Phoenix Noir

The guy was Mike Gallardi, his wife’s name was Rhonda. Together, they ran a hole-in-the-wall called Mike’s Place out on Baseline Road in South Phoenix. You could get a coronary just reading the menu but the place was clean, with a small counter and maybe a half dozen booths.

Here’s the thing: They catered to cops. You walked in, one whole wall was dedicated to fallen officers. Flash a badge, your kids got free sodas with their meals. Come in on duty and no one’s around? Boom, wink, you ate free.

I’d been at their place just once, a couple years before, taken there by a buddy of mine in traffic division. Rhonda worked the register and counter, a shy, chesty, bleached-out woman in her thirties. Mike was the talker and he came out from behind the grill to toady up, all shucks and gee-whiz.

How to say this—I don’t trust people who backslap cops. They always want something. Not that I made much headway on that point when I broke my news to the robbery roundtable.

“No way Mike’s the suspect.” This from Cavanaugh, the detective from Phoenix. “I can name fifty guys right now, this minute, who’ll vouch for him.”

“His own old lady handed him up.”

“After he batted her around, yeah. Go back, now that she’s cooled off. I’ll bet she admits it’s crap.”

He had a point, of course, domestics being what they are. But something about the way he said it made me think what he meant was: What would your wife say about you, Boghossian, if we gave her the chance?

Thankfully, the four commanders overseeing the roundtable agreed with me and ordered surveillance. The teams worked in rotation, each department on for three days then making way for the next detail. But Mike was smart. He made our guys early and burned them in heat runs, crazy Ivans, every kind of stunt you can imagine to flush them out. Once he just stopped in traffic, walked back to the unmarked car, and said, “Why are you following me? I haven’t done anything.”

I could just picture him, over one of those free burgers or shrimp baskets he doled out, pumping guys for information on tail jobs: C’mon, tell me, I’m just so doggone curious. And cops—hated by damn near everybody, grateful for someone who actually gives a rat’s ass—I’ll bet they couldn’t tell him their stories fast enough.

It got to me, sure. We were the ones who’d trained this guy—inadvertently, granted, but he was smarter than he should’ve been because of us. He was pulling out our wallets, whispering our names and addresses. And yeah, like everybody else he’d chumped, I felt ashamed.

Two weeks later, I got a call from surveillance: “Boghossian, get this. Gallardi and his wife locked up their place as usual but didn’t head home. They checked into a hotel on the frontage road along I-10.”

I knew the strip, we all did: a line of restaurants flanked that part of the freeway.

As I drove on over I thought about Rhonda’s tagging along. It surprised me, I’ll be honest. Maybe Cavanaugh had been right—I should’ve gone up to her early, asked her to confirm what she’d said that night Mike trashed her. And even though I knew that would’ve tipped our hand, now she wasn’t just keeping mum, she was joining in. I felt responsible, like there’d been a point in time when I could have saved her. No surprise, I felt like that a lot back then.

I met the team at the hotel and, sure enough, after 11:00, Mike came out of the room in dark coveralls, a day pack around his waist. He walked down a side street to the parking lot of an Applebee’s, then hunkered down in a patch of oleander to watch the kitchen crew do its thing. The radios started to buzz—we had our man, no more doubts. After a half hour, Mike eased out of the bushes, retraced his steps, and slipped back into his and Rhonda’s hotel room.

The next day, when I called the robbery roundtable together to report, Cavanaugh went from looking like he’d lost his dog to acting like he meant to kill somebody.

“Okay,” he said finally, “I’m in. If Mike Gallardi’s our guy, he’ll get no favors from me.”

I volunteered for surveillance at Applebee’s, even though it meant staying alert for hours on end with the windows rolled up in hundred-degree heat, drinking warm Coke and pissing it all back into the empty cup.

At 9, our eyes at Mike’s Place reported that Rhonda had left, heading toward home. An hour later, Mike locked up and followed suit. A collective moan went out over the radio. He’d called it off. Then, not long after, we heard that Mike and Rhonda were on the move again, leaving the house together. They were on their way toward us.

The voices on the radio perked back up—this was the night, we could feel it. And we knew we’d have to watch the whole thing play out, let him go in, rob the place, or it’d come apart in court. But what if he sniffed us out? What if he took a hostage?