The Lies that Bind

by Judith Van GIeson

  After the vanilla ice cream, Whit paused from his monologue to light a cigar, which was all the excuse I needed to get myself out of there. “Thanks for the dinner,” I said.

  “Let’s get together for lunch next week, Neil,” said Cindy. “How about Wednesday?”

  “Okay.”

  She gave me her number and made me promise to call.

  “You’ll be calling me as soon as you hear anything from Saia?” asked Martha.

  “Yes.”

  “You ought to get to know Ed George, Neil,” said Whit. “I’ll be glad to get the two of you together sometime.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Cindy let me out. Her wet shoes were still sitting beside the door. As I walked down the sidewalk toward the parking lot and my car, a color TV flickered and signaled like a campfire from the window of a town house across the lawn. An older woman was sitting in front of it, stoking the fire alone. That’s how it happens these days. The children (if you ever get around to having any) move away, the men split or die off, the women end up alone eating frozen dinners, watching TV, taking little helpers at bedtime. The sidewalk I was walking on was dry as a diversion channel in winter, not a wet spot or a puddle on it. The sprinklers that kept this part of Los Cerros grass green were not running.

  7

  IT DOESN’T MAKE any sense to leave a car at Mighty to get the oil changed when Jiffy Lube will do it while you wait and you know a mechanic who will do it for nothing, but I called them on Monday anyway. “Mighty,” the guy who answered said. “Ramón Ortiz speaking.”

  “Neil Hamel,” I replied. “I’d like to bring my car in for an oil change.”

  “When?”

  “How about noon on Wednesday?”

  “No problem. Do you want to use our courtesy van?” He had a slight Hispanic accent, but it wasn’t native New Mexican, I knew; it didn’t have the right rhythm.

  “Yes.” It beat sitting around the waiting room on a plastic seat reading People magazine. Besides, I was due at Cindy Reid’s for lunch at twelve-thirty.

  “No problem,” he said again.

  ******

  I called Cindy and got directions to her place. It was in the Heights and not far from Mighty. “Eleven Juniper Road in Los Verdes Meadows,” she said. “It’s a house that Mother built, and she’s renting it to us. You won’t have any trouble finding the place; it has Mother written all over it.”

  “I’m getting my oil changed at Mighty, and I’ll have the courtesy van drop me off,” I said.

  “Okay,” she replied.

  ******

  When I got to Mighty, Ramón Ortiz was standing behind the counter talking on the phone and wearing a pin that had his name on it. He was tall and good-looking, and he knew it. He had a bullfighter’s arrogant expression, a hawk’s steely eyes and an aloof manner, a man more comfortable in spurs and a cape than a white Mighty shirt. He sized me up while he conducted his phone conversation, as if he were deciding whether I was worth waiting on or not. “Loosen up, dude,” I wanted to say. “I’m only asking for an oil change.”

  “Ta luego,” he said to the phone and hung up.

  “I’m Neil Hamel.”

  His eyes moved across the checklist on the counter. “An oil change?”

  “Right. It’s the yellow Nissan.” I handed him my keys. He wrote Hamel on a tag, attached it to the keys and hung them on the keyboard near the phone.

  “You want to use the courtesy van?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I happened to be standing next to the door to the shop and could hear men joking in Spanish while they elevated a car on the hydraulic lift. “Chico.” Ramón raised his voice slightly, and one of the guys came around the corner. Ramón’s aristocratic manner gave him some kind of pedigree; Chico’s appearance wouldn’t get him a bone. Chico was a street dog, scruffy and scrawny. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, shabby running shoes. He had a broken front tooth that would cost more than someone who worked at Mighty could afford to fix. Unlike the guys in the shop, he wasn’t wearing a mechanic suit, and his hands weren’t stained with grease either. He was the driver, not a mechanic; a lightweight or the newest illegal alien.

  “Dónde están las llaves?” asked Chico.

