“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
“Why do you ask?”
“The night Justine died, the police found a revolver with two empty chambers in the glove compartment of her car.”
“Where did the bullets go?”
“I don’t know. You’d think someone in Justine’s situation would have reloaded the gun soon after she fired it, wouldn’t you?”
“You’d think so. Something you should understand about Justy is that killing Jaime Córdova didn’t make her inhuman, but anyone who does something like that is going to be living by different rules afterwards.” Emiliano had killed too. What rules was he living by? I wondered.
“I’m going to have to tell the DA’s office about the Argentine connection,” I said. “Martha’s my client. This is evidence that could keep her from being indicted.”
“I was afraid of that,” Emilio said.
“Why do you care?” I asked.
“She’s a heartless woman. She’s ruined a couple of lives, and I’d like to see her pay. If they put the old lady in jail, it’s all right with me.”
“Don’t you care about finding out the truth?”
“Not anymore,” he said.
******
But it was important to me—more than that: it was of the essence. Although a couple of years practicing law could easily make you care more about billable hours than the truth, it was the raft I tried to navigate through the shallow rapids of the legal river. Without it I’d be scraping the bottom with my butt. Practicing law could also make a person suspicious of everyone, even old friends. Emilio Velásquez hadn’t acted as though he was lying, and I didn’t want to think he’d lie to me. But the black velvet bog of suspicion is seductive, and I could feel myself getting pulled by the suction. Justine Virga could have been Niki Falcón, Niki Falcón could have murdered Jaime Córdova. On the other hand, Justine Virga could have lied to Emilio Velásquez and he could have lied to me. Justine and Miguel might have been involved with drugs. It would explain the Porsche and the revolver and the deaths of two young people, except that drug dealers are more likely to carry semiautomatics than revolvers. Maybe Cindy had been kidding herself about Michael’s drug use. Maybe he’d been fooling her. Emilio Velásquez could also have been involved with drugs, and in fact by his own admission he had been. Drugs might have been the bond that held Justine, Michael and Emilio together. Emilio had as much reason as anyone to want Martha to appear guilty. Just because I liked him better than Martha Conover didn’t make her wrong … or guilty.
The Kid came over for dinner that night, and I asked him if he had heard of Niki Falcón. He did, after all, have an Argentine connection.
“Sure,” he said. “She was famous all over Argentina. She was a hero to the students because Jaime Córdova, the man she killed, was an asesino.” The way he pronounced asesino, it sounded like a snake hiss. “For a while her face was on walls everywhere. The military put the pictures up, the students took them down.”
“What did she look like?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Chiquita. I never saw her. I was in Mexico when that happened. People say she was very beautiful.”
“Would anybody still care about Niki Falcón now?”
“Jaime Córdova was very powerful. He had friends and family, and those people don’t forget. If she got out of Argentina alive it is a miracle, but if she is alive they will find her. There are asesinos on the right there called Las Manos.”
“The hands.”
“Claro. They cut off people’s hands and leave them alone. There is nothing the people can do to help themselves, and they bleed to the death. The asesinos save the hands, put them in a jar and bring them out to show their friends. That’s the kind of people who were looking for Niki Falcón. You think that she is the girl la viejita hit?”
“I’ve been told she was.”
“It doesn’t sound like Las Manos to put her in front of an old lady’s car,” the Kid said. “Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they are afraid of getting caught in America and didn’t want to leave their imprint.” Or maybe they were drug dealers who didn’t want to leave their imprint.
The Kid shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.
14
I WASN’T OBLIGATED to tell Saia what I discovered in my investigations. He wasn’t obligated—at this point—to tell me what he discovered in his. The DA-defense attorney relationship is a poker game, and it doesn’t often work to your advantage to show what you’re holding.
