The Vanishing Point

by Judith Van GIeson

Claire stood up and shook his hand. “Thank you for your help,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” Nick replied.

  She went outside to the parking lot, which was dark and nearly empty at this end of the mall, although several cars were parked in front of a Korean restaurant at the other end. Lights were visible on top of the Sandias, but otherwise the mountains had blended into the night. Claire got into her truck, drove to the Korean restaurant, and parked beside the cars that were already there. While she waited, she wondered if Nick had told her the truth about San Miguel de Allende. It had to be one of the more charming places he visited during his investigation of Jonathan Vail. What was to stop him from inventing a near miss and a false death to keep the investigation alive? It would keep him in San Miguel de Allende and keep the checks coming. He wasn’t aware that Claire didn’t know how to contact Lou. In fact, if she really tried, she probably could find him and check his word against Nick’s. What if their stories didn’t coincide? Suppose Lou said he had never met Nick, had never been to San Miguel de Allende, had never told him Jonathan was killed in a bar fight? If it turned out to be Nick’s word and his sketchy notes against Lou’s word twenty years later, Claire wondered whom she would believe. That Nick’s description had been reasonably accurate was a mark in his favor.

  She could see his office door from where she sat, and her thoughts were interrupted when he came outside and got in his pickup. He turned on the lights, started the engine, and drove out of the parking lot, with Claire behind him. Her Chevy pickup was as generic in appearance as his Toyota, so she doubted he would notice her if he happened to turn around. She had never followed anyone before—not even her ex-husband when he was cheating on her—but the key had to be staying close enough to keep the other vehicle in sight and far enough back to remain unnoticed. She let a couple of cars get between them, hoping not to lose him at a light. Nick turned south on Fourth Street and west on Montaño, which didn’t surprise her. He was likely to be headed home, and Montaño would take him across the river to the West Side.

  Although Montaño was wide enough for two lanes in each direction, only one was permitted, as a concession to the people who lived near the bridge in the North Valley. Two cars were between Claire and Nick’s pickup, but she was able to keep him in sight as he crossed the bridge and continued west on Montaño. The cars eventually turned in at various subdivisions and Claire had to drop back to maintain an inconspicuous distance. The streetlights were bright enough that Nick would see her truck if he turned around. She could clearly see the vehicle behind her in her rearview mirror. On the other hand, Nick had no reason to look behind him, and even if he did, he might not have noticed what kind of vehicle Claire drove, unless he’d had her under surveillance, too.

  He turned off into a subdivision where the streets were named after historical battles, an irony that amused Claire. The turns came more quickly here, and she had to close in so she didn’t lose him at Appomattox or Wounded Knee. This was a middle-class neighborhood where all the houses had garages out front and were so identical that if a property owner came home under the influence, she could easily end up at the wrong door. Ada’s money hadn’t brought her son back, and it hadn’t brought Nick wealth either. He made a quick right onto Glorieta, and his brake lights came on. Either he’d spotted Claire or he’d arrived at his house. She stayed on Gettysburg and took the next right, hoping she could circle around and catch up to him from the other side as he pulled into his garage. Some of the streets here were cul-de-sacs. If she ended up in one of those, it would bring her investigation to a standstill.

  She made two more right-hand turns and found herself coming at Nick on Glorieta from the opposite direction, just as she had hoped. His garage door was open and he was driving inside. A woman stood in the light of the house’s front door apparently waiting for him. Claire gave her a quick glance and saw that she wore skintight pants and appeared to be considerably younger than Nick. How did he do it? she wondered before turning her attention to Nick’s two-car garage. The light was on, and she could see that the other space was taken by a subcompact. It was all Claire needed to know. She kept going while Nick parked his pickup. She hadn’t learned the make or model of the subcompact, but she’d learned that the other car in Nick’s garage wasn’t a white Dodge van. Not to say he couldn’t have borrowed one somewhere. She’d already ruled the van out as too old to be a rental. It didn’t prove Nick wasn’t at Slickrock when Tim was killed, but it lowered the odds that he had been there.

