So that was Thanksgiving. Except for the strangeness of the unsaid: whatever marital battle sent Peralta to find shelter at my house that night was carefully cleaned up for the holiday. Mike and Sharon didn’t even fuss at each other with their usual gusto. Sometimes my mind wandered, imagining Mike and Sharon as I didn’t want to imagine them: Bitch! Prick! Slut! Bastard! Diminuendo for a drowning marriage. I was aware of my presence keeping a brittle peace. Or maybe I imagined that, too. For just a moment, I recalled the last Christmas Patty and I were together. We had given each other expensive gifts and no cards. Lindsey was big on cards, and I had kept every one she had given me. The dusk came up early and I declined Peralta’s invitation to smoke cigars and watch the big game on TV.
The new freeway system took me from Peralta’s place, nestled into the bare mountainside overlooking Dreamy Draw, to central Phoenix in less than ten minutes. Traffic was light, traveling fast. Charlie Parker was on the BMW’s CD player. I got off at Seventh Street but didn’t feel like going home yet. The house would be too damned empty. I drove slowly through Margaret Hance Park, which sat atop the Papago Freeway and concealed the highway’s ugly gash through several blocks north of downtown. It was once a fine old neighborhood of bungalows and period revival houses, but all that remained was my old grade school, Kenilworth, the new city library, and the nearly new park, which sprawled uninvitingly amid the empty land.
South into downtown. Bobby Hamid was right about a building boom. After years of abandonment, downtown Phoenix was coming back at least a bit. The ballpark loomed massively amid the skyscrapers. A big federal building was going up near the city and county government centers. Some nights there were even crowds on the streets. Not tonight, though. Phoenix reverted to its small-town roots on holidays. The sparse traffic cruising Central disappeared entirely as I turned down Monroe, then went south again on Fourth Avenue. I could see the pale stucco facade of Union Station at the foot of the street and I let the BMW slowly slide down the block toward it. I interrupted Charlie Parker and listened to the echoes off the buildings, the tires scraping across the old railroad tracks.
I slowed to a stop just ahead of the old Triple A Storage warehouse, which stood forlornly off to the left. A couple of homeless men looked me over and scuttled off. Preservationists wanted to make these old warehouse blocks into an entertainment district. But that would require Phoenix to show an uncharacteristic sense of its past. When these old buildings were thriving with commerce, when premier streamliners like the Sunset Limited and Golden State Limited called at Union Station, when the graceful little mission-style building was the center of life here-most of today’s three million Phoenicians weren’t even born and their roots were thousands of miles away. This was a new-start, tear-it-down city that gave it up for the first developer who said we were pretty.
The old brick warehouse had really been a railroad hotel, right at the foot of the street that led into town. Thanks to Gretchen, I knew it had still been a hotel in 1941 when Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell were somehow taken inside and left in a wall in a hidden basement. Franklin Roosevelt was president, Nazi tanks were rampaging through Russia, and this street in the little farm town of Phoenix, Arizona was busy night and day with train travelers. So how did the twins get in there unnoticed? And why would Jack Talbott pick such a very public place to hide his victims? The street radiated only silence and gloom back at me.
17
On Sunday night, I dreamed a vivid dream about Lindsey in the rain. And then I realized she was really there in bed with me. We were both crying silently, big streaks of salty tears in the desert, and she was stroking my face with warm, soft hands, and I was holding onto her for dear life, and life was suddenly so precious and clear and treacherously sweet, and we didn’t dare say a word.
When the alarm went off at eight, I was alone again. But I felt sore and spent in all the right places, and a single long-stemmed yellow rose sat on the bedclothes, the bud barely opened. Outside the bedroom window, the sprawling city was utterly still except for the insistent patter of early-winter rain beating on the dust of new real estate developments. Maybe someday our lives would be normal enough that I could wake up with my complicated lover in my arms. But I knew in the silence of our lovemaking last night she had really said goodbye.
The Republic was wet. I brought it in and tried to read it anyway. Stories on the Y2K computer worries, a multiple shooting a half-mile away, and a new leg of freeway opening out on the edge of town. Another story on a record low number of people getting married and fewer saying they were happy when they did. I pulled on some sweats and drove over to Starbucks to start my day’s rituals.
By nine o’clock, I was at Phoenix Police headquarters. Little orange hoods declared the parking meters off limits today, so I parked two blocks away amid the vacant lots of an old neighborhood. Well, not a neighborhood now. Just emptiness.
Even when I left Phoenix to teach in Ohio, back in the late 1970s, these straight, wide streets that ran for ten blocks between downtown Phoenix and the Arizona state capitol had been a neighborhood. It had surely been in decline-that’s why they put the ugly police headquarters out here-but it had been a neighborhood nonetheless, with people, life, history. That damned word again. Victorian houses and bungalows had brought the semblance of modernity to a frontier town in the 1890s. Adobe and brick apartment houses had been graced with upstairs sleeping porches for an age without air conditioning. They had stood there, along palm-lined streets, all the way to the state capitol. Now, nothing. Block upon block of leveled, grassless vacant lots. Meeting them to the west: ghastly state office buildings. Back when. I remember. I was starting to sound like a geezer, but I couldn’t stop noticing things. Maybe that’s the curse of years.
Inside police headquarters, there was Lt. Augustus Hawkins. He sat at his desk just as he had the first day I saw him, behind paperwork that looked like a besieging army of forms and reports. This time, however, two other detectives were lounging at the tiny conference table in his office. In another chair, a woman wearing a visitor’s ID looked up at me and gave a little smile. Hawkins didn’t look up, but he gave a hearty post-holiday hello.
“Put on your ID card.”
“We have the DNA test back?” I asked, pinning the MCSO card to my pocket. It had been exactly two weeks since we found the skeletons.
“The fucking thing doesn’t match,” said one of the detectives. He looked eerily like O.J. Simpson, a fact that must have made for some interesting times out on the job.
I just stood there in silence. I’d heard what he said, but my mind didn’t want to process it.
“Must not be your famous Yarnell twins,” drawled the other detective, a white guy with the beefy looks of a second-string football player gone to seed and dark permed curly hair. The young cops favored crew cuts and shaved heads. Some older cops, from the ’70s, still thought they were disco studs. Maybe I was being unkind.
I took the last empty chair and let them fill me in. The woman, who introduced herself as Deb Boswell, was a pathologist from the medical examiner’s office and a national expert in these matters. She launched into a twenty-minute lecture about polymorphisms and probabilities, alleles and slotblocks, electropheresis and PCR, and how much they still couldn’t determine. I was at my liberal arts most ignorant in such matters, but the cops weren’t doing much better.
“Bottom line,” Hawkins broke in, “the DNA fingerprints don’t match.”