Camelback Falls (7 page)
As acting sheriff of Maricopa County, I could tell you a lot about what we do. We have 1,500 sworn deputies, and a volunteer posse of 3,200 reserve deputies. We police a county spread over 9,200 square miles, a larger area than some states. On the side of our patrol cars is the motto: “Protect and serve.”
The Sheriff’s Office is organized into nine bureaus. Patrol and detective operations are handled in four districts, dividing up the county. We have expensive and showy helicopters, heavily armed SWAT teams, and even a tank. We have a low-rider to win friends in the barrio.
Detaining prisoners is a big part of what we do. They’re kept in six different jails, including the former sheriff’s fabled Tent City jail, where the inmates live in tents, wear pink underwear, and eat green baloney. They seem to enjoy it.
Fifteen deputies have been killed in the line of duty, starting in 1922.
But that’s all numbers and organization, gadgets and background material off the sheriff’s web site. I know. I helped write it. But it doesn’t get at the heart and character of the organization. Even college faculties have heart and character. At the MCSO, even under the former sheriff’s showbiz years, those traits were best expressed, and embodied, in a man named Peralta.
I knew all his bad sides. He was stubborn. He could be relentless. He was the very antithesis of the teary-communicative, huggy-therapeutic postmodern man. But I had been blessed by his brave heart and manly charity more times than I could count. Not just the night in Guadalupe when he saved my life, but in the aftermath of the shooting when he made sure I was assigned to easy duty. He would have been insulted if I had thanked him. To his mind, I had done my duty, and that wrapped me forever in his web of mutual obligation. That’s why he stayed in touch all those years when we had nothing in common but a shared past. And it’s why he gave me a job when nobody else would, and kept the Jack Abernathys of the department off my back until I had time to prove myself. That was Peralta.
But right then he lay before me unseeing, unhearing, a machine doing his breathing. We were alone in the room. I sat deeply in a chair with slick vinyl sides, watching his chest rise. I was in quite a state. But no one would know. Only Lindsey would, but she had gone with Kimbrough to log in the evidence we found in Dean Nixon’s ammo box. They figured I would be OK alone here, guarded by a phalanx of deputies in jumpsuits and flak jackets patrolling the hospital halls.
“Log the evidence in quietly for now,” I’d instructed Kimbrough. He’d looked at me pointedly. “What are you asking me to do, Sheriff?”
I said, “I am asking you to do just what I said. That’s all.”
And then I came to Good Sam to sit with the man whose badge number appeared repeatedly in Dean Nixon’s logbook next to large amounts of cash.
I’m a good man to have in a crisis. The high-functioning child who grew up around old people, “man child” Grandmother called me. The multitalented adult who could do all sorts of different things well, but could never quite succeed at any of them. The cop who was too smart for law enforcement. The professor not smart enough to get tenure, or conform to the new political conventions of the academy, or even write popular history books that would sell.
And now, through a strange collision of events, all these destinies had been placed in my hands. Right that moment, my hands shook. My heart clubbed my ribcage. The point of pain between the belly and my heart had grown into a persistent ache.
“What have we gotten into?” I said to the mountain in the bed before me.
Only the mechanical wheeze of the respirator responded.
My voice was a dull monotone in a dim room. “Why is your badge number on those pages?”
I was suddenly so tired and angry with him, for putting me in this situation, for getting hurt, for abandoning us—it wasn’t rational, but, as I say, I was in a state. Just as quickly, I filled with remorse. But finally, I came back around to Dean Nixon’s record book, and the terrible history it gave. Could it possibly be true?
It would all have to go to Internal Affairs, of course. And to the feds. And to the media.
I had a lot of complaints and crotchets about the Sheriff’s Office over the years. But I never, even at my most discontent, thought we were corrupt.
Maybe this was all some kind of put-on.
But if so, why did my stomach hurt so damned much?