  Driving back across the bridge, Claire thought about the surveillance she’d just conducted. Her first attempt had been rather successful. She’d discovered what she wanted to discover. She didn’t believe she’d been noticed. She hadn’t spent hours of total boredom trying not to pee. Was this a job she would ever consider if things didn’t work out at UNM? The answer was no. She loved her work at the center, and although she didn’t mind poking into the lives of the dead, she disliked disturbing the privacy of the living.

  In the morning Claire practiced tai chi, trying to keep her mind free of plans and questions and thoughts. The one thought that pestered her like an annoying fly was that she should call Curt Devereux. She imagined herself putting a glass jar over the fly and the thought, taking it to the window and releasing it, being determined to think about Curt later, over coffee. Claire finished with the infinite ultimate stance, took a shower, made a cup of coffee, and sat down in the window overlooking her courtyard. There was no denying that her datura had ceased to bloom. It had no buds, and the pods had burst and dropped their seeds all over the brick floor of the courtyard.

  Her reason for calling Curt was to see if he had heard any rumors of Jonathan being in San Miguel de Allende. The problem was how to ask the question without revealing that her lead had come from Ada Vail’s private eye. Ada’s refusal to cooperate with Curt had to have hampered the investigation. If she and Nick and Curt had worked together, perhaps the mystery would have been solved by now. Claire sipped at her coffee and decided that the way to pose the question would be to say she’d heard a rumor about Jonathan being in San Miguel but not to attribute the rumor to anyone. She heard a lot of rumors in her job; in fact, she was a lightning rod for Jonathan Vail rumors. Resolving that issue was easy, but posing her other question—whether Curt had really had breakfast in the Navajo Cafe the morning Tim died—appeared to be impossible. She didn’t want to tip her hand. She also had no authority to question him. “What would you do, Nemesis?” she asked her cat, but he had no answer.

  When she finished her coffee, Claire let the cat out and drove to work. There was no pressing business on her desk, so she began by calling Curt at his office. “How is the investigation going?” she asked.

  “You’d have to ask Ellen Frank about Tim Sansevera. As for Jonathan Vail, nothing new. The duffel bag has not been found.”

  “The journal was authenticated by August Stevenson, a well-known handwriting expert.”

  “So Ellen said.”

  “I met with Lou Bastiann, the fan who is mentioned in the journal. He told me he sent Jonathan the briefcase from Saigon.”

  “Do you know how I can get in touch with him?” Curt asked.

  “I don’t, but Jennie does. I was going over some notes I have about Jonathan. Various people reported seeing him in the Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende. There was even a report that he was murdered there. I was wondering if you had ever heard any of those rumors, and whether you were able to substantiate or disprove them.”

  “Well,” Curt paused and gave the query some thought. “I never heard that he was murdered in San Miguel de Allende, but I did hear that he was there. On the other hand, I also heard that he was in Denver, Santa Fe, L.A., Seattle, and who knows where else? There were numerous sightings in the early years. I checked out the ones that were nearby, but I didn’t have the resources to go far afield. I certainly couldn’t go to Mexico. The fact that there were so many sightings seemed to take away the plausibility o
f any of them, but there’s always the possibility that one or more were accurate.”

  “You never told me what you believe happened to him,” Claire said.

  “In all honesty, I don’t know. The truth about the man was as elusive as a native trout. Luckily I only have eight months left to think about it.”

  Claire didn’t believe he would stop thinking about it once he retired, but she didn’t say so. She still wanted to ask him about breakfast in Bluff, but she couldn’t think of a way to lead into it. Did he eat breakfast? What did he like for breakfast? Were there any restaurants in Bluff that he enjoyed? It seemed far too obvious to Claire, and her confidence in herself as an investigator was waning. “Thanks a lot for your help,” she said. “If you ever get to Albuquerque, give me a call.”

  “I’ll do that,” Curt replied.

