Camelback Falls (10 page)
I studied the man’s face. He wasn’t looking right at the camera. Something about his wispy white rim of hair contrasted with dramatic black eyebrows looked familiar. But I had to shake my head.
“That,” said Lindsey, “is Jonathan Ledger, the author of
The Sex Instructions
.”
I sat back in the chair and pointed at the photos. “So this must be Camelback Falls.”
Draw me a map of the human heart. Show me the roads in and out. Where does Eros take the turnoff from love, darkness from passion? Destiny, fate. Nixon, Peralta, and me, we were all just cops together. Men with easily pierced skin and breakable bones. Men with hearts. But all along we were connected by invisible strands that ran to right now: Nixon dead, Peralta in a coma, Mapstone the sheriff. Badge numbers in the logbook. Photographs on my breakfast table.
Draw me a map of the human heart. The back roads of jealousy and rage. It is no coincidence that cops get killed during family fights. At the point of conjugal connection the mask of civilization is always shaky, our mastery of nature most personally at risk. Love and lust are dangerous things, and every civilization tries to control them, whether through ancient commandments or the latest dating code on campus. Nature is always ready to slip the leash, go mad again. We Phoenicians should know this most of all, living in our artificial city with the desert seemingly subdued for our pleasure and recreation. But beneath us are the ruins of the Hohokam city that preceded us. They were men with hearts, too, who dug the canals, unlocked the rich soil, vanished. The desert is really in control, merely biding its time.
These thoughts tried to find purchase inside my head as we drove the speed limit through the pleasant streets of northeast Phoenix two hours later. Lindsey was lost in her own thoughts and we didn’t talk much. We were in her Honda Prelude, with its bumper sticker that read, “Keep honking, I’m reloading.” But the message was lost on our tail from the previous night—no cars appeared to be following us. I was on an errand I most dreaded.
Judge Carlos Peralta lived in a rambling ranch house off Lafayette Boulevard in the city’s Arcadia district. The houses had been built in the 1950s where citrus groves stood. The judge’s house was guarded by lush grapefruit and orange trees, oleanders and desert honeysuckle. Down the freshly cut front lawn was a magnificent view of Camelback Mountain. Lindsey parked in the driveway and kept on her seatbelt.
“You’re not coming?”
“Dave, this is definitely an interview that should be one-on-one.” She patted my hand.
So I walked up a long sidewalk framed by ornamental lights and flowerbeds. The walk was enchanting at night, like the Thanksgiving five years ago when we all came over. The judge had been a widower here for ten years, but he refused Mike and Sharon’s yearly suggestions that he move to a condo. He had been the first Mexican-American on the state appeals court, and the first to move to Arcadia. This house also held his memories and his books. I understood that much.
His housekeeper, Mrs. Sanchez, a large woman with happy black eyes, greeted me and showed me into his study. The room was dark in the way that comforts the old or the grieving. It was a vast repository of books: on the walls, on tables, on the desk that looked out-of-place modern, even in stacks on the thick cream carpet. Amid a table full of family photos was a large picture of his son as an Army Ranger. Another showed him as chief deputy, his expression barely changed across three decades. Gas logs glowed in a fireplace. It was about 70 degrees outside, so they had to run the air conditioning to have the illusion of winter inside. And at the far end of the room, swallowed up in a leather armchair, was the frail figure of the judge.
“Come in, David.” I could hear his wheezing across the room.
“Please don’t stand, sir.” I crossed the room quickly and took his hand. I could feel bones barely covered with skin. His expression was concealed in the half shadow. The room smelled of Mentholatum. I felt like a nightstick had repeatedly been jabbed into my abdomen.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, Judge…”
“Why don’t you call me Carlos?”
“Carlos,” I said. But it was no good. “I can’t, Judge. It just goes against my grain. The way I was raised, I suppose.”
“Understood,” he said. “When I was your age it was inconceivable that I would address an older person by his first name. Now every stranger talks to me like I am four years old.”
“We’ve had a development in the case,” I said. He was silent, so I went on, speaking through the acid I could sense creeping up my throat. “A former deputy was found murdered, a man who used to work with me and Mike in the East County.” I watched his weathered face, but no expression registered. “We’re not sure if he was killed by the same person who shot Mike last Monday. But this man, whose name was Dean Nixon, left some evidence…”
I just let it hang there for a minute as my eyes were drawn into the conjuring flame of the gas fireplace. I looked away, scanned some of his books. There was Eisenhower’s
Crusade in Europe
, Octavio Paz’s
The Labyrinth of Solitude
, several volumes of Plato and Locke. The judge said nothing.
“The evidence is a logbook that may show payoffs to sheriff’s deputies from years ago, from the 1970s.”
