attempted murder.”
“You don’t know that,” he squealed. A pair of young women walking by stared at us. “You got your suspect in both shootings. This O’Keefe character. And, hell, with Dick Nixon, nothin’ he was involved in would surprise me.” I hadn’t heard someone use his nickname in years. “Bad things have a way of comin’ back around.”
“What were the River Hogs, Jack?”
“Bunch of idiots drinkin’,” he said, no hesitation. “When they’d get off duty, they’d drive down into some deserted spot in the riverbed, drink and party all night.”
“Did you ever go with them?”
His mouth puckered and he shook his head. “I know you’re tryin’ to get the old white guy. I’m not ‘with it’ in this department. I don’t read the same books as you. I’m not politically correct. But I’m sure as hell not a dirty cop.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I supported you for acting sheriff.”
Thanks, I guess, I thought.
Suddenly, he calmed down. “OK, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll get moving on those prisoner transfers. That oughta help. We wouldn’t want a jail riot your first week in office.” He added, “You looked good on television Wednesday. We need somebody like you, clever.”
He clapped me on the arm and walked away.
“Jack,” I called, and he turned to face me, all belly and jowls. “What about it? You ever go out with the River Hogs?”
He just gave me a little smile, raised a fat finger to his lips-shhhhhhh-then turned and walked on.
There was a disturbance off to my left, and my involuntary muscles sent my hand reaching for the Python under my coat. But it was just some domestic thing, woman and man and their lawyers arguing. A pair of burly young deputies intervened. The male deputies like their hair cut close these days. When I was a young deputy, the fashion was just the opposite: The old guys like Abernathy had crew cuts and the young cops tried to get away with hair as long as possible. I had lived long enough to see a cycle.
So I jaywalked and caught up with Lindsey.
“What did he want?” she asked.
“I guess to tell me I’m clever.”
Chapter Sixteen
Friday afternoon skulked by, passed in difficult meetings. The most difficult of all I postponed a day. After I left Abernathy, I drove out to the capitol and went into the mud-colored modern tower that looks very much like the Madison Street Jail. Inside, however, are offices for the governor, attorney general, and other high honchos. The thing looms like a bad hangover behind the lovely little capitol building, built in celebration of statehood in 1912 and crowned with a dome of copper.
I was there to meet the attorney general, and she saw me alone in a small conference room lined with new lawbooks and smelling of copy-machine toner. The AG was a popular Democrat in a Republican state, and she listened intently as I briefed her on the Nixon logbook. She wanted to have her office enter the investigation at once, of course. I should have expected that. These were dirty cops, not some garden-variety Arizona real estate scam. And if my theory was true, they were dirty cops who had murdered Dean Nixon and attempted to murder Peralta. I was more surprised by my reaction: defensive, testy-as if I’d been a bureaucrat in the Sheriff’s Office for years, as if I were Abernathy.
If I were still in the history business, I could write a grand and impenetrable paper on the way organizational cultures write themselves upon the individuals in charge. But I’ve always been a believer in individuals as movers of history, something that got me into trouble with the gasbags of conventional wisdom at the faculty club. No, I was protecting Peralta, plain and simple. That’s why I wanted to keep this mess in the Sheriff’s Office until we were sure what it was. But I was running out of time-she agreed to give me a week before her investigators intervened.
My meetings with the county attorney, county commissioners, and Chief Wilson of the Phoenix Police were just as stressful. I’m sure they were full of nuance and comedy. But I wasn’t really paying attention. I was going through the motions, carrying information. And I was still trying to understand what the discoveries of the past few days really meant. How the hell had Abernathy learned about the logbook? Why was Peralta so concerned with reports from the Guadalupe shooting? What did O’Keefe mean when he said Peralta was shot because “they can’t let any of this come out”? Was that why Nixon was murdered, too, and why someone took a crack at me? Who were “they”?
A week ago, I occupied a sweet little sinecure. Now, what a mess.
***
The western sky was putting on its nightly show-tonight narrow bands of clouds were inventing new colors, somewhere on the spectrum between purple and pink-as we crossed through the saguaro-spiked arroyos and hills of Dreamy Draw and dropped down into the Paradise Valley section of Phoenix. This had been desert when I was a kid. Now, the white lights of suburban safety stretched north and east for miles until they jammed up and faded into the base of the McDowell Mountains. At the Cactus Road exit, I wheeled the car off the freeway, then passed a couple of miles of identical strip shopping centers until Lindsey spotted the sports bar. Inside, just as she had promised, was a woman wearing a blowsy long dress and a red sweater with a needlepoint cat design.
Life is complicated, as Sharon said. Lisa Cardiff-it was Lisa Cardiff Sommers now-had readily agreed to meet us anywhere but her home. I would have preferred a place like Tarbell’s down on Camelback Road, or even Tom’s Tavern downtown. But it quickly became clear that Lisa, like many north Phoenicians, rarely came down into the “old” part of the city. Anyway, we were on duty and, with my new job, I had a damned example to set. Now, at the entrance to the sports bar and dressed to blend in with chinos and sweatshirts, we greeted her and discreetly showed our IDs, which she studied at some length. After we were shown to a table, we absurdly ordered coffees and Diet Cokes while
Franklin Roosevelt had a mistress, despite his heavy leg braces and a world war to run. So did LBJ, and Kennedy and Clinton had racked up impressive body counts. Before us, if Sharon was to be believed, was a woman who had been involved with Peralta. It was a side of him that had utterly hidden itself from me for a quarter century.
Lisa Cardiff Sommers hardly looked like a saucy home-wrecker. But the journey from nineteen years old to the edge of forty was unpredictable. Lisa was shorter than Lindsey, and comfortably filled out, though not fat. She wore flat shoes with ill-fitting footlets. Her brown hair was short. Her face, tanned and pleasant in an unremarkable way, looked like it was comfortable smiling and laughing. Which she wasn’t doing now.
“I hope you understand how impossible this is for me,” she started out. “Whatever happened when I was a kid is so far in the past. I’m married and have two children, and there’s no way I should even be talking to you.”
My Diet Coke was flat and I was bone-tired. I said, “Do you understand Sheriff Peralta is in a coma and his assailant is loose? We don’t have time to ass around. We could have just shown up at your front door.”
“Screw you,” she said with vehemence, her lips suddenly draining of any color. “I don’t even have to talk to you!”
She started to rise, but Lindsey lightly touched her hand. “Please, Lisa, we need your help.”
Maybe it was classic good cop, bad cop, or maybe it was the way Lindsey could disarm and soothe people. Lisa Cardiff Sommers sat back down and took a long swig of coffee. I could have calmed her down with a martini at Tarbell’s.
She said, “Deputy, I can’t imagine anything I could tell you-”
“Call me Lindsey.”
“That’s my daughter’s name!” She softened, melted. I felt like such a heel. Lisa said, “It’s spelled L-y-n-n-s- y.”
“That’s nice,” Lindsey said warmly, although I knew she would hate the spelling.
Lisa ignored me and went on. “Lynnsy just turned six, and her brother Chance is eight. Do you have children,
