“Oh, David, please. You do the tough cop act so badly…although you seemed to protect yourself well enough when those two hoodlums assaulted you a few months back.”
“Peralta is right. You’ve paid off a spy in the department.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I just hear things, keep up with the people I care about.”
“How can I get off that list? Or, maybe given your reputation, forget that last request.”
“I was talking about the Hayden Yarnell case,” he went on. “It was one of your most remarkable. The grandsons of the famous rancher, kidnapped in the Great Depression and disappeared. Dr. Mapstone’s greatest triumph, I would say.”
“I remember it.”
“And whatever happened to that lovely young woman you were seeing then, while you and Miss Lindsey were on the ‘outs’?”
“I don’t know,” I said, too hurriedly.
“She seemed very sensual, very sure of herself—so American,” he said. “Gretchen, I think her name was.”
I just kept walking.
“Ah, well, I can understand you choosing Miss Lindsey, once she had tired of, what should we call it, ‘testing the waters’ with that handsome young detective. And you conceive yourself too American, too upright, to have taken Miss Gretchen as your mistress. I must confess, I might have had a hard time choosing between the two…”
“Bobby, what is your fucking point?”
“I’m sorry I upset you,” he said, lightly touching my sleeve. “I just hoped that you were writing about the Yarnell case.”
“Rest your worried mind,” I snarled.
We walked in silence for a moment, then he said, “I am not one to seek anything to which I am not entitled. But I did save your life, David.”
“You did.”
“So the one time I really did shoot someone in the sheriff’s jurisdiction was to save his best friend.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue and teeth. By that time, we had reached the bus stop.
“Used any ice picks lately?” I asked.
“Such an imagination,” he laughed. “Where are you parked?”
“I took the bus, Bobby.”
“Very responsible.” He applauded softly. “Soon we’ll have light rail, and almost be like a real city. Well, I must be off.” He insisted on shaking hands again. “I don’t want to make the class wait. I’m teaching this semester, in the executive MBA program.”
>
“Goodbye, Bobby.”
He walked back into the campus. Then he turned, as if he had forgotten something. He said, “Do be careful out in the desert, Dr. Mapstone. And I can’t wait to read my chapter in your book.”
12
Counter-factual history. It’s a fancy way of imagining things—say, if America had stayed isolationist during World War II and the Nazis had won, what kind of world would we be living in? Counter-factual history: What if Bobby Hamid had not appeared three years ago when a bad guy was about to put a bullet in my brain? My world would have been over. Bobby was a killer, and I owed him my life. What if I had stayed with Gretchen? No contest there—although why did I feel the flush of guilt over remembering her? It was a guilt that probably informed my intense dislike of Patrick Blair. Lindsey and I weren’t together then. She had run away from me, remember? After we were back together, we hadn’t compared notes about our time apart. We weren’t the kind of couple who shared every detail, right down to the anatomical specifics, of our past lovers.
A future with Gretchen would have been impossible—she lived too many lies, carried too much darkness beneath them. It had been a crazy time in my life, and not surprisingly, the liaison with Gretchen had carried all the thrill of the temporary and the dangerous. What if Lindsey hadn’t come back, come to my door that Christmas Eve? It was a history too bleak to contemplate. That winter of Gretchen and Lindsey—that was a story to tell another day.
The bus was passing the tattered oleanders of State Hospital, where the Trunk Murderess escaped twice, when my cell phone rang. The readout glared peralta.
“Where are you?” he demanded, with no preliminaries.
“On a bus.”