“Is my son among them?”
The words were spoken with no emotion. I could imagine the cool litigator of a half-century ago. I said, “Yes, he appears to be. But we are very early in the invest—”
“I didn’t want him to be a policeman, do you know that?”
I shook my head.
The judge inhaled loudly and said, “From the earliest, I wanted him to be a man of the law, a lawyer. I suppose that guaranteed he would rebel against me.”
“I know he always revered you,” I blurted.
“We didn’t speak for years,” the judge said. I didn’t know that either, although I had always sensed a distance between father and son, like magnets repelling. He went on. “I was severe. I had worked very hard to make it in the Anglo world, and here was my son making common cause with men who, in my memory, would stop and beat a Mexican-American for sport. I told him, ‘You will be nothing but the token beaner, the one they call spic behind your back.’ He never listened.”
The judge raised himself up. It looked painful. But after all the effort, his body seemed even deeper in the chair. “Don’t get me wrong,” he went on. “I detest today’s Balkanization and victim-mongering. My brother always says he is a Chicano. I am an American, of Mexican descent…” He looked toward a small side table, where his hand found a teacup.
“Your evidence doesn’t surprise me,” he said, sipping from the cup. “Law enforcement always grows corruption.”
I shivered a little in the sudden coolness of the room, amazed at the clinical tone of the man opposite me.
“Judge, I’m not saying he was involved.”
“When I was elected to the bench in 1965, Maricopa County Superior Court, it was common to see cops plant evidence that damned a suspect, suppress evidence that might exonerate him.”
“Common?” I challenged, losing some of my fear of the man.
He ignored me. “In the 1970s, drugs changed everything. The money just added to the opportunities for corruption. I presided over a dozen trials involving law enforcement that had stolen drugs or fallen in with dealers. And that was nothing compared with what the federal judges heard.” He smacked his lips loudly. “I always wondered, if these were the stupid ones getting caught, what must be going on that we never even knew?”
My mouth had turned to a dry riverbed. “Are you telling me you suspect your son was involved in corruption?”
“Who do you think shot my son, Sheriff?” he demanded. He didn’t wait for an answer. In a higher, softer voice he said, “Policemen make a lot of enemies. Good ones and bad ones. Just like lawyers. I know I did. And when all this comes out, they won’t hesitate to crucify my son, just like they tried to do me. Whatever the truth.”
“What do you think the truth is, Judge?”
His breathing fell back into a wheeze. He said evenly, “Lawyers and history professors, both wordsmiths. Both truth-seekers. When we’re young we think truth is something that can be bottled and preserved, like some specimen in biology. Now, they tell us everything is relative, that there is no truth, and that’s crazy. What do I think? I think a revolution happened in the 1970s, and if that’s where your evidence comes from, then all the rules were off.”
“This is your son, Judge! Give me something that can help him.”
He didn’t speak for a long time, just seemed to shrink more into the big leather chair. I finally rose and prepared to go.
“I knew your grandfather Philip, you know.”
“Yes.”
“He was a good man,” the judge said. “He took patients from the barrio when Anglo Phoenix still treated us like dogs. He respected Mexican Americans, understood the dilemma, assimilation versus identity. He always struck me as the epitome of cultivated manliness.”
He sighed. “Cultivated manliness, our age doesn’t even know what that means.” The fireplace glowed yellow-blue, suddenly orange. I half expected to hear a log fall and crackle, but the room was dark silent. “I see some of him in you. David. So I think the best and only help for my son is you.”
I retreated. “Thank you, Judge Peralta.”
He said, “Do you have the courage to face the truth you find, David?” But he didn’t want an answer. In the dimness, I could see he had picked up a book and started reading, his breathing a steady squeezebox wheeze. I quietly let myself out.
I had begun to tell Lindsey about my talk with Judge Peralta when the cell phone rang and the communications center sent us twenty miles away to a hostage situation near Queen Creek. A former boyfriend was holed up in a double-wide trailer with a woman and her two children. Did I just imagine that the deputies on the scene looked at me differently, with fear and suspicion in their eyes? Did I count too many TV camera crews for just another crime story in the Valley? Bill Davidson was there, too, with a flak vest and a tall cup of Circle K coffee. But if he knew about Nixon’s logbook, he didn’t let on. He told me it was good to see the sheriff out with the deputies on a Saturday. For a moment, I felt better.
I was milling around the back of the SWAT command post, trying not to get in the way, when the cell phone rang again with another blast from the past.
“David Mapstone?” It was a man’s voice, baritone, brisk and impatient. “This is Hector Gutierrez, with Briscoe, Hayne and Douglas.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m making this call as an officer of the court,” the voice wobbled over the wireless stations.
