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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.”
Chapter Thirteen
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 amp; Koch submachine gun. I wondered what Grandfather would say to see this device in the well of his beloved desk. The H amp;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.
