by Don Travis
“Preposterous!” he said sharply. “I will not tolerate such talk. It is not possible.”
“That’s your call, Ariel. So far as I am concerned, I have delivered what you asked. I’ve identified the intruder with reasonable certainty. And I’ve informed the state and county authorities of what I know, so they will pursue that line of reasoning in Bas’s death. I’ll have my office manager forward my report and my final bill.”
“No, no, BJ. I apologize for my outburst. Hilfe bitte! Help me. Even though I have suffered some of the same thoughts, I could not bring myself to face them. Not until you gave them voice. I am afraid for this grandson I have never met. I feel an attachment. I feel family blood calling to me. Even though I cannot conceive of Margot, Heléne, Marc, or anyone else in my family being capable of such horror, I cannot leave a helpless babe to the mercy of whoever murdered his father, no matter how remote the possibility. Do not desert me now.”
I gazed at the man caught between family loyalty and the need to protect another member he had never seen, hadn’t even known about until days ago. That he might have to stand against the one to shield the other was a very real and painful possibility.
“Have you contacted the lawyer I recommended?”
“Yes. He cannot see me until Tuesday because of the upcoming Independence Day holiday. I am to be in his office at ten o’clock.”
“Very well, I’ll meet you there. We’ll see what he has to say before deciding on my future role.”
“Understood. And merci vielmal.”
Chapter 15
DESPITE WHAT I’d said to Ariel yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t wait out the upcoming holiday weekend without making another stab at finding a nearly two-year-old boy named David James Dayton. As my client acknowledged, if someone deliberately killed his father because of his bloodline, the child might be targeted as well. The purpose of meeting with Del Dahlman was to explore legal means of forcing the Dayton family to reveal the whereabouts of the child, but a little more digging on my part might move us down the road, so to speak.
We are all products of a combination of things, including our past experiences. So it was not surprising that my mind reached back to where I first ran across Ariel Gonda. Alfano Vineyards. Remembering that two-year-old case raised my hackles in ways I didn’t want. It had revolved around money as well. Lots and lots of it.
Was I preparing to deliver a helpless toddler into the arms of a loving grandfather or a cold, calculating man devoted to pruning errant offshoots from his family tree? Ariel Gonda was no Anthony P. Alfano—at least not outwardly. From my background checks, I actually knew quite a bit about him. He had a good, solid upbringing, a stellar educational background, and a history of stable employment and family ties. The affair with Barbara Zuniga was aberrant, but he’d done his best to do the right things.
I often say that paranoia is the constant companion of a good confidential investigator, and this line of reasoning was proof positive. I did not subscribe to the theory that just ran through my head. Nonetheless, I was grateful for the intellectual exercise. That meant my subconscious was aware of a potential danger. Now I needed to proceed carefully and allow my suspicions to guard against an ambush.
Turn that coin over and look at it from the other side. If Zuniga died because someone mistook him for Diego, then the danger to young Mr. C de Baca was real. Natander and Pastis—or someone—wanted him dead. True, I had turned that problem over to Yardley and Muñoz, but I’m cursed with this finely tuned sense of responsibility. I had to prevent that possibility as well.
Charlie was checking his contacts with the Cruces police to see if he could pick up a clue to the baby’s whereabouts before I headed down there. While he pursued that avenue, I left the office Friday afternoon to see if I could cajole any information out of Nancy Hummerman. I parked a couple of houses down from 3501 Holiday and walked to Hummerman’s brick home. Closed front drapes prevented me from glimpsing inside. No one answered the bell. I strolled around behind the house, noting that while Nancy’s public front yard was moderately well-kept, her private backyard was a mess. There were almost as many weeds as there were stems of grass. No mountain bike. I tried to see inside the detached garage, but a curtain on the window to the side door blocked my view.
As I stepped away, I heard a motor approach. A second later the garage door began rising. Assuming Nancy Hummerman was returning home, I moved against the back side of the house where I couldn’t be observed but had a good view of any vehicle entering the garage. Tires crunched on the two parallel strips of concrete of the driveway. The driver obligingly slowed to a crawl in order to steer the Jeep into the small building. As she passed I could clearly see Nancy was alone. Even so, the door was not yet closed behind her before I heard voices. More than one. I blocked access to the backyard gate and waited.
The woman emerged first with her back to me, still speaking to someone inside. Stuffed into short shorts and a tight halter top, she looked much more interesting than the other day. She held a bottle of milk in one hand and a small plastic bag of what appeared to be groceries in the other.
She turned around and spotted me just as Diego C de Baca emerged, loaded down with other bags. Nancy gave a short scream and dropped the milk. Diego froze where he was. Before either of them recovered, I barked in my best Marine Corps MP voice, “Stay right where you are, Specialist C de Baca. That’s an order!”
Surprisingly he did as requested. His feet seemed frozen to the ground as he straightened and appeared to stand at attention, although he was so laden with grocery bags it was hard to tell.
“What are you doing in my yard!” Nancy shrieked. “You’re trespassing.”
“And you’re harboring a fugitive. Let’s see which one carries the heavier penalty.”