“Why is that, Mr. Gutierrez?”
“You’re the acting sheriff,” he said. “I don’t know anything about you.” The verdict was final. “You probably don’t realize that I used to be in the public defender’s office. Years ago, I defended a man named Leo O’Keefe.”
“What about O’Keefe?” I cut him off.
“I saw the news. This is the man you think shot Sheriff Peralta.”
“What about O’Keefe?”
“He contacted me this afternoon,” Gutierrez said.
“How?”
“In the parking garage at my office,” he said. “I stopped in for some files, and he was there. He looked like hell. Of course, I told him I couldn’t help him, that as an officer of the court I was required to contact the police.”
“Did you offer to help him turn himself in?”
There was a long empty buzz on the phone. Finally, “I don’t really do pro bono work now, Mapstone.”
I couldn’t resist, “Is this the same ‘Red Hector’ who was fighting for the oppressed?”
“To hell with you, Mapstone. I’m doing you a favor. O’Keefe is on the run. I told him to go to the police. But he’s afraid. He’s convinced they’re out to kill him. He’s convinced they did everything they could to get him from the day he was found with two dead deputies and that girl in Guadalupe.”
“That true?”
“That was a long time ago,” Gutierrez said. “You do what you can when you’re defending some guy who has every deck stacked against him.”
A blast of radio traffic came through the command post. I stepped outside onto the road, facing an alfalfa field and San Tan Mountain, faded in a yellow haze.
“Did he get a fair trial?”
“In my opinion, no. But with two dead cops, nobody was in a hurry to help this kid. Jesus, even his name, Leo-O. Sounds funny.”
“What does that mean? Was the case prosecuted kosher?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I did the best I could. See, people get lost in the system. It’s like this giant threshing machine, and when it gets hold of you everything just kind of goes along automatically.”
“Why can’t I find his statement in the case file?” I asked. “Was that entered in the defense?”
“That sounds like a Sheriff’s Office screwup. Imagine that.” He chuckled humorlessly. “He claimed he was set up. That something was going on between the deputies who got killed, and the two fine, upstanding prison escapees who shot them.”
I asked him what was going on.
“It was a long time ago. Some dirty cop thing. It was in his statement.” I could almost hear him impatiently looking at his Rolex. “Look, he didn’t have any family, didn’t have any money. He was a long way from home and he hooked up with some bad people.”
“What about Marybeth?”
“Oh, the girl? She had a moneybags daddy in the oil business. He hired a big-time lawyer out of Tulsa. They cut her off from Leo so damned fast. Made it sound like she was a kidnap victim—and let me tell you, she had the devil in her. But Leo was seen as the bad guy.”
“Was he the bad guy?”
“How the hell should I know, Mapstone? Do you know how much this conversation would cost if you were one of my clients?”
“Consider this a public service, counselor.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “No, I thought the kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and everybody abandoned him.”
“Including you?”
“Hey, screw you, acting sheriff,” he snarled through the digital circuits. “I did my part. This is your problem now.”
***
The hostage-taker came out before the evening news. A crew of deputies dressed like Robocop wrestled him into the dust, and Lindsey and I carried out two scared little kids. The public affairs officer said it would make a great photo-op. I was just trying to be useful on a scene. Or maybe I was trying to get ahead of the news cycle, before the shitstorm hit over the logbook and the badge numbers.
We got back in the Prelude and headed to the Superstition Freeway, then turned west into the pink remains of the sunset, headed downtown. Leo O’Keefe was still out there, alive as of this afternoon and still carrying his secrets. I was at a loss as to how to get to him, if he thought the cops were the bad guys. By the time we reached Good Sam to check on Peralta, the cell phone rang again. The battery was nearly dead, and I half expected it was Gutierrez demanding to know where he could send a $1,000-an-hour bill.
“It’s Deputy Stevens in the communications center, Sheriff. Captain Kimbrough left word that he needs to meet you tonight. Do you have something to write with?” Lindsey passed me a notepad. I was amazed she actually had old-fashioned paper in the car. “He needs to see you at the Crown Plaza Hotel downtown at nine
P.M.
tonight.”
“And he wants me to meet him there?” Lindsey’s blue eyes followed my writing on the notepad. She raised her eyebrows.
“He said it’s important, sir. Said you’d know what it was concerning. He didn’t give me any further details. He said to meet him in the parking garage on the fourth floor, by the elevator.”
Then the phone died.
We walked across 12th Street to the hospital, me musing about our enslavement to technology, how we couldn’t get by without gadgets that a few years ago seemed like frills. Suddenly I felt something rushing toward us. Surprise and panic jolted through me. I pushed Lindsey back toward the curb, reached for the Python. It was a Mercedes-Benz the size of a starship, black with black-tinted windows. One of the windows came down with a soft electronic whisper and Bobby Hamid’s handsome face peered out.
