“I don’t go into bars, and men didn’t stare at my breasts. Ever.” She looked around the room. “Where is that waitress?”
The waitress happened to be standing within earshot, talking in Spanish to another table. “The goddamn Spanish are slower than molasses. Waitress,” Martha yelled, in a shrill voice that got her attention. That’s the way hostility gets spread around. A policeman insults Martha, Martha insults the waitress, who goes home and yells at her kid, the kid kicks the dog, the dog bites the mailman. The waitress gave Martha a look that said she might just dispense with the kid and kick her. At least it would break the chain. Instead she rolled her eyes and said “Híjole” to the other table.
“What did she say?” snapped Martha.
“Híjole.”
“I can’t hear you. Speak up.”
“Híjole.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just an exclamation. It doesn’t mean much.”
“Is it a swear word?”
“No.”
“I’ll have another martini, young lady,” Martha said to the waitress, who had arrived at our table. The waitress wrote down the order, stared at a speck on the ceiling and said nothing. I peered into Martha’s angry blue eyes and for a brief minute was able to enter her world, a world where she was only five feet two, where she was getting older and weaker and more frequently ignored, where she was losing the power she’d struggled so hard to get. The world was full of pheromone secreters, and hers were all used up. She lived in a place where she was surrounded by a language she didn’t understand and a culture she couldn’t comprehend. On the other hand, why had she moved to a place where Anglos are in the minority? For the weather? One of nature’s laws is that in any place with good weather, the locals speak a different language. Had she gone to the trouble to learn that language, it might not seem so threatening.
Martha ordered a chicken salad. I ordered the enchilada plate.
“Green chile or red?” the waitress asked.
“Green. And make it hot,” I replied, even though I knew Daisy’s hot green chile wouldn’t rate a footnote on the menu at Arriba Tacos.
“Well, have they decided what they are going to charge me with?” Martha asked.
“Not yet.”
“Then what did you want to talk to me about?”
“I’ve found out that Justine used the name Niki Falcón when she lived in Argentina and that the reason she left there was that she assassinated a general in Buenos Aires.”
Fortunately she didn’t think to ask me how I found out. “Did you know that?”
“No, but that proves I was right.”
“About what?”
“That girl was a killer. Cynthia never wanted to believe me, but I knew from the day Michael met her that Justine was no good.”
“The man she assassinated was a well-known pig and torturer.”
“And she was a troublemaker. Michael was a bright boy with a great future ahead of him, and then she came along and ruined everything.”
“It’s possible Argentine hit men were after her.”
“Or drug dealers.”
The food arrived, and I bit into my enchilada. Daisy’s hot was Arriba’s lukewarm.
“I’ve never understood how people can eat that hot food,” said Martha, picking up a fork and spearing her chicken salad.
“I like it,” said I. And then we got to the issue that even more than the question of Martha’s guilt or innocence was keeping me with one foot outside the door of this case.
“And I don’t understand what you are doing with that man.” She gave a little shiver of disapproval.
“If it’s not broke, don’t analyze it.”
“His hands are dirty.”
“He’s a mechanic.”
“You’re a professional woman. Why don’t you stick to your own kind? What’s wrong with a professional man like Whit?”
“Lots,” I said.
We didn’t have much else to say. She picked at her lunch, I gulped down mine. When we were finished I paid the bill and drove her up the road to her town house at Los Cerros.
******
The professional man himself showed up at my office the next morning before I did. When I got there, at a quarter of ten, the phone was ringing and Anna’s computer keys were clacking. He didn’t hear me open the door and come in, which gave me a chance to take a good look at him. He wore plaid pants, a navy-blue polo shirt with a mallet-swinging horseman galloping across his heart, and Top-Siders with no socks. He looked like the kind of man our former Vice-President praised for his family values. The way I saw it, that meant being tight in marriage, acquisitive in the marketplace and good at expensive sports. I was married to a man like that once (briefly, though it seemed like forever), and I know the breed. Whit was sitting, I was standing, and I could see clearly the bald spot beneath the strands of stretched and slicked-in-place hair. I could hear the breath that wheezed through his nose, see the ring he turned round and around on his little finger.
“Whit Reid,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
He stood up and dropped the magazine he’d been reading onto the coffee table. The pages fluttered as they fell into place. “Can we talk?” he said.
“All right. Any messages?” I asked Anna.
“No,” she replied.
I led Whit into my office and shut the door. My desk, as always, was filled to overflowing, and the potted plants were crying for water. I sent them a telepathic message. Later, it said. I flipped through the papers on my desk, searching for someplace to put the ashes from the cigarette I was about to light. I located an ashtray, dumped the contents into the trash, lit my butt. I don’t have a big office; I don’t make big money. My office had been a bedroom when Hamel and Harrison was a frame and stucco house—a small bedroom, not large enough for a king-sized bed, or a king-sized ego. I doubt if Whit felt uncomfortable very often; he was too full of his own importance and too oblivious to everyone else. It wouldn’t occur to a guy who could monopolize a conversation the way he did that there were people out there who didn’t like or admire or at least envy him. But he did seem ill at ease in my office. In fact he acted as though he felt the walls were closing in. He stood in front of the desk, shifting his weight from one Top-Sider to the other, twisting the ring around on his finger, casting a long shadow across my desk. Maybe he was used to bigger offices. It has been well documented that tall men are more successful in our society and they like to build themselves rooms to match their size, their success, their egos.
