High Noon in Phoenix : LOUD AND CLEAR <i> By Lake Headley with William Hoffman (Henry Holt: $19.95; 288 pp; 0-8050-1138-2) </i>

At 11:34 a.m. on June 2, 1976, newspaper reporter Don Bolles started his car in downtown Phoenix. Later they found parts of him atop a four-story building across the street.

Bolles survived the car bomb for 11 days as busy doctors cut off a leg, then an arm, then the other leg. Passersby who rushed to the scene of the blast heard the last words Bolles would ever utter: “Telephone my wife. They finally got me. The Mafia. Emprise. Find John Adamson.” Good reporter to the end, he made sure he filed before he died.

What has been done about Don Bolles’ last file is the basis of this book by Lake Headley, a Las Vegas private investigator. John Harvey Adamson, a local small-time hoodlum, now sits on Arizona’s Death Row for the homicide. Emprise, a vast corporation based on sports and gambling, one with a history of Mafia ties, remains untouched.

Naturally, the Mafia itself weathered the storm that resulted from the slaughter of an investigative reporter. The case remains essentially unsolved--Adamson at best was a cog in a larger killing machine. Who he worked with and who he worked for has been left a mystery by the state’s cops and prosecutors. A national team of investigative reporters descended on Phoenix after the murder, but they also came up with nothing on the crime itself--although plenty on the basic patterns of corruption by good old boys and gangsters that has long been an Arizona custom.

Max Dunlap and James Robison were charged along with Adamson in the Bolles killing and both were sentenced to death. Adamson plea-bargained to a lesser charge. Headley was hired by a committee of Dunlap’s friends to clear him, and eventually, the state’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction.

When Adamson refused to testify at a retrial, the case against the two men collapsed. Dunlap went free, Robinson was sentenced on other charges. Adamson was retried and shipped to Death Row.

Headley makes a strong case for the innocence of Dunlap and Robison, but his greater purpose is to characterize the leaders of the state as a group of corrupt liars. He spins a web that involves Barry Goldwater, the Phoenix Police Department, the state’s attorney general and 1988 presidential candidate Bruce Babbitt.

The two Phoenix newspapers, the Arizona Republic (which employed Bolles) and the Phoenix Gazette, come off as incompetent at best. Anyone who reads the two dailies will find it hard to disagree. Like any zealous effort at mudslinging, Headley manages to make some of the dirt stick.

But, alas, the book is ill written: “Inmates sweltered in sizzling slow summers and shivered when whistling winter winds chased in all manner of wilderness vermin . . . .” The action mainly proceeds through the device of absolutely wooden dialogue and none of the people in the book, including Headley, ever seem alive for a single instant.

Setting aside these unfortunate facts, it still is worth reading for those interested in a case of Sun Belt politics--a passion, to be sure, akin to necrophilia. The book presents numerous instances of corruption--cops destroying files; attorneys seemingly railroading defendants; witnesses being ignored; the rich and the powerful, for example the Goldwater brothers and the folks at Emprise, being spared serious questioning.

Various theories are tossed out about who might have wanted Bolles hit, and the book wanders into the politics of the Navajo reservation, and the ties between Mafia figures and Arizona leaders. But these possibilities and sketchy scenarios are more tantalizing than convincing. Headley also notes that many threats were made on his own life while conducting the investigation: The book ends with what he considers a suspicious apartment fire that severely injured and almost killed him and his wife-to-be.

The information he presents is frequently not new; much of it was put forth in press conferences he held over a decade ago. So why write the book now? In part, I suspect, in order to make some money, maybe get a movie deal--the normal motives that drive people to print. But the other reason, I think, lies in the nature of the Bolles case itself.

Someone slaughtered a very good and dedicated investigative reporter in the heart of a large American city in broad daylight, and got away with it. This is supposed to be business as usual in banana republics, not in the United States. People keep looking into the Bolles case because they do not like the obvious answers the bombing presents: that you can kill, you can cover up the act, you can--at least in Phoenix, Arizona,--literally get away with murder.

That’s why when Hollywood makes a movie about the press, the producers pick a property such as “All the President’s Men” where the good guys win. The Bolles case is one Western nobody wants to put on the big screen.

In this version of “High Noon,” Gary Cooper gets blown away on Main Street and business, well, it’s business as usual.