Lindsey? No? Oh, but I see you’re engaged.” Lindsey gave her a warm, single-family-detached-home smile. Lisa looked back at me and said, in a tone of motherly correction, “I hope she picked someone more sensitive and empathetic than you.”
“He’s a great guy,” I said. “I hate him.”
Lindsey tried to steer Lisa back on course, but she just started crying and talking, like some cheaply constructed dam had given way under pressure of a sudden storm.
“I love my husband and he’s a good man. Jim’s the southwest regional sales manager for Qwest Wireless. We have a good life. He’s a wonderful provider. But Jim couldn’t handle knowing about this. He just couldn’t. And I’m entitled to my privacy.” She sipped coffee and wiped her eyes with a paper napkin.
My God, I thought, she must think we’re here on some morals charge. But nobody thinks straight when the subject of old lovers comes up.
“I was nineteen years old when we became involved,” she said, a croupy whisper. “I was a kid, for God’s sake. I was just having fun. Didn’t you do things like that, Lindsey?”
“Sure,” Lindsey said. “It’s OK.” She held Lisa’s hand.
“How do you think it’s been since he became chief deputy and such a celebrity…,” She never said the words “Mike Peralta,” as if they had dangerous conjuring power. “People don’t usually get to be reminded on TV and in the newspapers about their youthful indiscretions. And that wife of his, on the radio!” She sniffled again. “Of course, I was sick when I heard he had been shot.” She looked at me, and drew herself up straighter. “But I just feel so dirty and violated that you’ve come here. I had to lie to my husband, tell him I had a girlfriend that was having trouble.”
Lindsey said, “Lisa, we’re not here to invade your privacy. We really just need your help remembering. It may be that some things going on in Sheriff Peralta’s life twenty years ago have something to do with the shooting.”
Lisa’s face softened again and she blew her nose loudly. She had green eyes that seemed speckled with other colors.
“Of course, I’ll try to help,” she said.
Lindsey tiptoed in. “Did Peralta ever seem like he was having trouble, back when you knew him? Anything at all?”
Lisa stared into the half-empty coffee cup. She gave a little smile. “He was very driven, very intense. I really got that danger charge out of being with him.” In a different voice, she said, “He wasn’t happy in his marriage. But what happened between us wasn’t his fault. I met him when he came to my apartment after there had been a break-in. Later, I found a reason to see him again. He was very shy and awkward, but in this very wonderful adult way. I picked him up. Threw myself at him, is more like it.”
I felt a queasy voyeuristic thrill, like listening to people make love loudly in the next room. I drank the flat Coke as penance.
“When did you guys break up?” Lindsey asked.
“January of 1979,” she said. “It was on a Sunday night. He said he had to stop seeing me. His wife…”
“And you didn’t see him again?”
“Once, years later, I saw him at a distance in Fry’s one night. I didn’t try to say hello.”
That ruled her out of any direct memory of Peralta after the Guadalupe shooting.
“What else was going on in his life?” Lindsey prodded. “Did he ever talk about work?”
“He had…” Lisa laughed out loud. “He had this partner who was, like, trying to become a college professor. He sounded pretty full of himself, this partner, with his big words and books. I don’t remember his name.” Lindsey kicked me under the table. Lisa said, “Mike was very down-to-earth.” She spoke the name tenderly.
“Now that I look back, it was a weird time,” she continued. “I was born in 1959, so I was too young to be with the real boomers. They had the sixties. Mike served in Vietnam. My sister, she got maced by the Chicago police at the Democratic Convention, and she lived in a commune for awhile. She was at Altamonte when the Rolling Stones played and there was the big riot. Kids her age had such a bond, I guess. My age, we got, like, the BeeGees…”
“Did you meet any people Peralta worked with?” Lindsey asked.
She shook her head. “We had lots of cops come to the coffee shop where I worked, but usually not deputies. I worked in Scottsdale. It was kind of cool, because he was my secret.” She suddenly sounded nineteen again.
Lindsey said, “Please don’t be angry if I ask this, but I assume you guys exchanged gifts?”
“He never gave me diamonds and pearls, if that’s what you mean.”
I felt the muscles in my back relax a bit.
“He gave me a mermaid, a little china thing you could have picked up at Los Arcos mall for ten dollars. I was going through a mermaid phase. I thought it was sweet of him.”
“Did he have any other friends?” I ventured softly. “Other than this stuffed-shirt partner?”
She thought about it and cocked her head in a wry smile. “I do remember one,” she said. “Because he had such a name. Nixon, like the president.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“No,” she shook her head. “He told me Nixon was a crazy dude, and I needed to stay away from cops anyway. I always wanted to meet his friends, to have him take me out with the boys, show me off, maybe. I was very fearless and stupid. But it sounded like they’d have fun. Get off duty and go down to the riverbed with a keg of beer. It wasn’t like there was a lot to do in Phoenix back then. They even had this cute name for their parties. The River Hogs.”
Chapter Seventeen
Driving home, Lindsey and I had a short, sharp fight about the ’70s. I found myself in that worst of debating positions, defending an argument I didn’t really believe. Resolved: The decade of the 1970s was a pretty good time, after all.
“How can you be saying that?” Lindsey shot back, and not quietly. “Are you envious of Peralta for having a chick on the side?”
“Of course not,” I said. “That’s not what we’re talking about. Infidelity has occurred in every decade.” Ah, the debater’s half-Nelson. It only made things worse.
“That doesn’t make it right,” she said firmly. Then, “Dave, you’re making me sound like some kind of prude. That’s not fair.”
“I just get tired of the X-ers blaming everything on the Boomers,” I said. “And ten years of complicated events and social forces can’t be reduced to one or two cliches.”
“I didn’t say that,” she said. Like all fights between people who love each other, this one was full of ciphers and code strings, and not at all about what it appeared to be. In a softer voice, she added, “You know, I had to raise myself because of all those good times and complicated social forces.”
“I know.” It was all I could say. She spoke the truth. “I didn’t have much fun back then myself,” I said. “I could barely get a date. The young women didn’t seem interested in me. I never had the great lines that the personality boys have.”
“Oh, you’re a personality boy, Dave,” Lindsey said. Out of my peripheral vision, I could see her luminous smile. “A thinking woman’s personality boy.” She put her hand on my neck and rubbed-oh, that felt good!
“Now you’re flattering me. Don’t stop rubbing.”
“And,” she said, “true personality boys don’t have lines. They have stories.”
“That unmarked car is still behind us,” I said, as we exited to the Seventh Street ramp and paused at the light. Two homeless men, with clothes, beards, and skin the same color as a paper bag, stared at us from behind hand-lettered cardboard signs. Several car lengths back, the Ford had also taken the exit and now prepared to shepherd us home.
“Kimbrough is nothing if not efficient,” Lindsey said. “I guess they don’t trust me to be your bodyguard.”
“Should we stop at Good Sam?”
She stroked my arm. “You know they won’t let us up at this hour, Dave.”