  After she got off the phone, Claire considered how else she might find out whether Curt had told the truth about breakfast in Bluff. One way was to go there. It was a five-hour drive, but it wouldn’t take very long to check out the Navajo Cafe. She didn’t necessarily have to do it alone either.

  She called the rancher, Sam Ogelthorpe, to ask if he would meet her. While the phone rang, she wondered if he’d be out on the ranch somewhere or if he had an answering machine.

  She was somewhat surprised when he answered, “Howdy,” on the fourth ring.

  “Sam,” she said. “This is Claire Reynier from the Center for Southwest Research.”

  “At the University of New Mexico?”

  “That’s right. I have to be in Utah this weekend, and I was wondering if you might be able to meet me in Bluff. My days are going to be pretty full, but 1 could meet you for breakfast.”

  “I get up early,” Sam said.

  “What time?”

  “Five-thirty, but it’ll take me a while to get over there. How about if I meet you at seven on Saturday?”

  “It’s a deal. How about the Navajo Cafe?”

  “It’s the only place I’d eat in Bluff.”

  “I’ll see you there,” Claire said. Her confidence had been restored to the point that she began making a list of the questions she had for Sam Ogelthorpe.

  Chapter Fifteen

  BEFORE CLAIRE LEFT FOR UTAH, she called John Harlan to see if he’d been able to locate the Out of the Blue’s.

  “I found two of ’em,” he said. “Neither was very valuable, and neither was written by Jennie Dell. Both have a man’s photo on the dust jacket. One is a novel, one is the autobiography of a pilot.”

  “I’m on my way to Utah and could use some reading material for the trip. Could I stop by and pick them up?”

  “Sure, but you’d have to be pretty desperate to want to read either of these books. A takeout menu would be more interesting.”

  “Let’s say I’m more curious than desperate.”

  “On the subject of curiosity, are you going to tell me why you’re going to Utah?”

  “To talk to Sam Ogelthorpe again.”

  “Has that guy got anything to say that he hasn’t already said a hundred times over?”

  “He might, if I ask the right questions.”

  There was a pause before John said, “Could you use some company on your trip? I’ve been thinking about taking a weekend off.”

  “Thanks, John, but this is something I have to do by myself.”

  On her way to Page One, Too, Claire stopped and bought USGS topographic maps of Sin Nombre Canyon and the adjacent quadrants, including Comb Ranch. John was out when she got to his office, but he’d left the two Out of the Blue’s on his desk, along with an invoice for thirty dollars and a note that read, “Call me on Monday. I’m expecting another Out of the Blue.” Claire was incapable of picking up a book without checking its content and its condition. A brief glance at both books confirmed what John had already told her.

  The traffic was heavy leaving town, and it took five and a half hours to get to Bluff, driving most of the way in darkness and missing the beauty of the red rocks east of Cuba. The fires at the oil refineries in Farmington blazed in the night. When Claire got to Bluff she found a motel and checked in at ten-thirty. Being a compulsive reader, she actually would have read the phone book or a takeout menu when she got into bed, if nothing else had been available. But she examined the books John left for her and found that he had been right. Jennie Dell wasn’t the author of either of them, unless she’d been a ghost. The autobiography had an interesting subject, but the poor writing made it dull. The novel read as if it had been written by a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which to Claire meant intensely personal observations ending in an epiphany that she couldn’t share. She glanced at the author photo and bio on the back flap. The bio confirmed that the author had graduated from the University of Iowa. The photo showed him to be an earnest young man. The copyright page revealed that the book had been published in 1975. Twenty years had passed, and the Iowa style remained unchanged, a thought that Claire found depressing, since she believed that writing should reflect the times. She put the books down and by midnight was sound asleep.

  She woke early and arrived at the Navajo Cafe at six-thirty, sitting at a table in the picture window and looking over the village of Bluff, which had a beautiful site, thick with cottonwoods, near the banks of the San Juan River. The town was a Mormon settlement that had been carved out of the wilderness at the cost of many lives, some of which were Mormon. A cemetery on top of the bluff commemorated their struggle.

