Arizona Dreams by Jon Talton

Author:Jon Talton [Talton, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General
ISBN: 9781781850350
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2011-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

24

It’s wisdom as common as a child’s saying: two’s company and three’s a crowd. My personal paradise with Lindsey had become badly crowded by Robin. It was enough overpopulation to make old Malthus turn over in his grave. I’d been mind-fucked by some pros—but Robin was setting a new standard. If she had her way, the congress wouldn’t have stopped with my mind. I knew Lindsey could sense something wrong in my voice from 2,000 miles away. As we talked, I could hear a beep every few seconds—her federal minder—sounding like a supervisor monitoring a sales call. We couldn’t talk about anything real. Was she really working all the time in a highly secure environment? Or was there time off to see Patrick Blair? Could what Robin told me possibly be true? “I’ll be back soon, Dave,” she said, “so don’t fall in love with my sister.” And she laughed her fine, crystal laugh. For just a second, I thought about telling her that Robin had made a pass at me. But then I would want to say more, ask more.

I spent the weekend with my Khrushchev biography, mostly sitting in the study, sometimes with Lester Young and Sinatra on my headphones. How the world had changed—I found myself feeling a little sorry for the Soviet leader. Of course that was hindsight sweetened by the way the Cold War had ended. When K was in power and I was a child, I had lived in mortal fear of nuclear war. There were missile silos around Tucson back then. Reflecting on all that from the safety of my leather chair made the mortal information given me by Robin seem small in comparison.

If I were drafting a biography, I would write, “Mapstone’s family situation became complicated that summer.” I tried to sift this new information at a cool remove: that Patrick Blair was also in Washington with Lindsey; and that Lindsey had a baby, and now would be the mother of a grown man. It might have no more truth than any number of myths that historians are paid to debunk. But I had about the same cool distance as the SUVs tailgating on Central that Monday as I rode the bus downtown. On the sidewalk, a man wearing nothing but dirty cargo shorts walked north with a hand-lettered cardboard sign. It said, “Jesus is Coming.” The weekend had been all anti-climax. I saw Robin as she was coming and going, and both of us acted as if nothing had happened. But the house seemed to lack oxygen, and I was happy to go back to work. I stopped for a mocha at the Starbucks on Adams Street, then walked in the shade of the buildings over to the courthouse. Somehow I wasn’t sweating yet—it was only in the high nineties. So I took the winding steps up to the fourth floor.

Even though the county was chronically short on office space, my end of the building was deserted. It involved some ancient dispute between this and that department over the offices, with neither winning.

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