“In another life,” I said. “I’m looking for someone called the Reverend.”
He stuck his large hands in his pockets and regarded me. “I was a pastor in another life,” he said. “So for shorthand, they call me the Reverend. You can call me Quanah Card.”
“You’re Comanche?”
“No,” he said. “Tohono O’odham. But my mother, she was a reader. She loved the stories of heroic Indians. And when I came along, she was reading about Quanah Parker.”
“I’m looking for somebody, Reverend Card.” I pulled out my Polaroid and a computer-generated sketch of the homeless man, perhaps nicknamed Weed. But Card looked at my cup of ice. He picked up another cup and handed it to Bill. Then he took a third cup and held it up to his full lips. He and Bill ate the ice, as if showing a primitive tribesman that it was safe to consume. I sucked on the ice. It felt like everything that room was not: cool, clean, and fresh.
“They would not give Jesus water on the cross, much less ice,” Card said, a dreamy look in his eyes. “So you are a very blessed man, Deputy.” Then he fixed them on me again. “How did you find this place?”
“A woman on the street,” I said. “She said her name was Karen.”
“Karen…” the Reverend said. “She’s got a crack problem. On top of mental illness. She won’t take her medicine.”
He finished his ice and handed the cup to Bill, who went away. “It’s a goddamned mess, this world.” Card said. “What did you profess, Professor?”
“History.”
“History,” he repeated. “Well, David Mapstone, what do you know about the history of homelessness in America?”
I knew that if I let my natural impatience take over, I would get nowhere with the Rev. Quanah Card. So I said a little about hobos during the Depression, about the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s, about how urban renewal tore down so much affordable housing. It was nothing brilliant, the kind of stuff I picked up from the Sunday
“Very good, professor,” Card said. “But you make it sound so goddamned nice and academic. Look around you. What do you see? Addicts. The mentally ill. People with HIV. The disabled. The elderly. Young runaways. The ones who live paycheck to paycheck, and then the paycheck is cut off. Weather’s nice in Phoenix, so they come here. They hang out downtown, sleep behind billboards, camp down at the riverbed or beside the freeways. The kids go to Mill Avenue. The saddest of all come here.”
As he talked, I pulled up a wobbly folding chair and sat at the table. He handed me another cup of ice, and I dutifully ate the crystals.
“I give them ice,” he said. “It doesn’t make them want to work a nine-to-five job, or take away the years of abuse and neglect, or end the hallucinations. I do what I can.
“They’re not really like you and me,” he went on. “That’s why it’s easier for society to abandon them. The homeless problem got worse under Reagan. Then it got worse again under Clinton. Here in Arizona, we refuse to fund social services, and the homeless haven’t gone away and gotten jobs. Nobody knows what to do.
“And yet…” He swept his arm to take in the humanity seated and standing around us. “Christ is in them. ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’” He let his arm drop. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Professor. Bible quoting is an occupational hazard where I come from.”
“So this is your church?” I asked.
He laughed without humor, his huge eyes closing into slits of artificial mirth. “I was a United Methodist minister for thirty years,” he said. “For the first five years, I was a street preacher in the Deuce. You know what that was?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t feel like I did a damned bit of good. So I ended up pastoring rich, white churches-and they thought it was so goddamned exotic to have an Indian minister. ‘Native American.’ I could have been a bishop, but I couldn’t stand the politics. Every Sunday, I’d try to get them to care about people like this. But I couldn’t push too hard. That would have made people uncomfortable. Shit, thirty years. I felt like such a failure.
“So,” he continued, “I took my savings and I bought this old warehouse. I open it every year from April through the end of October. It’s the worst time of year to be on the street. I lean on some rich old bastards who owe me a favor to give a little money to keep it going.”
“No soul saving?” I asked, trying to avoid falling out of the barely serviceable chair.
He narrowed his dark eyes, boring into me. “You believe in an unseen world, Mapstone?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
He snorted. “In my services, everybody prayed, ‘Thy will be done.’ But nobody wanted that. I want
He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, loudly drawing in the smoke. “When I was ordained, I was twenty-five years old and it was the happiest day of my life. I felt called, Mapstone.” Card’s face was remade with emotion. Canyons cut their way into his cheeks. His eye sockets deepened further. “I would preach the forgiveness of my Savior and Lord to penitent sinners. I would comfort the heartbroken and the dying.”
He studied the orange tip of the cigarette and added, “I didn’t know how perilous the borderlands would be…”
“Borderlands?”
He gave a sacramental wave of his Marlboro. “It’s where we all live, Mapstone.”
I cautiously asked about Weed.
“The old man with the Levi’s jacket,” he said, half to himself. “I haven’t seen him in awhile. He used to come by here. Said his teeth hurt too much to take ice.”
“Did you know his real name?”
“George was his first name,” Card said. “George Weed. Mapstone, you lapsed into the past tense. Has something happened to our brother Weed?”
Chapter Eleven
Now I was armed. Armed with a name. I could do the thing that had allowed me to make a living in the years after I quit being a history professor: bring in new information on the county’s most notorious unsolved cases. That history was written in names: Rebecca Stokes, my first big case, the woman who took a train home to Phoenix in 1959 and turned up dead in the desert. The Yarnell twins, the grandsons of a great rancher, kidnapped in the Great Depression and never found. Jonathan Ledger, the famous sex doctor who gave birth to the brave new world and ended up in a nasty drug deal and cop killing. In each case, I saw something the cops had missed, connected the dots in a different way, stumbled onto the fortunate clue. All from names that had found a bad end in Maricopa County.
Now I had a new name: George Weed. And an age, if what he told Card could be trusted: sixty-six. The data went with a man who had been coming to the Reverend’s shelter for three summers. Sometimes he would sleep there three or four nights a week. Other times he might camp behind the rocks in the vacant land just outside the boundary of Hance Park. He didn’t talk much. He never took off his jacket. One of the few things he told Card had stayed in his memory. “He said he was a native Phoenician,” Card had told me. “There are so few of them, you almost never see that.”
After I left Quanah Card, I drove to the sheriff’s headquarters on Madison Street. I avoided Peralta’s office until I had more to report. After the tension the week before in Scottsdale, it seemed better to avoid the sheriff for a while. My errand was to the computers, where I checked the local databases and the NCIC, the National Crime Information Computer. Even though the old vagrancy laws had been overturned in the ’60s, someone living the life of George Weed could still have found dozens of ways to become a violator. Public drunkenness, trespassing, sleeping in a park after sundown, soliciting. Shoplifting was a favorite. Any of those and sundry other offenses could
