The Long Fall by Lynn Kostoff Page B

papers. He was handed a pen.
    After Limbe left the force, nobody else, not even the private security companies, would touch him.
    That’s what he’d become. Untouchable.
    For a month, he’d averaged eight pieces of hate mail a day. He’d hoped for more.
    It had taken a long time for Limbe to find out the name of the guy with the jumper cables and white pickup. The brass had put a tight lid on the paperwork for the case. Limbe was patient. He waited and quietly asked around, and he eventually hooked up with a few right-thinking white guys on the force who were willing to do a favor for someone who’d once been one of their own.
    As soon as he got the name, Limbe set out to kill Coates, only to discover Coates was doing time in Perryville Correctional after having been popped with a tractor-trailer load of black-market saguaros.
    So Aaron Limbe had to wait.
    He was untouchable. While he waited, he began to understand exactly what that meant.
    He snaps to. He’s not sure how long he’s been parked at the curb watching the lights on the blue-and-white strobing the front windows of the dry-cleaning shop. He feels the beginnings of a headache blooming at the base of his skull. He climbs out of his car carrying two of Ray Harp’s metallic blue three-piece suits and crosses the street. He recognizes one of the Tempe cops, a guy named Henderson, and strolls into the middle of the crime scene.
    Henderson tips back his cap and scratches his forehead. “Come on, Aaron, you know the drill.”
    “I’m just curious is all,” Limbe says. “What you got, a straight armed? I don’t see any blood.” A few feet away a woman with dark blond hair is giving a statement to a fresh-deck rookie.
    “You shouldn’t be here,” Henderson says, still going at his forehead.
    “I know.” Limbe smiles. He watches the woman, listens to the spin she puts on her words. He unwraps a breath mint, slips it on his tongue.
    “You can bring those back tomorrow,” Henderson says, pointing at the suits.
    “Who’s the Gash?” Limbe asks, nodding in the blond’s direction.
    Henderson shakes his head and sighs. “The owner’s wife. She was working the register.”
    “She’s nervous,” Limbe says.
    “Of course, she’s nervous,” Henderson says. “She just got held up.”
    The rookie cop takes everything the woman says down. He’s polite and attentive. Limbe smiles. She’s nervous all right. But not because someone stuck a gun in her face. Aaron Limbe’s been around enough crime scenes to read a witness.
    “What did you say her name was?” he asks.
    “Coates. Evelyn Coates,” Henderson says.
    Limbe takes in the last name and smiles and listens to the rookie read back her description of the perp. She nods one too many times.
    Limbe considers telling Henderson that his primary witness is lying through her teeth.
    He doesn’t though.
    Instead, he files it away.

TWELVE
     
    J immy wishes he’d had a say in where he was to meet Evelyn. He’s got this thing about Scottsdale. The place gets on his nerves. It’s one of those peculiar American cities, like Key West, that have mortgaged their history with charm. The place started out in the late 1800s as nothing more than a bunch of tents and adobe houses that catered to lung cases from back East, but by the 1930s, Scottsdale was promising more than cures, branching out into recreation and elegance, the tents giving way to high-profile hotels and rustic resorts promising desert vistas; and with more big bucks pouring in from back East, Scottsdale began billing itself as the “West’s Most Western Town,” continually feeding the myth and enlarging its allure, reinventing itself to the tune of 183,000 square miles, the place now a trendy hybrid of the biggest lies from the Old and New West, the tourists and locals, as if by unspoken agreement, conspiring to hold each other hostage to its fabled charm. Everything in Scottsdale had the feel of something italicized, the place doubling as