It was newspaper copy paper, flimsy and brittle with age. It was datelined Florence, Arizona, July 20, 1942. I read the lead aloud:
“‘Convicted kidnapper John Henry “Jack” Talbott was executed in Arizona’s gas chamber early this morning, but not before his last words accused Hayden “Win” Yarnell Jr. of masterminding the kidnapping of his four-year-old nephews.’”
I sat up straight. “I never saw this story.”
“That’s because it didn’t run in the newspaper. The publisher himself spiked it. The publisher was a good friend of the Yarnells, remember, and this Talbott character was hardly the most reliable witness. So the account of his last words never ran.”
Another Marlboro flamed to life. She swept away the smoke with an incantatory wave of her bony hand.
“As I said, Mapstone, it was a small town. People talked. They knew Win Yarnell-that’s the name Hayden Jr. went by-they knew he was the black sheep. He drank, womanized. His wife left him. He had a terrible gambling habit. Used to gamble in the old Duece-they bulldozed it in the ’70s to make that horrible Civic Plaza. He gambled with Bravo Juan.”
“Great name.”
“Bravo Juan ran the numbers in the Deuce. He had an arrangement with the sheriff and the police chief, and kept everything in order. But the story went that Win Yarnell was deeply in debt to him. How do you like that, Mapstone? A loser named Win? Anyway, it all made the old man so mad, he disowned him, cut him right out of the business and the will.”
I asked when that happened. “The late 1930s,” she replied. “Everybody talked about it. It was a little town. People felt sorry for Mr. Yarnell, ending up with the sons he did. I guess Morgan was okay, but never that bright. And Win was a lost cause.”
I gingerly sampled the bourbon. “So was Win enough of a lost cause to kidnap his nephews?”
“Maybe.” Her voice became momentarily precise and delicate. “People are capable of anything. Didn’t Solzhenitsyn say that the line separating good from evil doesn’t run between nations or parties but through every human heart? Maybe it was Dostoevsky.”
“Solzhenitsyn, I think.” I thought of Lindsey, my Russian literature expert.
Zelda exhaled a plume of smoke. “What if Win stole Morgan’s children to get a ransom to pay Bravo Juan and something went wrong? Nobody thought Win was a killer, much less of his own nephews.”
I thought about that. “On the other hand, it might make more sense that Bravo Juan or somebody like him snatched the kids to put pressure on Win or the family to repay the gambling debts. Why didn’t the police ever do any checking?”
“Oh, even a college professor can’t be that naive. This was the most powerful family in the state. Phoenix was a corrupt little town where the elite got what they wanted. Look at the way they had railroaded Winnie Ruth Judd just a few years before that. Anyway, in this case the cops had a man caught red-handed with the ransom money, or part of it at least, and with the pajamas. Why would they need to do more?”
I just let the bourbon and information burn my throat.
She fished out a brown file folder and handed it to me. Yellowed papers bulged out from the sides. “Here’s Jack Talbott’s police record. Do you have it?” I shook my head. “You can add it to your collection.”
I slipped off the rubber band and leafed through the papers. Talbott had received a suspended sentence for burglary back in Elwood, Indiana. In Phoenix, he served a month in the county jail for assaulting a fellow drunk. That was in June 1940. Another arrest came in November 1941 for public drunkenness. I slowed down my reading. I read it again.
“This is strange. Jack Talbott was arrested for public drunkenness outside a bar on Second Street on November 27.”
She reached for the report. “Let me see that. I never noticed that before.” She stubbed out the Marlboro and scanned the page with her finger.
“Mapstone, that was the day of the kidnapping. Could he really have been set up, just like he claimed?”
“Maybe not.” Peralta’s skeptical voice was in my head. “The booking record shows he was arrested at one-ten a.m. that day. He could have been released in a few hours. The kidnapping was later that night. Maybe he got just sober enough to steal those little boys. It’s impossible to know without the jail release record. What about the art collection that disappeared? Could that have played into this?”
“Oh, you know about that. It was another thing the newspaper never reported. Supposed to have been quite a collection. But it disappeared after the kidnapping. Let me think…after the kidnapping, and before the old man died.”
“Maybe you can take it with you.”
She gave a wheezy laugh and slugged down the remains of the bourbon.
She walked me out to the rocky drive and we talked again of Hayden Yarnell.
“I met him, you know. It was around 1938. He came by the newspaper one day. He was very formidable. I’ll never forget his handshake-firm and honest, and for a nobody like me, a young girl working as a clerk. He was a legend, and it was a more innocent time. We were taught to venerate men like Hayden Yarnell.”
The wind had come up and I couldn’t help a little shiver. “What do you think from the perspective of a less innocent time?”
She put her hands on her ample hips and stared out toward the High Country. “The republic is founded on a noble lie,” she said. “Plato, as you know. When Hayden Yarnell came to Arizona, it was a wilderness. Men like him made it a state. They dug the mines and took the wealth out of the earth. They killed the outlaws and forced the Apache to make peace. Then they mortgaged their land to build the dams that allowed that city down there…” She gestured angrily toward the dirty air. “All in all, I think it was a mighty achievement. They created a civilization so comfortable and safe that now they can be portrayed as exploiters and oppressors. Isn’t that the history you teach now, Mapstone?”
“I…”
She really didn’t want an answer. “But they were only men, and they had their flaws. Hayden Yarnell was a builder, but he was greedy, too. He was this engine that never stopped. You could see that even when he was an old man. Maybe the qualities go together. And he wanted to build a family that would carry on everything he built. Make his name immortal, if you will. He was an orphan, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“He wanted sons of strong character more than anything, more than the Copper Queen Mine or the largest ranch in the state. And it was the one thing that was out of his grasp.”
I thanked her and started the BMW.
“Cops must make a lot more money now.” She eyed the car.
“It’s a long story.”
“That’s what they all say,” she said. “Did you find anything else in that building with the skeletons?”
Damn. I had nearly forgotten. “A pocket watch was with them. Does that mean anything to you.”
She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “Anything else down there?”
I shook my head. “There were tunnels under the building, but they didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Why?”
She stared toward the brown metropolitan cloud.
“I don’t know. Just thinking. Sometimes I think too much.”
27
I drove back to the city against the outbound afternoon rush, but the traffic was still miserable. The city limits went nearly to New River now, a good twenty miles north of where they sat when I had been in high school. I played the Heather Nova CD Lindsey had given me last summer. Now I was pricked by the lyrics of longing, love and regret. I had to stop midway through Avalanche. So I took it off and slipped in Sinatra. He got to “One More for the Road” as I blew over the Stack and into downtown. I shut the music off. I would rather have been thinking of Gretchen again, wondering about her next appearance.