carpeting.
“I’m talking about the naive idea we’re on the same side here,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to your agent.”
“That’s the problem,” said a sausage-faced man who stood behind the assistant director. “You have no authorization.”
The words dropped into the room as if Robespierre had sentenced me to the guillotine. All that was missing was a basket to receive my severed head. But the crowd nearly gasped.
All the attention made me alternately frightened and amused. I tried to go with the latter feeling. “You guys…” I shook my head. “You’re still trying to cover your asses.”
“Hey!” A man’s voice. Assistant Director Davies held up a hand.
“This is serious, Mapstone,” Davies said. “What did Renzetti tell you?”
“Not a damned thing,” I lied. “He’s a lonely old man. You ought to invite him to a retirees party every now and then.”
“He’s talked to us,” Davies said.
“So.” I said, “you know he didn’t tell me anything. He’s a stand-up guy.” Stand-up enough to keep my confidences, I hoped.
The Feds looked at each other.
I asked, “What are you afraid he’d tell me?” They easily ignored this foolish civilian entreaty.
Another Fed: “Special Agent Maddox said you went to Renzetti’s house twice. That’s a lot of trips for nothing.”
“That happens sometimes in law enforcement,” I said. My career had been built on lots of trips for nothing.
“And the son?”
“He was a kid when his father died,” I said. “He doesn’t know anything.”
Sausage Face demanded, “Why did you remain in San Francisco four additional days after you assaulted Special Agent Maddox? You were gone an entire week, Mapstone.”
“I assaulted him? Jesus!” I wished I were facing toward the window. As it was, all I could see were hostile faces in golfing shirts. “You assholes decided to have him tail me-how smart is that?”
“Answer the question, please.”
“I was sightseeing,” I said. “Am I under arrest?”
Silence. Bureaucratic brains processed. I was sure if I tried, I could hear the clanking. Assistant Director Davies’ makeup looked odd, with rough meeting points for base and rouge. Hell, I was no expert. I stood and walked to a window. The gigantic pools were stocked with beautiful people and not so beautiful people with fat bankbooks. Others meandered on the putting green and bowling lawn. They were loving the ninety-nine-degree weather-back home it was probably forty-five degrees and the sun hadn’t shined for a month. If you could spring for several hundred dollars a night, you could live better than a Roman emperor.
I tried again, “What are you guys afraid of? That I’ve found photos of J. Edgar Hoover in a dress plotting the Kennedy assassination?”
That set them all off.
“…highly sensitive…”
“Who have you told about this case?”
“…national security…”
“…court order to check your hard drive…”
“OK,” Davies said. “Let’s hear it from the top. From the moment you last met Eric. Everything you’ve done. Including your meeting at the park with the retired Phoenix detective, Wolfe.”
I gave them a sanitized version, but even so it took about an hour with their questions. I left out some of Wolfe’s conversation and lots from Renzetti. I didn’t tell them my sightseeing was across the Bay, to the University of California library’s special collections. One of the archivists was another protege of Milton. It was a valuable connection. When I was finished telling the story, it didn’t seem as if I’d accomplished much at all. They seemed to agree, if you could judge by the bored faces in the room. All except Pham, who looked as if he had been constipated for a month.
But Davies wasn’t done.
“Weren’t you once involved romantically with a newspaper reporter?” she demanded.
“Yes, about twenty-five years ago,” I said. “Is that the best you can do? What the hell are you so afraid of?” My worry instincts told me these folks could use some new antiterrorism statute to toss me in jail forever. I pushed past them and said, “I thought the Bureau was convinced that John Pilgrim was a suicide.”
“That’s correct,” Davies said, a note of discomfort creeping into her voice.
I continued, “So I’m just looking for the way his badge ended up on a homeless guy in Maricopa County. And right now I’m not making any progress.”
Davies gave a chilly smile. “I don’t know if there’s progress to be made, Dr. Mapstone.”
“I could make more progress if I could get Bureau help in tracking down records on Pilgrim’s death.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes we just have to live with mysteries.” Then she nodded toward Biff and Muffy, who put hands on my shoulders. “These agents will drive you home, Dr. Mapstone. Thank you for your time.”
***
I had just lugged my bags inside the house on Cypress Street when there was a banging on the front door. I clipped the holstered Python on my belt and walked quietly in the direction of the banging.
It was Peralta in full dress uniform, his star gleaming in the sun.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?” I was tired and annoyed.
He was already halfway to the street, where his familiar black Crown Victoria was idling.
“So what’d you do to piss off the FBI?” he asked, once we were rolling. After I told him a Reader’s Digest version of the past week, he said the Feds were demanding I be taken off the case. He was smiling.
“I thought you said not to worry about Eric Pham.”
“They’re pretty mad,” Peralta said. “You can make people mad, Mapstone.”
“I just have an inquiring mind. John Adams said an inquiring mind is God’s greatest gift.”
Peralta grunted.
In thirty minutes, we were on the far west side of the city, past the old suburb of Maryvale and into the new sprawl of Avondale and Goodyear, heading toward the White Tank Mountains.
“Where are we going?”
“Are you ready to offer a theory?” he demanded.
“Not yet. Where are we going?” The sun sent heat waves off the freeway, the mirages of the auto age. Late April and the newspaper said every day of the month had been above normal temperatures. I angled some air conditioner vents on me and finally started to cool off.
His deep set, lively black eyes looked me over, then returned to the road. He said, “Patience.” That was to my question. He had none. “How does all this connect with your homeless guy?”
I said, “Patience.”
He shifted his bulk in his seat. “We don’t have a lot of time, Mapstone…”
“What?” I said. “My wife is being chased by the Russian mafia and I can’t even see her. I don’t have a clue how our life is going to be from now on. That’s urgency I can understand. This fifty-year-old murder case is-”
“Important,” he said.
Then we were at the gate of Luke Air Force Base, where heavily armed Air Police in camouflage fatigues waved us through the maze of concrete barriers.
“I’ve had my fill of feds today,” I said. Peralta ignored me as we passed the main administration buildings, then anonymous brick maintenance and barracks buildings. Luke was the largest fighter training base in the world- but the subdivisions kept creeping closer, and soon it would be forced to shut down. We eased the car past more guards, barriers, and concertina. Peralta stopped the car and we both were ordered out for a search. As an airman used a mirror on wheels to check the underside of Peralta’s cruiser, we handed over our firearms and signed on a clipboard. The Air Police were young, superbly fit, and unsmiling. Then we were loaded into an olive Humvee-not the luxury civilian kind that had chased me. An Air Police officer in back slid a hood over my head.