I could not accept that this man before me was a dirty cop. I could not. I owed him my life, on more than one occasion. But a voice inside me, a voice trained by an unfaithful wife and a career ruined by betrayal, said, How well do we really know anyone, especially the people we love? And the voice of a trained historian, who knew to look beneath the surface, to view institutions skeptically, to distrust one’s preconceptions…well, that voice told me I was in too deep.
“David?”
It was Sharon. She had come in silently and now stood behind me. I stood and gave her a quick hug.
“Have you been crying?” she asked.
It was a slander. It was the smog. I said, “You went back to the radio show?”
“I had to find a routine,” she said. “Better to deal with other people’s problems than mine.” She was wearing expensive-looking cream slacks and a black blouse. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, bringing out her high cheekbones. She sat in the other chair and took my hand.
“He won’t wake up, David,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve read whole books and web sites on head trauma and comas, but it’s shocking how little they know, even today. So much of it seems out of our hands.”
She stood and worked her way around his bed, inspecting gauges, connections, fluids, contraptions. “We’ve been taking shifts, the girls and I. We try to have someone with him every moment they’ll let us.”
Peralta’s color looked all wrong. His broad, expressive face—the turbulent synthesis of Aztecs and conquistadors—was several shades lighter than I had ever seen it. The crinkles around his eyes seemed etched in pink blood.
“David, how is the hunt going for this convict?”
“Badly,” I said. “But I don’t think he’s our suspect anyway.” I told her of the events of the past few hours, cleaning it up for civilian sensibilities, leaving out the part about the gunshot aimed at my head.
She shook her head with increasing agitation. “I can’t believe someone can try to kill the sheriff of one of the largest counties in America, and you people are so helpless!”
“It’s not that,” I said quietly, feeling pretty damned helpless. “We’re making progress. But it’s taking us in a different direction.”
“But David, you have a note pointing to this…”
“Leo O’Keefe.”
“What a name,” she said. “No wonder he’s deranged. I’m going to write a book someday about what parents do to their children with rotten names.”
“I’m not saying he’s not involved. I’m just saying I don’t think he pulled the trigger.” I let silence fill in the room again. I had to talk to her. I just didn’t know how.
“How is Lindsey? That is a pretty name.”
“She’s OK,” I said. “She’s concerned.”
“Sometimes,” Sharon said, “she reminds me of a young Susan Sontag, all that dark hair, and that poetic watchfulness she has.”
“Different politics,” I said. But I liked the phrase “poetic watchfulness.” I added, “And she doesn’t consider herself an intellectual. She’s quite stubborn about that. But she is a great mind and soul.”
“I like Lindsey,” Sharon said, turning aside my idealistic parry. “I’ve come to like her. She’s knocked off a lot of her rough edges the past couple of years.”
“She’s knocked off some of mine, too.”
“I suppose so,” Sharon said. “You certainly seem happy around her. I don’t know if that’s a reason to get married. Who said a second marriage is ‘the triumph of hope over experience’?”
“Dr. Johnson,” I said.
She patted my hand. “David, the Renaissance man. I hope she gets that about you.”
“She does,” I said. “She reads. We read to each other. That’s a big deal today.” I felt uncomfortable, as if I were defending Lindsey from a subtle, professionally engineered attack.
“You know,” she said, “the day he was shot, I was wrapping up an article about women and marriage.”
“Oh, yeah?” I was relieved for a slight change of subject.
“The headline, I guess, is that marriage is bad for women’s growth. That’s the way I see it.” She sighed heavily. “I was trying to figure out how I was going to tell him about this without setting him off. How screwed up is that?”
“It sounds pretty bleak,” I said. “About marriage.”
“Oh, there are always exceptions, I guess. But in my line, love gone wrong is the biggest source of people’s unhappiness. On the radio show, I could take nothing but lovelorn calls. I have the screener keep a better balance with other pathologies, just so I don’t get bored.”
