It sounded like a trick question. I started cautiously, as if I were defending a paper before a panel of hostile- and jealous-professors. “The city had fewer than one hundred thousand people then. The industries were the Five ‘C’s-copper, cattle, citrus, cotton, and climate. In 1948, Phoenix hoped to surpass El Paso as the leading business city of the Southwest. But it was still an upstart.”
“Very good, professor,” Wolfe said. “Now, look deeper. Phoenix has always been a corrupt city.”
My chamber-of-commerce native pride made me protest. The mob had been in Vegas and Tucson, after all.
“Jesus, you’re naive for an educated man,” he said, his voice giving off no more edge than usual. “In the mid 1950s, when I came here from the LAPD, the feds had identified five hundred known mobsters in Phoenix. That was more per capita than in New York City.”
I didn’t say anything. My mind just processed this new information.
Wolfe just shook his head as if he was instructing a child. “Remember Gus Greenbaum?”
I remembered. He was the former Las Vegas mobster, living under an assumed name in Palmcroft. One day in the fifties, he and his wife were killed at home in a mob hit. The house was still there, on Encanto Boulevard. I could barely make it out through the trees.
“The Greenbaums were cooking steaks,” Wolfe said. “So after they were killed, the hit men sat down and ate their dinner. Bet you didn’t know that.”
“You ought to teach history,” I said.
“Most of the good stuff happened before I got here.” Wolfe said. “We had a good chief in the fifties. He was absolutely honest. So after he took over, things might still go on. But they had to go around the chief, do it where he couldn’t find it. But this has always been a town for strange crime. Winnie Ruth Judd, the trunk murderess. The
“Yeah, no need to remind me.” The music from the carousel no longer sounded innocent.
“So, if you ask me, ‘Did Pilgrim kill himself?’ Until now, I had no reason to doubt it. But this town is just weird enough that anything’s possible.”
A youngish blond man walked by and paused to lean over the bridge railing. He had peroxide yellow hair, long but slicked back over his ears. His eyebrows were blond, and his lips small and curled, like the mouths in eighteenth-century portraits. He was wearing a blue shirt and a tie as yellow as his hair. We stopped talking, and in a moment the blond man walked on.
Wolfe said, “I can tell you this. I remember a guy named George Weed.”
I stared at him as if he had revealed the location of the Lost Dutchman Mine.
“Don’t look so surprised, Mapstone. I’m old. I’m not stupid.”
“Where? When?”
“I remember a guy named George Weed from the 1960s. Skinny guy. He ran the elevator at the old Greater Arizona Savings Building.
Remember, at Central and Adams? With the big radio antenna on the roof.”
I nodded.
“Back then elevator operator was steady work. And he was one of my snitches. He’d tell me things, things he heard and saw. I had lots of guys like him around. You didn’t need a whole day to drive across the city. You walked four blocks and talked to people.”
“Did he have family? Where did he live?”
“Well, my memory’s not that good. It’s been forty years. He was the elevator man, Mapstone. Like the scissors sharpener and the guy selling candy in the courthouse lobby. I don’t even know where those people are now. Maybe on welfare, or wandering the streets. Anyway, you saw him every day. He was part of the landscape.”
“I had an address for him, an apartment on Second Avenue,” I said.
“That’s the guy,” Wolfe said.
“What ever happened to him?”
“They automated the elevators-this was sometime in the early sixties-and there was no more need for elevator operators. So I think he went to work down in the produce district. Oh, where the hell was it? McMackin Produce, over at Buchanan and Second Street. Just cleaning up. The guy wasn’t a brain surgeon, OK? He was nice enough, but seemed simple. He wasn’t going to live out in Arcadia with the bankers and the lawyers.”
“Did he seem like the kind of guy who would be wandering around with an FBI badge sewn in his coat?”
Wolfe snorted. “Nobody ever seems like the kind who will do what they eventually do. Just ask your common everyday serial killer. People will surprise you. I know one guy…see him at the bar every now and then. He’s just some old man in raggedy clothes. He’s a goddamned millionaire.” Wolfe shook his head. “The guy drove a Greyhound bus for thirty years, and never did anything but save his money. He lives on oatmeal. So who knows what was underneath George Weed.”
We both leaned on the bridge railing, watching the park. The crew was finished at the carousel, the music gone.
“My heart is shot, you know.”
I stared at him, asked what he’d said although I had heard him perfectly.
“They won’t let you have a transplant if you’re an old bastard like me. So I’m sorry I can’t do more for you.”
“I’m sorry, Wolfe.”
“Don’t be.” He shrugged. “I’ve had a hell of a life. And I’ll tell you this, if I live long enough I’m going to be a real pain in the ass. I might just get Peralta to hire me as your partner.”
I looked at him anew. Looking for signs. Was the skin around his eyes more ashen than I remembered it? I resisted an impulse to touch my own chest. We go through most of our lives thinking the old are a different species from us, that we won’t become them. I said, I’ll look forward to it.”
It seemed time to go. I was about to shake hands when Wolfe’s hard cop voice returned. “When I was first on the force we didn’t allow that.”
I followed Wolfe’s eyes to a lump of dirty clothes on the grass that contained a dark-skinned man.
“They stayed in the Deuce or we ran ’em in,” he went on. “It was a simpler world.”
Chapter Fifteen
Driving east on Encanto Boulevard, I passed the brick mansion where the mobster and his wife were murdered. Another unsolved case in my town. The house sat amid lovely landscaping and innocence, its history brooding silently in the memory of a few old cops and crime aficionados. A crime that had happened before I was born, but after John Pilgrim had been dead for years. Harrison Wolfe had been a strong man in his prime, careless of his heart. Dan Milton would have been a promising postdoctoral student. A pair of kids would become Lindsey’s parents, a troubled life before them. A pair of lovers in their late twenties would become my parents. Only the house remained.
The car swap was wearing on me. But I dutifully drove the Olds toward its hiding spot. Spring gardeners were out in Willo, despite the early heat wave. I resisted the impulse to drive down Cypress. Fifth Avenue took me south, across McDowell and into the older bungalow neighborhood of Roosevelt. This was where the rich and powerful leaders of Phoenix lived nine decades before. I wondered about George Weed. He ran an elevator in the early ’60s, sometimes pitched tips to Harrison Wolfe. Did he carry the badge even then? Was he a cop wanna-be? I would have been satisfied to know how he got John Pilgrim’s badge and why it was important enough to hide in a jacket he wore like second skin.
Yuppies from the apartments were out in the narrow grassy strip of Portland Park walking their dogs. As I slowed to let an athletic woman with short blond hair pull a golden retriever across the street, I noticed a black SUV about a half block behind me. It had been in my rearview mirror at least since I crossed Seventh Avenue. I coughed
