“Here is nice.”
“I could see you here, David.” She gave a mischievous smile. “You’re cultivated and quirky. You are such a big-city person.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Your Little Miss Perfect would like it, too.”
“Lindsey,” I said.
“Mmmmm. OK, no cattiness, I know you’re worried. And I must admit she’s been good for you.”
We ordered, and I ate too much. Sharon told me how her old practice had dwindled in the years she was doing her radio show, so she felt free enough to work from San Francisco and commute to Phoenix twice a month. “I’m not sure, after twenty years of practice, that I was doing most of my patients any good,” she said. Here she could focus on her radio show-“I know it’s entertainment,” she said-and writing. She was teaching a class at San Francisco State.
Then she wanted to know more about me, and I told her about Dan Milton’s death and my own questions about whether I should go back to teaching, my growing discontent with my hometown.
“Maybe it’s my midlife crisis,” I said.
“You should go to Portland,” Sharon said. “You need to be around smart, stimulating people.”
I just listened.
“Do you still have panic attacks, David?”
I hunched deeper into my seat. It wasn’t something I was proud of, despite the New Age of nonjudgmentalism. I said, “Not so much now.”
“See, I told you Lindsey was good for you.” She patted my hand. “You’re a Renaissance man, David. One of the last. You needed to come back to Phoenix when you did-you found Lindsey there, didn’t you? Somehow you needed the adventure of the sheriff’s office. You’re a man of action and a man of the mind. A thinking woman’s deputy.” She laughed, her full crystal laugh that I realized I had missed. “But you were gone from Phoenix for years before you came back. You just outgrew Phoenix. I did, too, in my way. Whatever comes next will become clear soon enough. I’ve lived long enough to know every day is a gift. I’m damned if I’ll mortgage my happiness to the future a day longer. That’s another reason I’m here.”
“And what about the sheriff?” I ventured cautiously.
She shrugged and made a little face. “He’s got his dream,” she said quietly.
Unease descended over me. God knows they’d had trouble before. But Mike and Sharon had always been together. All my adult life, really. I started blathering about my case. Then the check came.
Outside, a misty rain had begun. I started to hail Sharon a cab, but she put a hand on my arm.
“David, you need to know.”
“I don’t, Sharon.”
“Yes, you do. I have someone here. Someone I’m in love with.” She studied my face. “Don’t hate me,” she said.
“You know I don’t,” I said. “I’m just listening. Does Mike…?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think he cares. He doesn’t want to be here. And he had a fling years ago. But this isn’t payback. I really want to be happy, David. Nobody knows this yet, but I’m going to end the radio show. Money isn’t an issue now. I just want to finally live my life. My daughters are here. And now I feel like I have a real shot at something good.”
Sharon’s black hair glistened in the misty rain, and I saw clearly how it was shot through with gray, how her face was now a scrimshaw of subtle wrinkles. We’d all gotten older together, me and Mike and Sharon. But the world was moving at a thousand miles a minute. I felt a wave of love and sadness. I pulled her into me and hugged her. She cleaved close to me, and I could feel her tears on my neck.
“Time to get you out of the rain,” I said, holding my arm up. In a few seconds, a yellow cab pulled over.
***
I buttoned up my trench coat and walked, happy to be surrounded by the tall buildings and the lights. The detached scholar in me absorbed Sharon’s news with equanimity, while the edgy David was thrilled. A few couples walked by covered by umbrellas. Men and women. Women and women. Men and men. Better to muse on the many wonderful varieties of love in a beautiful city. The windows of an art gallery shimmered in the night, well-dressed patrons inside laughing and drinking wine. The narrow, crowded streets of Chinatown beckoned on one side. The towers of the financial district rose above me. Sharon was right, I could see myself here.
I turned onto a darker sidestreet and heard voices singing. Singing well. They seemed weirdly out of place on a deserted sidewalk. I recognized the grand nineteenth-century hymn, written before modernity and doubt: “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” A church hulked against the street, its stones black from age and soot. But a stained glass window was brilliantly lit, and it let out the voices of the choir practice inside. It took me a moment to realize that one of the voices was closer, coming from a darkened portal into the church. My eyes adjusted to a raggedy man standing against the sooty stones. He had a beautiful voice. “’Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all who breathe away,’” he sang to the street.
At his feet was an upturned hat. I pulled out a bill and dropped it in. I walked on slowly, letting the rain mend my desert skin, hearing the voices fade.
When I got to the lobby, the desk clerk handed me a message. It was from Vince Renzetti.
Chapter Nineteen
What is it about old photographs? Did they always look old? On a shelf at home, my grandmother and grandfather look out at me from a sepia print. He wears a thin tie and suit coat, she a simple, light-colored blouse. He is blond, with a wide, sensual mouth. She is black Irish, her eyes brooding and intelligent. Both wear serious expressions-the style of the day, and, as Grandfather told me much later, a style that helped conceal the dental problems that were rampant then. Those days were 1910, and Grandmother and Grandfather were newlyweds, twenty and twenty-four years old respectively. And of course that photo was the leading edge of technology of that day. They didn’t sit for the photographer in dusty territorial Arizona knowing that many decades later they would look like a museum piece to their grandson, who lived with everyday miracles such as jet travel, air-conditioning, biotechnology, and computers.
I reminded myself of this as I sat in Vince Renzetti’s parlor and took in a lifetime of old photos that sat on tables, shelves, and walls-everywhere that didn’t house a plant. He was one of those men who were told “You haven’t changed a bit!” at reunions. So he was instantly recognizable in the Army Air Corps officer’s uniform of World War II. Same in the photo with J. Edgar Hoover, both men wearing double-breasted suits and expressions of straight-mouthed seriousness. And another picture showing him with a young man who had a thin nose and an earnest Kentucky face: John Pilgrim. They were walking with their hands on the arms of a fleshy-faced guy who tried to look away from the camera.
“That was just after we were assigned to Phoenix, in 1947,” Renzetti said, noticing me noticing the photo. “Everybody wore suits, ties, and hats back then. Even the bad guys.”
He sat in a straight-backed chair opposite me, drinking green tea. This day he wore a blue blazer and red and white rep tie. Outside a screen door the weather was chill and rainy. Inside, it was uncomfortably warm and smelled vaguely of dill and Williams LectricShave.
“I’ve checked you out, Mapstone,” he said in the booming master-of-ceremonies voice. “You worked as a sheriff’s deputy when you were young. Then you got your Ph.D. in history and taught for fifteen years. When you failed to gain tenure, you went back home to Phoenix. You got a job from your old partner, who was the chief deputy.”
“Now he’s the sheriff,” I interposed.
“You use the historian’s techniques to solve old cases,” he went on. “Very innovative.”
Renzetti’s eyes never left me. His hands didn’t move from the teacup he held in his lap-no gesticulating Italian-American stereotype in Vincent Renzetti. His posture was relaxed and businesslike. Only his sentences, short, chopped, conveyed any sense of energy or agitation.