She added quietly, “I haven’t been sure I wanted to be married for years. Many women are that way, David. They’re stunted in their growth taking care of their men.”
She went on: “I can’t say it quite like that on the radio, of course. It would disappoint the love fantasies of too many listeners, and their advertisers. So this article is for an academic journal. Publish or perish, you know all about that.” She paused. “Anyway, I guess I should feel terribly guilty in the wake of all that’s happened. So you and Lindsey have set a date? You’re going to do this for a second time, David?”
There was a lot I wanted to say. But I just said, “April 30th. Central Methodist Church. We expect you both to be there.”
She just smiled and nodded. Then, quietly, “David, I always imagined you as the scholar, just living the life of the mind.”
I made myself talk. “Sharon, have you ever heard of something called the River Hogs?”
She said she hadn’t, and asked the inevitable “why.” I avoided answering, the cop way, by firing another question.
“What do you remember about Mike after the Guadalupe shooting? What was his state of mind?”
“His state of mind?” She laughed. “You were his partner, David. You tell me. You knew him better than I did, certainly back then.” She smiled to herself. “You were such an oddity. This intense young man who read books and seemed gentle and thoughtful, among all these cowboys. I think I learned something about Mike from the way he gravitated to you, in spite of himself. It was like you filled a part of his soul that came from his father. It was a part he’d never let me into.”
I sat up and rearranged myself, trying to find a comfortable perch in the chair. But there was nothing wrong with the chair.
I went on, “What was his life like off-duty? Did he talk about work?”
“He barely talked at all,” she said, her huge eyes darkening.
“Did he have buddies he hung out with? Acquaintances? Anybody else he might have been talking to during that time.”
I had thrown her out of synch. A rigid silence overcame her usual easy poise. “We were going through a hard time then,” she said.
I plunged ahead heedlessly. “How so?”
She sighed and her fine cheeks flushed. “He had been having an affair.”
My face must have given me away. She said, “You didn’t know? I thought partners knew everything, certainly more than spouses. Oh, yes. It was some waitress at Hobo Joe’s. Her name was Lisa. She was nineteen and had fake red hair. I blamed myself, of course. All women do.”
I thought, Gosh, my ex-wife blamed me when she had affairs.
Sharon said, “I learned a hell of a lot about her, Lisa.”
“What was her last name?”
“Cardiff. Lisa Ann Cardiff. Doesn’t that sound like some porn star’s name? Maybe I’m being too harsh. She was just a dumb kid, overwhelmed by his…What do you call it? Not charm. You’re charming, David. But he’s like this tidal wave of personality. So maybe Lisa was kind of like me, just flooded by him. I don’t know how the hell he afforded her, on a sergeant’s salary, when he had two daughters and I was trying to put myself through school…”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Life is complicated,” she said, looking over at her husband, lying two feet away, lost to the coma world. “He’s not a bad man.”
“No,” I said.
And for a long time we sat, not speaking, barely breathing. Sharon and I were old friends. Our relationship had an ambiguousness that I had never dared explore. Now a new tension rippled through the room like the pulses from the monitors beside Peralta’s bed.
Finally, she said, “I have this feeling that I don’t want to know what all these questions have to do with here and now. And yet, David, I know you are about to tell me.”
The midafternoon sun broke through the smog, sending intense sunbeams into the little study that sat just off the living room. When my grandparents built the house back in the 1920s, this room was Grandfather’s office and behind it was the examination room where he plied his dental practice. That didn’t last. By the time I was living in the house, the exam room had long since been turned into an enclosed sunporch, which it still was, facing the interior courtyard and garden. But the office still had traces of Grandfather in the big, cherry desk and leather swivel chair. I swear I could still get a whiff of his cigars. Peralta smoked cigars.
