“Nothing personal. I like my privacy out here. I lived in Phoenix for nearly forty years, and I was happy to get away from it. My grandparents were pioneers. They farmed down by Seventh Avenue and Broadway. The pioneer stock is gone now. Down here, I feel safe. Until they pave this over, too. God willing, I’ll be dead by then. I know who you are. You’re the history guy. I’ve seen you on TV. Guess it makes sense you’d be the one to find Pilgrim’s badge. Makes sense. He floated ten miles in the Grand Canal, then got sucked into a lateral. You know what a lateral is, right? The small ditches that flow out of the big canals, take the water to the fields. Water does strange things to a body.”
The small woman sat across from me in a room with Navajo rugs on the floor, faded 1960s space age furniture covered with colorful drapings, and an aggressive clutter of newspapers, magazines, and clothing. A fat white cat watched me from a nearby chair. The woman’s voice tended to squeakiness, and on some vowel sounds her throat constricted as if saying the words hurt. When she laughed, she covered her mouth with her hand. Her shirtsleeves were too short. We both sipped iced tea from old jelly jars. Hardin was a talker now that the shotgun was back in the closet. Unlike Vince Renzetti, Hardin had no family photos displayed. Instead, the room was dominated by unframed paintings that crowded against each other on walls. Most of the canvases were watercolors, landscapes from familiar places in Arizona, the kind of sunsets and mountain views that sold well with the tourists in Tubac. I am no art critic-the work seemed competent enough illustration, but only slightly above what you might find on the walls of a motel in the Southwest.
“The canals looked like that.” She pointed to a large canvas showing a reedy, tree-shaded waterway, with a blurred dark cluster of picnickers on a bank in the distance ahead of a stormy sky.
“You know, children used to swim in the canals in the Valley. The laterals were all open, not covered with streets and concrete like now. They had trees and grass along the banks. It was very beautiful. People had boats. When I was in high school, my buddies would drive their cars along the banks and pull us on water skis. I read that Pilgrim’s hat floated all the way with the body. Isn’t that strange…”
“Do you collect art?” I asked.
“I paint it,” she said. “It’s not much. It calms me. I sell a few. Anyway, you remember 1948, the year he was killed? Of course you can’t. You’re too young. They were having UFO scares then. I saw a girl in a bikini for the first time. It looked very scandalous. The FBI must not like you. Looking into their precious closed case.” She made this segue without any change of expression. “How’d you pull that off, Mapstone? They fought me for every scrap of paper. I bet they didn’t give a damn about John Pilgrim when he was alive. But dead, he was their property. His murder was egg on their faces…”
“Ms. Hardin…” I tried to break in.
“Have you ever shot anyone, Mapstone?” she asked.
“Let’s talk about the Pilgrim case,” I said.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “You’re asking the questions here.” Laugh. Cover her mouth. She folded her small hands under her arms. “You sound like them.”
“Them?”
“The FBI.”
I asked her why she used the word murder. “The FBI says that Pilgrim killed himself.”
“I thought you’d seen the files, Mapstone,” she said. “The cops didn’t find any evidence of suicide. No note. No powder burns or flash debris on the face. Who shoots himself and then falls into a canal? And then drives his car back to downtown Phoenix. Did you know the FBI sent two hundred agents to Phoenix after John Pilgrim was murdered? And they stayed for three months?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s a lot of manpower for a suicide. It was murder. And they always knew it was murder. That’s why they covered it up for fifty years.”
“I don’t understand.”
The small old face seemed all expressive eyes. “The Outfit killed John Pilgrim. The Chicago mob. It’s obvious.”
“Why would the FBI cover that up?”
“Hoover never wanted to go after the Mafia. What kind of historian are you? Hoover denied there was a Mafia. And no wonder, they knew he was a homosexual. They knew his lover was the deputy director. This was a different time. Nobody called them ‘gay.’ He was queer, and if the public had found out, Hoover would have been ruined. So they made an accommodation, Hoover and the mobsters. He went after communists, and left the Mafioso alone. They even paid for Hoover and his boyfriend to go gambling at Del Mar. It was a cozy little setup.”
“Until Pilgrim upset the balance…”
“Something like that. He didn’t have clean hands, either. But Pilgrim didn’t play the game. The Outfit was moving in, taking over the rackets from the old boys who ran Phoenix. Maybe Pilgrim allied himself with the old boys, the city commissioner Duke Simms. Duke ran the prostitution racket on the south side. Do you know a cop killed another one, right in the police station? It was all about money from the rackets.”
That police station had been in my courthouse.
Hardin continued, “Pilgrim was a long way from Washington, making his own rules. It was a corrupt little town. Maybe he wanted a cut of the action. Maybe he was doing his duty. You know he was warned-that’s the way the mob operates. Anyway, somehow Pilgrim got crosswise with the Outfit, and they killed him. I can imagine how it happened. They lured him somewhere, out in the farmland by the canal. They probably made him think he was going to meet a witness who could help him. Then when he shows up, he gets a carload of goons instead. They shoot him and toss him into the canal. End of problem.”
“And Hoover wanted it covered up, because they were blackmailing him?”
My face must have held a skeptical expression. She said, “You probably think Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman.”
I looked around the small room. It didn’t look like the home of a conspiracy nut. I’m not sure what I would have expected: black curtains on the windows, autopsy photos on the walls? Instead, benign paintings for the tourists, if anyone bought one. What was I buying? Everybody had a theory about John Pilgrim. For the feds, and for Harrison Wolfe, it was a suicide. Richard Pilgrim suspected that his father’s vices did him in. Renzetti was convinced that the Soviet agent Dimitri killed Pilgrim. Why was A.C. Hardin’s theory any worse than the others? Lack of sleep was catching up with me, and my back hurt from the mushy old sofa I was sitting in. Hardin’s cat watched me mistrustfully. I let Hardin talk, squeaking out her vowels.
She said the case had always interested her because her family had known the Pilgrim family, back in the 1940s. She grew up hearing about the death. After Lorie Pope wrote her first Pilgrim retrospective, in the late 1970s, Hardin began researching the mystery on her own. The county archives and newspaper accounts provided some information. She filed for the FBI report under the Freedom of Information Act, and was refused. That only stoked her interest, and caused her to study the Bureau, as well. She tracked down some of the original detectives who had investigated the case and none of them believed the suicide theory, either. These were the deputies and city officers whose names I recognized from the old reports. They convinced her of the Outfit theory. Unfortunately for me, those detectives had passed on long before. She became obsessed with the case, she said, and was a pest about it with Lorie Pope. “I had a lot of time on my hands, I guess,” she said. “The Pilgrim mystery became my hobby. I guess if I had been twenty years younger, I would have become a cop.”
“So why would Pilgrim’s badge end up on a homeless man?”
“Is that where you found it?” she asked.
I told her about George Weed, about the badge found sewn in the old jacket. I showed her a photo of Weed, and she slipped on a pair of gnarled wire-frame reading glasses to examine it. Oddly, the glasses brought out the girlishness of her face. If it were true that the Outfit murdered Pilgrim, would they have taken his credentials and badge? Did they fall into the canal? Did Pilgrim leave them in his car, to begin their decades-long journey to a swimming pool in Maryvale?
“Maybe the man just found it,” she said. “Sometimes things are that simple. I don’t know.”