“Have a seat,” I said. He sat, and so did I. I lit my Marlboro. “What brings you to my office?”
“I do volunteer work with minority businesses and I had to come downtown, so I decided to stop by. I’m concerned about Martha,” He had reason to be; she stood a fair chance of being indicted for second-degree murder or vehicular homicide, and she would not be a model prisoner if she got sent away. “I saw her after her lunch with you yesterday. She was very upset, but she wouldn’t tell me why.”
“Maybe the chicken salad didn’t agree with her,” I said.
“Did you tell her she was going to be indicted?” He leaned forward in his chair. Every action produces a reaction, and I leaned back in mine.
“Actually, Whit, I’m not at liberty to discuss this case with you. Martha is my client, and there is the matter of client confidentiality. If you have any questions, why don’t you ask her? She’ll tell you whatever she wants you to know.” Exactly what she wanted him to know.
“I don’t think she understands the seriousness of the charges she’s facing. She can be irrational at times.”
“Martha’s a woman,” I said. “We’re known for that.” The snideness in my voice went right by him. Whit wasn’t great at picking up on subtleties. He had noticed my smoke blowing by, however, and moved his chair sideways out of its path. He leaned back and crossed his arms. “I mean big-league irrational. She changed a lot after Michael died. Before
that she was quite sharp. But I don’t think she’s old enough to be suffering from that disease where you can’t remember anything.”
“You mean CRS?”
“What’s that?”
“Can’t remember shit.” He didn’t laugh. Whit’s sense of humor was about as lively as a stone’s.
“You know what I mean.”
I did, but he was the one who’d gone to all the expensive schools; why should I have to tell him?
“Alzheimer’s,” he remembered. “Besides, the changes in her came on too quickly to be Alzheimer’s. Her doctor says there’s nothing wrong with her that a good night’s sleep won’t fix and just prescribes more Halcion. You’ve probably only seen her when she has it together. Martha can put on a good front when she has to. But Cyn and I see her when her guard is down. Sometimes she doesn’t know what she’s doing or even where she is. It’s got to be the Halcion and the drinking, a bad combination. She used to be just a social drinker, but after Michael died she started drinking alone.”
Drinking alone used to be a warning sign of alcoholism, but that had to be before everybody lived alone. Nowadays if you didn’t drink alone you might never get to drink at all. At least people who drink in the privacy of their own homes don’t drive while they’re doing it.
Whit continued. “I was riding in her car with her one day, and she stopped at a green light. ‘Why did you stop here?’ I asked her. ‘Because the light changed,’ she said, and she got all confused and bent out of shape. But then all the other cars honked and went through the light, and she realized she’d done something dumb.”
“I don’t know why you’re telling me all this,” I said.
Both he and Cindy seemed more than eager to talk about Martha’s character flaws.
“Because you’re her lawyer and I’m not sure that Martha is competent to be making the right decisions about her life or is giving you the right information.”
“And you are?”
“I’m more competent than she is.” He shrugged.
“She seems capable enough to me.” Martha was as edgy as a lapdog, the kind of dog you’d like to drop-kick across the room, but she knew where her self-interest lay.
“You can do a better job if you have all the facts,” said Whit.
“Who ever has all the facts?”
“I think the Halcion defense will be her best chance, but you may have trouble getting her to agree to that.”
“Really?” I picked up a rubber band, shot it at a coffee mug on my desk, missed.
“Well, I just want you to know that Cyn and I are here if you have any problems dealing with Martha. We’ll be glad to talk to her if you like.”
“It won’t be necessary.”
“If you need help, Nellie—”
“My name is Neil.”
“—don’t hesitate to call on us.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t have confidence in you. I do, and that’s exactly why I recommended you to Martha.”
“You recommended me? I thought it was Cindy.”
“No, it was me.”
Why me, whose office was the size of his clothes closet, I wondered, instead of some large and prestigious firm? Like lightning flashing on one dark Sandia peak and then another, my mind bolted and landed on a seemingly distant subject. “When is El Dorado going to be auctioned?” I asked him.
Whit Reid stared at me through his glasses, stretched his hands out in front of him until his knuckles cracked. “Where did you hear about that?”
“Cindy told me. I saw the picture when I was at your house. She said she thinks foreign investors are interested.”
“Next week, I think,” he said, giving the foreign-investor theory all the attention it deserved—none. He looked at his watch. “I have to be going. Now please don’t forget you can call on us anytime if you need our help.” Whit’s surface politeness was as smooth as still water in whose depths sharks go efficiently about their business.
“I won’t,” I said.
