I was on the freeway by nine that morning, making good time going south while in the opposite direction the army of suburbanites from the East Valley and Ahwatukee-the cops and firefighters call it “All-White-Tukee”-crept toward the city. As much as I loved riding trains and trolleys in Portland and San Francisco, in spread-out Phoenix I sometimes needed to drive in order to clear my head. After Bobby had left the neighborhood hours before, I had gone out to the Olds, put down the top, slid in a CD from Frank Sinatra’s Columbia years, then I had driven slowly through darkened city streets.
Walt Whitman’s “huge and thoughtful night” was all around, but Frank sang “One More for My Baby.” “Let’s just leave,” my baby had said, as we lay nude, legs entangled, surrounded by barracks walls, and beyond them armed guards. “Let’s just leave and start over, in a wonderful place. The government will have to resettle us, give us new identities. Can you leave Phoenix, Dave?”
“Can you leave your garden, Lindsey?”
“It’s your home, Dave.”
“I came home by accident. I had to find you…”
“I found you.” She laughed. “You were too shy.” It was nice to hear her laugh again. She said, “We can do anything we want. We can make a new future.”
Our future would have to wait. I let the towers of Central Avenue sparkle down on me while I tried to figure out why the FBI was digging through my office, with Kate Vare in tow and with Peralta as tour guide. Too bad for them: most of my Pilgrim notes were in my old briefcase, sitting next to me on the car seat. Maybe Peralta was looking after my interests-but if that were true, why didn’t he call me? Peralta had gone from badgering me with ultimatums to ignoring me while…what? It was enough to make you listen to talk radio and believe the conspiracy kooks who called in.
I let the big car take me through the forlorn streets of the inner city. People were sleeping in vacant lots and on street corners. They could have been mistaken for piles of rubbish. I idly looked for the woman named Karen. I had fresh questions about George Weed and his precious jacket. The Reverend Card’s building looked dark and shut down. Prostitutes beckoned me from the gloomy sidewalks of Van Buren Street. I turned north, past streets that reminded me of a small safe town sheltered by citrus groves and pristine mountains: Mariposa, Cheery Lynn, Glenrosa, Montecito. A sign painted decades ago pointed to “Susan’s Apartments.” Gangbangers looked me over, seeing if I might be an easy victim. I drove and brooded, and that finally led me to another drive, this one out of town.
Once I got past Green Valley, the retiree tract houses and golf courses gave way to clean air and blessed emptiness. It was the West of my youth, rather than the overcrowded West of my adulthood. By noon, I had reached Tubac, the storied town north of the Mexican border. The land east rolled out to the massive Santa Rita Mountains. On my right was another rugged range, which I recalled as the Tumacacori. They were not my familiar Phoenix mountains. The history lay deep and fertile here, the conquistadors and padres and Piman peoples. Silver strikes and gunslingers and the coming of the iron horse. Off the interstate, I felt the high-desert air as cool tickling around my eyes.
My journeys of late were tying history into neat circles: San Francisco was founded by Spanish colonists from Tubac. In 1774, they were led by Col. Juan Bautista de Anza across El Camino del Diablo, the Devil’s Road, west to California. The great world city that I had enjoyed lately was seeded by the little Arizona town sitting quietly off Interstate 19. Neat circles except in the history I was trying to understand.
I was down to playing hunches, and remembering tips. I remembered that Lorie Pope had told me I would find A.C. Hardin, crime buff, obsessed by the Pilgrim case, here in Tubac. In the chaos of the past month, I had forgotten Hardin. But I was a little surprised that he hadn’t called me after the media exposure the case had received. Maybe it took awhile for the news to reach Tubac.
The place was not “done” like a Taos or Sedona, but it had aspirations. Art galleries lined the old dusty streets, a subdivision uglied up the south edge of town and the local paper promised rising property values and development. Tubac had survived 400 years of history, often bloody, but I found myself wondering if it could survive the Arizona growth machine. I asked directions at a coffee shop and used a little bridge to cross the Santa Cruz River. There was water in the river. A dirt road diverged through a thick stand of cottonwoods, then rose up a slight hill covered in brittlebush. Through the brush, I could make out a shack-it was no more than that. Four unpainted adobe walls, a window, a door, and a dilapidated roof. A rusty mailbox sat sideways on an old railroad tie, with “Hardin” painted in black letters. It looked like a scene out of one of those “forgotten West” books. But it made me feel uneasy. I was a man with ambiguous relations with the FBI and maybe with the sheriff of Maricopa County. My relations with the Russian mafia were fatal. I came unannounced.
As it turned out, A.C. Hardin was a she. Later I learned that A.C. stood for Amelia Caroline, and she cared for neither name. At that moment she didn’t care for the tall stranger walking toward her house, and her displeasure took the form of a double-barreled shotgun aimed at me. She was twenty feet away but the barrels looked only slightly smaller than a pair of howitzers. I felt a huge pool of sweat gather on the small of my back. I wondered whether I stood a better chance if I identified myself as David the historian, or Deputy Mapstone the cop.
“I know who the hell you are,” she shouted. Her voice had a little trill-did I detect just a hint of hysteria in the vocal cords? I noticed her finger was inside the trigger guard, putting me one spasm of her knuckle from kingdom come.
I said something about putting down the gun and talking, or maybe something about me being happy to turn around, walk back to my car, and drive away. I forget exactly. Shotguns have that effect on me.
“I don’t want any more Maricopa County, Phoenix, bullshit!”
And who wouldn’t agree with that? Maricopa County, Phoenix, bullshit had led me to the doorstep of a crazy woman with a shotgun. She didn’t know the half of it.
“Don’t you know there’s been a break in the Pilgrim case?” I said hurriedly.
The shotgun came down. She stared at me. Then she turned and walked into the little adobe house. I heard her say, “I don’t care about that.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t see it on the TV.” I walked slowly toward the house.
Her small face crinkled. “I gave up TV, especially the Phoenix stations. Too depressing. Every night it’s three fatal wrecks, a child molestation, and a shooting. Every night.”
“Lorie Pope at the Republic says you were interested in the Pilgrim case for years,” I called into the doorway. I let my hand rest on the butt of the Python in its holster, just in case the shotgun urge hit again.
She said nothing and I called to her again. Arizona was full of eccentrics. Bikers, mountain men, cowboy wanna-bes. The state with freaks of all flavors. Young misfits without the energy or originality to get to Seattle or New York. Old grudge-holders who rolled West until there was nothing left but California, and the money ran out. Californians who were too weird for the Golden State. Street-corner mumblers. Neighborhood junk collectors. And, of course, crime buffs. They obsessed about police work. A few of them were professional confessors, who claimed to have committed any high-profile crime of the moment.
“I gave up on that,” she said. She reappeared in the doorway without the shotgun. She was a slight old woman wearing jeans and a long-sleeved Madras shirt. Her face had been plowed into a thousand furrows by the sun and the world, but she had naturally high cheekbones and large, pretty eyes. They were green eyes and provided the only color in her face. In fact, there was something oddly girlish about her, beginning with her hair, which was still long and straight, parted in the middle like a 19-year-old’s but turned to the color of a winter river.
“Pilgrim killed himself, right?” she said.
“Do you believe that?”
“Why not? That’s what the FBI always said.”
“We found Pilgrim’s badge,” I said, watching her eyes take the news in.
After a long pause, she said, “Then I guess you’d better come in.”