Now the office was half filled with my books and papers, and half occupied by Lindsey’s two laptop computers, hardcover Russian novels, and a collection of Mexican Day of the Dead art. The figures now gaily stared at me, skulls and bones, as I sat alone behind the old desk. Lindsey would be back with lunch and Starbucks, soon. She had left a weapon at my feet, just in case. It was a light, lethal Heckler & Koch submachine gun. I wondered what Grandfather would say to see this device in the well of his beloved desk. The H&K wasn’t much of a companion for a life of the mind.
I needed time to think, time for sober reflection, as one of my professors used to say. Actually, I badly wanted a martini, or some scotch neat. I settled for a Diet Coke and the Bud Powell CD on the stereo. Powell was all wrong for my mood, assertively innovative, confidently modern, string bass and piano exploring new combinations far from the world of cops and mortals. But I let it be.
It wasn’t that I hated the stereotype of the absentminded professor, thinking tiny great thoughts while running into doors. It was that I never took it personally. I was engaged, worldly, even carnal—that was what the women in my life had said, and I took it as an accurate assessment. But the realization was pushing me deeper into the leather chair: A whole world had been going on around me twenty years before, and I had been…oblivious.
Peralta was having an affair. Of course he was. Little things made sense now. But I only realized it as Sharon was telling me, decades later. Maybe he was having more than an affair. What else didn’t I know?
Dean Nixon was apparently the bookkeeper for some sinister enterprise. Badge numbers and money and dates. Who the hell were the River Hogs? I had spent nearly four years out in the patrol districts, accepted as one of the go-to deputies, but I had never heard the phrase. What else didn’t I know?
And now Peralta was lying wounded, perhaps mortally. Dean had been murdered in the most squalid circumstances. That kid I booked years before had broken out of prison, trying desperately to contact me. And someone else was out there, trying to stop him through the barrel of a gun.
The only event in common was that shooting in Guadalupe. But even that didn’t explain Peralta’s cryptic reminder: “Mapstone—Camelback Falls.”
What else didn’t I know?
How much of an excuse is youth?
I was young, oh my God, was I young. But I was a quick study of routines and skills. Knowledge of history and some innate intuition gave me judgment beyond my years, especially rare for the late 1960s and 1970s. Adults loved me. When my peers were sowing wild oats, I was working as a deputy sheriff, seeing things most people didn’t even realize existed.
And I was also carrying a backbreaking class load in graduate school. I was so unfashionable. A narc in class, a pig on campus. Out on the job, I was the outcast who had to hide my books, conceal my degree, tell my insights into the human condition only to myself.
My one real girlfriend left me for a rich doctor with a sailboat.
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I felt so old, so experienced—in some ways so world weary. Maybe, I realized, that was one thing that had attracted me to Lindsey three years before. I saw something of myself in her.
But there was a shadow world I was beginning to see.
After I had left Peralta, I called Kimbrough and walked him through what I wanted done. We would go by the book. Nothing less, but nothing more. Internal Affairs would be brought in, with no interference from me or anyone else. Our liaison officer with the FBI and U.S. Attorney would brief the feds on what we had uncovered. I would make a courtesy call to the county supervisors, county attorney, and state attorney general. And we would not talk to the media, not yet.
I asked him, “Do you agree?”
He laughed sadly through his nose. “That doesn’t matter, Sheriff. It’s going to blow up on us, and we’re all going to be within the blast radius.”
The front door opened, and Lindsey came in with a cardboard Starbucks carrier and takeout from the China Doll. I got up and helped her carry things. Then I took her in my arms, full body close against full body, and held her for a long time.
***
The dinner crowd was gathering at Durant’s as we slid into the cool slickness of a dark red banquette. I had changed into a charcoal Brooks Brothers suit, and Lindsey was wearing a smashing little black dress. We both enjoyed dress-up, and Durant’s was only one degree separated from the very adult 1950s, when it was one of two or three restaurants in town. Now, it rode the wave of retro nostalgia and pervasive irony. No cell phones in Durant’s. The only thing that didn’t quite fit was the darkly good-looking man who awaited us. His name was Bobby Hamid.