I got out my yellow pad and made a list of all I’d discovered since Saia and I had last talked: what was fact and what was speculation, what would be advantageous to reveal, what wouldn’t. Justine and Michael might have been involved with drugs. Speculation. Ci did not give Justine the note, and the note was typed on Emilio’s typewriter. Facts. Emilio believed Justine wrote the note. Speculation. Justine went to Michael’s grave alone. A probable fact that the APD should investigate for themselves. They could also find out whose typewriter typed the note. It wasn’t my job to do their work. Justine Virga was Niki Falcón, or so Emilio had said. Niki Falcón was an assassin who blew up Jaime Córdova. A fact that had been confirmed by both Emilio and the Kid. Hit men were after Niki Falcón. Speculation.
I decided to keep the rest to myself and pass the Niki Falcón story on to Saia. I didn’t see how that information could hurt Martha, and his investigations might uncover something that mine couldn’t.
“Hey, Neil, how’s it going?” he asked when I called. I visualized him leaning back in his chair, putting his feet up on his desk, lighting a cigarette, flipping the match at his ashtray and missing.
“Pretty good. What’s happening over there? Have you decided whether you’re going to file charges?”
“Not yet. Like I said, this is a case without precedent in the Land of Enchantment.”
“I’ve discovered something you ought to look into,” I said.
“Shoot.”
“I found out that Justine Virga was Niki Falcón, an assassin who planted a bomb under a general named Jaime Córdova in Buenos Aires. She changed her name when she came here.”
“Yeah? Says who?”
“Michael Velásquez’s father.”
“He’s a reliable source?”
“The Kid, who comes from Argentina and has nothing to prove one way or the other, confirmed that Niki Falcón assassinated Córdova.”
“You still seeing that guy?” His voice had that edge men get when they think a rival has entered the playing field, even when they aren’t interested in playing the game.
“Still seeing him,” I said. “Jaime Córdova came from a powerful family. My sources think they’d send hit men after Justine.”
“How long has it been since this supposed assassination took place?”
“Several years.”
“I don’t know, Neil. Sounds like a long shot to me.”
******
My next call was from Eric Winston at New West in Phoenix. “You called me about the Sharon Amaral mortgage?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s see.” I imagined Eric Winston, whom I’d never met, sitting at his desk shuffling papers. He’d be cleanshaven, chubby, have short hair of indeterminate color and rosy cheeks. Would he be smiling? Probably not. “That mortgage is in default.”
“I know,” I said. “I called to see if you would be willing to reduce the payments to get Sharon through a bad time.”
“We might be able to let her pay the interest alone until she gets back on her feet.”
“What will that save her? Twenty dollars a month?”
“Fifteen,” he said.
“That’s not going to help any.”
“It’s the best we can do.”
“You want to foreclose on a run-down house in a declining neighborhood in another state?”
“Her credit rating will be damaged if she doesn’t get her payments current.”
“Her children will be damaged
if she doesn’t feed and clothe them.”
He paused while he went through some motions. What? I wondered. Rubbed his nose, pulled his ear, scratched his belly? “Let me run it by the committee and see what I can do. How much could she afford to pay?”
“Seventy-five dollars,” I said, leaving some negotiating room but not much.
“That’s it?”
“Times are tough.” And the difference between $75 and $250 was food money.
“And it’s a tough time to be a banker,” he said. “By the way, we’re interviewing law firms to represent us in New Mexico. Would you be interested?”
“Well…” It would be a steady source of income, which we needed. It would also mean handling foreclosures, which I hate, and real estate closings, which I don’t like much better. The work would be boring at best, if not downright unpleasant. Not my brand of beer, but I did have a partner who had a lot of free time.
“We’ll be conducting interviews next week. We’ll fly you over to Phoenix if you’d like to talk to us.”
“Let me think about it,” I said.
“I’ll get back to you about the Amaral matter,” he replied.