After he left, I watered the plants. “Sorry, guys,” I said. Then I got out a legal pad and drew blue circles up and down the red line, wondering why exactly Whit had come to see me and what ever had made Cindy believe the El Dorado auction would solve their financial problems. Whit was a real estate professional. He’d know what I knew: you can’t get laughter out of a stone, tequila out of a turnip, or money out of a property being sold at a real estate auction, not in the current market—only he hadn’t told Cindy that. Given the location—Arizona—and the times—the nineties—there was a good probability El Dorado was an S&L loan that had gone bad.
I dialed 800 information and asked for the number of Resolution Trust Corporation, the corporation that is administering the sale of the assets of the S&Ls that went belly-up. At the moment, those assets made it the largest corporation in the world, although a lot of them were really liabilities, properties that never should have gotten the loans they did in the first place. Chalk it up to bankers’ optimism, stupidity, greed, or the fact that the money they were lending was savings deposits insured by the federal government. What did the S&Ls have to lose? Our money, but what the heck—we’re used to seeing that go down the tubes. In the eighties, bankers looked upon Arizona the way Pizarro coveted Peru and Cortés lusted after Mexico, virgin territory to be raped and plundered, the profits to go in their pockets.
The RTC office in Washington referred me to its office in Denver, and that office referred me to Harry Chambers, the auctioneer in Phoenix who was handling the Arizona properties. I asked him if he was auctioning off El Dorado. He said he was and offered to send me a brochure.
“I’ll get it in the mail today,” he said. “According to RTC guidelines, that property will be sold absolute. No minimum. It goes to the highest bidder.”
“Suppose there aren’t any bidders?” I asked.
“Trust me. There’s always somebody out there looking for a deal.”
Just like the legal profession, real estate is full of bottom feeders. “Thanks,” I said.
******
I wandered out to the reception area to see what Anna was up to and found her hard at work reading the Journal “Hey, get a look at this. Women are having almost as many car accidents as men. They’re driving faster and harder and wrecking their cars a lot.”
“They steal and murder more too,” I said.
“They also smoke,” said Anna, eyeballing the lethal weapon that was slowly burning down to ashes in my hand.
“That’s progress for you.” Sometimes I think the women’s movement tried too hard to make us more like them when what we should have done was let them be more like us. But then I remembered that what we used to be was so devalued nobody wanted it.
“Who’s Whit Reid?” Anna asked. “Is he a client?”
“He’s married to Cindy, Martha Conover’s daughter, my old high school friend.”
“He got way impatient waiting for you. He looked at his watch about a hundred times and breathed through his nose—loud—like he wanted me to be sure to notice he was around.”
“Whitney James Reid III is the final flower on one branch of the civilization tree.”
“Huh?”
“He was born rich, went to the best schools, was successful in business. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting; he expects everybody to cater to him.”
“He didn’t even have an appointment, did he?”
“No.”
“Why doesn’t he get his nose fixed? It has to drive his wife crazy, like living with someone who snores twenty-four hours a day.”
“Likes himself just the way he is, I guess.”
“Does his wife like him?”
“Not as much as he does.”
“Actually, he kind of reminds me of someone,” Anna said.
“Who?”
“Your ex-husband, Charles.”
“I was afraid of that,” I said.
16
&nb
sp; ERIC WINSTON FROM New West Bank in Phoenix called the next morning to tell me the board would reduce Sharon Amaral’s mortgage payments only to the amount of the interest. “I’m really sorry about this,” he said, “but there was nothing I could do.”
Winston knew whether he was telling the truth about who had made the decision. I didn’t know, but I had my suspicions. Who wouldn’t like to have an anonymous board in his or her life to take responsibility for the tough choices? To be able to say to the Martha Conovers of this world, “Sorry, Martha, but the board says I can’t represent you, and there’s no arguing with the board”? Bankers get to pass the buck. Lawyers in business for themselves don’t.
“Sharon was a good customer,” I said. “She made all her payments on time before her husband took off. Just give her a chance to get her life straightened out.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“You’re going to be taking on an undesirable property in a declining neighborhood,” I warned him.
He wasn’t intimidated. Bankers know how to say no; they get lots of practice. They get lots of practice saying what comes next too. “I’m sorry.”
“Would you sign off on the note if Sharon turns the house over to you? It’ll save you the time and trouble of going through foreclosure. You’re not going to get any more money out of Sharon anyway.”
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “We’re going to be interviewing Albuquerque lawyers next week. Could you come over?”
“I could,” I said.
“Why don’t we talk about the Amaral matter then?”
“All right.” My making a client out of New West Bank might help Sharon, I thought, but what would it do for me? All I’d get out of it would be the ability to pay the bills a little sooner and the aggravation of having to hound Brink. That plus a trip to Phoenix.
I called Sharon. It wasn’t much, 5½ Yellow Arrow Street, but it was home, and she was going to lose it. I might be able to improve on the terms, but sooner or later she’d have to pay up or move out. I picked up the phone, dialed Sharon’s number and heard an answering machine voice. It was tempting to leave a message. “Sharon, the board says you’re going to lose your house, and there’s nothing I can do. Sorry.” I wasn’t likely to get paid for my efforts in any case. “This is Neil,” I said. “Call me.”
The Lies that Bind Page 14
