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Peralta had as close to a rapt expression as his big immobile face could hold. It was fascinating. If I had launched into an exposition about the root causes of the Great Depression or the complex social changes of Renaissance Italy, Peralta would have been twitching after the second sentence. But I was not blond and long-legged, and Robin had a quirky charisma. She told a good story, had a big, uninhibited laugh, and looked at everyone she talked to with intense, friendly interest. When she was talking and laughing, the animation brought her face together in a way that was attractive. My biggest surprise was Peralta’s interest.
“Who is this rich guy?” he asked. When she supplied the name, he nodded and exhaled. “Wish I could get him to contribute to my campaign.”
“May I?” Robin snatched the cigar out of Peralta’s hand, struck a dashing pose and took a puff. She said, “Cuban?”
He nodded approvingly, making no effort to retrieve it. I made an extravagant face at Lindsey, who raised her eyebrows and smiled. Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. They went on talking and sharing the Cohiba.
There was a melancholy aspect to all this. For what seemed like my entire adult life, Peralta had been married to the same woman. In their heyday, Mike was rising to the top of the sheriff’s office and Sharon was becoming the most popular radio shrink on the West Coast. I cared about both of them. Even when I was living away, I had always found a friendly place with them when I came back to Phoenix to visit. But they were never very similar and the gulf only widened over the years. Now Sharon was living in San Francisco, and the sheriff seemed happy to work all the time, just as he had through their marriage and the raising of two daughters. I missed Sharon, but she was doing well. And Peralta showing some interest in Robin was better than him sitting alone every non-working moment in the big house in Dreamy Draw.
I could almost hear their voices in the bedroom, as I lay in bed and my mind discarded the contents of the previous day. But then I was not fully awake. My mind was distracted by the bad dream. Gradually, I got that feeling in the belly that comes when you’ve been lying in bed, enjoying yourself, not quite with it, and then you remember the car has a flat tire or somebody said something you wished you hadn’t heard. Robin’s words came back to me. Robin did say it. I wasn’t dreaming.
The conversation was on how the sisters had reunited. Robin and Lindsey took turns telling about that day in the neighborhood, when we had been called to the crime scene. This brought an update from Peralta on the homicide, him being a grand master of information, whether it’s cop gossip or an interesting investigation going on in another department. The victim was a lawyer, but he also owned two dozen check-cashing outlets, the banks of choice of immigrant workers, as well as human smugglers—the coyotes—and sometimes drug traffickers. But his stores seemed pretty clean, Peralta said. They had passed muster with a state attorney general’s investigation the previous year. Maybe somebody was trying to move in on him, get him to do illegal business or sell out. The victim had been forty-two years old, had lived in Willo for two years, and was named Alan Cordesman. And that’s when Robin spoke.
“I knew him,” she said.
11
“There’s no history here, it’s so new.” People who moved to Phoenix from the Midwest often said that. That’s what Dana, or whatever her name was, said
. It’s a lie, born of an inability to look beyond the brand-new houses they bought and the brand-new Wal-Mart down the road. Arizona has a richer and longer history than the places many of them considered home. Ancient Indian peoples created diverse cultures. Conquistadors and padres cut a trail for European settlement. Cowboys and Buffalo Soldiers, Confederates and Federals, Mormons and Chinese railroad builders, miners and Navajo code talkers. Nope, there’s no history here. We also had our share of crime history. Dillinger came to Tucson thinking he could hide out from the small-town cops. He was wrong. Winnie Ruth Judd—the trunk murderess; now we know she was probably railroaded by the Phoenix elite, trying to cover up for one of their own. From the rustlers and bushwhackers of the nineteenth century to the international gangs of the twenty-first century, Arizona had always drawn badlands people.
One or more of them stuck an ice pick in my neighbor’s brain. Only the police didn’t have a suspect, and my sister-in-law Robin had known the victim.
“I knew him casually,” she had said. “I met him on a First Friday, at a gallery down on Roosevelt. He seemed like a nice man…” Then she told a story about riding her motorcycle to Denver and stopping in every honky-tonk along the way to dance with a cowboy.
