I kept my neighborhood pride tamped down. I didn’t tell him you couldn’t pay me enough to live in his gated property or mountainside mansion.
He said, “I hope you’ll keep my card in case you change your mind. If what I hear about you is correct, this story might really intrigue you.”
I walked him to the door, eager to get him out-eager, desperate really, to make drinks.
For the first time in weeks, I put on jazz. Bill Evans, Stan Getz, McCoy Tyner. Coltrane, of course. I drank two martinis and Robin had one. I was drinking too much. It was the least of my problems. Robin opened our last cans of chili, used up the box of crackers, and made me eat something.
When the music stopped, Robin said, “This isn’t your fault.” There was no question what this was. “There’s nothing you could have done differently.”
“I wonder about that every day,” I said.
“I know you do.” It wasn’t a reproach. Just a gentle commiseration. “There’s nothing anybody could have done. Nobody is to blame.”
“That may not be what Lindsey thinks.”
She didn’t respond.
Her face brightened. “If you’ll go running with me tomorrow, I’ll take you to a bookstore.”
“Will you wear the vest?”
“Hell, no.” She tried unsuccessfully to pull her hair behind her ears. It fell back, gently framing her smile.
“You are a pain in the ass.” I said it fondly.
We sat a long while in the dark living room, until she asked, “Do you want your space tonight?”
I closed my eyes, remembering the previous night, after Lindsey and I had strolled together along the Mall, the monuments grandly lit, the cold sharp. It felt important to try again to make a connection, to find my way back to her. It was a bad idea. I talked and she met me with silence. Until we came back to the Washington Monument, and then she spoke for all of ten seconds.
Lindsey’s words were still burning inside me like white phosphorous. The compartments had shattered and now I was carrying the shrapnel. But my body was giving in to alcohol and east-coast time.
I looked at Robin and shook my head. “Come be with me.”
Part 2: The Bitterest Method
13
The bedraggled, single-story building on Grand Avenue looked somewhere between sixty and eighty years old, with a single door and a square window on each side. All were covered by bars that might once have been painted. The square structure itself was bleached brown, done in cracking stucco to resemble adobe, and it sat atop the remains of an asphalt lot. It had once been the office to a motel in the golden age of driving, and this was the highway west out of town.
A battered sign on a pole near the street read, very faintly, Easy 8 Auto Court and beneath that, Air Conditioned-It’s Cool Inside!, but all the cottages were long gone. Now the office sat by itself, surrounded by barren lots on either side that held dirt and rocks the same color as the building. The only signs of newness were a twelve-foot-high security fence, a couple of halogen lights aimed from the roof, and Peralta’s silver Dodge Ram pickup parked in front. The Prelude bumped across the perimeter of the open gate. We got out, went inside, and found Peralta.
“I can’t believe this.” Those were my first words.
“What, Mapstone? You don’t believe in entrepreneurialism? It’s the American dream.”
He stood from behind an ancient metal desk, came around, and hugged Robin.
To me, he said, “What’s that growing on your face?”
A second desk sat at an angle across the room. Two institutional armchairs with green-cushioned seats that might have been new during the Eisenhower administration flanked both, and tall gray metal filing cabinets took up one wall. The floor was old linoleum, the color of coffee with three creams. The sheriff’s cigars had augmented the musty smell. Behind Peralta’s desk was a framed poster that proclaimed “Diversity.” It was meant to look exactly like one of those insipid motivational placards, but the image was of a dozen mean-looking assault rifles laid out neatly on white sand.
“Why are you not in some luxury suite in north Scottsdale?”
“Fake tits on a stick, not my style,” he grunted as he sat. To Robin, “Sorry about my language.”
She smiled at him.
“And you turned down how many high-powered offers to be corporate chief of security or a national consultant?”
“Thirteen,” he said. “But it’s a slow job market. I wanted to be on my own.”
“You must be crazy. You have a law degree, for god’s sake.”
He actually smiled. “Res ipsa loquitur.” The thing speaks for itself.
We sat in the chairs. He didn’t look much different. He wore a starched white shirt, red tie, and black slacks, with his usual firearms accessory.
“I’m a private investigator now, Mapstone. It’ll be fun. I don’t need to make much money. My ex has been very indulgent with her book royalties. But business comes anyway. I just got back from Douglas. Client wasn’t satisfied with how the police handled her brother’s murder. So I put some fresh eyes on it. Got out and saw a beautiful part of the state.”
I repeated, “I still can’t believe this. Why here?”
“I like it. The freight trains go by. I’m near my people. You know, I’m just a simple campesino.”
“Who went to Harvard,” Robin said.
He lowered his head and squinted at me. “Where’s your cannon?”
“I’m learning to love the Five-Seven.” The semi-automatic was tucked in my jeans, in the small of my back, concealed by my shirt. February, which was once the sweetest month in Phoenix, had come in hot, with today’s temperature near ninety. I wished that I had worn a short-sleeve shirt.
“Good.” He reached in a desk drawer and slid across a laminated card. “You won’t need this once the Legislature makes everything connected to guns legal, but here’s your concealed weapons permit.”
“But I didn’t…”
“Sure you did. I had you sign the paperwork for it the day you resigned.” I was irritated but reached over and took the card. He said, “So, give me an update?”
It didn’t seem as if there was much to tell. We had survived January, with no more scares, no more watchers sitting on the street at night. Sometimes I had seen a marked PPD unit drive down the street, but it could have been routine patrol. Vare had not even checked in with a phone call. When I called her to get an update, I was told to leave a message. It was, of course, never returned.
He put his elbows on the desk and folded his fingers in front of his face as I talked.
In a way, the lack of action had made the tension worse. But I had kept my anxieties to myself. Robin had become more comfortable, the trauma of opening the FedEx box receding. We held long discussions about the Great Depression-she knew much about the art and artists of the era-and comparisons with things now. She laughed more easily. She had a great laugh, uninhibited and delightfully distinctive. I could find her in a crowd just by her laugh. Although we relaxed some of the house rules-I was getting the mail and newspapers now-I tried not to let us get careless. I wouldn’t let her sunbathe outside and she complained that her tan was fading, but the result was quite attractive, at least to me.
…Oh, and I’m sleeping with my sister-in-law…Just that, although sometimes she caresses me in the night and I smooth back her soft hair and when I lie behind her, my front to her back, she knows how I feel about her, unfaithful bastard that I am…I’m not myself. Am I?
The only big news was the email I had received from ASU, blowing me off because of a new round of budget cuts. After all the in-person courting that I received after the election, I lost the job via an email. And it was just to be an adjunct professor, the minimum-wage counter help of academia.