“You seem tense, Dr. Mapstone.”
I muttered something obscene and took my hand off the revolver. I looked around to see how many county supervisors and investigative reporters were there to witness our exchange. But the street was empty in the crisp air of the gathering January night. Bobby opened the door, slid over. Lindsey and I exchanged glances, then we climbed in. What the hell.
“You looked quite heroic on television,” he said, turned out in a three-button black coat, jeans, and gray silk T-shirt. “Saving the children in prime time. I do believe the sheriff’s hat is growing on you.”
“Come on, Bobby,” I said, settling into the soft leather of the seats. “You don’t want to be my agent.”
He regarded me with his amused, feline eyes. Bach was quietly coming out of the car speakers. “How is your little mystery coming along? The River Hogs and all that nostalgia for the disco era?”
“I’m feeling less nostalgic.”
“Oh, come, come,” he said. “‘Disco Inferno,’ ‘Love to Love You Baby,’ K.C. and the Sunshine Band.”
“I was more a Springsteen-Eagles-Linda Ronstadt fan,” I said, letting Bobby play his game.
“Yes, Linda. ‘Love is a Rose.’ You know her brother was the Tucson police chief?” Suddenly his eyes went completely opaque, like the windows of the Benz rolling up. “David, someone wants to kill you.”
I sat back in the seat. Bobby had sources in law enforcement, don’t ask me where. Somehow he had found out about the shots at Kenilworth School. I said, “It’s not clear who those shots were directed at.”
He looked at me quizzically. “You are obviously giving me credit for knowing about some recent adventure of yours. I am talking of something different.”
“Quit screwing around,” Lindsey said, her fair skin flushing with anger. “What are you talking about?”
“What they call ‘the word on the street,’” Bobby said, momentarily surprised to have been challenged out of his circuitous conversational ways. “The word on the street is that Sheriff Mapstone is a dead man.”
“Why?” Lindsey demanded.
“It seems to be something to do with your River Hogs,” he said. “It seems that you are into something very dangerous. A man named Nixon, a former deputy sheriff, was murdered, no? And the shooting of Chief Peralta. My sources tell me this is not the work of this escapee, O’Keefe, as your press conference said. As a good citizen, and a friend, I felt I should pass this information along.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Lindsey said. “Good citizen, my ass.”
Bobby’s perfect posture took subtle offense. “Yes, Miss Lindsey. A good citizen and a friend. This isn’t a game. These are killers.”
“Who are these people?” I asked. “Cops? Deputies?”
“Contrary to Sheriff Peralta’s tiresome obsession, I am not plugged in to the underworld.”
“But obviously you hear things.”
He faced out, staring at the street, content to let us stew in Bach. I looked at Lindsey. Her hair glowed blackly in the reflection of the streetlights. Her eyes looked tired.
“Professor Mapstone,” he said, “What was this affair in Guadalupe, in May 1979?”
I studied his face, suspicion in me like a high fever. “It was a shooting. Two old deputies stopped a car with two prison escapees. They killed the deputies. Peralta showed up and killed the escapees.”
“I thought you were there?”
“I was. How do you know that?”
“Everyone seems to know,” he said. “That word on the street again. Do you really remember what happened there? Twenty years is a long time.”
“I remember it all.”
He nodded his head slightly. “What happened after the shooting?”
“It was a cop shooting,” I said. “Lots of paperwork, lots of Internal Affairs.” I felt like I was stuck in an essay test I hadn’t studied for. What the hell was he getting at? I knew if I pushed him too far, I’d end up with nothing.
“Why were those two deputies in Guadalupe?” he asked, his voice soft, contemplative.
“It was a traffic stop gone bad. That was obvious when Peralta and I rolled up.”
“Really?” he said. “Obvious. Well, eyewitnesses can be unreliable, can’t they? That’s why we need historians who can sift the evidence with more detachment. Quite an irony for you, Professor Mapstone.”
“Shit,” I said. “I give up, Bobby. If this is your help, it’s not much.”
“You give me too much credit,” he said, stroking his fine jawline. “I don’t know all the answers. Only some of the questions to ask. That ought to be enough.”
Lindsey popped the door handle and stepped out. But Bobby gently took my shoulder. “I know this much: You have the trusting nature of the reflective man, the man who wants to live the life of the mind.” He looked hard at me, his eyes empty of humanity. “Your department is not what it seems, Sheriff. Remember the Roman emperors who trusted the Praetorian Guard. Trusting will get you killed.”