He had already made a show of kissing Lindsey’s hand when we came in. Now he sat, perfectly tailored in a priceless gray suit, dazzling us with his smile.
“Miss Lindsey,” he said. “Now I understand Dr. Mapstone’s obsession with you all these years.”
“And I understand Sheriff Peralta’s obsession with you,” she said, smiling sweetly.
He sat back with mock horror and smiled again. “Oh, Dr. Mapstone, are American women not the most delightful creatures in the world? Full of spunk and vinegar. There are more descriptive words in Persian, but I won’t bore you.”
We ordered drinks. Bobby wanted a kir royale, and instructed the waiter meticulously on its construction. I settled for a Bombay Sapphire martini, straight up, one olive.
Bobby was full of pleasantries and solicitations, asking about Peralta, giving me best wishes at such a trying time for the Sheriff’s Office. Peralta had only spent the past fifteen years trying to put Bobby in prison forever. I had been close enough to see that Bobby’s elegance masked a cruel gangster, a man who rose from an Iranian exchange student to become one of the richest men in Phoenix. Bobby’s American dream had been paid for with drugs, prostitution, and murder. But he was undeniably charming, and not with the bad-boy musk of criminals. No, Bobby was a learned man, a cultured man. He gave to all the right local charities. Once he had saved my life.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t want to come here,” he was saying as the drinks arrived. “Durant’s is a Phoenix institution. Grown-up. Classy. Fully of history. Just like you, Professor. Or, I should say, Sheriff.”
“Well, Bobby, I guess it was a reluctance for the media to see the acting sheriff having dinner with a disreputable character like you.”
His lips maintained their curl of amusement but a flush crept into his fine cheeks. “What is the country song? ‘All my rowdy friends have settled down.’ That is why I have kept my distance as you took over as sheriff. People would not understand. But, Dr. Mapstone, you called me this afternoon, remember? You may be ashamed of me, but I know you need me.”
And he was right.
“Bobby, you used to own that place down in the riverbed, Terry’s Swedish Message Institute, right?”
Bobby sampled his kir royale. “Very nice,” he said. “Do you know the Ayatollah Khomeini spent years in Paris before coming back to ruin Persia? Me, I would have stayed in Paris…” He sipped again. “Why are you asking me this?”
Lindsey said, “He’s calculating whether various statutes of limitations have run out.”
Bobby ignored her. He leaned forward on the table and fixed me in his black eyes.
“David, you are starting to acquire some of Chief Peralta’s quirks, no? This fascination with character assassination. Combined with your fixation on the past. If I had ever owned Terry’s”—he sipped again—“that would have been many years ago. Back in the era of disco in America and revolution in my homeland.”
He reached forward quickly, and I could sense Lindsey tense her arm toward the holster concealed on her right thigh. But he only wanted bread. He broke off a piece and daintily buttered it, careful to set his knife at a precise angle on the bread plate.
“Did you see the profile of me in
Fortune
last month?” he asked. “They called me ‘the venture capitalist to know in Arizona.’ I thought real estate had been good to me. That was nothing until I gave these software developers a few million. Oh, the New Economy, I love it.”
I said, “Well, if you had owned Terry’s Swedish Message Institute—just hypothetically speaking—I imagine you would have run across the name ‘River Hogs.’”
The waiter reappeared and we ordered dinner. This would be an interesting expense to walk through the department’s financial services bureau. After the man went away, Bobby regarded me with something new in his eyes.
“You know, David, the essence of dramatic irony is conveyed by the play
Oedipus Rex.
The king searches for a truth that the audience already knows will destroy him. That kind of investigation can be quite dangerous.”
I sipped my martini. Bobby liked to talk.
“River Hogs,” he said. “I have not heard that name for many years. Not since I…” A flock of snowbirds went past on the way to a table, a flash of pink and green and laughter. Back home in New Jersey the landscape was gray and the temperature was in the 20s.
“And?” Lindsey said.