Diego spoke in a pleasant baritone with a slight catch in it. “Fugitive? Who says I’m a fugitive?”
“For starters, the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office and the New Mexico State Police. I can probably take care of those for you, but I keep hearing about a Department of Defense investigation of you and your two buddies. Don’t know if I can help there. But let’s sit down and talk. My name is B. J. Vinson, and I’m a confidential investigator. I’m not a cop.”
“Don’t listen to this guy,” Nancy said. “I’ll just yell rape, and you’ll have all the time you need to get away.”
Diego looked confused.
“That might work,” I said calmly, “if I wasn’t gay. And every cop in Albuquerque knows it. Come on, Diego. Let’s go inside and talk.”
“How do I know you haven’t already called the cops?” he asked.
“Why would I? I didn’t even know you were here until the garage door opened. Do you always ride around crouched down on the floorboard?”
A sheepish look came over his features. “Pretty much… lately.”
“Look, I think you need help. Maybe I can give you some.”
“Why would you do that? I can’t afford your rates.”
“That $10,000 you transferred to Georgia would do a pretty good job of it, but I’m not looking for money. There’s a situation I’m working that kicked off when you started hiding out at the Lovely Pines. Maybe you can help me with it.”
Despite Nancy’s stated objection, he marched past me into the house and held the door open for both of us. I took a seat at the table in the small, neat kitchen while they put away groceries.
He spoke into the refrigerator as he put away milk and eggs. “Why do you think I hid out at the Lovely Pines?”
“Didn’t you think the owner would call for help when you broke into the winery?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t steal nothing, so I thought they’d put it down to kids and forget about it.”
“Too neat for kids. And you did take a couple of bottles of wine.”
“Curiosity got to me. I wanted to see if this Gonda fella’s wines were any good. Shoulda remembered he hadn’t had the place long enough for his product to ripen.”
He paused in the act of putting coffee in a cabinet. “Pretty good stuff, but it was ours, not his.”
They finished with the groceries and settled down with me at the old-fashioned oak table. If I had to guess, I’d say Nancy Hummerman rented the place furnished.
Both of them listened carefully as I sketched out the way I figured things were. Then Diego, who’d been leaning forward over his elbows on the table, settled back in his chair.
“You’re the guy I threw my beer at the other night, aren’t you? I guess you are a PI. You got it nailed pretty good. Except it’s not exactly the way things went down.”
“Okay, enlighten me.”
He scowled, but I got the feeling he was just reliving some unpleasant memories. “Me’n Spider and Hugo went to this bombed-out monastery, I guess you’d call it. Like he always did, Spider went his own way. Pretty soon we heard shots from Natander’s M16. Two bursts. When we found him, he was putting things in a sack he’d found somewhere. There was fresh kill lying nearby. Some guy in black that Spider claimed was an Ali Baba.”
“Did you see a weapon of any kind?”
Diego shook his head. “Didn’t really look. Spider had us scooping up shit and stuffing it in sacks. By the time we boogied for our Humvee, we each carried a load.”
“What kind of stuff?”
He shrugged. “Souvenirs. Don’t really know, but Spider seemed to. We hid it back at base, and for the next few months, he sold most of it off to the other guys. We only had a couple of things left by the time some OGAs showed up and started asking questions.”
My military jargon was over a decade old, but I’d understood the reference to an Ali Baba. That was an insurgent, a bad guy. But OGAs, escaped me, so I asked about them.
“Other government agencies. Usually CIA or the FBI.”
“And that’s when you realized you were in trouble.”
“Yeah, and I was getting to be a short-timer then. Since I was the only one with a permanent stateside address, I’m the one who mailed the one artifact we still had left back to the States. Spider claimed it was something special. Something that would make us all rich.”
As Diego rose to get us cold sodas from the refrigerator, I told him that was a load of bull crap.
He passed around cans, sat down, and popped the lid on his drink. “That part about me having the only home address stateside was. But not that part about getting rich. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a lot of looting going on, and these OGAs were trying to put a stop to it. Spider and Pastis didn’t want to be caught shipping it out, so they conned me into doing it. But by the time I figured out how serious things were, I’d already sent it through the APO. Man, I didn’t get much sleep the next month, but the package sailed right on through.”
He guzzled a swig and rubbed the cold can across his forehead. “When they shipped us back home, I got a scare. They questioned everybody who was getting on that plane, and I thought for sure I was toast.”
“Why?”
“That was the first time I heard a priest in some monastery got murdered and something called Our Lady of the Euphrates got stole. I knew right off she was what I mailed home. A beat-up, ten-inch clay figure of a woman about a thousand years old with traces of faded paint clinging to her. Didn’t look like anything special, but she was supposed to have cured diseases, made crazy people sane again.”
“And sane men crazy, apparently. Why didn’t you put a stop to it right then and let them know what happened?”
He stared at me with eyes the color of dark chocolate. “Man, you don’t know those guys. If they get down on you, they’re worse than the LNs. Local nationals,” he added when he saw my frown. “Those two fuckers will kill you. At least, Spider will if you cross him.”
“Okay, that explains that. But when did you start having trouble with Natander and Pastis?”
