“God, I’m sick of men talking about power and women living without it! Do you believe what you just said?”
After a pause I had to admit I didn’t.
“I’ve been reading some of the notes the lead detective made in the case,” I said. “Joe Fisher. I just found some of his files. He had reservations about whether Frances was involved in the kidnapping. He testified at her trial for leniency.”
“My God…”
“But he couldn’t get past the fact that she was found with Talbott, with some of the ransom money and the pajamas. I have no idea whether he knew that Talbott was in jail the night of the kidnapping, but he did interview a lot of people about the possibility that others were involved.”
“Why didn’t he…?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to do the right thing, but he could never make the case.”
“You cops,” Heather said. “Always sticking together. Can’t you do anything, Mapstone? This woman was a victim! She never got justice. Don’t you care?”
I just listened. Anything I said would seem insincere.
“Mapstone?”
“I’m here. I do care, Heather. That’s why I’m asking these questions. I just can’t figure out what would have caused Frances to keep silent.”
Heather said, “I can think of one thing.”
38
The rap on the door was tentative, almost like someone made a mistake. Still absorbing the news from Heather Amis, I wanted to let them walk on. Whoever it was couldn’t want me that bad. But I set aside my notes and went to the door.
Before me stood a small, dark man in a starched white shirt and a bola tie. His face looked as lined and cracked as the desert itself, but his hair was vividly black and slicked back on his scalp. He carried a Stetson in one hand, a large, powerful-looking hand for such a small man.
“I am Luis Paz.”
I invited him in and sent Carl down to the marriage license bureau to get him a cup of coffee. Carl wouldn’t like it, but I was afraid the old man might walk out if I kept him waiting. Or he might just disappear like the apparition he seemed to be. I led him to one of the straight-back wooden chairs and invited him to sit. He put the Stetson on my desk.
“My son gave me your card.”
I told him that I appreciated that.
“He didn’t want me to come here. To open up things that should have been closed so long ago.”
“But you came anyway,” I said. I sat cautiously behind my desk. He regarded me in a long appraising glare.
“You work for Chief Peralta?”
I said I did.
“He’s a good man. I knew his father, the judge.”
“Mr. Paz, you worked as gardener…”
“I worked for Mr. Yarnell for nearly twenty years.”
“Hayden Yarnell?” I coaxed.
Paz stiffened. “There is only one Mr. Yarnell,” he said. “His older sons were…” He let the sentence hang between us, as if only a fool would not understand.
“After he died, I started my own lawn business.” He relaxed a millimeter, no more.
“Sir, may I ask how old you are?”
“Ninety-three,” he said.
“You don’t look it.”
He smiled a little. “I feel every year,” he said. “But I am not here about me.” He sighed and looked across the desk, then met my eyes. “What happened in 1941, all those years ago, I’ve carried it in my heart.”
We fell into quiet that seemed endless. It was a taste of the silence the Yarnell twins must have felt, an absence more frightening than their cries for help, the silence of Jack Talbott before the executioner did his job, or the endless years for Frances Richie. But I didn’t dare break it. Finally, Paz did.
“At first I could tell myself stories, that maybe I was mistaken about what I had seen and heard. And then it didn’t seem to matter, so much had gone wrong it couldn’t be made right.”
I spoke into the next long gap. “What couldn’t be made right?”
“You don’t understand. They were so powerful…”
“The Yarnell family?”
He nodded slowly. “First they told me to keep my mouth shut, that Mr. Yarnell wanted it that way. I couldn’t believe that, but he became so sick, and I couldn’t talk to him.” He sighed heavily. “I was afraid. I had my own family, and I was afraid. Later, when the Yarnells offered me money to start my own business, I took it.”
His hands bunched into gnarled, hard-time fists that sat on his knees like holstered weapons. “Do you know what it is like to hold something terrible in your heart for so many years?” he asked. “Do you know how heavy it becomes?”
Carl stepped in and put the coffee on the desk. He started to say something. Then he saw Paz’s face, and walked quietly out, closing the door without a sound.
Paz sipped the coffee. “They tell me I should not have caffeine, or anything else I love. Am I going to live another twenty years? I hope not. A man can live too long.”
I didn’t try to guide him. I just sat and listened.
“Mr. Yarnell could have lived forever but he died of a broken heart,” Paz said. “I was so young and stupid then, I would not have believed such a thing. But I watched it happen.”
“When his grandsons were kidnapped.”
“Yes!” Paz erupted. “Yes, it killed Mr. Yarnell.”
“You were there the Thanksgiving they were kidnapped?”
He nodded.
“And you stayed with Mr. Yarnell until he died?”
“I was there the entire time,” he said. “I didn’t understand all that was happening. I didn’t know how to help Mr. Yarnell. There was no straight course that I could see.”
“You cared about Mr. Yarnell.”
Paz stared at his fists, opened them and stared inside, as if the lifelines on his palms could translate for him.
“Do you understand what I am trying to say?” he demanded.
“I think I do,” I said. “But I need you to tell me in your own words, from the beginning.”
He sat for a long time in that death silence, the big room swallowing up even the sound of our breathing. Then he set the coffee cup carefully on my desk and began to talk in a strong voice.
39
The rain stayed all week, under a sky that looked like boiling lead. On Friday morning, I walked across Jefferson Street to the sheriff’s administration building, showed my ID at the deputy’s entrance and used the back hallway to reach the private entrance to Peralta’s office suite. His space held the comfort of the familiar: the big Arizona flag furled in its coppery sunset behind his desk; the framed photos of a storied career on the wall; a bulletin board on wheels with the latest case reports; a wall-sized map of Maricopa County; the contrast of his credenza piled high with files, law books, and used legal pads with the utter emptiness of his big modern desktop. He was leaning back in his chair, black cowboy boots on his blotter, sipping a caffeine-free Diet Coke.
“Where have you been? I’ve eaten all your leftovers at home.”
I dropped a two-inch-thick file folder beside his boots. I said: “Progress.”
He lifted his dark brow a quarter of an inch. I sat down and gave my report.
In the end, he wanted to talk to Luis Paz himself. All the way down, Peralta quizzed me rapid-fire. Turned my ideas on their head. Turned my words against me. Questioned the sequence. Questioned the motives. He could demolish the careless truth-seeker in one sentence, and I needed that. He reminded me we would face tougher questions from the county attorney-and from Superior Court Judge Arthur C. “ACLU” Lu, if we were to get the court order we must have.
But after spending an hour with Paz in the living room of the modest, well-kept home, Peralta was uncharacteristically silent. All the way back downtown he was as pensive as Mike Peralta can get. Only when we got to a dark booth in a deserted corner of Majerle’s did he speak.
“I’ll go to Judge Lu for a court order this afternoon,” he said. “How do you want to play this?”