  Claire’s waiter appeared wearing a T-shirt, a bandanna, and a name tag: Nelson. He had a round face and long black hair tied back in a ponytail. He was a big man, but soft-spoken, with a gentle, humorous manner. Claire thought he was most likely a Navajo, since the reservation was on the other side of the San Juan River. The waiters in Indian country had a way of lowering the volume and slowing the pace.

  “High test or regular?” he asked.

  “Regular.” Claire laughed and told him she would wait till her companion arrived to order breakfast.

  When Nelson returned with the coffee, she asked him if he knew Curt Devereux.

  “Don’t think so,” Nelson said. “Does he live here?”

  “He works for the Park Service.”

  “Those guys like to sit at Dolores’s station. She’s retired now, but her family’s been havin’ some health problems and she needs the extra cash, so she works here part-time. She still likes to keep in touch with what’s happening. Want me to ask her to come over?”

  “Please,” Claire said.

  She watched Nelson cross the room and stop to talk to a waitress with ash blond hair pinned on top of her head with a clip. She wore jeans and hiking boots and had a muscular build and a no-nonsense manner. Dolores glanced briefly at Claire, then went back to serving her table. Claire sipped at her coffee and debated how to broach the subject of Curt Devereux. When Dolores had a free moment, she walked over, stood beside the table, and studied Claire with wary eyes that seemed to suggest she considered Claire too refined and too urban to trust. Since Claire was wearing a T-shirt and jeans herself, she wondered what signal she might have sent that she was a scholar or a nuisance.

  “You want to talk to me?” Dolores asked.

  “I’m looking for Curt Devereux. I heard he comes in here sometimes, and I was wondering if you knew how I could find him.”

  “He’s working out of Gallup now. I don’t see him much anymore. Last time he came in for breakfast was, oh, a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Do you remember what day?” Claire was pushing at the envelope of the circumspect limits she had set for herself and worried that she might be trying Dolores’s patience as well.

  “It had to be the last Saturday in October. That’s when I started working the breakfast shift. If you really want to find him, you could check the ranger station. They’ll know whether he’s over this way or not.”

  “Thanks,” Claire said.

  “No problem.” As Dolores walked back to her
side of the cafe, Claire thought that although the alibi she’d given Curt wasn’t airtight, it tended to substantiate his story. If Curt had been in the Navajo Cafe the morning Tim died, he couldn’t have killed him. The owner of the white van parked at the entrance to Sin Nombre Canyon remained unaccounted for. Claire got out the USGS maps and was studying the terrain when Sam Ogelthorpe showed up, wearing his swooping black hat and dusty cowboy boots.

  “You’re here early.” He sat down, took off his hat, and laid it on an empty chair.

  “I like the morning. It’s the best time of day, don’t you think?”

  “Evening’s not too bad.”

  Nelson arrived with two menus, and the conversation ceased while they ordered. Claire decided on bacon and hashbrowns. Sam had eggs over easy.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked, eyeing the map.

  “The way to get from Sin Nombre to your ranch.”

  “It’s a direct route,” he said. “You hardly even have to cross an arroyo.” With the tines of his fork he traced the path across Cedar Mesa. “Back when they used to let me graze my cattle in the canyons, I rode over there a lot. My tracks were clear in 1966. Jonathan followed my trail right up to my ranch. All he had to do after that was walk out to the road and hitch a ride to Mexico.”

  “Can you tell me what kind of a build the person you saw had?”

  Sam shrugged. “Medium height. Slim-hipped.”

  “Would you say he was short-legged or barrel-chested?”

  “No.”

  “What color was his hair?”

  “Brown.”

  “Was it thick or frizzy?”

  “No. It was long, but it wasn’t frizzy.” Sam’s answers were quick and sure, considering the event had taken place more than thirty years ago, but it was also a story he had repeated often. Claire wondered how much it had lost or gained in the retelling.

  “Did anyone fitting that description ever visit you?”

  “Might have. A lot of people visited me back then. I may not remember all of them, but I do remember who I saw killing my cow.”