I said, “What if we’re being set up?”
“Then it’s better to take the initiative.”
“What if we’re being set up by going to San Diego?”
“I told you, you’re not going to see Patty.”
When I lapsed into silence and he realized his effort to piss me off had failed, he spoke again.
“Whoever did this would expect us to give a full report to the police and lay low in Phoenix. That would be logical. So we’ll do what they don’t expect. All you have to do is your history thing.”
This was what he used to say when he would barge into my office in the old Court House. It became a longstanding joke. But I blew. “What history?!” It was amazing how his luxurious cab absorbed the sound of my tantrum. “The dead man in front of our office didn’t have any history! This isn’t a historical case.”
As usual, my outburst failed to move him. In as soft a voice as he could manage, “Mapstone, everybody has a history. You need to find it. ‘The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know.’ Saint Paul said that.”
“Harry Truman said that.”
“Same difference.”
I resisted the familiar urge to reach over and try to strangle him, even if I would lose the fight and he would never even swerve out of his lane.
He said, “We have a name, D.O.B., Social Security Number and photo…”
“Right, and she’s a sweet girl who went to Chaparral High in Scottsdale, was a student at San Diego State, worked part-time at the Nordstrom perfume counter at Horton Plaza. She had a boyfriend and somehow she ended up at Larry Zisman’s condo on the night of April twenty-second.”
“See how much you know?” He lazily draped his arms over the steering wheel despite the tangled road we climbed.
I slumped in my seat. “If any of it is true.”
“David.” He never called me David. “You have a gift for history. I never thought you’d be happy as a professor. You’re a cop down in your bones. But you’re a historian, too. You look at a case the same way a historian studies the secondary sources and published material on a subject. You talk to the primary sources, read their recollections. Then you apply a historian’s skepticism and diligence, come up with new interpretations, dig out fresh facts, add context, shine the light in a different direction seeking the truth. It’s what you do.”
It shut me up. Even made me feel better about myself for the moment.
When we crested Laguna Summit, he spoke again.
“Here’s something else to consider, Mapstone. We don’t know why Felix was shot to hell. Maybe it was because of this girl, or something else in his life that made him carry that Desert Eagle that was on the car seat.”