  “Yo las tengo,” replied Ramón, taking a set of keys from the keyboard and handing them to Chico. They had the same way of pronouncing y and ll, like the s in measure, the way they do in Argentina. I knew that because it was the kind of Spanish the Kid spoke. Before I heard that sound I would have thought Ramón spoke Castilian, except that you usually don’t find people who speak Castilian Spanish working in auto repair centers or even owning them. You didn’t use to find Argentines doing that kind of work either, until their country fell apart.

  “Argentinos?” I said.

  “Claro,” said Ramón, using an expression Argentines like, meaning “right.” “How did you know that?” One elegant eyebrow went up, the other remained wearily in place, a mix of passing interest and permanent disdain.

  “I have a friend from Argentina.”

  “Where are you going?” Chico asked me, squinting his eyes and studying my face while I replied. His English was several years behind Ramón’s, but the accent was similar.

  “Los Verdes Meadows. You know where that is?”

  “Sure,” Chico replied. “No problem.”

  Ramon looked at his watch and then at me without changing his superior expression. “Your car will be ready in one hour. Call when you want Chico to pick you up.” It wasn’t exactly service with a smile, but I kind of preferred his indifference to the aggressive politeness you often get these days. At least he didn’t have to know how I was or wish me a nice day.

  I followed Chico outside to the Mighty van. Los Verdes Meadows was only about a mile away. I thought I’d have to direct him, but as he said, he knew the route. He drove as if we were in a grand prix event and the Mighty minivan was a formula one racer. It took a certain amount of optimism or inexperience to try to turn an elephant into a greyhound. The minivan resisted, jerking forward when Chico braked, hesitating when he accelerated, swinging wide when he cut a corner.

  Los Verdes Meadows is a name that is known in the trade as real estate Spanglish, a combination of English and Spanish or a word that looks like Spanish but really isn’t. It was a destination development, the kind of place that has a golf course, swimming pool, sauna and workout room. The only reason you’d need to leave it would be to go to work or get food. If you clipped coupons and had your food delivered, you wouldn’t even have to do that. A lot of Duke City developments have sentry boxes at the entrance, but mostly they’re empty, just there for the looks. Los Verdes Meadows’s box happened to be inhabited by a guard, whose role was to keep the riffraff and solicitors out. He recognized the Mighty van and/or Chico and waved us in. It could be that a lot of people from Los Verdes Meadows had their cars serviced at Mighty, I thought. I’d never live in a place with a guard myself, even if I could afford it. But in Latin America they were commonplace. There they finish off the tops of their walls with shards of broken glass and rolls of razor wire, and their guards carry automatic weapons.

  Chico waved back to the guard. “Nice place,” he said to me.

  “I’m going to Juniper Road,” I said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Sure,” he replied.

  The houses in Los Verdes Meadows were built around a gully that was an extension of the golf course. The grass in the gully was sparse and sun-dried brown; the ticking sprinklers hadn’t been able to keep the course green. They should have dyed it grass color, the way they do in California. The houses were big and came right up to the edge of their lots and the edge of the gully. One bold and ugly architectural statement clashed with the next, but the strangest one of all was number 11, the house Whit and Cindy Reid lived in. It was a large white two-story clapboard Colonial with columns next to the front door and black shutters on the windows. It would have blended right in in New England. It stuck out like a
maple tree in the desert here, one that spread pollen and soaked up valuable water. Martha had tried to leave home and had ended up taking home with her. You had to wonder why she hadn’t stayed put.

  Cindy came jogging down the road as the van let me off in front of the house. “Muchas gracias,” I said to Chico.

  “De nada,” he replied, backing slowly out of the driveway.

  Cindy wore a gray warm-up suit, and her tied-back hair was falling down. She ran the way girls used to run—awkward as the Tin Man. Her elbows were pressed to her sides, her hands flopped loose and her heels swung out. She was sweating, so I knew the exercise had gotten the heart pumping and the blood flowing, but her movements lacked grace and power. She jogged like a woman who was going through the motions but deep inside was ambivalent about being strong. She stopped when she got to me, put her head down and caught her breath. “Whew,” she said. “Find us okay?”