“Let me ask you a question, David,” he said. “Where have you heard this name? Why is this important to you now?”
“It’s connected to a major investigation,” I said. “You know I can’t say more.”
He sat back and nodded his head. “Of course.”
“The River Hogs,” I prompted.
“Well, David, they were your people,” he said. “The River Hogs was a gang of deputies.”
“Maricopa County deputies?”
He nodded.
“And this was, what, a pinochle club?”
Bobby shook his head, lightly jostling his movie-star hair. It was starting to go gray, which made him look even better.
“That was a long time ago,” he said. “But one heard things. And they were not good. The River Hogs offered protection to certain kinds of businesses, in exchange for certain kinds of, let us say, reciprocity.”
I reached for my drink too fast. “This is absurd. I worked in the East County patrol district.”
“David, you asked me,” he said. He paused, then added, “Now you know why my relationship with the police has always been so—what is the right word?—textured.”
“Then why didn’t I ever hear about these rogue deputies?” I demanded.
He said, “Maybe we moved in different circles.”
I realized my shoulders were rigid bars against the banquette. I made myself lower them, relax. “Are these people, these deputies, still in business?”
“I would not know that,” he said. “And, because I know you will ask, let me emphasize that I heard things, only that, I made it a point never to know more, and never to know the identity of individuals. It seemed like the way to maintain a healthy lifestyle.”
After dinner, I just had to drive. I launched the BMW into the river of headlights flowing east on Camelback Road, and we passed 7th Street, 16th, 24th, headed in the direction of Scottsdale. It was definitely high season, the streets crowded with tags from Ohio, Ontario, Minnesota, New York, and Massachusetts, and Arizona tags on the kinds of cars so bland that they could only exist in the fleets of rental-car companies. Lindsey held my hand and we took comfort in the alchemy of silence and city lights.
“I turned the log over to Internal Affairs,” I said as we missed the signal at 44th Street.
“What else could you do, Dave?”
I just shook my head. “I didn’t even want to know who else was in the book. There’s such a thing as due process. Even if this stopped twenty years ago, we’ve got evidence that could tarnish good cops. Who the hell was Dean Nixon? A bad cop. I owe it to everybody to make sure we do this right.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.”
“Maybe it’s not badge numbers,” I said, not believing it. “Maybe it’s something else.”
“Partial zip codes?”
I took a left at Arcadia Drive. The oleanders and citrus trees gave way to the arched mass of Camelback Mountain, sitting blacker than the night sky, directly ahead. The road began to rise.
“I need to stay out of this and let IA do its job. The feds might get involved, too. I just need to stand aside.”
“But you won’t,” Lindsey said quietly, proudly.
Arcadia made a hard right, turning into a street called Valle Vista Road. Off behind us you could see why. The city lights expanded grandly behind us, an electric empire flowing out to the far mountains.
“Oh, I love this view,” she said, turning in her seat to take it in. Her hair glowed darkly in the reflected light.
I came to a closed gate, immersed in rock and hedges. The car sighed into park. “This should be it.”
“What is it, Dave? Your old college make-out spot?”
“Look.” I pointed through the landscaping to a modish adobe house perched out on a crag. “It’s Camelback Falls.”
“Wow. Pretty cool spot. Doesn’t look like anyone’s home.” The house was as dark as the street was deserted. “Do you know who owns it now?”
“No. I just wanted to see it. In a way, this is the last message I have from Peralta.”
The city twinkled back at us. Across the Valley, the TV towers on South Mountain beat a tempo in red lights. Airplanes, two abreast, floated into Sky Harbor at a regular tempo. The BMW’s engine idled gently. I turned and cupped Lindsey’s face in my hands, caressing her cheek, the slope of her neck. She turned her lips up to meet my kiss. I ran a hand across her knee, around the edge of her holster, up the silky tension of her stockings, into the taut, loamy warmth of her inner thigh. She sighed happily.