restorations going on up and down Cypress Street. But Grandfather’s house had good bones and wore well.
Our old life was walks in the neighborhood, on the narrow palm-lined streets with the sunset bursting across the horizon, the enchanted metropolitan twilight of the New West. We might stop by Cheuvront for a glass of wine, or the Thursday night event at the Phoenix Art Museum. I had learned to ride a bike on these streets—spent all my young years there. The ghosts were mostly benign.
Lindsey had taken over Grandmother’s gardens and brought them to new glories. I worked intermittently on a history of the great Central Arizona Project, which brought water from the Colorado River to the desert of Phoenix, and I taught a class at Phoenix College every fall. We cooked on the
chiminea
in the backyard and celebrated with cocktails in the courtyard that filtered out the sun on even the worst days of August.
My old friend Lorie Pope, who wrote for the
Republic
and knew me in my restless years, had remarked more than once on the change in me. “I never imagined you living such a domestic life, David,” she had said. I didn’t take it as a criticism.
I pulled Lindsey close and kissed the top of her head. I said, “You didn’t get us into anything. You were just doing your job.”
I added, “Peralta can fix this.” I wasn’t sure if I really believed it. “It might take more than two weeks.” That was closer to reality. What we did for a living was inherently dangerous, and all over the world—Colombia, Sicily, Bosnia—cops were killed as a political statement or a business expense. A New Economy of borderless evil. Another manifestation of Dan Milton’s new dark age.
I felt an involuntary shudder. The absentminded professor lost in his reveries of archival research jolted back to reality. Lindsey held me closer as the sun slipped behind the mountains.
She said, “I know these people. This will never be over.”
Chapter Twelve
Friday, eight days since George Weed’s body was found and a week after the shooting in Scottsdale, I was in my office on the fourth floor of the old courthouse. I was leaning back in my chair, feet up on the big wooden desk. Downtown sounds were filtering through the expansive, arched windows—this place had been built to last in 1929. I was thinking about Lindsey. Across the room was the black-and-white photo of Carl Hayden, sheriff of Maricopa County a century before. Sheriff Hayden looked back at me across time from beneath his Stetson. The future senator from Arizona had met his wife at Stanford, I recalled. She had never been threatened by the Russian mafia. When a knock came on the pebbled glass, I called out that the door was open, and the security guard stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
His name was Carl, too, and he had been a highway patrolman for thirty years before retiring. But he had a white pencil-thin mustache and an erect bearing that always made me envision him in the uniform of a British army officer at a remote post. After exchanging pleasantries, I was about to ask him what he knew about the John Pilgrim murder, when he said, “This is my last day, Mapstone.”
“You don’t want to be bothered protecting the sheriff’s office historian anymore?” I beckoned him to sit, and he did.
“It’s been fun to know you, Mapstone. But Marcia and I are leaving Phoenix. We’ve got a little piece of land in southern Arizona, about an hour from Tucson. We’ve built a house.”
Sometimes I get stir crazy, alone with my records and my idle thoughts. I was glad for the company, and made obligatory small talk about Carl’s milestone, wishing him well. I’d probably talked to him every day I came into the courthouse over four years, but I never knew he and his wife were thinking of moving.
“It’s this damned place, Mapstone,” he said. “It’s been ruined. Too many people, too many cars. They’ve paved over the citrus groves and the Japanese flower
Our old life was walks in the neighborhood, on the narrow palm-lined streets with the sunset bursting across the horizon, the enchanted metropolitan twilight of the New West. We might stop by Cheuvront for a glass of wine, or the Thursday night event at the Phoenix Art Museum. I had learned to ride a bike on these streets—spent all my young years there. The ghosts were mostly benign.
Lindsey had taken over Grandmother’s gardens and brought them to new glories. I worked intermittently on a history of the great Central Arizona Project, which brought water from the Colorado River to the desert of Phoenix, and I taught a class at Phoenix College every fall. We cooked on the
chiminea
in the backyard and celebrated with cocktails in the courtyard that filtered out the sun on even the worst days of August.
My old friend Lorie Pope, who wrote for the
Republic
and knew me in my restless years, had remarked more than once on the change in me. “I never imagined you living such a domestic life, David,” she had said. I didn’t take it as a criticism.
I pulled Lindsey close and kissed the top of her head. I said, “You didn’t get us into anything. You were just doing your job.”
I added, “Peralta can fix this.” I wasn’t sure if I really believed it. “It might take more than two weeks.” That was closer to reality. What we did for a living was inherently dangerous, and all over the world—Colombia, Sicily, Bosnia—cops were killed as a political statement or a business expense. A New Economy of borderless evil. Another manifestation of Dan Milton’s new dark age.
I felt an involuntary shudder. The absentminded professor lost in his reveries of archival research jolted back to reality. Lindsey held me closer as the sun slipped behind the mountains.
She said, “I know these people. This will never be over.”
Chapter Twelve
Friday, eight days since George Weed’s body was found and a week after the shooting in Scottsdale, I was in my office on the fourth floor of the old courthouse. I was leaning back in my chair, feet up on the big wooden desk. Downtown sounds were filtering through the expansive, arched windows—this place had been built to last in 1929. I was thinking about Lindsey. Across the room was the black-and-white photo of Carl Hayden, sheriff of Maricopa County a century before. Sheriff Hayden looked back at me across time from beneath his Stetson. The future senator from Arizona had met his wife at Stanford, I recalled. She had never been threatened by the Russian mafia. When a knock came on the pebbled glass, I called out that the door was open, and the security guard stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
His name was Carl, too, and he had been a highway patrolman for thirty years before retiring. But he had a white pencil-thin mustache and an erect bearing that always made me envision him in the uniform of a British army officer at a remote post. After exchanging pleasantries, I was about to ask him what he knew about the John Pilgrim murder, when he said, “This is my last day, Mapstone.”
“You don’t want to be bothered protecting the sheriff’s office historian anymore?” I beckoned him to sit, and he did.
“It’s been fun to know you, Mapstone. But Marcia and I are leaving Phoenix. We’ve got a little piece of land in southern Arizona, about an hour from Tucson. We’ve built a house.”
Sometimes I get stir crazy, alone with my records and my idle thoughts. I was glad for the company, and made obligatory small talk about Carl’s milestone, wishing him well. I’d probably talked to him every day I came into the courthouse over four years, but I never knew he and his wife were thinking of moving.
“It’s this damned place, Mapstone,” he said. “It’s been ruined. Too many people, too many cars. They’ve paved over the citrus groves and the Japanese flower
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