  “As soon as I saw the white clapboards, I knew this was the house that Martha built.”

  She laughed. “Mother knows what she likes. C’mon in.”

  I followed her through the front door into a large central hallway, which was guarded by a great white-hunter trophy, a stuffed bear standing upright with one paw extended as though he wanted to shake your hand. His claws could have used a trim, his eyes were glassy and his fur needed a good beating to get the dust out. It wasn’t something you’d want to stumble across unexpectedly or in the dark.

  “Where did that come from?” I asked.

  “Whit’s grandfather shot it in Montana. It’s been in the family for ages.”

  There was a gun rack along the wall, filled with ancient and dusty-looking rifles that had probably been in the family forever too. Hunting is the kind of skill that gets passed along from father to son. The rifles rattled as I walked by. The Oriental rug on the floor was so worn in places the hardwood floors showed through. I tripped on a loose edge and caught myself against the banister. A large mirror with a gilt frame balanced over a spindly-legged table. A stairway led up to the second floor. Someone had been here before us and left his trail: scuffed and muddy riding boots flopped at the foot of the stairs; a sweatshirt hugged the banister; a few stairs up, a navy-blue T-shirt had collapsed in a heap. Cindy began climbing the stairs, picking up the clothes one by one. I followed. When we got to the second-floor landing we found white riding pants stained with dirt. What came next? I wondered. Jockeys? Boxers?

  Boxers. Cotton, pale blue and lying beside the shower stall in the bathroom at the top of the stairs. Cindy picked them up too, opened the closet and dumped the load in a laundry basket.

  “Whit,” she said. “He grew up with maids and never learned to pick up after himself. One summer when he was a kid, the maid quit. The family had a dinner party their last night in the summer house, and they just got up and left the table the way it was, full of dishes, and the kitchen full of dirty pots and pans. The next summer, when they remembered what a mess it was, they hired a new maid to go in and clean it up.”

  I’m not the neatest person in the world, but I do pick up my own clothes, and sooner or later I do the dishes when I use dishes. The towels on the bathroom racks were navy blue with the white monogram WCR, I noticed. Their edges were frayed, and the nap had worn off long ago. Wedding presents? I wondered. I tried to remember how long ago it had been. Twenty years? Old money hadn’t wasted any money on new linens.

  I followed Cindy back down the stairs and through the living room. The sofa was big, beige and ugly. The cotton stuffing was oozing out of the upholstered arm of a wing chair. A large portrait of somebody’s mother in an evening dress hung over the fireplace. “Mom?” I asked.

  “Whit’s,” said Cindy. “The furniture is hers too. She left it to him when she died.”

  It was the old-money-pretending-to-be-no-money look, what was good enough for mother and father is good enough for me, and we care more about the dogs and the horses than we do about the house anyway. There’s a fine line between antiques and junk; I’ve never been able to see it.

  Considering the size of the house, there had to be several more rooms downstairs: a kitchen, a dining room, a library maybe, a den. We went to the kitchen next. The freezer door hung open, and water dripped onto the floor. An ice tray sat on the butcher-block counter, floating on a puddle of water. “Damn,” Cindy said. “He got himself some ice and left the freezer door open.” She took a sponge, soaked the water up and squeezed the sponge into the sink. Then she opened the refrigerator and took out a bowl of chicken salad, cucumber sandwiches and a pitcher of tea. There was no ice for the tea, it had all melted. We sat down at the kitchen table. Cindy poured the tea, served the sandwiches and the salad, brushed the hair away from her face and took a look back into another decade, another man. “Do you remember Emilio, Neil, how good-looking he was?” She sighed.

  I remembered. Emilio’s appearance in those days went beyond good looks into the danger zone of perfection. He was David who had just stepped out of Michelangelo’s marble, Elvis Presley before the army got him. He had warm brown eyes that could convince you to leave home and school and never come back. His kind of looks were bound to piss somebody off: gods, parents, the people who wore uniforms and suits. He wasn’t spoiled by it—not then anyway. Who knows what came later? He wasn’t arrogant either, which made him even more appealing. “Had me creaming in my jeans,” I said.