******
My partner was hanging around the reception area, talking to Anna, who was wearing a pink sweater with matching pink ornaments in her hair and exuding a pheromone buzz. He was drawn to her wantonly and incessantly, like a bee to a flower. She wore the bright colors that attracted a mate and had the sweet smell of youth and of idleness. She knew the punch line to every bad joke. But she liked the Georges and the Stevies, good looks and loud music. Brink knew it. That was what made her safe and kept him hanging around.
“I just had an interesting offer,” I said, interrupting their ritualized dance. I was the heavy in this office, which says something about me, more about the office.
“Another murder?” he asked.
“No, it was from New West Bank in Phoenix. They’re looking for someone to represent them here.”
“But you hate that kind of work.”
“You’re right, and that’s why you should do it.”
“Me?”
Instead of a snide but predictable “Got anything better to do?” I said, “You’re so good at it.” It was the old female flattery routine, and it didn’t work. Brink knew me too well.
“I’m not that good at it, and I don’t like that kind of work either,” he said.
“We could use the money.”
“I’ll think about it.” That meant he’d do what he usually did—nothing. The reason I had a partner who did nothing was that I didn’t have the energy to do something about it.
A stereo on wheels was negotiating Lead Avenue. Even with the windows closed for autumn, I could clearly hear its progression. It stopped for a traffic signal at Fourth Street, resumed forward motion when the light turned green, cruised slowly and inevitably as fate in our direction. One of nature’s laws is that the louder the speakers, the worse the music. Nobody plays Mozart or even Garth Brooks at full volume. The sound of heavy bass and heavy metal came to a stop right outside the Hamel and Harrison window, rattling the bars of our cage. Anna was already combing her hair and redoing her lipstick.
“Quitting time,” she said.
“Are you going to Baxter, Johnson’s party?” Brink asked me.
“Is it tonight?”
“Yeah.”
I thought about what was and what was not in my refrigerator. “All right,” I said.
******
There was the usual collection of suits and skirts at Baxter, Johnson’s. The male lawyers wore their prosperity in one of two ways. Either they were tanned, fit and athletic-looking, indicating they had the time and money to take care of their bodies, or they were pale, fat and unathletic-looking, indicating they worked too hard to take care of their bodies. I looked around the room to see if there was anybody I didn’t already know in person or by reputation.
A woman was loading up her plate at the hors d’oeuvres table: artichokes on top of prosciutto on top of deviled eggs and pâté, and green chile on top of that. If she ate like that normally, how did she remain so thin? I wondered. Then I realized I’d seen her before, but only at a distance or behind a sun screen. Her hair was mostly light brown, with a few strands of gray around the face. She had attempted to put it into a bun with hairpins, but the hairpins and the hair were falling out. Her skin was full of crinkles, but underneath she had a thoroughbred’s fine bones. She held her head high, had a superior posture and the defined and graceful movements of a dancer, a tiny dancer. She was only about five feet tall. Her dance at the moment seemed to be the filling of her plate, and she was giving it her best shot.
Her makeup had been carefully applied, but her basic-black dress was wrinkled and her shoes had a hole in the toe. She wasn’t uptight enough to be a lawyer, disgruntled enough to be support staff, well dressed enough to be a lawyer’s wife, young enough to be a girlfriend, wealthy enough to be a Baxter, Johnson client. She was not the kind of person who had any reason to be at this party at all, unless, of course, someone had invited her.
I walked up to the table, put my margarita down, helped myself to a stuffed mushroom. “I’m Neil Hamel,” I said.
She looked up from her plate. She had outlined her lids with black pencil and wore a lot of eye shadow. She didn’t say anything, just looked at me with a deer-in-the-open-meadow expression.
“I live in La Vista, and I was the one who left the invitation to this party on your windshield.” It was a bad mistake, and I knew it the minute I spoke. At least I hadn’t been so dumb as to remind her the Kid had been leaving her food. Looking into her frightened eyes, I felt I had yanked form from the shadows, deer from the woods, pain from oblivion, and all of them would have preferred to stay exactly where they were. She didn’t want to know who I was, and she didn’t want me to know her.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, straightening her back and lifting her head. She had been a dancer and would always have that. She had probably, in fact, been a swan when I was still a duck. She put her overloaded plate down on the table, pretending she didn’t need the food, although I knew she needed every vitamin and mineral and calorie that she could get. Damn it, I thought. Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?
