“Jesus.”
The fireman soaked my neck with Betadine. The gauze pads looked as if I were bleeding rusty radiator water.
“If there was a Susan,” said the deputy chief.
Peralta said, “Fuck you, Frank. I don’t question the motives of your officers.”
“My officers, Mike,” the deputy chief said, seething, “don’t get into shoot-outs involving submachine guns at crowded malls in the county’s jurisdiction.”
“If I can’t get a city APB on this woman,” Peralta said, “I’ll just get Chief Wilson out of bed to discuss the matter. We were supposed to meet for golf first thing in the morning, but I’ll be happy to wake him now.”
The deputy chief looked long and hard at Peralta. “Okay,” he said. “You are a real prick, Peralta.”
“But I’m not a city prick.”
“This guy’s not even a real deputy,” protested Ralph Lauren. He went on talking as if I were one of the IV poles on the stretcher: “I’m still not convinced this shooter wasn’t some disgruntled employee at Metrocenter, or maybe he was pissed because his wife was at one of those nightspots with another man.”
“Hello,” I said to nobody in particular. “Did IQs fall dramatically among city cops during the years I was gone from law enforcement?”
Three pairs of eyes squinted at me.
“The point, gentlemen, is that this woman came forward to give new information on the murder of Phaedra Riding.” I faced Ralph Lauren and spoke very slowly, “Mur-der, murder.
“Somebody was trying to keep Susan Knightly from talking. And he damned near succeeded. She said she didn’t trust the cops in this case, and this won’t exactly bolster her confidence. The thing we’d better be thinking is that somebody was willing to blow away damn near a whole shopping mall full of people to keep her from talking to us.” I looked at Ralph again. “I’m sorry, Detective. Talking to me.”
Afterward, Peralta walked me back to the Blazer, both of us bathed in the blue-and-red wash of emergency lights and the harsh whiteness of TV cameras kept at a distance.
“You okay?” Peralta asked.
“I suppose,” I said. “It’s been a few years since somebody pointed a gun at me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this assault in your carport?”
“I guess I was ashamed,” I said. “You were my self-defense instructor, remember?”
Peralta grunted, pulled a cigar from his tux, then smelled it and clipped it. He slowly shook his head and said, “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Mapstone?”
We walked on, and he lit the cigar until the end flamed.
“Now do you believe me about Phaedra not being connected to the Harquahala murders?”
The cigar tip glowed. “I don’t know what I believe,” Peralta said. “I think we need to let the task force detectives do their job.”
My head ached. “God, you are a stubborn SOB.”
“Look, David, I’m feeling some heat here. The FBI’s gotten involved in these serial killings. The county attorney’s going crazy. It’s only a matter of time before the media blow this thing out. I hear what you’re saying about Phaedra and the drug angle, but she was also found in the vicinity of the other Harquahala victims. How do you know she didn’t just answer the wrong personal ad?”
I sighed and unlocked the Blazer door. “How was San Diego?”
“Sharon wants to buy a condo facing the bay,” he said glumly. “We’re never going to get out of debt.”
Gen. Omar Bradley did algebra problems to relax. I was never any good at math, so I drove. East on Dunlap into Sunnyslope. Count Basie in the CD player. Why had I never learned to do anything useful, like play jazz piano? South on Seventh Avenue, past sleeping neighborhoods of large, well-landscaped houses. The guy on the phone was right: Nobody would miss me. Hell, the cops didn’t even believe me. Left turn on Glendale Avenue, through the thinning traffic of a late Thursday night. Eyes checking the rearview mirror more than usual. Did he follow Susan to the mall? Or did he follow me?
Across the Arizona Canal and up Lincoln Drive into the foothills of Paradise Valley. The lights gave way a bit as the city neighborhoods were replaced by acre lots and privacy walls. A black Saab whisked past me at eighty and disappeared into the distance. My stomach reflexively tightened. Phaedra landed in the middle of a drug rip-off. By Greg Townsend? So they kill them both? It had the terrible thoroughness of drug-related homicides. South on Tatum Boulevard, saguaro cactus and palm trees flashing in the headlights. Basie cooking. Camelback Mountain looming gigantic, straight ahead, a necklace of lights around its base that predated the prohibition on building on the mountains.
Except-why was Greg Townsend so calm when I showed up at his house? Why was he even at his house if he had ripped off a dope dealer and was hiding out? And why did he call me in the first place? Could it be as simple as Peralta was hinting? That Phaedra ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time-with the wrong man? Just like we thought about Rebecca Stokes. No, no.
I made a U-turn and headed back to Lincoln, then took Twenty-fourth Street back toward downtown. I needed the view and it didn’t disappoint me: a vast sea of lights stretching west and south to the horizon. Off in the distance, the dark form of South Mountain and the Estrellas contained the brightness. TV towers on the South Mountains blinked red. City of American refugees, fast money and fresh starts. City of uneasy memories. City of lost sisters. My city.
Phaedra. She wasn’t murdered with shotgun blasts or a Colombian necktie or any of the usual gruesome killing methods of the drug world. She was killed in a way that resembled a high-profile murder from forty years before, which had recently been in the newspapers again-a story involving a certain unemployed history professor turned deputy sheriff. None of it made sense.
I dropped back down into the city neighborhoods below Camelback Road, heading south on Twenty-fourth Street, thinking about what the detective had said. No, I wasn’t a real deputy. But I had never been a “real” anything. When all my little friends had siblings to fight with, I was an only child. Later, when they played student radicals, I became a deputy. I was too left-wing for the cops and too right-wing for the ivory tower. When the sexual revolution was at its peak, I couldn’t get a date. I could never stop thinking and just go along with the crowd. I could never fit that one-dimensional, sound-bite mold of late-twentieth-century man. In a postliterate society, I read books. In an age of moral relativism, I chased after things like truth and honor. As people obsessed about their health, I enjoyed Mexican food and liquor and good cigars. When Mike Peralta told me to keep out of a murder case, I remained mired in it.
Predestination or free will? A fellow named Erasmus couldn’t settle the issue, so I wouldn’t even try. Basie might have known the right answer, lodged somewhere in that tight congress of piano and brass and drums.
I drove through the empty streets of downtown, past skyscrapers lighted only for the janitors. Past the new baseball stadium and the new science museum. The America West Arena preened glamorously on the corner of Jefferson and Third Street, THE SHOWPLACE OF THE SOUTHWEST, a massive electric sign proclaimed to a deserted street. Basketball season was over, and it had been a bad one for the Suns.
I turned down Fourth Avenue and drove past the charming Spanish mission-style Union Station, which sat dark and abandoned. Rebecca Stokes had stepped off a train here in 1959, when the building was the center of the city’s life. I could imagine the stainless-steel passenger cars and the rush of people under the lamps of the station platform. Catch a cab home and…
“What happened to you, Rebecca?” I asked aloud. “Whom did you go meet? You must have been thinking about him as the train pulled in.”
Now the trains were gone from Union Station. Nobody home. All alone in the desert. All alone in the world. I thought momentarily of Patty. Two Phoenix PD units sat across from the new City Hall, distracted by a traffic stop, happily unaware of me. I had come within a heartbeat, a moment’s judgment, of killing a man tonight. I had come within a mechanical malfunction of being dead myself. Basie was done. I continued north in silence, over the underground freeway, past my old grade school, slowly driving toward home. The rearview mirror was dark and empty.