  “I never knew how many friends I had until Emiliano started hanging around. Even you, Neil—you came over a lot more.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. That’s the trouble with having a good-looking guy. Your friends are always coming on to him, and half the time they don’t even know they’re doing it. One thing I can say about Whit: nobody’s trying to get into his pants.”

  “I know where they are, if anybody’s interested.” She laughed and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Some women might be trying to get into his checkbook,” I said.

  “Not anymore they’re not. Arizona is in a deep recession. That’s why we came here. I meant to call you once we got settled.” They looked settled to me. They looked, in fact, as though they’d been in this house forever. “We were only here a few weeks, and then this business with Mother and Justine…” She looked at her plate, poked at a piece of chicken with a fork.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked her. One classic investigatory technique is to find disgruntled current or former employees who know the suspect and get them to bitch. I didn’t have an employee, so I turned to a family member. Even criminals need to confide in someone, and who else did Martha have to talk to?

  “I don’t know,” Cindy said. “Mother hated Justine, and she is not a forgiving person.” She speared the chicken with the fork, picked it up, ate it automatically. “If you find out, let me know—or maybe I don’t want to know. I don’t know.”

  Some defense lawyers’ mantra is: It’s better not to know, but I’ve let curiosity get in the way of business before. “Do you have any idea how much Halcion she takes?” I asked.

  “Mother’s little helper?” Cindy smiled. “She got started on that after Michael died. She was crazy about Michael and was devastated by his death. He was the son, the husband, all the men she’d never had. She probably takes more Halcion than she should, but who knows how much? Probably she doesn’t even know herself. Her doctor hands them out like candy. I snitch a couple now and then when I need them, but she never notices.”

  “Actually, I took a few myself,” I admitted.

  She was startled. “You?”

  “I wanted to see what kind of effect they would have combined with a couple of drinks.”

  She laughed. “I guess I’d better lay off for a while. She might notice double dipping.” She touched my hand, brushed her hair out of her face and looked into my eyes. “I’m glad you’re here, Neil. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the best thing about Albuquerque, maybe the only good thing. When this mess gets straightened out and El Dorado sells, Whit wants to go
right back to Arizona. You must like New Mexico—you’ve been here so long—but to me it seems poor and empty.”

  “That’s what I like about it. What’s El Dorado?”

  “I’ll show you.” She went into another room and came back with a watercolor of an enormous adobe-colored building that appeared to be floating above the desert, suspended on clouds of illusory money. “It’s a planned development and destination resort that Whit was building outside Phoenix. This is the hotel. There was also going to be an eighteen-hole golf course with home sites around it.” It looked to me like the kind of development they call Las Tramponus in Santa Fe, a place that uses up all the natives’ water and tax dollars but won’t let them in. “He lost it to the bank,” Cindy continued. “We lost just about everything when the real estate market collapsed. They let us keep our house, but by then the mortgage was worth more than the house was. Whit lost his polo ponies, his cabin cruiser, his collection of antique cars. El Dorado is being sold at auction, and we’re hoping to get enough out of it to go back and start again. In the meantime Whit’s been working for Mother.”

  “Who’d buy a property like that at auction these days?”

  “Foreign investors.”

  “Um,” said I. Maybe they’d like to buy some oceanfront property in Gallup too, I thought. It’s okay to share secrets with an old friend but not necessarily to tell the truth. El Dorado means “the golden place,” but in this case I’d say it was fool’s gold. The truth was that if El Dorado was being sold at auction, the Reids were far more likely to end up owing than receiving. It was a truth Cindy could have found out for herself easily enough if she wanted to. Foreclosures rarely sell for the amount of the mortgage. By the time the banks get them, the properties have often been trashed, and in the eighties real estate was often overvalued by appraisers and overmortgaged. If the bank didn’t recoup the amount of the mortgage, the Reids could remain liable for the difference.