Dry Heat

Chapter Twenty-six

I drove back to Phoenix that afternoon, playing Debbie Davies’ Round Every Corner over and over, determined to write my report and move on. The girl-woman in the Madras shirt-after I left I realized she had it inside-out-was no help. Crime buffs rarely are. Some mysteries have no answers. Nobody knows why Napoleon lingered in Moscow until the Russian winter came to destroy the Grande Armee. It was completely out of character from his previous campaigns. But those were the facts. Nobody knew why. America was discovered by sailors looking for someplace else, and at first the New World seemed to have no value. History is chancy. So said Samuel Eliot Morrison, who knew a thing or two about history.

In my puny corner of history, no answer seemed to present itself as to why John Pilgrim’s badge had traveled five decades and landed in the jacket of a man named George Weed. All I could do was write what I knew and deliver it to Peralta. I borrowed A.C. Hardin’s file of Pilgrim clippings and police reports, which she surrendered reluctantly. She said she had to come to Phoenix next week anyway and would retrieve it then. So, feeling a lift of liberation, I stopped at Mi Nidito in Tucson for a President’s Plate. Passing Picacho Peak, site of Arizona’s only Civil War battle, the dust devils lulled me into history daydreams. A Union army from California and a Confederate Army from Texas clashed lethargically, then both retreated, no doubt wondering why the hell anybody would want to own what they saw as a godforsaken place of rattlesnakes and dry mountains.

An hour later the city had swallowed me up, its concrete tentacles seeming to have expanded outward just in the day I was away. This valley had lain empty for centuries, forgotten and sleeping, until the aftermath of the same Civil War loosed adventurers and land-hungry farmers on the West. The founding of Phoenix was in the living memory of old-timers in 1948. Now most Phoenicians didn’t even know where the water came from. The old pioneer stock was indeed nearly gone. I held on to my pioneer amulets in my mind, memories of Grandfather and Grandmother. Somehow the death of John Pilgrim was linked in the official archives to another name, Dr. Philip Mapstone. His signature on the coroner’s jury report. That knowledge focused the inchoate unease that I carried around like a layer of Sonoran Desert dust. What was Peralta keeping from me?

I wouldn’t find out soon. For the next week, I avoided the Sheriff’s Administration Building and Peralta. For whatever reason, he reciprocated. Not a nagging call or sarcastic e-mail. Instead, I haunted the Arizona Room at the Phoenix Public Library. It holds microfiche of Phoenix newspapers, as well as city directories, maps, and obscure history books. I even wrote one of them. The room had once been my sanctuary, before the teen room opened next door with a constant din of hip-hop music and chatter. “A new dark age,” I heard Dan Milton say in my ear. At the Hayden Library at Arizona State, I took too much of the staff’s time, gathering everything from National Security Agency Venona documents on Soviet espionage in the 1940s to student projects interviewing the homeless in Phoenix. An archivist with auburn hair named Amy was friendly and helpful. I was a good boy. I missed Lindsey. I was working to prove or disprove at least three different theories. I also spent hours at the state archives, the Phoenix Museum of History, and on the Internet from my courthouse office. Some mornings I brought my files to Susan’s Diner and worked while I ate breakfast. If I couldn’t solve the mystery, at least I would try to give the taxpayers their money’s worth. At night, in an empty bed, I dreamed about 1948, about men in hats and travel by train. But I awoke afraid.

Some days, needing human contact or fresh data, I came up from my quarry of records. Being a native had its advantages, even in a place where nine out of every ten people seemed to come from the Midwest. I knew people. An old high school buddy was a public relations official at the Salt River Project, the nation’s oldest and largest reclamation effort. He spent an afternoon teaching me about the 1,300 miles of canals and five reservoirs that allowed Phoenix to exist. I learned about flow rates of various canals, and the impediments that would cause a body to flow this way, not that. The reeds, trees, and swimming children were long gone. But the canals regularly were a dump for trash, evidence, a surprising number of shopping carts, and dead people.

Using 1948 maps, I tried to trace the route Pilgrim’s body might have taken. It wasn’t easy. Even when I was a boy, the city had been relatively compact. We could drive ten minutes and be in the citrus groves or cotton fields. Back then, streets quickly gave way to roads bracketed by irrigation ditches-laterals-and shaded by giant cottonwood trees. The land had been even more pastoral in 1948. But now, subdivisions, shopping strips, car dealerships, malls, and golf courses covered what was once one of the great farming valleys on the planet. The laterals were mostly underground now, as congested seven-lane streets conquered the charming farm roads. But I did what I could. I walked along the bank of the Arizona Canal, by Seventh Street, where the farmers heard the loud voices and the gunshot the night Pilgrim disappeared. I drove along Fifty-first Avenue, where the lateral once flowed that carried Pilgrim’s body until it could travel no more. What was once a lettuce field had become a decaying commercial strip in a transitional suburb. It was no more than two blocks from where George Weed’s body was found on April Fool’s Day.

