I let that one sit on the concrete between us. Lindsey was across the street smelling flowers by the old municipal building. She gave me a little wave.
“This logbook from Nixon,” he said. “This is not good.”
I felt the balls of my feet tense. “That’s confidential information, Jack.”
“Word gets around the department,” he said, working his jaw like he was chewing tobacco. “You know, Dean Nixon was trouble. Long time before we finally got him out. You check his file. I know he was a friend of yours.”
“I don’t know if he was a friend…,” I stammered. “We knew each other in high school.”
“He recommended you,” Abernathy said. “I sat on your review board for the academy, remember?”
Actually, I didn’t remember.
“I voted against you,” Abernathy said, not unkindly. “I thought you were some egghead who would get bored with law enforcement. Those kind of people don’t like rules, don’t like routines. They’re a pain in the ass for the supervisors…”
“They probably can even read the little card that has the Miranda warning.”
He laughed once, high and breathy and alien. “You’re a clever one.”
“Well,” I said, “Lucky for you I don’t hold a grudge.”
“Nixon would go crazy, you know.” Abernathy didn’t meet my eyes. He stared over my shoulder, at the early lunch congregants at Patriot’s Park. “One time I saw him nearly beat a suspect to death. Would have, if I hadn’t stopped him. He was drinking all the time. Probably taking drugs, too. Then he fell in with those bounty hunters…”
“Jack, what do you think this logbook means?”
He kept his gaze over my shoulder. “How the hell would I know that?”
“You brought it up, Jack.”
“Shit.” His face reddened, evening out the patches of red and white. “I don’t have a clue what it means. I don’t know what you’re getting at.” He fixed me with his little eyes. They were liquid gray. “Don’t you know what this kind of thing can do to this department? Look what’s happened over in L.A. with the Rampart scandal. Months and months of allegations, careers ruined. Politicians make hay over this. And in the end nothin’ changes. I tell you one thing, the only people it helps is the politicians and the bad guys.”
I started to speak but he cut me off. “You ain’t never gonna get cops to roll over on each other.” His voice had changed. Never polished, it had dropped into a rougher clone of itself. I could almost imagine him interrogating a suspect back when he was on the streets. “There’s a code of silence, Professor. You think anybody’s going to talk about this log, even if it’s true?”
I said, “I guess if we have badge numbers, that might lubricate some memories.” He worked his heavy jaw again. Maybe he didn’t know that detail. I went on. “This isn’t some petty-ass IA investigation, like over in Mesa where the male and female officers were taking breaks on duty to go off and fuck. We’re talking about murder and attempted murder.”
“You don’t know that,” he squealed. A pair of young women walking by stared at us. “You got your suspect in both shootings. This O’Keefe character. And, hell, with Dick Nixon, nothin’ he was involved in would surprise me.” I hadn’t heard someone use his nickname in years. “Bad things have a way of comin’ back around.”
“What were the River Hogs, Jack?”
“Bunch of idiots drinkin’,” he said, no hesitation. “When they’d get off duty, they’d drive down into some deserted spot in the riverbed, drink and party all night.”
“Did you ever go with them?”
His mouth puckered and he shook his head. “I know you’re tryin’ to get the old white guy. I’m not ‘with it’ in this department. I don’t read the same books as you. I’m not politically correct. But I’m sure as hell not a dirty cop.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I supported you for acting sheriff.”
Thanks, I guess, I thought.
Suddenly, he calmed down. “OK, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll get moving on those prisoner transfers. That oughta help. We wouldn’t want a jail riot your first week in office.” He added, “You looked good on television Wednesday. We need somebody like you, clever.”
He clapped me on the arm and walked away.
“Jack,” I called, and he turned to face me, all belly and jowls. “What about it? You ever go out with the River Hogs?”
He just gave me a little smile, raised a fat finger to his lips-shhhhhhh-then turned and walked on.
There was a disturbance off to my left, and my involuntary muscles sent my hand reaching for the Python under my coat. But it was just some domestic thing, woman and man and their lawyers arguing. A pair of burly young deputies intervened. The male deputies like their hair cut close these days. When I was a young deputy, the fashion was just the opposite: The old guys like Abernathy had crew cuts and the young cops tried to get away with hair as long as possible. I had lived long enough to see a cycle.
So I jaywalked and caught up with Lindsey.
“What did he want?” she asked.
“I guess to tell me I’m clever.”
Chapter Sixteen
Friday afternoon skulked by, passed in difficult meetings. The most difficult of all I postponed a day. After I left Abernathy, I drove out to the capitol and went into the mud-colored modern tower that looks very much like the Madison Street Jail. Inside, however, are offices for the governor, attorney general, and other high honchos. The thing looms like a bad hangover behind the lovely little capitol building, built in celebration of statehood in 1912 and crowned with a dome of copper.
I was there to meet the attorney general, and she saw me alone in a small conference room lined with new lawbooks and smelling of copy-machine toner. The AG was a popular Democrat in a Republican state, and she listened intently as I briefed her on the Nixon logbook. She wanted to have her office enter the investigation at once, of course. I should have expected that. These were dirty cops, not some garden-variety Arizona real estate scam. And if my theory was true, they were dirty cops who had murdered Dean Nixon and attempted to murder Peralta. I was more surprised by my reaction: defensive, testy-as if I’d been a bureaucrat in the Sheriff’s Office for years, as if I were Abernathy.
If I were still in the history business, I could write a grand and impenetrable paper on the way organizational cultures write themselves upon the individuals in charge. But I’ve always been a believer in individuals as movers of history, something that got me into trouble with the gasbags of conventional wisdom at the faculty club. No, I was protecting Peralta, plain and simple. That’s why I wanted to keep this mess in the Sheriff’s Office until we were sure what it was. But I was running out of time-she agreed to give me a week before her investigators intervened.
My meetings with the county attorney, county commissioners, and Chief Wilson of the Phoenix Police were just as stressful. I’m sure they were full of nuance and comedy. But I wasn’t really paying attention. I was going through the motions, carrying information. And I was still trying to understand what the discoveries of the past few days really meant. How the hell had Abernathy learned about the logbook? Why was Peralta so concerned with reports from the Guadalupe shooting? What did O’Keefe mean when he said Peralta was shot because “they can’t let any of this come out”? Was that why Nixon was murdered, too, and why someone took a crack at me? Who were “they”?
A week ago, I occupied a sweet little sinecure. Now, what a mess.
***
The western sky was putting on its nightly show-tonight narrow bands of clouds were inventing new colors, somewhere on the spectrum between purple and pink-as we crossed through the saguaro-spiked arroyos and hills of Dreamy Draw and dropped down into the Paradise Valley section of Phoenix. This had been desert when I was a kid. Now, the white lights of suburban safety stretched north and east for miles until they jammed up and faded into the base of the McDowell Mountains. At the Cactus Road exit, I wheeled the car off the freeway, then passed a couple of miles of identical strip shopping centers until Lindsey spotted the sports bar. Inside, just as she had promised, was a woman wearing a blowsy long dress and a red sweater with a needlepoint cat design.