Concrete Desert Read Online Free PDF Page A

detectives, and that was that.”
    “If that was that, why do you remember it?”
    “Oh, an old man’s memory,” he said. “She seemed so pretty, from her pictures. And back in those days, things like that hardly ever happened. It just stayed with me.”
    “Did you feel any pressure from the governor’s office to keep the case quiet?”
    “We were told by our sergeant not to say a word about it. The newspapers never said she was old man McConnico’s niece.”
    I asked him if he remembered any other cases like it, and his face changed a bit, collapsed a little on itself.
    “There were some others around that time.”
    “The Creeper?” I ventured.
    “Whatever,” John Rogers said. “I know that’s what some cops were talking about. Shit, I was just a patrolman. Only Indian on the force. First Indian on the force.”
    I listed the other four body drops and asked why the detectives hadn’t linked the cases.
    “Who the hell knows?” he rasped, angry now. “Who knows why detectives do anything? No offense.”
    “None taken,” I said. “Did you respond to any Creeper calls?”
    “Not that I know of. But there were always prowlers, and some might have been him, if there was a Creeper. Nobody really knew.”
    “What did you think?”
    He looked at me for a long moment. “What did I think? Let me tell you something. When that second girl was killed—Leslie was her name, I think—they found a Mexican who worked for the family gardener, and they thought they had their man. He’d been looking at her through the window at night; we knew that. Took him up to the fourth floor and beat him with saps for an hour, and he was ready to confess to anything. That’s how it was done then. The dicks thought they had solved that one, so how could the cases be linked?”
    “So why isn’t that in the reports?”
    “Because they beat him to death. Internal bleeding, didn’t show up at first. He died in the city jail overnight. They put him in a pauper’s grave, and that was that.”
    ***
    Tuesday night, I stayed home to write an update for Peralta. I also needed to go over my lecture notes for the American history survey I was teaching at Phoenix College—another few bucks for my dwindling bank account. And I wanted to rewire the back porch light. So I got comfort food—chilies rellenos from Ramiro’s—settled behind Grandfather’s old desk in the study off the living room, and booted up the PowerBook. That’s when the doorbell rang.
    Once again, Julie Riding was on my doorstep. This time, she wore a light blue denim shirt and blue jeans. Her hair was pulled back, and she looked startlingly like the Julie I had known twenty years before.
    “I know I’m bothering you,” she said. I said something polite and invited her in.
    Back in the facing chairs, I told Julie what I had found out about her sister, which wasn’t much. Her eyes were dreamy, unfocused, and she seemed drunk.
    “I brought you something,” she said, handing over an envelope. “It has some of Phaedra’s things. Photos, an address book. That kind of thing.”
    In my mind, I was still back in the fifties—with young John Rogers and Opal Harvey and Rebecca Stokes—and the dissonance of being pulled back made me a little cross.
    “Julie, I can’t search for Phaedra,” I said. “I’m barely making a living. I said I’d make some inquiries, and I did. No Jane Does who match her description in the postmortem lab. No body drops…”
    When I looked up, Julie’s face had reddened and she was crying. I instantly felt terrible.
    “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
    “Goddamn you,” she said, sniffling. “You are still angry with me after twenty years.”
    I poured us both a McClelland’s. She lighted a smoke.
    “Do you know what happened after I left you?” she said.
    I made no response.
    “I went to San Diego for a week with Chet, whom you were so threatened by.…”
    “Yeah, he was a wealthy heart surgeon, and I was a