City of Dark Corners, Jon Talton [top 10 best books of all time TXT] 📗

his investigations to underestimate him, which was an advantage. But the results he got made him enemies. All the years of going through documents and sitting at a typewriter also cost him his fighter pilot eyesight. As a result, he wore black, horn-rimmed glasses. Women liked him.

Then the bosses suddenly moved him to cover the Legislature. That had been a year ago. The demands of investigative reporting cost him his first marriage. People who didn’t know him well believed he was happier to be out of the pressure cooker and the regular threatening phone calls and letters that came with his old beat. He stopped his ritual of putting scotch tape where the GTO’s hood met the fender—if the tape was broken, someone might have tampered with the engine, even placed a bomb there. Or that was what he told his friends and colleagues.

In fact, he hated the change. He was mostly bored. Nor did the capitol job keep him out of controversy. When the governor named the wealthy rancher Freeman Burke, Sr., to the state Racing Commission in 1977, Page wrote several stories on Burke’s unsavory past and how he had been the biggest contributor to the governor’s campaign. The Legislature refused to approve Burke for the board that regulated, among other things, dog racing.

I would learn later that “Front Page” was quietly working on a project that would get him back as the Gazette’s top investigative reporter. The week before, he had run into a colleague at a grocery store. He told her he was wrapping up “the story that will bring it all together, blow the lid off this town, finally.” Page was not given to bragging or superlatives. I would also learn that he was keeping a sheaf of sensitive material, too hot to keep in his desk at the capitol bureau or in the Gazette newsroom, much less unattended in his apartment. He moved it around, to hiding places only he knew.

He was on his way to meet a source at the Clarendon House Hotel in Midtown Phoenix, a couple of blocks north of Park Central shopping center. Buzz Page didn’t know what to make of Mark Reid. He was cautious. Reid was an enforcer for his old nemesis, Ned Warren. Page’s stories helped put Warren in prison on multiple counts of land fraud and bribery. This after years of well-documented crimes and foot-dragging by the County Attorney. Another red flag was that Reid hung out at the dog tracks. Page was convinced that pressure and threats from RaceCo had forced his bosses to send him to the Siberia of the capitol bureau.

On the other hand, Reid promised Page a piece of information that was critical to his big story. If he never talked to riffraff, he wouldn’t have half as many sources.

Their relationship went back two weeks, when a source of Page’s at the courts connected him with Reid. They met at The Islands, a bar on Seventh Street in Uptown. Reid said he had evidence that would connect organized crime and RaceCo to prominent local leaders: Congressman Sam Steiger, Senator Barry Goldwater, and Harry Rosenzweig, a long-time Republican boss and businessman. Page was skeptical. Steiger had been a good source on his land-fraud stories. Goldwater had always been friendly.

But his gut told him to see what Reid had to say. That meeting provided little. Reid said he needed time. He would contact the reporter when a man from Los Angeles visited. The mystery man had the details Reid had dangled. More than that, Reid seemed clued in when Page asked vague questions about his current story. Not enough to show his hand, but to elicit more information from Reid than the reporter gave away. The strand seemed promising.

The call came that morning. “Meet me at the Clarendon.”

Page probably avoided the straight shot north. That held too many bad memories. Not long before, his girlfriend Cindy had been killed by a train at the railroad crossing west of the six-points of Grand Avenue, Nineteenth Avenue, and McDowell Road. Friends said he stayed away from that intersection as if it were radioactive. They didn’t know how he continued to work, he was so grief stricken over her death.

Instead, he went east to downtown, ran a quick errand, and then, back in the car, drove north on Third Avenue. It was a little more than a mile and a half to the Clarendon, through the old residential neighborhoods that were declining—at some point the Papago Freeway was coming through. Midtown, with its new high-rises along Central Avenue and busy Park Central mall, was vibrant, the place to be. Sometimes Page went to the Playboy Club, drank bourbon on the rocks and looked out at the lights of the city. More often, he had lunch at the Phoenix Press Club. Unless it was necessary to meet a source, he tended to stay away from the nearby bars where the mobsters and lawyers drank.

Around 11:30 a.m., Page swung the GTO into the second line of spaces behind the hotel and parked. It was an unshaded surface lot like most of those in Phoenix, no tree to keep the car cool as with his capitol parking spot, but nothing could be done. The asphalt lagoon was empty of people and only about one-third full of cars. No sign of Reid. The lunch crowd had yet to arrive.

Reid wasn’t inside, either.

Page waited inside the lobby for fifteen minutes and then heard his name being called from the front desk. He picked up the white courtesy phone and heard Mark Reid’s voice.

“The meeting’s off for today,” Reid said. “The guy from LA chickened out. Maybe I can talk him into it later.”

“Well, thanks for calling at least. Let me know if he changes his mind.”

Page put the phone down and walked back out into the heat. There was time to have lunch at the Press Club. He slid into the GTO, started the car, and backed out. The car rolled fifteen