I went back again. “So you hooked up with these two guys and went riding. What were you doing before you were stopped?”
She didn’t answer at first, just stared at the hardwood floors with the closed-in expression of her daughter. All those hidden codes and customs in our genes, whether we wanted them there or not.
“I was high,” she repeated. “I don’t remember much.” Then she stood, reared on me, her face suddenly flushed. “Jesus. It has been twenty-one years! I have tried to forget it! I was a kid!”
“What about Leo?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“When was the last time you had contact with him?”
Her lower lip tightened just a millimeter. “Not for years. He was like a high school boyfriend, for God’s sake. Do you stay in touch with your high school girlfriends? He went to prison.” She sighed. “My dad made it so I couldn’t even talk to him, after we were arrested. Dad never liked Leo. And then life went on…”
“You haven’t heard from him lately?” Lindsey asked.
“No.” This said with firm shakes of the head. “Of course not”
“Do you know he escaped from prison recently?”
“No,” she said, louder. “I didn’t know that.”
Lindsey said, “Tell us about Camelback Falls?”
“What?” Beth said, a seamless conversationalist.
“Camelback Falls,” Lindsey said. “Dr. Jonathan Ledger and his house on the mountain?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Beth said.
I fished out a card and handed it to her. “You can leave a message on the voice mail if you think of anything,” I said. “We’re at the Hyatt up the street, and we’ll be here a few days. If you remember anything.”
“I’m sure I won’t,” she said. “Would you like to take the cheese and fruit with you?” Sweetness returned. We demurred.
As she let us out into the cold, Lindsey said, “So you’ve never been on any of the prison pen pal Internet sites, in touch with Leo O’Keefe?”
The winter light cut a harsher profile of Beth. She stared at Lindsey and whispered, “No.”
I started down the two steps to the street, but Lindsey held back. She said, “By the way, your daughter said to tell you she misses you, and wishes you’d come home early tonight.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Monday morning. It was two hours later in Boston, and my call caught Lorie Pope just as she was going out the door. I asked her if she could talk.
“If you’ll give me about thirty minutes to get all these coats off me,” she grumped. “Every time I start to miss the East and think I want to live back here, I remember how cold it is in January. What’s the temperature in Phoenix now?”
“Probably 75,” I said. “But I’m in Denver right now, so I feel your pain. Actually, I kind of like the cold. I just don’t have a good coat.”
“Well, you’re a native Zonie,” she said. “You probably thought snow was fallout the first time you saw it.”
It was true. I asked her what she was doing on the East Coast. It had only taken several days to find out where she was.
“I’m at Harvard, a Neiman Fellowship.” She paused. “It’s a journalism thing.”
“Sounds like an honor,” I said.
“It gets me out of the newsroom for a few months,” she said.
“And that keeps me from pissing off the bosses with my daily rebellions.”
I told her about my daily rebellions, and she let out a squeal of delight. I could just see her tossing her hair back out of her eyes, smiling that wide white smile and lighting up a Marlboro. “You’re the sheriff! I don’t believe it! I’ve been skiing the past week in New Hampshire and I haven’t even read the paper online. God, I wish I were there to write that story!” Then she knocked her voice down. “I’m sorry about Peralta. I know he’s your friend.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But as usual, I need your help.”
“Anything for my old boyfriend the sheriff.”
“Remember that big shootout in Guadalupe in 1979? The two deputies?”
“I covered it, David,” she admonished. “Remember, we met when I was covering the police beat?”
“I remember everything,” I said “So, what about that case never made the papers?”
“Oh, David, now the bargaining side of my personality is coming out. It’s not my best side. Why do you want to know, my love, and what’s in it for me?”
“A well-made martini when you get back to Phoenix,” I said. “Anyway, you’re on a junket.”
I knew from the expectant silence that it wouldn’t fly. So I told her my story as economically as possible.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Are you safe?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
“Well, the thing that never got in the paper was the degree of influence exerted by the girl’s father, Bill Watson. He was loaded with oil money. And I’m convinced some heavy campaign contributions came to the judge and the county attorney in exchange for the light sentence for Marybeth.”
“But she was just a kid, and the record indicates she wasn’t directly involved.”
“Mmmmm,” Lorie said. “So how do you explain the prison sentence for her boyfriend?”
“Daddy’s money?”
“Exactly.”
“So what do you know about Camelback Falls?” I asked.
She let out a little whistle. “I haven’t heard that name in years. It was Jonathan Ledger’s house. You know, the sex guy?”
“Did you ever go up there?”
She laughed. “Oh, I had an adventurous youth, but not that adventurous. I did get an invitation to a party there once, but I was busy or had to work or something. It was apparently quite the swinger’s place back then.”
“I never got those kind of invitations,” I said.
“You were too ponderous, my love. All those books and big thoughts.”
“So what kind of people went up there?”
“My invitation came from a doctor, a sports medicine guy I was dating. I think I was dating about five men at once then. No, you weren’t one of them. Anyway, I got the sense it was a crowd with a lot of money and not much sense. You know, it was the seventies. Anything goes. Ledger kept a salon of beautiful people, and they had legendary parties. That was the rep.”
“So no lowlifes, or prison escapees? Or runaways from Tulsa?”
She paused. “David, this is getting way too interesting. Maybe I’d better get on the next plane back.”
“What if I told you I’d seen a photo of Marybeth and Jonathan Ledger, and they weren’t posing at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.”
“I’d say that’s news,” she said.
I asked, “What were the River Hogs?”
“This is memory lane. The Hogs were cops, deputies. They were bad news.”
“Bad news, how?”
“I’ll tell you what I heard, and then I’ll tell you what I saw. Remember, I was a twenty-two-year-old kid reporter. If the cops were friendly, they usually just wanted to try to get me into bed. Usually, they were outright hostile. Not only was I the press, but I was a woman.”
She went on. “What I heard was that this group of deputies was a kind of force above the law. They looked the other way on things like drugs and prostitution in exchange for protection money. They had the reputation of tough guys, and there was talk they were somehow tied into the Vegas mob. Real muscle. You didn’t want to mess with them. You never knew exactly who they were. That added to the mystique.”
“They were the River Hogs?”
“Yes and no. The River Hogs were a joke at first. A bunch of guys would get off duty, buy a few cases of beer and go drink themselves silly down in the riverbed. Big time in the city, huh? When the department brass got wind of it, they tried to shut it down, but the drinking parties always just moved somewhere else. I heard they got really out of hand sometimes, drunken target shooting, bringing along prostitutes and cop groupies, that kind of thing. But there was also this kind of understanding that the way into this shadow group of dirty cops was through these parties. So were they one and the same? I never found out.”
“Why didn’t I ever know any of this?”