Another friend had charge of the historical photo collection at Bank One, a little-known cache of downtown history. Through her, I found pictures of the Pla-Mor Tap Room, Pilgrim’s hangout on Central Avenue downtown. It looked suitably dark and seedy, and had been replaced by an office building in the 1950s.

One morning, before the heat became unbearable, I slipped on walking shoes and went downtown. Finally, the police reports, newspaper clippings, and black-and-white photos were not enough. I needed to walk where John Pilgrim had walked. For the moment, this was my Civil War battlefield, my Johnsonian London. I added my imagination to the reports, the stories conjured by Grandmother and Grandfather when I was a child, my own memories. In 1948, downtown held a handful of Art Deco towers, twelve movie houses, eleven hotels, five department stores, countless bars. The rooftops were festooned with radio towers and neon signs-Hotel Westward Ho, Hotel Adams, Valley National Bank. By comparison, downtown Fort Wayne or Akron would have seemed like Manhattan. But they were not surrounded by miles of orange groves, flower gardens, and green fields, all guarded by the ancient mountains and the vast Sonoran Desert.

I walked along deserted sidewalks on Central, my ears assaulted by passing cars playing rap. Cities all over America had enjoyed a downtown renaissance. Not my hometown. But in my mind the sidewalk was busy with people, alive with storefronts, as it had been even in my youth. That was before the real estate boys ran to the edges of the city and paved over the orange groves, the flower gardens, and the green fields.

The Pla-Mor Tap Room was just a block from the old federal building, where Pilgrim would have worked. It was easy to see why it was a hangout. Why did the place fascinate me? This old city would have heard the constant sound of train whistles. Union Station was the center of activity, of comings and goings. It now sat empty, fenced and always in danger of thoughtless demolition. But in 1948, it was a Soviet agent’s portal to mischief. What had Dimitri and Pilgrim talked about, the last time they met? Who was armed, and what happened next? I watched the dates stamped in the sidewalks: 1928…1936…1947.

It was May now, and every day broiled above a hundred degrees. I surrendered to casual clothes-even then the fabric stuck to my sweat-soaked skin. Palo verde blossoms covered the sidewalks in a yellow-green dust. Overhead misters spewed their smoky-looking balm at restaurant patios. The glare off the cars made it appear that they were firing futuristic pulse weapons at each other. The newspaper and TV broadcasts settled into their summer staples of forest fires, children drowned in swimming pools, and migrants suffocated in the locked tractor-trailer rigs of smugglers. In the Republic, Lorie Pope wrote a story about a subdivision of 80,000 houses planned for west of the White Tank Mountains. “Master planned community” they called it. I wondered if their master plan included water. A brush fire closed Interstate 17 to the north, trapping well-off Phoenicians from their weekend escape to cabins in the High Country. The fire made its contribution to the soup that obscured the mountains.

I was in danger of spending too much time between my ears, as a friend once put it. But every day I was reminded of George Weed’s world, whether by the transient sweeping through Starbucks trying to grab somebody else’s coffee from the bar, or by the sight of trash-filled shopping carts lined up outside the central library like cars at a drive-in. Homeless children wandered Van Buren. Some homeless adults burned a Victorian house awaiting restoration. A woman attending a convention was attacked-a homeless man was blamed. Bedraggled men with skin corrugated by the sun huddled in little shade spots. Everybody had a theory. Nobody knew what to do. It’s a shame. It’s an alternative lifestyle, and who are we to judge? One day I went to the carwash on Van Buren and Grand, where a tall young guy was bumming change. He wore a filthy do-rag and looked as if he hadn’t bathed in a month. When he came to me, I just shook my head. Then he approached a dark-skinned Latino man who wore a sweat-stained shirt emblazoned with a landscaping company logo. The Latino rebuffed the transient, too. As the guy walked away, the landscaper looked at me and shrugged. It was a look that said, there will always be two kinds of people, those who work and those who don’t.

I found no comfort in my usual hangouts. They seemed to conjure strange signs and premonitions, if even in absurdities. Drinking in a dark corner of Durant’s, I overheard a conversation. It was typical guy talk. But the phrases gradually drew my attention: “You know that’s got to be so damned sweet,” “Yeah, my son had the hots for her,” and “cheerleader legs,” a familiar name, and “What a waste she married that professor guy. Maybe she’s repressed…” I eased my head around to see who was talking, and it was a couple of old career guys from the sheriff’s office. Talking about Lindsey. They couldn’t see me, and I resisted any Frank Sinatra-like impulses to walk over and defend my wife’s honor.