“Right then. Spider saw how shook I was, so he or Hugo stayed with me all the time. As soon as we hit the States, Spider wanted to take off and get the Lady, as he’d started calling the clay statue. He’d figured out it was worth real dough. A million bucks, he claimed. But I insisted I was going to finish my enlistment and get out with an honorable.”
“But they deserted and came to New Mexico with you after you were discharged.”
“One on either side of me. But I threw them a curve. I didn’t send the package where they thought I did. I sent it to Nancy.” He saw my look and explained they’d been going together before he left for his Army service and remained in touch. He gulped his soda. “And that’s when things really started going sideways.”
Diego went on to explain that his father was seriously ill, and he didn’t want to bring strangers home. Natander insisted and reminded Diego he was complicit in the murder of the priest and an active participant in stealing valuable artifacts.
So he convinced the other two this was something he had to do alone and went back home. He knew they stayed close by to watch what was going on, so he didn’t dare try to slip the statuette into the winery. That was probably the time German told me about. But before Diego could figure out what to do, he spotted Natander’s car pulling into the parking lot at the Pines. Unwilling to introduce his companions to his father and brother, Diego panicked and took off through the woods and hitched a ride back to Albuquerque and to Nancy.
Before he figured out what to do, his father died, and he hadn’t even dared attend the funeral. He and Nancy took a quick trip to Colorado to put some distance between Diego and the two AWOL GIs.
“I shoulda gone to the Pines and accessed the hidden room while everyone was at the funeral, but I was hiding out in Pueblo with Nancy, trying to figure out how to extricate myself from the situation.”
“Why not just give them the artifact and say goodbye?” I asked.
“That’s what I wanted him to do,” Nancy said. A faint trace of her perfume reached me. She didn’t spend a lot of money on her toiletries.
Diego squirmed in his chair. “That wouldn’t solve the problem. By then, Spider figured out how squirrely I was about this whole thing. He believed I was going to turn over the artifact to the authorities and confess everything.”
“Why haven’t you?”
He spread his hands and lifted his shoulders. “Who to? What do the police know about stealing artifacts in foreign countries? They’d laugh me out of the station.”
“The FBI wouldn’t.”
He sighed. “I know. And that’s probably what I’ll have to do.”
“Not without a deal, you won’t,” Nancy said.
“And how do I get a deal?”
“You need legal help,” I said. “I know a lawyer. He doesn’t practice criminal law, but he can steer you to the right place. Where is the artifact now? Not here, I hope?”
Diego shook his head. “No. I took it to the Pines the night I broke in. But now Spider’s got it staked out. He almost got me last time.”
“That was me who fired the warning shots, by the way. I spotted someone with a rifle on your trail.”
“Thanks.”
“Does he want to kill you or does he want to recover the Lady?”
“Both. He doesn’t trust me any longer. Not since I gave them the slip and disappeared.”
“That would have been around the first of June.”
“How’d you know? Oh yeah. The break-in at the Pines.”
“I assume there’s a hidden room behind the wine cellar, but you needed access to the winery in order to enter. But you haven’t been going in or out through the winery since then.”
“There’s another way in, but before I left for the Army, I made sure it was barred.”
“How’d you find the room in the first place?”
“My dad showed it to me back when I was getting into trouble in high school. Best hideout in the West, he always said. So far as I know, he never showed it to anyone else.”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell me about it. That’s the only way I can see to get the
artifact out of there.”
I sat back and regarded the handsome young man seated opposite me. He was probably pretty decent, even if there were a few chinks in his moral code. But that was a quick judgment. I hadn’t been plopped down in the middle of a foreign country and told to start killing people who were a little different from me before they killed me. After a while I imagined the killings became indiscriminate. Or was that writing him an excuse to give to the headmaster?
“Diego, if the artifact is safely hidden away at the winery, why did you keep going back to the place? That just increased the odds Natander or Pastis would catch you.”
“I was afraid they’d tumble to Nancy and catch me here. That might put her in danger. I didn’t dare stay any one place for long. So some nights I snuck back into the winery. It’s worked so far. Spider’s a trained sniper with more patience than me’n Hugo put together. But so far I’ve managed to fool him. Well, except for last time when you bailed me out.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you were putting the people at the Pines in danger?” I asked.
He frowned over that one. “Spider wouldn’t have any reason to hurt anybody at the Pines. He knows the place has been sold, and nobody there is family. That wouldn’t gain him anything.”
“I’m going to go out to the car and get my case. Are you going to run?”
He shook his head. “Think that lawyer you talked about might be what I need. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Glad you recognize that. Be back in a minute.”
Both of them were still seated at the kitchen table when I returned. I sat down and handed over a cheap cell phone, one of several I keep to hand out to confidential informants. “Diego, I assume you’re a reasonable man and that we’ll be able to help one another. Keep this phone on you at all times. My numbers—home, office, and cell—are already programmed into the phone.”
He pushed it away. “I have a cell phone.”
“Take it and use it exclusively for contacting me. And for me to contact you. Don’t let it out of your possession, and don’t give the number to anyone else. Understood?”
