field by the White Tank Mountains, a desolate desert graveyard with numbers denoting the dead buried at the county’s expense.
“Not bad, Mapstone,” Peralta said slowly, speaking around the cigar in his mouth. “Pretty good detective work.”
“I know it doesn’t tell us how he came to have an FBI badge.”
Deep in my head, I was only wondering where Lindsey was, how she was. I glance back in the house, half expecting her to come out with chips and salsa and join us. But Lindsey wasn’t there. I felt her absence more painfully as we talked hour after hour, through three drinks.
“I have an offer, to go back to teaching,” I said.
He stared into the night while I told him about the job at Portland State.
“It rains all the time.” he said.
“Not that much, and I like rain.”
“You’d be bored,” he said. “Sitting around with Volvo drivers, using nonsexist language and hugging trees. Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians-I could never work in a university.”
“I believe that.”
“You won’t go.” Peralta said, hurting my feelings that he didn’t try harder to talk me out of it.
Finally, Peralta rose to go. He looked steady as a tree trunk. “You’re dumb to stay in this house,” he said, his posture showing no evidence of having consumed a trio of sizable cocktails.
“You’re here.” I said.
He motioned to the east. “I have a security detail waiting for me over there.” A pair of car headlights came on.
Peralta stared into the dry black sky, where you could see stars even against the city lights. He said softly, “You and I go back, don’t we, Mapstone?”
I agreed we did.
He produced an envelope from the cargo pants and set it on his chair. “Those are tickets to San Francisco. On the county’s dime. In that envelope you’ll also find a name and an address. It’s the son of Special Agent John Pilgrim. Why don’t you go talk to him about his father?”
I stood, a bit unsteady. “What will Eric Pham have to say about that?”
“Leave him to me.”
I didn’t pick up the ticket.
“Lindsey is going to be fine,” he said, “And you’ll be climbing the walls.”
“Why do you care?”
“About Lindsey? You must really think I am a bastard.”
“You are a bastard,” I said, draining my martini and setting down the glass. “But I mean the Pilgrim case, George Weed in the swimming pool. Why do you care?”
Peralta said nothing. The skin on his face hardened until, in the meager light reflected from city sky, he seemed to take on the countenance of a stone idol. Waiting for worship or sacrifice, I thought unkindly. I said, “You go to San Francisco. You can see Sharon.”
“Not my kind of place,” Peralta said. “Can’t you just trust me for once? We go back, remember? Old partners?”
“Old partners are straight with each other.”
“Thanks for the drinks, Mapstone.” He ambled down to the street, his earlier limp gone, and a black Crown Victoria slid up to the curb.
He gave me a little wave with his big hand and disappeared inside.
Chapter Seventeen
The force of jet engines pushed me into the fabric and cushion of my seat. It was just enough G-force to keep my back from hurting. After several hours of looking at the airline tickets, I had decided to get out of town. Less than twenty-four hours after being taken down like any other scumbag fleeing from the cops, I had a diverse menu of aches and pains. For some strange reason, I was less nervous than usual about flying. Maybe after two weeks of keeping anxiety like an unwanted boarder I had become accustomed to being afraid all the time.
Out the window, the city fell away rapidly and spread out. It looked like a 1,500-square-mile semiconductor chip surrounded by dun and gray mountains. Down below, spring was almost gone. April had been a succession of days with above average temperatures. The sweet season that begins in October would be burned away by May, followed by the hellish summer. All the rich people fled to Coronado or Del Mar or the San Juan Islands. The rest of us suffered.
The jetliner climbed and turned northwest. Out the window, the urban organism that was Phoenix ate up the fields and citrus groves that had once separated the city from the desert. Farming was the oldest human activity in the Salt River Valley, dating back to the prehistoric Indians who dug the first canals. Now it was almost all gone. Home looks different from 15,000 feet.
I was on the airplane after spending one of those nights of the damned that produces artists or serial killers. Sleep brought nightmares of violence and loss. Waking brought its own anxieties. Every noise in the old house assumed a sinister tone. Closing and locking the bedroom door provided no security to my imagination. Nor did keeping on every light. So I lay down, turned from side to side, got up, prowled, came back to bed, over and over. I swore I could smell Lindsey in the sheets. That and lying on her side of the bed provided my only comfort. So I walked the floors, checking doors and windows, setting traps, finally turning off all the lights so I could watch the street. Pasternak, the old tomcat, watched me from Grandfather’s grand old leather chair. The Russian mafia didn’t come, but sometime after 4 A.M. I was lost in yet another nightmare, vivid and horrible. The clock said I had been asleep for all of fifteen minutes.
I was really hurting by that time. So I downed too many Advils and took up station in the study. There was nothing to do but try to work, so I put my mind on the world of John Pilgrim. In 1948, World War II had been barely over for three years but the Cold War was coming together. Harry Truman had won a surprise victory for another term as president. But a freshman Republican Senator named Joe McCarthy was accusing the administration of being riddled with communist agents. The Russians were about to acquire the A-bomb. It was a time of fear.
John Pilgrim would have arrived in a small farm town called Phoenix. It was an entirely different dimension, a different state of matter, from the sprawling city I was leaving, with its golf courses, world class resorts, endless subdivisions, and urban problems. Phoenix in 1948 consisted of about seventeen square miles. Those who weren’t farming worked in the produce warehouses, the farm implement businesses, and the feedlots and slaughterhouses of the world’s largest stockyards. The good jobs were on the railroads, or in the banks and offices that a small city could support. One of those offices was my grandfather’s dental practice downtown on Washington Street.
The sense of newness and mastery of nature must have been overwhelming. The Valley had only been inhabited, in modern times, for eight decades. Before that, it was a vast wilderness, with the abandoned canals of the Hohokam sitting there for centuries as testimony that here was one of the most fertile river valleys in the world, provided you could add water. At the turn of the twentieth century, the federal government did add water, with the dams and lakes on the river east of town, and the desert bloomed. By the 1940s, the second miracle was coming into wide use: refrigerated air. A completely manmade environment became possible. Thousands of servicemen had trained in the Arizona desert during the war, and many had decided they wanted to return. So the sleepy farm town that John Pilgrim found was in the midst of big change.
Pilgrim’s world would have been one of hopeless conformity to twenty-first-century eyes. If a man was lucky, he held one job all his life, a good union trade. And lucky was the word, for these people had been through a Great Depression when a quarter of the workforce was out of a job. In a little town like Phoenix, people lived conventional lives, went to church, knew their neighbors. This was the confining place John Pilgrim found.
But none of that told me a damned thing about why John Pilgrim ended up dead, and lost his badge. And I was right on the edge of a profound thought when I slipped into a heavy nap 30,000 feet above California.
***
I took the new BART line from the airport into San Francisco. The train was filled with all the characters that
