Cactus Heart | страница 21



“I know.” It was an old discussion, among Arizonans and between Carl and me.

He moved into the office and leaned against the edge of the desk.

“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.