“Max Yarnell,” Lorie declared, as if she had spoken a whole paragraph.
I sighed and started mixing the drink.
“Are you making martinis?” Lorie demanded. “Why don’t you make one for me?”
“Because martinis blur judgment,” I said. “You told me that years ago.”
“So? It would do you good.”
“I would bore you. I was never dangerous enough.”
“Yeah, but we could have fun while I was reaching that self-destructive conclusion.” She gave a deep, sensual giggle. I imagined her too-wide smile and the toss of her short dark hair. I sealed up the gin and ice in Grandfather’s deco cocktail shaker and I gave the concoction a good workout.
I took out one of the Neiman Marcus martini glasses my colleagues had given me as a going-away present from San Diego State University when I lost the tenure sweepstakes. I had a lot of going-away presents. The clear fluid slipped delightfully into the glass, little frigates of ice cruising the surface.
“Max Yarnell,” Lorie said again.
“I honestly don’t know much. I’m as baffled as everybody else. You know, ‘police are baffled.’ That’s me.”
“David!” Her voice was suddenly taut. “He’s one of the richest and most prominent men in the state, and he’s been murdered less than three weeks after it seemed like the Yarnell kidnapping had been solved? This whole thing stinks.”
“I don’t doubt it, but how?”
“You’re the one with the Ph.D., my love.”
“Fat lot of good it’s done me.”
“Look, I’d love to play career one-downmanship, but I’ve got a deadline. What’s Peralta holding back?”
“Don’t put me in that position, Lorie.”
She sighed and said, “I’d like to put you in a position all right, but I guess you’ve got to go drink martinis out of Leslie’s navel.”
I dropped an olive into the martini like making a green wish. “Lindsey.”
“Whatever,” Lorie said. “Give me something, David. How was Max Yarnell killed? Gun? Knife? Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic? The PIO won’t tell me a goddamned thing.”
“You know the cops always hold back details, stuff the suspect alone knows. And you know I can’t tell you that. “We’ll talk.”
“Hey,” she said. “Be careful, David. I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into but it’s pretty heavy-duty. Watch that sweet melancholy-intellectual ass of yours.”
She could always make me smile.
I put Count Basie on the stereo and went back to the staircase. From the perch of the carpeted steps, I savored the martini. Gotten myself into something heavy-duty, but what? What could a 58-year-old kidnapping have to do with a murder that happened yesterday? Hadn’t the DNA test said those skeletons weren’t even the Yarnells? Then what had Max Yarnell wanted to talk about with me? This same Max Yarnell who had his assistant pull the property records on the Triple A Storage Warehouse and then pretended to be surprised to learn his company owned it. Was he already dead as I was sitting at the gate, pushing the little red button on the communications box? Would it have made a difference if I had immediately agreed to a meeting? What was I missing?
It could all be a coincidence. Maybe he just surprised a burglar; maybe he only wanted to complain to me again about my lack of respectful behavior toward him, only this time with the liberating influence of alcohol; maybe he pissed off some environmental activists who decided to return him to the soil a little early.
That all could make sense, until you had to figure in that damned doll.
I went back to scanning book titles. All that history. The only problem was the history I didn’t know. Out the picture window, the world appeared dark and profound, my valley of low ranch house rooftops and big sky, where stranglers, snipers and killers of rich men with secrets did their restless trades. I thought about what Philip Roth said: “the terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides.” Then I heard James Yarnell’s voice in my head and I jumped to my feet.
The garage-apartment behind the house was where I was building an HO-scale model railroad, a scene of Phoenix in the 1950s. It was a place to store boxes of books, old clothes and things headed for Goodwill. I guess I could have rented out the upstairs to a boarder if I wanted to clean out about forty years of records stored from Grandfather’s dental practice.
I opened up the musty apartment and stared at the boxes and filing cabinets. Old patient records from my grandfather, the dentist. James Yarnell had said Grandfather had been their dentist way back when. Could it really be this easy? I started looking through files, getting a sense of how things were organized, or not. For decades, it seemed, Grandfather had an assistant named Mrs. Hill. I could barely remember a large woman with steel-wire stiff gray hair and thick fingers. Now I detected her steadfast handwriting on files before the 1950s, when typewritten labels took over. Her filing was quirky, made more so by the move of the records from Grandfather’s old office on McDowell after he had finally retired. It took some time. I mixed another martini, came back to the garage apartment and dug in again.
In about an hour, I heard the door from the house open and Peralta’s heavy tread came over the walkway to the apartment.
“What are you doing, Mapstone?” He stuck his head in the door.
I held up the files.
“Finding the Yarnell twins,” I said.
24
“I don’t hate all men,” Gretchen was saying. “Maybe I’m wary of the species in abstract. When your name is Gretchen Goodheart, it brings out the predator in some men.”
When she spoke, her mouth animated those double lines that became dimples when she smiled. They were like double parentheses etched into the smooth skin around her mouth.
“A good heart is good to find,” I said.
“I like a few individuals of the species very much.” She touched my arm.
It was Monday night. We were sitting in a booth at Los Olivos, the oldest Mexican restaurant in Scottsdale and one of my favorites. It was our first real date and the place was overflowing with winter visitors. Max Yarnell had been dead for a little more than two days.
We had been talking about Frances Richie, about the bad sense and bad luck to fall in with somebody like Jack Talbott. Gretchen had said he represented a type of man that made women hate all men.
Philosophy and enchiladas. I was glad for a break. Sunday had been nonstop for fourteen hours, as I trailed along with sheriff’s and police detectives as they interviewed people in the homicide of Max Yarnell.
He had been one of the richest men in the Southwest, and one of the loneliest. He had divorced his wife of thirty years back in the early 1990s and then had gone through a string of pretty young trophies, none of the women in the picture recently. His children lived out of state; one lived in London. He and his brother, James, hadn’t spoken in seven months. His assistant, the lovely Megan, was on vacation in San Diego. So apparently on Friday night, Max Yarnell had worked in the midtown skyscraper until around four, then had driven home. He lived alone, with a housekeeper and cook who only worked as needed. With business dinners and travel, Max Yarnell didn’t seem to have much time to enjoy his sweeping views.
All that work had produced enemies. The defense company owned by Yarneco had faced government investigations into alleged contracting fraud. Another Yarneco subsidiary had terminated an employee who had vowed to come to Phoenix and personally kill Max Yarnell. It was a promising lead until the man was found with a new job and a tight alibi in Seattle. But the biggest trouble came with the company’s ambition to open the first new copper mine in Arizona in years.