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Then she took my hand snugly in hers, and we resumed our fast walk home.
Chapter Eight
By 10 A.M. Wednesday, I had already spent two hours in the records bureau, looking through case records of the Guadalupe shootout. I’m not a morning person, but I wasn’t sleeping. Until two days before, I could come here as a nobody. Or a curiosity: that former history professor who worked for Peralta. Now I created a sensation. Records clerks scurried forward to meet me, to find every file I sought, to cover their asses. With difficulty, I persuaded them to return to work and let me have some quiet. Hell, I was still nobody, and would happily return to that state as soon as Peralta popped his eyes open and started making his usual demands.
But two days after the shooting, that still hadn’t happened. The night before, we sat with Sharon as nurses came and went from his bedside like initiates in an obscure cult. We watched his heartbeat on the scratchy electronic line of the EKG, watched his chest rise and fall to the command of the respirator. I had asthma as a child, and the fear of suffocating still lingers. The respirator scares the hell out of me. The swelling of his brain had gone down, the doctors told Sharon. And their devices measured brain activity, a good sign. But he was still out cold. Sharon sat by his bed speaking to him in her soothing coloratura, a voice even nicer in person than on the radio. But the only response was the steady trace of a heartbeat, a blue-white line on the screen by his bed.
With that memory, I finished off the remains of a bagel, took another sip of my mocha, and went back to the work before me. The trauma of that May evening so many years before was reduced to four file folders on a table. Paper records. The department was moving backward, putting files into the computer database that could be viewed by deputies using laptops in the field. But that effort petered out with documents dated around 1990. I was looking at antiques of law enforcement record-keeping.
The files were a mess of incident reports, witness statements, news clippings, detectives’ notes, and court transcripts. Some faxed pages were almost entirely faded out. But sheet by sheet, the events revealed themselves. There was even a copy of the arrest report of Leo Martin O’Keefe and Marybeth Watson, with my signature and badge number-“D.P. Mapstone, 5718”-at the bottom of the page. I didn’t remember being there for the booking, but obviously I was. It was a long time ago.
The memory of the files was incomplete, but it went like this: At approximately 6:45 P.M. on the evening of May 31, 1979, sheriff’s deputies Harold Matson and Virgil Bullock stopped a suspicious vehicle in an alley in Guadalupe. The occupants of the car apparently opened fire on the deputies as they approached. Matson and Bullock never knew what hit them. Their.38 Special service revolvers weren’t even drawn.
At 7:02 P.M., Sergeant Mike Peralta and Deputy David Mapstone arrived on the scene. They encountered the suspects, who immediately opened fire on them with automatic weapons. Peralta killed two suspects. (Mapstone was pretty fucking worthless, though the record happily omitted that fact). The two dead suspects were Billy McGovern and Troyce Meadows. They were prison escapees from Oklahoma, in for armed robbery and, at ages twenty-three and twenty-four, carrying hardcore records. They had escaped from the state prison in McAlester the previous July by hiding in a laundry truck.
Charged as accessories were Leo and Marybeth. They were Okies, too. Just kids: Leo was twenty-one and Marybeth was seventeen. Billy McGovern was Leo’s cousin. Somehow the four had hooked up on the afternoon of May 31. Then the paper trail faded and disappeared. The files held no statements from Leo or Marybeth. It was the frustration of dealing with records that had been picked over a period of years, then relocated as the department grew, and finally neglected until the past reached out and threatened us. I made a note to call over to the County Attorney’s Office. Maybe they had a more complete file.
Still, the outcome was clear from court papers and press clippings. Leo and Marybeth were charged as accessories. Arraigned as a juvenile, Marybeth received five years’ probation. Leo agreed to a plea-bargain, accessory to assault on a police officer, and got a year in the state prison. It jarred me to see the name of his public defender, Hector Gutierrez, who was now one of the best known white-shoe lawyers in town. Back then, he had been called “Red Hector” for his radical politics and courtroom diatribes against “the system.”
A frayed clipping: Leo O’Keefe, imprisoned for his role in a 1979 killing of two deputies, was charged with the murder of another inmate. Then it was life for Leo, which in Arizona meant more than seven years and out on good behavior. So he was capable of killing.
A mug shot from 1979: Leo looking scared and a little stoned. A stupid kid with stringy black hair over his shoulders and black plastic-framed glasses. But he had an old-man’s face, with a knobby chin and raw cheekbones. He hardly looked the role of the hardened killer.
Then I saw myself. My God, I looked young, so damned young. My photo stared out from an article on the shooting. Peralta was there, too. I had forgotten he was sporting a thick bandito mustache back then. And even though in my mind’s eye Peralta was always the same, he, too, looked impossibly youthful. The article was by Lorie Pope of the Arizona Republic. She was a twenty-one-year-old cub reporter then. I wondered what she remembered about the case.
“So how’s it hanging, Sheriff?”
It was Bill Davidson, his long, handsome face peering around a set of filing cabinets.
“Oh, somehow I’m still employed,” I said. “How are you?” It was strange to see these senior commanders, who had mostly regarded with me indifference, suddenly chatting like old friends. Davidson was OK compared to his peers. He’d never treated me like I had two heads and open sores.
“Oh, getting too old to do this stuff.” He sighed and edged against the filing cabinet, a lean uniformed man with careless posture. “Every day I come to work thinking I’ve seen just how cruel human beings can be to each other, and every night I go home with a new lesson I didn’t want to know.” His face regarded me with easy brown eyes, a thick gray mustache, long age lines in the right places on skin that was sundried and taut. It was an adult man’s face, authentic but out of place in an age of teenage boy beauty.
I couldn’t help but notice the long whitish scar on the side of his neck. It came up out of his collar and stopped just below his left ear. Davidson got that when I was still a rookie. He was the first on the scene of a guy trying to kill his baby daughter with a machete. Davidson pulled the kid out of the way and took the brunt of the blade in the side of his neck and shoulder. It was one of the bravest things I ever heard of when I was on the streets.
“I see you’re in uniform,” he said.
“I brief the media at noon,” I said. “It seemed like the right thing.”
He drew his mustache down distastefully. “I don’t envy you that,” he said. “Little light reading?” He nodded toward the array of files on the table before me.
I told him what I was doing. He said, “Sheriff, you pay detectives to do this kind of thing for you. You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, I just wanted to see.” Truth was, I desperately needed something to occupy my time besides going to meetings and worrying about Peralta.
Davidson shook his head. “Poor old Matson and Bullock,” he said. “Talk about the wrong place at the wrong time. I remember right where I was that day: flat on my back with strep throat. Got it from my kid.” I didn’t know Davidson personally back then, and he probably didn’t
know of my involvement in the shooting.
He said, “That killing shook up this department for years. It hit home. Hell, Harry Matson had been my training officer when I was a rookie. After that, we knew Phoenix wasn’t the same place any more.” The long etchings in his face tensed and deepened. “People were just crazy, vicious for no reason. They called us ‘pig.’ They’d set up ambushes for us. Pull out guns when all that happened is they were stopped for some petty-ass traffic violation.”
“What do you know about this O’Keefe?”
“Not a damned thing,” Davidson said.
“I just wonder if he’s capable of coming back to get revenge.”
Davidson said, “It’s always the ones you don’t think about. Not the guys that stand up in court and threaten to kill your family. Prison has a way of dealing with most big talkers. No, it’s guys like this little prick.”
