“I think El Jefe is a prick for making you work the minute you get back, especially after what you’ve been through. He lost his father last year. He ought to have a little more emotional intelligence.”
It was true. Judge Peralta’s death had barely registered on him, on the outside at least. It was just the way he was.
“I always loved the judge,” Lindsey said. “So courtly, so old school. You’d think Mike would be more of a sensitive guy considering his wife is such a big time psychologist.”
“I knew them when he was just a deputy, and she was just a scared housewife.”
“You are an old guy, Dave.” She tickled me, and I nearly upset what was left of my drink.
“Yeah, kid, I remember you on my very first case back at the sheriff’s office. Seems like only yesterday. I said, ‘Who is this babe in the miniskirt and the nose stud.’”
“I saved your ass, Dave.”
“True enough.”
She snuggled against me. “You saved me back,” she said.
“Anyway,” Lindsey said conspiratorially. “Dr. Sharon living in San Francisco, what does that mean for the sheriff’s marriage?”
I shrugged. “They have their own thing, and it’s survived for thirty years or so. I think her radio syndicator wanted her in San Francisco. And the daughters live in the Bay Area. I still can’t imagine Mike and Sharon as grandparents. But Sharon says she’s just commuting there during the week.” I listened to the wind, stroked her soft hair. “Do you regret we didn’t go to San Francisco?”
She said, “Sometimes.” Before the dot-com bubble blew up, Lindsey had what seemed like a stack of offers from companies in the Bay Area.
“I would have gone with you,” I said.
“Damn right you would have,” she said. “But I wanted to do something that mattered. It’s never been about money. And this is your home, Dave. I know how much that means to you.”
“Sometimes I wish it weren’t,” I said, thinking about the premature hundred-degree day on April first. Suddenly, I lost the high that Lindsey and sex and Bombay Sapphire had conjured in me.
Dan Milton disdained Phoenix as a barbarous place, all subdivisions and automobiles. It was one of the reasons why I disliked him when we first met. I had barely been away from Arizona when I went to the Midwest for my Ph.D. work. A protege of Arthur Link, Milton had been an enfant terrible in the 1960s, engaging in violent intellectual jousts with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and legendary party binges with Robert Conquest. By the time I came to study with him, he was one of the most distinguished scholars of Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive era, widely published, cherished, and still controversial.
He was hard on his students. To study with Dan Milton was to live in the library-this was before personal computers-learning what he called “real research methods…not the candy-ass lazy shit you learned scamming your master’s degrees at state colleges.” He was a native Texan and reveled in being a profane scholar. He had a weakness for guns and fine Kentucky bourbons. He affected to be uninterested in my youthful detour to become a deputy sheriff. To him, scholarship, done right, meaning Dan Milton’s way, was heroic.
Out in the house, I heard Billy Bragg’s “California Stars” on the stereo. I let the guitars and wanderlust harmonica stoke my melancholy. I was now approaching the age that Milton was when I arrived on his doorstep as a twentysomething Ph.D. candidate. It made me feel strange, caught in time’s riptide and unable to see the shore.
He was hard on his students because the ones who made it were his great legacy. They went on to become noted professors, cutting-edge scholars, influential authors, in-demand advisers to secretaries of state, and national security aides-and me, I came back home to Phoenix and took a job at the sheriff’s office again.
I read to Dan Milton as he lay dying from stomach cancer. He had long ago moved to Portland, a wonderfully civilized city for a man who prized civilization. Writing a pair of bestsellers-one book won the Parkman Prize-had supplemented his family money, so the high cost of living was no object. His condo overlooked downtown and the river, Mount Hood in the far distance. Its rooms were occupied by books, modernist paintings, and a young woman with honey-colored hair named Kathleen. Milton always had a Kathleen or a Heather or a Pamela, intellectual young women who ran through his life, each for a few years, and amused him. He favored Smith graduates. He was as much auteur as scholar.
Finally, a hospital bed was added. And a part-time nurse. He dismissed the entreaties of his grown children to go to a nursing home.
I visited almost every day, and read to him from Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography,
“He never forgave me for leaving teaching, for not making something of myself as a scholar,” I said aloud. “He never said so, but I know…”
Lindsey laid her head on my chest, letting her dark hair sweep against my skin. I went on, “Milton wants me to take a lecturer job at Portland State.” I corrected myself, “Wanted me. He talked to the dean and recommended me. It’s a two-year appointment, in American history. It’s some kind of interdisciplinary deal with the criminal justice program. Milton said it was tailor-made for me, and the class load is light enough to do research and writing, too.”
“Do you want to do that?” Lindsey asked, not facing me.
“I don’t know,” I said, looking into the murk of the ceiling, listening to the wind. “All the politics and political correctness drove me nuts before. But I didn’t have you before. Oh, it’s probably silly to even consider it. You wouldn’t like the rain…”
“Oh, History Shamus,” Lindsey stroked my head. “You’re tired. You’re grieving.” She held me close, and her body heat was a wonderful force field against a cold world.
Finally, she said, “You can do anything you want, Dave. Even as an old guy.”
She smiled at me, and sipped the last of her drink. “I know what will cheer you up. I got takeout at the Fry Bread House. Let’s eat Indian tacos, drink cerveza, and screw all night.” She sat astride me, and my body quickly responded.
“I’ll make some history with you, Professor.”
Chapter Four
“Can you help me out? Some change to get something to eat?”
I shook my head like a heartless bastard and walked into Starbucks. The man lingered for a moment, staring at the big Oldsmobile. Then he walked toward Safeway, slipping into a forlorn limp as he approached a woman getting out of her car. She hurried into the store and he resumed a normal walk, wandering across McDowell Road into the park.
It was Friday morning, a day after the body was found in the Maryvale pool. The storm’s aftermath was a yard littered with downed palm fronds, and the neighbors anxiously cleaning their pools, but the day dawned clear and mild. My apocalyptic environmental visions of the previous day were replaced by fond, familiar appreciation for my hometown. At the foot of the broad streets, mountains glowed vivid purple and brown. The ascending morning sun turned wispy clouds from pink to alabaster. Even the last remnants of citrus blossoms were lingering in the seventy-degree air. So I put the top down on the Olds, slid in an Ellington CD, and got to work.
The first twenty-four hours are critical in a homicide investigation. But in my line, the first fifty-six years are critical, at least for a body carrying an FBI badge that disappeared in 1948. From the quiet of my office in the old county courthouse, under high ceilings, big windows, and the gaze of Sheriff Carl Hayden from his 1901 photograph, I imagined my battle plan. Its basics had evolved as I had learned the job, invented it really, over the past several years since Peralta had taken pity on my untenured, unemployed state and given me an old case to research. I would need a timeline, a gallery of the major players in the case, lists of key evidence, plus all the case records and newspaper clippings. My job was to find connections as a historian and researcher, bringing something to an investigation that the regular detectives might miss, or so I told myself.
