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said.
    “That’s ridiculous.” she said.
    “Didn’t Patty Hearst date a guy named Weed when the SLA kidnapped—?”
    “Don’t change the subject,” she said. I noticed that, in dealing with me at least, she was speaking even before I finished my first sentence. I felt a fresh surge of annoyance, and was tempted to tell her about Thurlow Weed, the abolitionist political boss in New York in the mid nineteenth century.
    More silence took us to lunch. We stopped at a little taqueria on Jefferson and Seventh Avenue for burritos. We were only a block from police headquarters, but the little shack that promised “burritos y hamburgers” was a gathering spot for the woebegone neighborhood between downtown and the state capitol. We ate with the top down, and every time somebody hit us up for money, we showed the photo and asked them about a guy named Weed. Pretty soon word got around we were cops, and foot traffic dried up. Kate looked distinctly uncomfortable, and I took way too much pleasure in that.
    Then there was nothing left to do but cruise and ask questions. I drove across the Seventh Avenue overpass, made a right on Grant Street, and then turned back north on Ninth. Up through the 1970s, this had been the industrial heart of a much smaller city. The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads sliced through on their way to Union Station. The railroads also served scores of produce warehouses and other agricultural terminals. Old Phoenix was a farm town, where irrigated fields and groves yielded oranges, grapefruits, lemons, lettuce, and cotton for markets back east. Mile-long trains of refrigerator cars were made up here, sending fresh Arizona citrus to the tables of families in Chicago and Dayton and Minneapolis. Now those families seem to have moved to Arizona, and the old produce district had been long abandoned.
    Could the man from the pool, the dead man without a name, maybe nicknamed Weed, have walked these streets? It was a long shot. Only a meal card told us he could.
    We were in sight of the nicest new investments downtown, the Dodge Theater, Bank One Ballpark, and America West Arena. But these streets held blocks of bleak single-story warehouses, some close to falling down. The produce businesses were gone. Almost everything was gone. One building held the Interfaith Cooperative Ministries. Another said it was the Joe Diaz Top-Level Boxing Gym (“There is no substitute for experience”). Concertina wire flashed menacingly off fences and rooftops. Vacant lots glistened with broken glass. A few early bungalows sat incongruously beside the industrial buildings—if you could have moved one to one of the historic districts and fixed it up, you could have sold it for half a million bucks.
    The streets were covered with the memory of pavement. Curbs and sidewalks were cracked, broken, or nonexistent. Long unused railroad tracks ran down the center of the cross streets, Jackson, Harrison, Madison, heading nowhere. As we drove slowly up Ninth Avenue, they appeared. Singles, pairs, and clusters of people. They stood or walked aimlessly up and down. Most were black, but there were also plenty of Anglos, a few Indians. On one corner a man huddled by an open water faucet, rinsing his face. An ancient-looking Anglo hobbled across railroad tracks using stainless steel crutches. Across the street, a black woman pulled what looked like a new wheeled suitcase and two small children.
    “Jesus Christ,” Kate Vare said quietly.
    “Don’t you remember the Deuce?” I asked. The old skid row in Phoenix had been centered around Second Street, hence its name.
    “No,” she said. “I moved out from Wisconsin in 1989.”
    “When the city proposed tearing the Deuce down to build Civic Plaza, a few people asked where the transients would go. Here’s where they went, as well as to every neighborhood park in the center city, behind big billboards, at camps down at the riverbed…”
    “Mapstone,” she said, “Spare me your