Reflected in the primal orange light of the torch and the sunset, his fine features seemed to sag.
“I guess I was hoping for some answers,” he said. He groped for the word. “Some justice. But it’s not going to happen, I guess. This kidnapping began the most terrible years for my family. Dad and Uncle Win were both dead before the war was out. Bad hearts, the doctor said. Grandpa died in 1942, and his hacienda burned, this lovely stone house down by South Mountain. I was overseas in the Army by then. People started talking about a Yarnell curse.”
“You seem to have come out all right,” I said.
“Well, I’m not Max,” he said. “I’ve been lucky to be able to do what I want, which is collect and preserve Indian art. But I can’t say there are no regrets. I wasn’t there for Andy and Woodrow. And even though I was blessed with a wonderful daughter and three grandsons, I can never see little boys without thinking of Andy and Woodrow.”
He stopped and I could see the slightest mist across his eyes. Or maybe it was across mine.
I stood, thanked him and offered my hand. He shook it with both of his and thanked me for coming. Even in his sadness he had more warmth than I could ever imagine from his brother.
“One more thing,” I said, pulling a snapshot from my coat pocket. “Have you ever seen this before?”
He tilted the photograph into the light from one of the torches. “That’s my grandfather’s pocket watch.” He tried to hand back the photo.
“Are you sure? Check again.”
“It’s his. I’d know it anywhere. Where did you get this?”
When I told him, he walked a couple of steps away, staring out at the lingering Sonoran Desert twilight. I heard him say, “My God.” Then he walked back and recomposed his fine features.
“Come by the gallery sometime.”
“I’d like to,” I said. “I grew up two blocks from the Heard Museum, so I come by my love of Indian art honestly.”
“You would have loved Grandpa’s collection,” he said. “He realized the value of this art long before it became popular. In the 1920s and 1930s, he would take trips out to the reservations to buy art.”
I had written a paper in grad school on Hayden Yarnell but this was new to me.
“Oh, yes,” James Yarnell said. “It was an amazing collection. It would have been on the order of the Heard.”
“What happened to it?”
He stopped and look at me. “Why, it disappeared during the war. When Grandpa’s hacienda burned, the family was afraid it was all lost. But when they went through the ruins, there wasn’t even a trace. It was gone. It’s never been found.”
“My God,” I said. “Why?”
He rubbed his jaw as if an old ache had come back. He said, “The Yarnell curse.”
20
I came back to the courthouse from Scottsdale and pulled out a legal pad. I could hear Lindsey’s voice telling me to use the Mac, but I needed the comfort of pen on paper. Lindsey. I was sending prayers and good thoughts to her, yet I had this feeling that some terrible breach had come upon us like a shipwreck on the unsuspecting. Don’t worry, Dave. I was a worrier, and now I felt like something akin to a bad cold was coming over me, my heartbeat too noticeable, my brain full of dread. I shifted in the creaky old desk chair and started making notes on the case, what I knew, what I didn’t know. The latter list was a hell of a lot longer. By the time I left, it was nearly midnight. I was tired and getting nowhere on a fifty-eight-year-old double-murder. The BMW’s fuel gauge was nearly on empty, a little needle stuck in the festive dash display.
At the light on Roosevelt, a VW Jetta full of Asian teenagers pulled up beside me. They flashed me clean-cut smiles and then one showed me a little machine gun, just like it was prized artwork he had bought at First Friday. I thought very clearly: am I supposed to show you mine? I smiled back stupidly. Then they drove away going the speed limit, signaled, turned right and disappeared down a side street. I didn’t feel scared or brave or outraged, or even like calling PPD on the cell phone. It was time to get some sleep. All day I had been hoping I would find Lindsey waiting for me.
But Peralta was sitting in my driveway.
We walked into the kitchen in silence and I handed out beer. Sam Adams, love it or leave it. I told him about James Yarnell in Scottsdale.
“Stay on the case,” he said, sipping reluctantly from my loathsome yuppie brew.
“And do what?” I was getting cranky from lack of sleep.
“What’s the next step in a case like this?” Peralta the academy instructor.
I threw my hands in the air and walked out. “I’m too fucking tired to employ the Socratic method on the chief fucking deputy.”
He appeared in the bathroom doorway as I was preparing to brush my teeth.
“Did you hear from your little friend today?”
“Lindsey. No.”
I didn’t answer beyond that.
“Sharon and I are having problems.”
I just started brushing, nice circular strokes that would make Grandfather happy.
“Do you know what it’s like to be in the spotlight all the time.” he said. “No, you don’t. It’s not like I can just go check into a hotel, without this showing up in New Times next week.” That was the alternative paper that had waged war with the sheriff for years.
He went on, “They’ve already got me as the next sheriff. Shit, I haven’t even decided to run. Anyway, my personal life is none of their business.”
I would leave the First Amendment arguments to Lorie Pope. I just kept brushing. Circular strokes. Rinse. Spit. Floss.
“I guess I should get a place of my own, quietly,” he went on. “I just…Hell, it seems like such an irrevocable step. I can’t figure out what she wants. How the hell can any man figure that out nowdays?”
I was a silent poster boy for dental diligence.
“Goddamn it, Mapstone. This isn’t easy for me. You know what I mean?”
I looked at him. His face seemed heavier and more careworn than I could remember. I looked back in the mirror for some vain reassurance.
“No, I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “It’s fine for you and Sharon to fuss over my personal life for fifteen years, and I don’t get to be let in to yours?” I wanted to say: You demand to know other people’s weaknesses but never show yours. But I was just dragging. I said, “Stay here when you want, for as long as you need.”
I cleaned up and turned out the light. “You know where the guest bedroom is. There’s an extra door key in the black pot on the kitchen counter. I’ll buy some Coors and try to keep the noise down from my reading.”
“Fuck you,” he called after me as I went in my bedroom. Then, very quietly: “Thanks.”
So began the strange life we fell into that season. Peralta and I acted like two bachelors sharing an old house. Most of the time, we barely saw each other. He was in no mood to cook grand dinners. One night we got takeout from Hong Kong Gourmet and rented two Dirty Harry movies-Peralta was contentedly critical of the actors’ combat shooting stances. We didn’t talk about love and women. He was neat and nearly invisible as a roommate, but a steady beachhead of Peralta’s clothes and county reports built up in the guest room.
I was grateful for the company. As the days went by without word from Lindsey, I grew tired of leaving clever, unanswered messages in her voice mail. The conviction grew on me that I might never see her again, at least as a lover. Or maybe I knew that at an instant when the phone rang at midnight, when she told me of her mother’s suicide. I put the copy of Dante back in the bookshelf. I kept the rose she left me in a little vase on the bedside table as the leaves turned black.
I grieved to myself, without the poleaxed pain that lived in my middle for the first year after Patty said she was leaving. That first time Lindsey made joyous love with me, I saw her as such a miraculous appearance in my life that I vowed not to jump into the vortex of hope and fear that breeds possessiveness. I just let her and us unfold, and I would never regret that. Maybe I always knew it was temporary, and if she didn’t run away first, well, maybe I would. So I grieved to myself and tried to create a world of small forward motion.