“I needed a job,” I said. “Now I think that Mexican sheriff is going to want to talk to you.”
“Nobody’s talking.” It was a new voice, coming from behind me. The next thing I felt was a gun barrel push me into the room. I turned, to see Dennis Copeland. His eyes were like burned glass.
Larkin laughed until he started wheezing and coughing.
“My associate arrived just in time,” he gasped.
“He doesn’t work for McConnico?” I demanded, mustering a bravado I didn’t feel, looking down the barrel of a.44 Magnum. The Python was now a hand’s grasp away-might as well have been a light-year.
“You’re a young fool,” Larkin spat at me. “This man works for me. If you’d have paid attention to him, none of this would have happened.”
He ran a bony hand across his bald crown. “Brent is a young fool, too.”
I noticed Harrison Wolfe again when he subtly shifted his weight and faced Copeland.
Wolfe said, “Mr. Copeland, you murdered a Phoenix police officer. If you don’t put that gun down, I will kill you where you stand.” His voice was different now, calmer, almost sleepy.
Copeland laughed and cocked his head back contemptuously. It was a stupid move.
Before I could even process what was happening, Wolfe had the Chief’s Special in his hand and put two rounds between Dennis Copeland’s eyes. The small man collapsed backward into the doorway, his fall seeming to take longer than Wolfe’s move. Then the loud crack-crack faded into a hum in my ears, and a haze of gun smoke sat at eye level like thin morning clouds. I knelt down and confiscated the.44 Magnum.
Wolfe’s cold features didn’t change. He merely turned and put the gun to Larkin’s temple.
Larkin was sweating terribly, and I could see a large stain spreading in the crotch of his pants. He forced his eyes closed and said quietly, “I’ll meet you in hell.”
Then Wolfe stuck the.38 back in his belt and tossed me a pair of handcuffs.
“You can have him,” he said. “I won’t give him the satisfaction.”
He stepped across Copeland and then turned on the porch.
“You did okay, Mapstone,” he said. “Give my regards to Chief Peralta.”
Then he walked off into the night.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Susan Knightly greeted me at the door and led me into her condo, an airy, sunlit space of plants and wicker furniture and photographs. On one wall was a moody black-and-white shot of workers in a farm wagon under an ancient oak tree and cloud-scudded sky. “California,” she said as I lingered. Inside another simple black metal frame were the faces of two little girls-a color print this time-with old eyes and haunted looks. “The Amazon,” she said. We sat on a dark wicker sofa under high windows dense with palm fronds.
“You’re a hard man to find,” Susan said.
“She said without irony.”
She laughed. “Well, I figured after what I read in the paper, it was safe to come out of hiding.”
“You hide well.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I know it seems silly to you, but I was so unnerved by what happened to Phaedra, I didn’t know what to do. After that night at the shopping mall, I went to San Francisco for a few days. A friend put me up.”
“You could be charged with withholding information in a homicide.”
“What?” she laughed. “I told you what I knew. I think you had just promised me protection when the gunfight broke out.”
“Okay,” I said. “So much for the tough cop routine. You called me. I’m here.”
“Look,” she said. “Phaedra Riding has caused me more trouble than I would ever have imagined. I was just trying to give her a break.”
I watched the palm trees and didn’t speak.
“She played the cello, you know,” Susan said. “It’s a very mournful instrument, when you think about it. I think Phaedra spent most of her life running away from a lot of sadness.”
“Sadness with men?” I asked.
“She was a very sensual creature. That part of her set her free from her devils, I think. Maybe only temporarily, and maybe it was self-destructive. But it was enough for a while.”
“Love?” I coaxed.
“It wasn’t love. Love hurt too much. She told me, ‘Always be the one to leave; never be the one who’s left.’ Quite a philosophy for a twenty-eight-year-old. Once, she told me she always tried to juggle two or three lovers at once so her heart would never be exposed, as she put it. They never knew about one another, of course.”
“Sounds like Phaedra had a lot of secrets.”
She looked at me with those green eyes. “Haven’t you ever had secrets, David? Cheated on your lover? Had a one-night stand with a friend, or with a stranger? Did something you never thought you’d do, and it was strange and wonderful and exciting? You felt alive like you never imagined possible. The next day, you acted like nothing ever happened. That part of your history belongs only to you.”
“What I’m after is the secret that will catch a murderer.”
We sipped tea and watched a bird fighting to get into the palm tree to nest. She asked, “Why are you here?”
“You called me.”
“No, David. I mean, why are you investigating this case? This isn’t an unsolved murder case from 1959. Why in the world are you involved in this?”
She had turned the tables on me very neatly. So much for my great interview skills. “It started out personal. Phaedra’s sister, Julie, is an old friend of mine from college.”
“Talk about secrets,” Susan said. “She’s an old girlfriend, right?” I nodded. “Men have a way of referring to their old girlfriends. Something in their voices. I’ve been referred to that way before.”
I laughed unhappily. “Julie showed up at my door one night and asked me to see what I could do. I thought I was going to make a phone call and be done with it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” I sighed. “No, I stayed with it.”
“Why?”
“I can’t really say. Something about Phaedra got under my skin. Something mysterious, maybe. Something tragic.”
“I think she had that effect on people. She did on me.
“Look,” she said, pushing back her hair, “I’ve been working since I was fourteen years old. Otherwise, God knows what kind of a mess I could have gotten into. I remember when I was Phaedra’s age. There’s no end to the trouble that can find you…especially where men are concerned.”
“And you think it was her boyfriend Greg Townsend who got her into the trouble?”
“I never met the man,” Susan said. “And Phaedra was afraid to tell me much. But once she got drunk with me and said she had dated a man who flew in cocaine from Mexico. She said she felt like a fool because she didn’t even realize it at first; she just thought they were flying to Mexico every other weekend to have a good time.”
“But?”
“But something happened. She never told me what. But somehow it became clear to her what Mr. Wonderful was doing. So she told him adios and came back to Phoenix. That’s when she went to work for me.”
“Did she ever mention somebody named Bobby Hamid?”
She shook her head.
“So what went wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “After she’d been working for me a couple of months, she said one Friday that she was going to Sedona for the weekend. I must have looked at her like, Are you nuts? because she said, ‘Susan, don’t worry.’ That following Monday, she was late, and when she finally came in, she looked like hell. She never seemed the same. About a week after that, she said she had to go away to take care of some business.
“After that, she might call me once a week. I saw her twice. She told me she had overheard something she shouldn’t have. She said she was afraid she was going to be killed.”
“By whom?” I asked. “By Greg Townsend?”
“She wouldn’t say. It was never clear. But as I told you at the mall, she was convinced the cops were paid off and that nobody could be trusted.”
“And now Greg’s dead, too,” I said. “So where does that leave us?”