Dry Heat

Chapter Four

“Can you help me out? Some change to get something to eat?”

I shook my head like a heartless bastard and walked into Starbucks. The man lingered for a moment, staring at the big Oldsmobile. Then he walked toward Safeway, slipping into a forlorn limp as he approached a woman getting out of her car. She hurried into the store and he resumed a normal walk, wandering across McDowell Road into the park.

It was Friday morning, a day after the body was found in the Maryvale pool. The storm’s aftermath was a yard littered with downed palm fronds, and the neighbors anxiously cleaning their pools, but the day dawned clear and mild. My apocalyptic environmental visions of the previous day were replaced by fond, familiar appreciation for my hometown. At the foot of the broad streets, mountains glowed vivid purple and brown. The ascending morning sun turned wispy clouds from pink to alabaster. Even the last remnants of citrus blossoms were lingering in the seventy-degree air. So I put the top down on the Olds, slid in an Ellington CD, and got to work.

The first twenty-four hours are critical in a homicide investigation. But in my line, the first fifty-six years are critical, at least for a body carrying an FBI badge that disappeared in 1948. From the quiet of my office in the old county courthouse, under high ceilings, big windows, and the gaze of Sheriff Carl Hayden from his 1901 photograph, I imagined my battle plan. Its basics had evolved as I had learned the job, invented it really, over the past several years since Peralta had taken pity on my untenured, unemployed state and given me an old case to research. I would need a timeline, a gallery of the major players in the case, lists of key evidence, plus all the case records and newspaper clippings. My job was to find connections as a historian and researcher, bringing something to an investigation that the regular detectives might miss, or so I told myself.

But as I sipped a mocha, my legs went up to the desktop and laziness set in. I didn’t look forward to falling all over the feds, and I sure as hell didn’t want to deal with Kate Vare. I picked up the phone, eager for a shortcut.

As it happened, my friend Lorie Pope was in the newsroom over at the Republic. She was yelling even before I finished the first sentence.

“John Pilgrim!” she exclaimed. “Do I know about John Pilgrim? Jesus Christ, David, this case has been driving me crazy for my whole career!”

She had a big voice, one that had gotten raspy with years and too many cigarettes since the first day I met her, back in the ’70s when she was a cub reporter and I was a rookie deputy. I moved the receiver closer to my ear again and continued.

“Why driving you crazy?” I asked.

“Because the whole thing is…Wait a minute, David. Why? Why do you want to know?”

“I’m just naturally curious.” I could already imagine the explosion from Peralta if the story of the found badge appeared on the front page of the local newspaper.

“Bullshit,” she said, glee in her voice. “David, you were a lousy liar when you were my boyfriend…”

“Was I your boyfriend? I recall there were several of us.”

“What can I say,” she said. “I’m loveable. But I guess you’re happier now with Leslie.”

“Lindsey,” I said.

“Don’t try to change the subject. You’ve got something new on Pilgrim.”

Now it was my turn to be obstinate. “’Bye, Lorie.”

I held the phone out just enough to hear her hollering. “Stop! Don’t hang up!”

I said, “So give me the short version of why this case matters to you, and I’ll try to help you, too.”

“Bastard,” she said, not without affection. “OK, it’s the only unsolved murder of an FBI agent in Arizona history. John Pilgrim was found floating in an irrigation canal on November 10^th, 1948. He had a single gunshot to his heart. The locals and the FBI interviewed more than a thousand people, and they never made an arrest in the case.”

I asked her why.

“That’s what always drove me nuts. I was assigned to do a story on the Pilgrim case years ago, just a historical feature on famous local cases that had never been solved. I’d never even heard of the case before. But I didn’t get anywhere with the FBI. Even some of my good sources wouldn’t talk. And I’m like, what’s the deal? This is a case that happened decades ago. Why do they give a shit? Well, let me tell you, David, they do. I came back five years ago and filed a FOIA, Freedom of Information Act request, for the Pilgrim files. Guess what? They blocked it.”

I sipped the mocha, trying to square Lorie’s information with Eric Pham’s willingness to share the case with the local cops.

“What about the county files?”

“The assholes tried to block that, too. The paper took them to court. I got this very redacted version. Lots of reports were missing. This was all before you came back to Phoenix, David.”

“So why do they care so much?” I asked.

“I’d like to tell you it’s the great Phoenix murder mystery, that’s it’s got sex, betrayal, a dead body and somehow ties the FBI into the Kennedy assassination. But my theory is that Pilgrim killed himself, and that would have been an embarrassment to the FBI. But who the hell knows. Not everybody would agree.”

“Who is not everybody?” I asked.

“There was someone I spent some time with who was one of these amateur crime buffs. A.C. Hardin-how could I ever forget. A.C. was convinced that Pilgrim was killed by gangsters.”

“Where can I find Hardin?”

“Used to live down in Tubac. Hang on…” I heard her banging through drawers, and then she came back on with a phone number. I thanked her.

“Yeah, well, A.C.’s a nut,” she said. “So now it’s your turn, Deputy-Professor-Ex-Boyfriend. Talk.”

I saw a shadow at the pebbled glass of my door. “Later,” I said, and hung up. I could hear her cursing as the phone sank to its cradle.

Kate Vare opened the door without knocking. “We’ve got to canvass the shelters, find out who this guy was,” she muttered.

“Can’t the detectives do that?” I asked.

“We are the detectives, Mapstone,” she said. “Didn’t you see TV this morning? A fourteen-year-old girl kidnapped at gunpoint from her parents’ house. Everybody in my shop is busy on that. Not that we didn’t have enough to do already.”

She looked around my office. “How do you rate so much room? And this furniture?”

“This was just a storeroom when I cleaned it up,” I said. “Actually, it was the sheriff’s personal office when the courthouse was built in 1929, but it had been forgotten all these years…”

I wasn’t even going to get into how I found the 1930s hardwood chairs and bench, and the leather sofa, in county storage. Her eyes were blurry with boredom.

“I didn’t hear about the kidnapping,” I said. I was just making conversation. My stomach hurt, the ache of unpleasant people. My stomach said, Be somewhere else.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, giving me a small, sad smile. “You read books.”

“Or the newspaper.”

“Who has time.”

She fished in her tote and held out two handfuls. “We have some photos of the guy, and his jacket in a bag. Maybe someone will remember dealing with him.”

I stayed at my desk. “Kate, I have a wonderful idea. You check out the homeless guy, and I’ll work things from the Pilgrim angle. That way we’ll stay out of each other’s way.”

“No way,” she barked, and squared her shoulders against me. “I’m not taking the shitwork while you play professor.”

“This isn’t-”

“I’ve dealt with sexism my whole career, Mapstone. So don’t think you can pat me on the head, tell me I have pretty legs, and send me on my way.”

“I-”

She drilled an index finger my way. “If you want to be part of this case, you have to step up and do the real work, just like me.”

She stalked off toward the elevator, pausing to toss her head at the door into the great sexist’s office. She said, “Coming?”