“I can’t believe you,” she whispered. Her eyes did a subtle once-around-the-room. The crowd at the bar laughed uproariously at something.
We walked the half mile home, alongside streets with sparse weeknight traffic. Up Fifth Avenue to Cypress, past the big old palms and the stucco houses. The air was dry and cold. It might get down to the low 40s tonight. Lindsey had a tension in her stride, and I knew she was quietly aggravated that I had decided we should walk to the hospital, stop at My Florist, and walk home when some nut was out there who might be after me, too. I looked behind us, but the street was empty except for the shadows of the palm trees. The buzz of a helicopter-police or TV news-came from the direction of downtown.
I decided against telling her about my mysterious visitor that afternoon. After I saw the fire door open, I went back in my office and called the security desk downstairs. But the guard said he never saw anyone come out. Leo O’Keefe? It was probably just somebody who was lost and looking for the marriage license bureau in the courthouse basement. Cops could get so paranoid. So could history professors.
Finally she asked, “What about Nixon’s partner, the rookie? Is he safe.”
“He’s dead,” I said. She looked at me wide-eyed. “No, not that way. Cancer. He died in 1995.”
Time to change the subject. “Lindsey,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Camelback Falls?”
“Sounds like a new resort on Camelback Mountain. Just add water,” she said. “What is it, really?”
“I don’t know. It was a notation in Peralta’s datebook, next to my name. I saw it yesterday when I went for his insulin. But I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
She said, “David Mapstone, native Phoenician and Arizona history expert stumped? Let me write down the date.”
“I also had a run-in with Jack Abernathy, who came in Peralta’s office while I was there. He was acting strange.”
“He is strange, Dave. The deputies call him the Planet Abernathy, because he’s so far out in orbit.”
We crossed Monte Vista, one block to Cypress. She went on, “Anyway, I don’t know what Camelback Falls is. Maybe it’s like Niagara Falls.”
She stopped and gave me a kiss, all tongue and passion. She giggled, a very un-Lindsey-like action. “I’m yours ’til Camelback Falls, Dave.”
Then she took my hand snugly in hers, and we resumed our fast walk home.
Chapter Eight
By 10 A.M. Wednesday, I had already spent two hours in the records bureau, looking through case records of the Guadalupe shootout. I’m not a morning person, but I wasn’t sleeping. Until two days before, I could come here as a nobody. Or a curiosity: that former history professor who worked for Peralta. Now I created a sensation. Records clerks scurried forward to meet me, to find every file I sought, to cover their asses. With difficulty, I persuaded them to return to work and let me have some quiet. Hell, I was still nobody, and would happily return to that state as soon as Peralta popped his eyes open and started making his usual demands.
But two days after the shooting, that still hadn’t happened. The night before, we sat with Sharon as nurses came and went from his bedside like initiates in an obscure cult. We watched his heartbeat on the scratchy electronic line of the EKG, watched his chest rise and fall to the command of the respirator. I had asthma as a child, and the fear of suffocating still lingers. The respirator scares the hell out of me. The swelling of his brain had gone down, the doctors told Sharon. And their devices measured brain activity, a good sign. But he was still out cold. Sharon sat by his bed speaking to him in her soothing coloratura, a voice even nicer in person than on the radio. But the only response was the steady trace of a heartbeat, a blue-white line on the screen by his bed.
With that memory, I finished off the remains of a bagel, took another sip of my mocha, and went back to the work before me. The trauma of that May evening so many years before was reduced to four file folders on a table. Paper records. The department was moving backward, putting files into the computer database that could be viewed by deputies using laptops in the field. But that effort petered out with documents dated around 1990. I was looking at antiques of law enforcement record-keeping.
The files were a mess of incident reports, witness statements, news clippings, detectives’ notes, and court transcripts. Some faxed pages were almost entirely faded out. But sheet by sheet, the events revealed themselves. There was even a copy of the arrest report of Leo Martin O’Keefe and Marybeth Watson, with my signature and badge number-“D.P. Mapstone, 5718”-at the bottom of the page. I didn’t remember being there for the booking, but obviously I was. It was a long time ago.
The memory of the files was incomplete, but it went like this: At approximately 6:45 P.M. on the evening of May 31, 1979, sheriff’s deputies Harold Matson and Virgil Bullock stopped a suspicious vehicle in an alley in Guadalupe. The occupants of the car apparently opened fire on the deputies as they approached. Matson and Bullock never knew what hit them. Their.38 Special service revolvers weren’t even drawn.
At 7:02 P.M., Sergeant Mike Peralta and Deputy David Mapstone arrived on the scene. They encountered the suspects, who immediately opened fire on them with automatic weapons. Peralta killed two suspects. (Mapstone was pretty fucking worthless, though the record happily omitted that fact). The two dead suspects were Billy McGovern and Troyce Meadows. They were prison escapees from Oklahoma, in for armed robbery and, at ages twenty-three and twenty-four, carrying hardcore records. They had escaped from the state prison in McAlester the previous July by hiding in a laundry truck.
Charged as accessories were Leo and Marybeth. They were Okies, too. Just kids: Leo was twenty-one and Marybeth was seventeen. Billy McGovern was Leo’s cousin. Somehow the four had hooked up on the afternoon of May 31. Then the paper trail faded and disappeared. The files held no statements from Leo or Marybeth. It was the frustration of dealing with records that had been picked over a period of years, then relocated as the department grew, and finally neglected until the past reached out and threatened us. I made a note to call over to the County Attorney’s Office. Maybe they had a more complete file.
Still, the outcome was clear from court papers and press clippings. Leo and Marybeth were charged as accessories. Arraigned as a juvenile, Marybeth received five years’ probation. Leo agreed to a plea-bargain, accessory to assault on a police officer, and got a year in the state prison. It jarred me to see the name of his public defender, Hector Gutierrez, who was now one of the best known white-shoe lawyers in town. Back then, he had been called “Red Hector” for his radical politics and courtroom diatribes against “the system.”
A frayed clipping: Leo O’Keefe, imprisoned for his role in a 1979 killing of two deputies, was charged with the murder of another inmate. Then it was life for Leo, which in Arizona meant more than seven years and out on good behavior. So he was capable of killing.
A mug shot from 1979: Leo looking scared and a little stoned. A stupid kid with stringy black hair over his shoulders and black plastic-framed glasses. But he had an old-man’s face, with a knobby chin and raw cheekbones. He hardly looked the role of the hardened killer.
Then I saw myself. My God, I looked young, so damned young. My photo stared out from an article on the shooting. Peralta was there, too. I had forgotten he was sporting a thick bandito mustache back then. And even though in my mind’s eye Peralta was always the same, he, too, looked impossibly youthful. The article was by Lorie Pope of the Arizona Republic. She was a twenty-one-year-old cub reporter then. I wondered what she remembered about the case.