eighteen?”
“I guess the prosecutors thought she looked innocent enough, if they let her skip out on a cop killing with just probation.”
I remembered the terrified young woman with the cheerleader looks, begging me not to shoot her and Leo as they crawled out of the backseat that night in Guadalupe.
“That smells like daddy’s money,” Lindsey said. “But how does she go from sucking off Jonathan Ledger in a Kodak moment to being in the middle of a gunfight between two prison escapees and the Sheriff’s Office? I know one of the escapees was Leo’s cousin, but Leo’s not in any of those photos. There’s no connection between Leo and Camelback Falls.”
Denver suddenly embraced us with warehouse rooftops and a massive traffic jam. I said, “Hell, how did she get to Camelback Falls from her safe little upper-class life as a Tulsa teenager?”
The trail to Beth Proudfoot led us into the old neighborhood north of the Denver Country Club and the booming Cherry Creek shopping district. Mamie Eisenhower grew up in the neighborhood, which still boasted neat bungalows built before the First World War. They had been gentrified into the half-million-dollar range by Denver’s ascent into the New Economy. Unlike Phoenix, the landscape here was a winter palette of bare, black tree limbs, livened by the occasional evergreen. No snow was on the ground, but the gutters were full of brown leaves and everything had the stiff countenance of winter. Denver and Phoenix had different histories, too. Denver was a city when Phoenix was still a dusty farm village. Now Phoenix had long since outgrown Denver, but Denver still had more of the feel of a city. I liked it.
“There.” Lindsey spotted the numbers on the porch of a small but lovingly restored cottage, framed by cedars. She pulled past the house and parked. “That’s the most recent address we have. Should we make a courtesy call to the Denver Police?”
“We should,” I said. “But I don’t particularly want anyone to know we’re here.”
“Agreed,” she said. She reached into the backseat, pulled open her backpack, and retrieved her Glock. She snapped the holster onto the right side of her jeans. Then she slipped an extra magazine into her left pocket. Then she covered it all with her jacket. She said, “Is it better if I check alone while you wait here?”
“You think she remembers me after all these years?” I asked.
“I think you’re unforgettable.”
“Pardon the unprofessional behavior,” I said, leaning over to kiss her. Her lips were warm. “I think I’ll go with you.” I opened the door to the cold street.
Thirty paces up the sidewalk and five knocks on the door, and there she was. The young blond girl from Guadalupe, right down to her tie-dyed top and tight bell-bottoms. I just looked at her, feeling an odd, out-of-place disorientation.
“We’re looking for Beth Proudfoot,” Lindsey said.
The girl cocked her head and fixed a look on us with her fine, wholesome features. She said, “And who the fuck are you?”
“Sheriff’s deputies,” Lindsey said in her hard voice, flashing her badge with a swing that made the girl involuntarily have to follow her hand.
“You got a warrant?”
“Do we need one?” I asked.
The girl gave a heavy sigh and fell into bad posture.
“She’s not here,” she said. “She’s never here.”
“She’s your mom?” Lindsey asked. She received a semi-affirmative shrug.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She mumbled something that sounded like “Paige.” I looked past her into the house. It was fashionably spare, with a few colorful
“When do you expect your mom to be back?” Lindsey asked.
“How the fuck would I know that?” Paige said, with a heaviness as if we had asked why war is a constant of the human condition.
“You and your mom don’t get along?” I asked. She looked at me with a contempt that only beautiful young women can bestow on the mortal world. She didn’t have to say anything. I was as vanquished as if I were a pimply seventeen-year-old asking for a date. I tried again, “Where does your mom work?”
Paige looked down at the sidewalk. We were at a standstill and I was freezing. Finally, Lindsey handed her a business card. “Let her know we came by. We’ll be back.”
We started down the sidewalk when we heard the girl’s voice again.
“You’re from Phoenix. What’s in Phoenix?”
“Your mom used to live there,” I said. She just stared at us and shook her head, an older person’s shake, sad and knowing, Then she closed the door.
In the car, we ran the heater on high and didn’t speak. Lindsey stared back at the house. I ran the zipper of my leather jacket all the way up and still shivered. “What?” I asked finally.
“She reminds me of me at that age,” Lindsey said, and she unconsciously gave the same shake of the head.
Chapter Twenty-four
We were just about to pull away from the curb, when the door to the cottage opened and Paige stepped out, now wearing a heavy forest green parka. She waved to us and walked deliberately to the street. She silently held out a card. I rolled down the window, froze anew, and took it. It read: “Beth Proudfoot…Artist” and gave an address I knew was in the Lower Downtown district.
“Thanks,” I said.
Her eyes almost seemed to fill with tears. But maybe it was the cold. She said, “If she asks about me, tell her I went to stay with Aunt Amy. But she won’t ask about me.” Paige spun on the balls of her feet and walked north up the street, then she ran, her hair a bouncing flaxen halo against the fading afternoon light.
I gave Lindsey directions and we drove down Speer Boulevard into downtown. We went almost to Union Station, with its grand beaux arts front and neon roof sign inviting us to “Travel by Train.” Then we made a couple of turns and found the address on Beth’s business card. When I was teaching in Denver a decade before, these old four- and five-story brick warehouses and offices from the late nineteenth century were close to being torn down. Now LoDo, as it was called, was the hottest neighborhood in the city, a wonderful combination of nostalgia, yuppification, and the desire for dot-com office space. Two blocks away, the facade of Coors Field loomed over the street as if it had always been there. There was nothing like this neighborhood in Phoenix.
We parked and walked across the original cobblestones and remnants of railroad tracks to Beth Proudfoot’s gallery. It was nearly four on a Sunday afternoon, but it was open. We stepped into a big, warm-smelling space with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and lots of light. A bell on the door tinkled. I could see a woman in the back-a flash of blond hair-helping a warmly dressed couple. We waited at a distance, grazing from a silver platter with cheeses and fruit, and milling around the sparse displays of what I presumed were artworks by Beth Proudfoot.
My art tastes were eclectic, and if I had money I could really be dangerous. I would add to my tiny collection of Acoma and Santa Clara Indian pottery, start collecting the major impressionists, sprinkle in a few of the postwar moderns, and indulge a taste for Edward Hopper that a recent case had reawakened in me. I didn’t know anything. I knew what I liked.
Beth’s art wouldn’t have worn well with me. A lot of wire, rope, and contractors’ flotsam glued to canvases, in crude wooden frames painted in bright primary colors. The frames were the highlight. Inside the frames, it was like high school vo-tech meets