I felt more of a melancholy detachment than a jealous zeal. My only contact from Lindsey that week came one day when I was on the Internet. A console suddenly popped up on the screen of my Mac, and there in the console was a high-resolution color photo of Lindsey smiling, blowing me a kiss. Then the console disappeared, with no trail left on the history directory of my browser. The horny old deputies would never know how beautiful Lindsey looked when she was hot and sweaty, working in her garden, her brown-black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Or her native kindness, whether in caring for the old tomcat or in reading every article I wrote in my history professor days and pronouncing them brilliant. And as for their observation about being repressed, Lindsey would say, “Repressed is the word people use when they mean ‘not like me.’” I would say the reality of Lindsey is beyond any old man’s fantasy. Ah, I was spending too much time in my own head, not a good thing.

On a Thursday, I came back to my office to find the door open and Kate Vare sitting primly at my desk. I was hot, sweating, feet aching, and shouting at her as I crossed the threshold into the room.

“What the hell are you doing in here? Who the hell do you think you are?”

She came up out of my chair as if she was launching herself as a missile with overdone shoulder pads.

“Mapstone, you son of a bitch! You arrogant, lying bastard!”

“You ought to know about lying, Kate. Breaking into somebody’s office.”

“Break in, you asshole, you’re lucky I’m not here with an arrest warrant!”

“What the fuck are you screaming about?” I demanded. We were nose to nose across the desk, both armed. She opened her black leather City of Phoenix portfolio, pulled out a jail mugshot, and slammed it on the desktop.

“This is what I’m screaming about, bastard! As if you didn’t know!”

The photo was of the homeless woman from the parking lot, what seemed like months gone by. Her name was Karen, or so she said. She claimed she knew George Weed. She said she wanted help with visitation rights to her daughter.

Kate studied my face. “Don’t you play dumb, you bastard. You know who this is.”

“Of course I do. She came up to me one night, and asked about George Weed.”

“What are you talking about? Who is George Weed?”

“The guy in the pool, the guy with John Pilgrim’s FBI badge sewn into his coat.”

“Lying bastard!” she shouted, exhaling so exuberantly I could feel her breath tousling my hair.

I started to say something but she grabbed the photo and waved it in my face.

“Heather Heffelberg!”

“That’s her name? She said it was Karen.”

“You stupid bastard, that’s the fourteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped out of her own bedroom in Paradise Valley six weeks ago. It’s only been the biggest case to hit this city in years. The media are on it. The brass are on our asses every day about it. The FBI has entered the case. This woman, whose name is Karen Barshevsky, was seen in that neighborhood the night before Heather disappeared. Karen is the common-law wife of Jake Roberts, aka Jake English, aka Randy English. Five years ago they kidnapped a teenage girl and raped her and held her captive for a month. Both of them walked on a technicality. Tell me this is really all news to you, bastard!”

I sat in one of the straight-backed wooden courtroom chairs that faced my desk. I said, “It is news. And my name is not ‘bastard.’”

Kate’s tense body looked as if it was ready to leap over the desk. She sputtered, “I can’t fucking believe this! This…You…The fucking sheriff’s office is more incompetent than I ever believed. You…you’re not even a real police officer!”

“Kate, I’ve had nothing to do with your disappeared girl case.”

She started to speak. But she just glared and fell into my desk chair with a heaviness that belied her slender frame.

“So you were in here rummaging around with Peralta last week because you thought I was holding out on you?”

“I’m still not sure you’re not holding out,” she said, although in a calmer voice. “You’re always trying to claim credit. You write a book report, and Peralta goes ‘ooh, ahhh’ and you’re on TV as this big crime buster.”

“I never sought that out-”

“Oh, spare me,” she said. “If you are telling the truth, and you’ve really been wasting your time with this dead vagrant.” She shook her head as if she were trying to dispense with a bad dream. “I just can’t believe it. Karen just walks up to you?”

“In a parking lot, one night about a month ago.”

“Every cop in town has been trying to find this woman.”

“She found me,” I said.

Kate’s usually tan pallor was now the color of a cranberry. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “Look at you. Look around you.” She swept her arm to take in my bookshelves and historic photos. She stood, walked over, and rapped her knuckles on the bulletin board that held photos from the Pilgrim case. “You live in this dream world. In the real world, I have to go on calls. I can’t just work one case because my friend is the sheriff. So earlier today, I went on a call. A woman had been dumped by her lover. So she went home and drowned her son and daughter, and then tried to kill herself. That’s the real world, Mapstone! Tell me what your history says about that.”

“Oh, Kate,” I said, trying to be the calm one.

She leaned over my desk and shouted, “Tell me! You can’t even see what’s in front of your face!”

“I live in the same world.” I shrugged. “It sucks. But human nature is unchanging. I was reading a newspaper clipping from 1948 about a woman, right here in Phoenix, who tried to murder her children. It sounded like what you’re-”

But she was gone. I was surprised that the glass in the door didn’t shatter when she slammed it.