Her voice was precise and elegant. Her words were “There’s been some mistake. You and I have never met.” She turned and walked away with a proud, toes-out ballerina’s step. I wanted to stop her and ask her something, only I didn’t know what.
15
THE BALLERINA COULD be a person who’d been more harmed than helped by the women’s movement, I thought. One of those who didn’t have the skills or a man to get her across the Sahara desert of middle age to the trickle of social security that waited on the other side, someone who’d ended up with no place to live but a van in La Vista’s parking lot. The gulf that separates us from them isn’t a whole lot wider than that parking lot. Sometimes all it takes to get off the street is a month’s deposit on an apartment. In the old days, a woman like La Bailarina would have married and stayed married, and the man would have been expected to stick around and support her, but nowadays the man might not have a job either.
I had lunch the next day with a woman who’d also had to make her own way but who had been ahead of her time in her ability to do it. Martha Conover had prepared herself well for middle age and beyond, financially anyway. I wondered if, given a choice, she would have preferred to have a man do it for her. You wouldn’t think so to look at her, but by now she’d been on her own too long to do it any other way. I picked her up at Los Cerros. She chose the restaurant, a little-old-lady hangout in the Heights called Daisy’s. The parking lot was filled with big American cars. The interior was filled with potted plants. It wasn’t the kind of place where I’d expect to see anyone I recognized, but I did see Sergeant Paul Deschiney, a police officer I knew slightly, having lunch with one of the old ladies. I stopped to say hello. Martha stopped too, right next to me.
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“Hi, Neil,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Pretty good,” I replied. “How are you?” He didn’t bother to introduce his companion, who could have been his mother, and I didn’t introduce Martha, who definitely wasn’t mine.
“Do you believe this weather?” he asked.
“Great, isn’t it?”
“Fall’s my favorite time of year.”
“Mine, too.”
“Be seein’ ya.”
“Bye.”
That was the extent of the conversation, but short as it was and tiny as Martha Conover is, she made her disapproval felt. I could feel her tensing like a guard dog beside me. Her back got straighter, the elbow that held her purse gripped firmer, her lips pressed together tight.
The minute we reached our table, she latched onto a waitress and ordered a martini. “Do you know who that was?” she asked in a loud and irritated voice.
“Paul Deschiney,” I said.
“That’s one of the policemen who came to my door the night of the … the accident.” Deschiney had suspected her of a criminal act, but that wasn’t what made her really mad. “And today he didn’t even recognize me.” Her eyes snapped, her sprayed-in-place hairdo quivered.
I couldn’t deny it. Paul Deschiney had given absolutely no sign that he’d ever laid eyes on Martha Conover before. In fact he’d given no indication that he saw her today. I might have been standing at his table alone, for all the attention he paid her.
“As soon as your hair goes gray you become invisible to men,” Martha said. “Once, I sat next to a man at a dinner party and talked to him for three hours. The next time I saw him, he didn’t even remember me. Now the police are accusing me of murder, and they still don’t recognize me.”
She had a point. It did seem that second-degree murder or vehicular homicide ought to at least get a person some attention. When Martha’s martini came, she gulped it down. I’d ordered a ginger ale myself and sipped it like a lady. To present the counterargument and also because I was curious, I said, “I understand why you’re mad. On the other hand, don’t you ever feel it’s kind of nice to be invisible, to be able to walk into a bar or a restaurant and not have every guy in the place staring at your tits?” A few days before, that had been my dream, but like a lot of dreams, it was better in the imagining than in the reality.
The Lies that Bind Page 13
