralta appropriated my chair and sat back, his meaty hands folded across his chest, his suit coat and tie bunched beneath.

“…Kate Vare, the department’s cold case expert, made the revelations, Megan,” the reporter said. “A cold case expert is someone who works on some of the very toughest crimes, the ones that have been unsolved for years.” I heard Peralta sigh loudly I didn’t want to meet his eyes. I looked at my fine rolling bulletin board, which stood there in all its ridiculousness.

“An FBI badge, missing for fifty-six years, has been recovered by Phoenix Police. Sergeant Vare said this badge was lost when FBI agent John Pilgrim was found shot to death in November of 1948.”

“This is bullshit!” I said. Peralta held up a hand for silence.

“Pilgrim’s badge was found on the body of a homeless man, who died last week from natural causes…”

I mumbled, “They don’t even have the date right.” On the screen, Kate Vare stood before a crowded room of reporters, nodding her head officiously, pointing to a diagram that included a photo of Pilgrim and the reproduction of the badge.

I reached over and shut off the TV.

“This is bullshit,” I repeated. “Grandstanding. I’ve actually got the homeless guy’s name! I’ve got a Social Security number, a date of birth, even an address from 1981.”

“It’s not about the rummy, Mapstone. The rummy died of natural causes. It’s about the goddamned FBI badge!” His voice echoed into the far corners of the high ceiling.

Sheriff Hayden looked on but declined to intervene. “Don’t you know how the media works, Mapstone? We never announced we found the badge. Nobody knows. So now Kate acts like she’s made a breakthrough. And in the mind of the public she has made a breakthrough.”

“Jesus!” I yelled back. “Is this about your petty little who-gets-the-credit game?”

“It’s been a good game for you,” he snapped back. “Why the hell would the sheriff’s office need a historian, a deputy with a wooptieshit Ph.D. in history, if it wasn’t all just a goddamned media effort!”

I sat down, wounded amidships.

Peralta went for more damage. “I’ve supposedly got the smartest cold case guy in the country, and he makes us look like morons. He spends his week playing social worker with all these fucking derelicts, and he comes up with dick.”

“I’m just a consultant.” I said quietly, all the smart ass drained out of me.

“What’s the matter with you, David?” He stared hard at me. I gave my head a shake and held open my hands, no answer.

“You’re not working this case. It’s like you’re in dreamland.’’

‘Well, let’s see. My wife is targeted for death. My mentor died a terrible death…” I was getting madder and madder, which did no good with Peralta. I knew this. “Not all of us can lose a loved one and just go into the office next day like nothing happened.” Like the way you reacted to your father’s death, I wanted to add.

“Did you know she was going to do this?” he demanded.

Of course I didn’t. I told him about Kate taking herself off the case. He snorted and unleashed a string of profanities, slamming his fist down on my desk as the encore. Then we sat like survivors of a bomb detonation, until the ringing faded and the room was only silence.

In a conversational voice, Peralta said, “There was a laundry mark in the jacket. She traced it to the Salvation Army used clothing program. So the jacket was at least secondhand, and the badge might have been sewn into it for years.”

Nausea washed over me. I sat in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs facing my desk.

I asked, “Did Eric Pham agree to release this information, that we had found the badge?”

“How the hell do I know,” Peralta said. “Maybe she batted her goddamned eyes at him or something…”

More silence. I could hear the bells at St. Mary’s, all the way across downtown, chiming two o’clock. A train whistle blared from the south.

“So,” Peralta said finally. “Tell me again what you found.”

I went through it again. With the information I had now on George Weed, it could lead me to his family, some sense of where he was all those years before he ended up dead in a pool.

“Why do we care, Mapstone?” Peralta said, his voice calm again.

“These guys are all over. All they want is money. You give ’em the money and they go buy booze and drugs. Some of ’em are as able-bodied as you and me, but do they get work? No.”

“I know,” I said.

“How often do you hear about a case where some transient is the suspect? Remember that poor little girl a few years ago, when I was still chief deputy? She’s walking to school when this fucking pervert grabs her, a ‘homeless man,’ the news stories said. Homeless, my ass. He was just a predator vagrant scumbag.”

“Sheriff,” I said. “Weed is all we have. You wanted me to work this case, remember? I wanted to be on the vacation that you told me I am not allowed.”

“The badge, Mapstone. Kate Vare doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your vagrant.”

“I can’t do anything about the badge without the vagrant,” I said. “You heard the TV. The badge is in Washington for extensive testing in the FBI labs. Now, I can go to Washington and wait for a press release, or I can follow the only human thread I have.”

