But those assumptions had been based on another Arizona, before millions of retirees and Midwesterners had collided with the huge wave of illegal immigration before the big housing crash. It was a bad time to be a Hispanic running for office and Peralta lost, even though he was a life-long Republican. There would be no Governor Peralta in today’s Arizona. He took the defeat stoically. Instead of moving on to any of the lucrative consulting offers that had come his way, or encouraging the feeler to become San Antonio police chief, he set up shop as a private investigator. And here I was, too, as his partner. He was my oldest friend.
Our office was shabby compared with the places Felix Smith must have been accustomed to, based on his suit. We were on Grand Avenue, the bleakest thoroughfare in a city with abundant competition for the title, in what had once been a little motel, an “auto court.” Most of the motel had been bulldozed long ago-Phoenix loved clearing land and leaving it that way. The new mayor was trying to encourage art projects and gardens on vacant lots, but I wondered if the effort would do much good.
Robin had found a 1948 post card of the motel: a charming affair with half a dozen buildings, each with two rooms, a swimming pool, lawns, and palm trees. All that was left was the former front office-a small, square adobe with enough room for our two desks, some file cabinets, and places for clients to sit. Except for our comfortable chairs, the décor was spare. Recently, Peralta had added a black leather sofa.
We were barely moved in. Peralta had sprung for a bookcase for me, but I hadn’t put a single volume in it. Boxes of correspondence, all for Peralta, sat behind my desk. Speaking requests for him came almost every day. We really needed a secretary. Behind the office were a bathroom and a storeroom, the latter having been remodeled and fortified by Peralta for gun storage. Robin had named it the Danger Room. We each had a key to it, but it was mostly Peralta’s playroom. A super-sized Trane air conditioning system had been installed.
Outside, sixty-year-old asphalt was the best you got for parking. It was as much potholes and the crumbled remains of petroleum products melted and reformed, summer after summer, as it was a parking lot. A carport next to the office was for our vehicles. Mine barely fit thanks to the size of Peralta’s extended-cab pickup truck. The only other improvements had been a heavy-grade fence with a section that rolled across the driveway to seal things up tight when we were gone and restoring the old motel sign of a cowboy throwing a lariat. The neon was new and blinked happily into the night. And some well-concealed security cameras. We both had made enemies over the years.