Later, Lindsey and I had talked about it. It was a conversation that didn’t end well. Lindsey and I have few fights, and we’re quick to seek mutual forgiveness. But I’d be damned if I knew how we got into this one. Toward the end, she seemed agitated but said I seemed agitated. And I felt misunderstood—that’s just what she said I was doing to her position. Which was: Robin said she knew the guy, what’s the big deal? “I didn’t say it was a big deal,” I said. “I just wonder if she should tell the police she knew him.” She said, “She met him at a gallery with a hundred other people. Dave, you’re being paranoid.” We went on this way for fifteen minutes, when Lindsey said something I had never heard her say before, “I just can’t talk about this any more.” And, uncharacteristically flushed and red-eyed, she got up and left the room.
Later, she hugged me close as I prepared to leave for work, and gave me enough of a French kiss to please a Parisian. But the encounter left me feeling a little raw. I remembered saying something about whether we should trust a woman who had a history of substance abuse. “That’s not fair!” Lindsey came as close to a shout as I had ever heard her use in conversation. In a calmer voice, she said, “Robin is thirty-five years old, and she has ten clean years behind her.” My blood was up by then, too, and it was an effort not to say, “she claims she has ten clean years.” But I said nothing. I knew we would talk about it later.
The fight was still on my mind that afternoon as I left the Hayden Library at the university. I had spent the day surrounded by Hollinger boxes and files that contained source material for the book. Now, I walked down Cady Mall, past buildings that hadn’t changed much since I was a student. The money went to biotech, business, and athletics, not liberal arts. It was hot enough to be uncomfortable, the sun reflecting intense light back from the sidewalk. But a breeze was blowing from the north, and coeds walked past in the latest incarnation of provocative miniskirts. I was the model of worldly discretion, marital fidelity yet appreciation.
Then I saw a slender, well-dressed man walking directly toward me. He saw me, so it was too late to switch course. I should have done so anyway. He was not the kind to wave. He merely held out his hands appreciatively and smiled.
“Dr. Mapstone, are you teaching again?”
“Hello, Bobby.”
“You look so at home on campus, Dr. Mapstone,” he said, and changed direction to fall in at my side.
“We shouldn’t be seen talking,” I said.
“And why should I not talk to you?” He had a slight English accent. “Because Sheriff Peralta has convinced you that I am the godfather of organized crime in Phoenix?”
I stopped and faced him. Bobby Hamid was wearing a navy pinstriped suit that covered his trim form with perfection. His lovely muted blue tie went with a white shirt that was dazzling in the sun. Not a molecule of sweat dared visit his movie-idol face. I faced him and said, “Look me in the eye and tell me it’s not true.”
He smiled, kept eye contact, and affirmed that it was not true. “But of course you do not believe me,” he said. “You see it as a cheap trick of revisionist history. You have a strong loyalty to your friend, the sheriff. And in his anti-Persian bigotry, he cannot handle it that I, who came to this very campus as a foreign student, could become such a success. To me, an American success story involving a Middle Eastern man is nothing but good for our society today…”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, resuming my walk. Unfortunately, he matched my stride. “You’re a venture capitalist, and an Episcopalian, and on the board of a dozen worthy charities.”
“All true,” he said. “Now I am not saying our city is without crime and corruption. Far from it. Things happen in Phoenix, Dr. Mapstone, and they seem inexplicable. But then you realize there’s a certain, let us say, alignment of interests. The moneyed and political classes get their way. Funny thing. But those are the friends of your sheriff. I am happy to be an outsider from such things.”
A flock of coeds walked by and Bobby asked, “So how is your book coming?”
By now I was sweating from frustration. “How do you know these things?” I said. Peralta had been convinced for years that Bobby had a mole inside the sheriff’s office.
“I’m a big fan, Dr. Mapstone. Are you writing about my case?”
“Not until Peralta puts you away for many years,” I grinned.
