“Because she was the governor’s niece,” Lindsey observed, “and they were hiding something.”
Rogers snored softly and we watched him for a while, hoping for more, knowing we wouldn’t get it. We walked out quietly, and I told Lindsey about a surviving witness to Rebecca’s life.
Opal Harvey insisted on getting us iced tea and cookies. We waited in the cool dimness of the living room as Lindsey picked at the doilies on the furniture arms and looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “Frozen in 1930 middle-class earnestness,” she said softly. “Kill me if I ever do this.”
“I promise,” I said.
“I sent a copy of the newspaper to my granddaughter,” came the mechanical voice. “I said, ‘I was part of that.’”
“I appreciate your help, Mrs. Harvey. There’s just some loose ends we’re tying up.”
I led off half a dozen times with questions about Rebecca’s habits, family, friends. About the neighborhood. About the Creeper. Nothing.
Finally, Lindsey asked, “I bet she was pretty lonely, Rebecca. Living so far from home. Only twenty-one years old. Back then, everybody was supposed to be married by that age.”
Opal Harvey started to put the wand to her voice box and then stopped, looking out the blinds for long minutes. “Oh, honey,” she finally said. “Rebecca had a lover.”
She sipped some tea and went on slowly. “I’ve never told anyone that. I didn’t want to hurt the family. I didn’t want anyone to think she was cheap, because she wasn’t. She was a good girl.…” The thought trailed off.
“Who was he, Mrs. Harvey?” Lindsey asked.
“I never knew.” She studied her hands. “Rebecca kept him a secret and I never intruded on that. I think he was married, because he only came at night, and he never stayed with her. It was still a small town back then, and people would have talked. I know this: He was older. He dressed well and drove a nice car. I always wished he would have picked her up at the train station that night-I guess I assumed he would, since Rebecca said she didn’t need a ride from us.”
“Did you ever see him again after she disappeared?”
Opal Harvey shook her head.
Afterward, out in Lindsey’s Prelude, waiting for the air-conditioning to cool things down, I felt the rush of discovery, however slight. But Lindsey was quiet, her eyes unreadable. “Most murder victims knew their murderers,” she said.
“The lover?” I said. She nodded.
“But we know she was picked up at Union Station that night by a taxi. The driver was a moonlighting Phoenix policeman.”
“Maybe the lover was waiting for her at home. Maybe she went to him.”
“Motive?”
“Who needs a motive when you’re in love?” Lindsey said.
Chapter Seventeen
I should have gone to see Peralta Wednesday morning. Instead, I called his secretary to put off our meeting. She said he had been called to a meeting with the county supervisors and was in a very bad mood. “So it’s probably just as well,” she said. Just as welclass="underline" She didn’t know the half of it.
The morning paper had news of a gunfight between rival gangs in Maryvale, which once upon a time not so long ago was a neighborhood synonymous with suburban safety and blandness. And there was the obituary of the veteran TV anchorman who had read the evening news when I was growing up. My grandparents would let me watch the ten o’clock news, and this man with a blond pompadour and black plastic glasses had been a figure of reassurance, a bookend on the days. He had been retired for years, of course. But I had been away. Little by little, everything in my past in this city was passing.
I tried to act normal. I went over to Phoenix College and lectured to my students in the survey course on the origins of the Civil War. Faces-hot, eager, bored, distracted. Most of the younger students were hearing this for the first time, so rotten is the teaching of history in high schools. Once, that would have motivated me or depressed me, but that day I just wanted to get through it. Slavery, states’ rights, the passing of the compromisers from the scene. “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.” I kept seeing the faces of Rebecca Stokes and Phaedra Riding. I am the keeper of murdered souls.
All I had wanted was a summer at home to get my bearings and some easy work from Mike Peralta. Instead, I was in the middle of-what? Three unsolved murders. Two warnings to quit looking into something. Thoughts of Lindsey-too many thoughts. Too many questions. You wouldn’t think anxiety and paranoia would grow so much in a city of endless sunny days, tanned goddesses, and opulent resorts. You would be wrong. It was a concrete desert and this was high summer.
I went to a gun shop and bought two sets of speed loaders for the Python and three boxes of rounds heavy enough to drop a gorilla. I wore extra-extra-large shirts, attempting, with little success, to conceal the bulk of the gun on my hip. So I just started clipping my star on my belt all the time and carrying openly.
I finished cleaning up the mess at home. After work, Lindsey came over and we drank Bloody Marys and listened to Billy Strayhorn and Charlie Parker CDs. It would have seemed reassuring if I hadn’t felt the constant heavy tug of the Colt Python on my belt. Lindsey carried a baby Glock 9-mm automatic in her purse, nine rounds compactly held in the magazine, “ready to rock ’n’ roll,” as she put it.
That night, we sat out in the garden and defied the heat, listening to the cicadas and the city noise. We swapped life stories. I learned that she was a another Virgo, born twenty-seven years before-“on Labor Day,” she deadpanned.
She was an Air Force brat. She came to the Valley when she was three, when her dad was stationed at Williams Air Force Base. Her middle name was Faith. “Hey, it was the seventies,” she said.
After high school, she tried college but was bored. “No offense,” she said. Hell, I’d been bored with it, too. So she enlisted and went into the Air Police. After four years, she knew she hated being told what to do, so she came home and tried college again. “Still boring.” She went to work for the Sheriff’s Office. That was five years ago. She’d been fooling with computers since she was fourteen. No training, but, she said, “I know how computers think.” There was an unhappy love affair with a lawyer named John. She lived in Sunnyslope with a cat.
She stretched her legs out onto my lap and I massaged her feet, nice feet with long, athletic ankles and delicate toes. I told her more about my life.
I gave her the short version: I am a Phoenix native born at Good Samaritan Hospital. An only child. My parents were killed in a plane crash. Little kids play that “orphan game” when they get mad at their folks. But it was real for me. My mom’s parents raised me. Grandfather was a dentist, named Philip-I carried that as my middle name. Grandmother sold real estate; her name was Ella. It was a good childhood. In college, I thought I’d be a lawyer and save the world. But I didn’t like the idea of defending bad guys, and I didn’t want to stay in school forever. So I got my B.A. and went to the Sheriff’s Academy. When I knew I didn’t want to be a cop, I went back to college part-time, studied history, and grew to love it. So I got my Ph.D. and, in those ironies life springs on us, stayed in school, teaching in Ohio and California. Got married. Got divorced. No kids. It all sounded neater than it was.
When I was done, she asked, “Why are you attracted to emotionally unavailable women?”
“I didn’t see it that way at the time. I saw brilliant, creative women who had suffered and wanted so desperately to be loved.”
“Maybe I’m emotionally unavailable,” Lindsey said.
I said, “Maybe I am, too.”
I got back from class a little after 2:00 P.M. Thursday and the phone was ringing. I expected it might be the Realtor I had called about listing the house, but it was a woman’s voice.
“We’ve met,” she said. “We met in an apartment a couple of weeks ago. But please don’t say my name.”