Cactus Heart - [11]

“I see you found the Yarnell twins Monday night.”

He pointed to the copy of the Republic sitting on my desk. Lorie Pope had a Page One story on the discovery of the skeletons. It included photos of Peralta and me, as well as historic shots of young Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell, looking premonitorily unhappily at the camera. I didn’t feel guilty about giving the story to her-we had been helping each other for twenty years, since she was a cub reporter and I was a rookie deputy thrown together on a long-ago crime scene.

“It was a hell of a case,” Carl said. “I was here when it happened.”

“You would have been…?”

“I was born the same year they finished this building,” he said firmly. “That was 1929. I was 11 years old when the kidnapping happened. Nothing like that had ever happened in Phoenix. Those two poor little boys…”

I politely motioned for him to sit down, but he ignored me and kept standing. “It was all my parents talked about at the time,” he said. “The Lindbergh kidnapping was still fresh in people’s minds, you know. And everybody also felt so sorry for the kids’ grandfather, Old Man Yarnell. The kidnapping just killed him. Died of a broken heart, they said.”

“I know he died in 1942,” I said. “Did you ever run across him?”

“Oh, my goodness yes,” Carl said. “A living legend, that’s what he was. Phoenix was a nice little city, but we still had some cowboys and Indians. Real ones. The West wasn’t completely gone.” The words sent a little stab of melancholy through me.

“And Hayden Yarnell…” Carl went on to recount the gunfight at Gila City. Then he told of a scary confrontation that he, Carl, had near there as a young highway patrolman in Eloy back in the 1950s. I tried to steer him back to Hayden Yarnell.

“I knew the man!” Carl said. I sat up a little. “Not personally, I mean, but I worked a summer as a bellhop at the Westward Ho, and Mr. Yarnell kept a room there and would give me dollar tips-a lot of money in the Depression.”

“Wait, Carl. I thought Yarnell had a mansion of some kind. He was living in a hotel?”

“He did have a grand house. Sat on a bluff down by South Mountain. Burned in the early forties, as I recall. But he kept a suite at the Ho. Most of the big shots in Phoenix did.”

Carl went off on a story about young Barry Goldwater. I let him talk himself out, and after a while he went away. The tragedy of lonely retired cops. I told myself again I wouldn’t end up that way.

***

I wrote a list of people to interview, made a couple of calls, and had started a timeline on the kidnapping when I heard footsteps coming back down the hall. Some days the only way to disengage from Carl was to feign a meeting over at Madison Street.

But it wasn’t Carl. It was a cowgirl.

She looked to be in her early thirties, with reddish-brown hair flowing out from the brim of her hat. Large, brown eyes were set nicely atop high cheekbones in a Midwestern pretty face. Her mouth was wide and dug dimples as she smiled. Her light-blue denim shirt and jeans fit her well enough for me to indulge in several introspective lustful moments. She leaned against the door like we were old friends. Then she crossed the room with a confident stride and shook my hand, a firm shake. I was standing now, and noticed she was tall, maybe five-ten, maybe more.

“I’m Gretchen,” she said, her voice holding the unaccented tones of the West Coast. “Gretchen Goodheart. I’m with the city archaeologist’s office. I’m fresh out of business cards.”

I invited her to sit. “There is such a thing as a city archaeologist’s office?”

“Yes there is,” she said, running a hand across the stack of history books on my desk. “You read books.”

“And I’m housebroken.”

She sat in one of the straight-back chairs, instantly making it a more interesting piece of furniture. She took off her cowboy hat and let her hair fall freely. Not a trace of hat hair. “This city is built on top of its history, as you well know,” she said. “Rose from its ashes. We work with the Indian sites, the ruins and the canals. But we’re also interested in the city’s early years after modern settlement. We’ve found lots of artifacts during the building of the ballpark.” She gestured toward the window. “It’s being built where the city’s old Chinatown stood.”

“So how can I help Gretchen Goodheart of the city’s archaeologist’s office?”

“It’s how can we help you,” she said. “Sounds like you had quite an adventure the other night. That must really hurt.” She indicated my black eye, touching her cheek with an elegant finger. Then she frowned for a moment and the dimples went away; her face was wonderfully expressive. “Didn’t Lieutenant Hawkins call you?”

“Nope,” I said. “But sometimes it takes a while for word to get from the PD to the sheriff’s office.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “He said it would be all right if I offered our help.”

“We’re pretty lonely up here on the fourth floor, ma’am,” I said. “And happy for help from an archaeologist.”

“Actually,” she crossed a long, denim-encased leg, “my undergraduate minor was in history. I was a junkie about the Old West. I’ve got every book on the subject I can find. I even read your book,