“What if the poor bastard was wandering around for years without even knowing he was carrying it?”

I stared down at the floor. “I don’t believe that,” I said. These guys check the coin return in newspaper racks that haven’t been stocked in years. He’d know if something was sewn into his jacket. A jacket he wore even on hot days.”

Peralta raised his bulk out of the chair and looked me over from the summit of six feet, six inches.

“I want progress within a week,” he said as he stalked out of the room.

Or what? You’ll put my wife in danger, treat me like a twenty-year-old rookie and not even allow me vacation time? Oh, my mind was full of arch and devastating comebacks all the way home that evening. I was nearly talking aloud to myself when the elevator came up from the garage to the lobby, the doors opened, and standing there was Bobby Hamid.

He raised his eyebrows in surprise and lit up his 50,000-watt smile. He was only getting better looking as he got older, the slightest veins of gray working their way into his luxurious wavy black hair. He was wearing one of his tailored-by-God suits, which probably cost half my year’s salary. A wine bottle was tucked under his arm.

“Dr. Mapstone!” he said.

I nodded to him. Then I realized I hadn’t even stepped out of the garage elevator.

My mind took a quick pop quiz: the godfather of Arizona organized crime was standing in the lobby of the building where Lindsey was secretly stashed. What to do? I stalled with conversation.

“Bobby, I thought Sheriff Peralta had run you out of town.”

“You know better than that.” His green-brown eyes twinkled.

“And if I were gone, what would happen to the dozens of Valley charities and non-profit organizations that I help?”

I made a half grunt. “From your venture capital profits, right?”

“Of course,” he said amiably. It was pretty much the same tone Bobby had used when I watched him put a large-caliber bullet in the kneecap of a man, then repeat the maneuver with the other leg. Unfortunately, or fortunately, that man had been trying to kill me, so Peralta had to once again lose his chance to put Bobby away forever. Yes, our history was long and uncomfortably complicated.

“So,” he said, making a point of noticing the badge and holster peeking out from beneath my cream sports coat. “Does business or pleasure bring you here tonight?”

The deputy, sitting behind the lobby desk and pretending to be concierge, made eye contact with me. I signaled nothing. I didn’t know what the hell to do. If I made a fuss, Bobby might become suspicious, and where the hell might that lead? I said, “I’m visiting a friend.”

“As am I, Dr. Mapstone,” he said. He walked over to the elevator that went up to the condos and pushed the button. “Maybe we’re visiting the same friend?”

I tried to ignore him. He said, “Isn’t this a magnificent building? A bit of Bauhaus, a touch of le Corbusier, right here in central Phoenix. I must say, I don’t care for the balconies.”

The elevator arrived with a whoosh and I let him step in first.

Then I stepped in and the door closed. I felt my palms sweating.

“Floor?” he prompted, smiling like Torquemada on the verge of uncovering a heretic.

“Seven,” I lied. I sure as hell wasn’t going to lead him to Lindsey on the eighth floor. How did I know he was visiting a friend? Whatever he was doing, the seventh floor was now his destination, too.

The machine did its work, rising slowly up the shaft.

“I was sorry to hear about that unpleasantness in Scottsdale,” he said, arms gracefully crossed, eyes watching the lights mark each floor we passed. “And that poor young deputy who died.”

“It’s a dangerous world,” I mumbled, wondering what were the signs of a person becoming a claustrophobic.

“It is, indeed,” he said. A pause, then, “I do hope Miss Lindsey is taking good care.”

I stared hard at him. He appraised me with cool predator eyes. “These Russians are very frightening, Dr. Mapstone. They have no respect for any civilized convention.”

And you would know this how? I wanted to ask it. My mouth felt like a dry lake bed. Then the elevator slid to a gentle stop and the doors opened. I held out my hand: After you. Bobby bowed and stepped out. I followed him, not knowing what the hell I was going to do. The halls were short affairs, with only four condos on each floor. Bobby stood there looking at me, an amused expression crossing his handsome features.

Inspiration. “Damn,” I said, pointing to his wine bottle. “I left my gift down in the car.” I turned back to the elevator and hit the call button, too hard.

“Dr. Mapstone,” he said, insisting on shaking hands. “Good evening.”

As I stepped in the elevator and waited for it to depart, I listened for the sound of Bobby’s knock on a door, the door opening with a cheerful greeting, maybe the sound of party laughter beyond. All I heard was the hum of the building’s hidden electronic nerve endings.