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She smiled that dimpled extravaganza. “It was called the Sunset Rou
te Hotel until the late 1940s. I’m not quite sure why.”
“The Southern Pacific’s premier passenger train through here was the Sunset Limited.”
“See, David. You’ve got the moves.”
“I am a storehouse of useless knowledge.”
“I think you’re a very intelligent man.” She fixed those baby browns on me, an intense connecting gaze. I invited her to have a drink at Majerle’s.
Chapter Fifteen
“Now I am entranced, David Mapstone,” she said. “A martini man? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cop drink a martini. I am shaken and stirred.”
“I picked it up in another life.”
“Ah, this was the life in the federal witness protection program?”
“How did you know?”
“So you lost the girl but kept the vice?”
I smiled. “Something like that.”
She set aside her chardonnay and caught the barmaid’s eye—not hard to do, since we were the only people in the bar. “I’ve decided I must have a martini, too.”
“Bombay Sapphire,” I instructed, and the barmaid went away, her black tennis skirt swinging saucily behind her.
Gretchen said, “When I was twenty three, I dated, well let’s say he was the youngest son of one of the richest men on the West Coast. He was a total idiot, but, oh, how I loved his toys.”
The crowd noise from the basketball game on TV drifted over our way and then the server did, too. Gretchen sampled the martini.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“So how does one get to be the city archaeologist?” I asked and heard her story.
Gretchen Goodheart grew up in Tempe, where her dad was a teacher. She was a tomboy, and excelled at track and gymnastics in high school. She went to UCLA and then worked four years as a smoke jumper, fighting forest fires around the West. “I survived,” she said. But she also loved history. “I decided archaeology was a good mix of the outdoors and the past. But it’s not like you can take that degree and open an archaeology shop on Mill Avenue.”
So she came home to Phoenix, worked in several dead-end jobs. Then she answered an ad for the city archaeologist’s office. For fun, she rode horses and hiked in the desert. She wanted to collect Santa Clara pottery but couldn’t afford it. She read Montini in the Republic because he made her mad and she was a Big Sister to an eleven-year-old girl in the barrio.
Gretchen was safe, pretty, athletic. She’d probably never had anything really bad happen in her life. She’d never sat up with a lover through a dark night of the soul. She had none of Lindsey’s edge or surprises. She would never dig black platform heels into my back as we made love. I had that thought and then wondered why I would presume to think it. I imagined she had a pleasant-looking boyfriend who worked at Bank One.
“So what’s your story?” she asked. “You don’t seem like the other cops I’ve met.”
“Oh, I’m a bona fide graduate of the Sheriff’s Academy.”
“David Mapstone keeps his mystery up.” She smiled. “I know you left law enforcement to teach history. You were a professor. A friend of Mike Peralta. And you came back to Phoenix this year and took a job with the Sheriff’s Office again.”
“Gretchen, you don’t miss a thing.”
“I read about you in the newspaper, solving old crimes. It must be very satisfying. Who said, ‘The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice’?”
“Martin Luther King, Jr. Although his words were ‘arc of the moral universe’ and he was quoting an abolitionist preacher named…” I let the sentence trail off. My flirty nervousness with her was turning into pedantry.
She smiled and touched the top of my hand. “I’m interested. Just from reading about you, I kind of felt like you were a kindred spirit, a refugee from the social sciences trying to make a living in the real world. I’m afraid I don’t have a Ph.D. in history, though.”
“Well, then you’re more employable than me,” I said. “I’d like to think I bring something special to all this, but mostly I think Peralta had pity on me and gave me a job.”
