“My mother couldn’t have had a stroke. She’s too strong.” Cindy was hiding in the dark den of denial, and she didn’t want to come out. She was living with her mother’s substance abuse; she was used to that. The effects of the vodka and Halcion were self-induced and, presumably, reversible, but physical deterioration was something else. Once the aging body and mind start to go, there are good days and bad days, but there’s no turning back. Watching an all-powerful mother change into a frail and dependent mother can’t be easy. For one thing, it means you’ve got to do a lot of adjusting yourself.
“I’d have her checked if I were you.”
“I’ll try. You never really think your mother’s going to get old and sick. You always think she’s going to live forever. I mean a mother like mine anyway, one of the tough ones.”
I knew my mother wouldn’t live forever, that she might live only as long as I remembered her, but if she lived only as I remembered her she’d never get old. As for how tough she was, I didn’t know.
“Well, thanks for calling, Neil. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Okay,” I said. There were more questions that needed to be asked, but Cindy wasn’t the one to answer them.
I called Emilio. “Hey, Neil,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Pretty good. There are some things I want to talk to you about.”
“Can you come over?”
“How about this afternoon?”
“Okay. I’m going to Arroyo del Oso to watch the soccer game. Could you meet me there at four?”
“Yeah,” I said.
******
My next call was to Anthony Saia, to tell him about the Arizona trip. Either his back was to the wall or his bucket was full. He was in a bad mood and didn’t want to listen to what I had to say. Present an opposing point of view to a man who’s down and he’s liable to attack, and the way a man attacks a woman (if he doesn’t punch her out) is to tell her, in one way or another, that she’s stupid. Maybe they do that to each other too. Who am I to say?
“You’re imagining things, Neil,” Saia said. “Why would some guys kill Justine Virga and then try to do you?”
“Justine Virga because she is Niki Falcón and she assassinated a general in Buenos Aires. Me because I’m doing the APD’s job for them.”
“Hearsay. You heard Justine Virga was Niki Falcón. There’s no evidence to support that theory.”
“There is evidence that someone attacked me, if you want to see it. Big red welts on my neck.”
“So some douchebag was trying to rob you or get into your pants, and you’re making a big-deal conspiracy out of it.”
If that kind of talk made him feel like a superior man, what did it make me? A paranoid bimbo? “Fuck you, Saia,” I said.
“You, too,” he replied and hung up.
Anthony Saia was the friend I counted on to chase away the legal blues and raise the level of any old boring day, the professional associate who would laugh, flirt and do what was necessary to maintain the feeling that life doesn’t suck before you die. We’d had the bond of You jolly me up, I’ll do it for you. No more than that, but it was a bond, and he had violated it. A grouchy man can ruin your day faster than a flat tire in a rainstorm—if you let him. I picked up a rubber band, shot it at the coffee cup on my desk, lit a cigarette.
When the phone rang, I let Anna answer it. “It’s Saia,” she yelled. “For you.”
I picked up my end. “Yeah.” I didn’t think he would go so far as to actually apologize, and I was right. What he said was, “I’ve had a bad day.”
“No shit.”
“C’mon, Neil, cut me a little slack, will you? Dorman’s been on my case.” It was about as much as you could expect and more than you usually got. “I do have some interesting news for you.”
“What’s that?”
“The APD checked out the headlight glass at Atalaya and found it didn’t come from Conover’s car. As for the tinted glass, Martha’s car doesn’t have tinted glass. None of her windows were broken anyway.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Glad to do it,” he replied.
22
THE ARROYO DEL OSO or Bear Creek soccer fields have a wide-angle view toward the west, big enough to show several storm systems at once. It could be raining in gray sheets in the South Valley, sunny in the North, and you’d see it all from up there. When you see that far, you have the feeling that if you took a giant step you’d end up in the sky, and you can easily forget you’re in a city. Emilio had parked his van beneath the trees. He wasn’t supposed to park there, but his license plate had wheels on it and his bumper wore a sticker that said Vietnam Vet, so he knew no one was going to bother him. He had rolled his wheelchair into the shade. It was a trimmed-down racing model, nothing but seat and wheels canted out for balance and speed. He wore black leather fingerless gloves, and his legs were strapped in with a black belt. It was a clear, crisp fall day, a relief after the heat of summer that presses you into the pavement. The match had started. Teenage boys ran down the field in their shorts, bouncing the ball off their thighs and their heads.
“Hey, Nellie,” Emilio said when he saw me.
“Hola.” I bent down and gave him a kiss.
“Miguel loved to play soccer. Did I ever tell you that?”
“No.” Emiliano had been a good soccer player himself. I remembered games he’d organized on the playing fields of Ithaca, New York.
“He had hot feet. I saw him score four goals once right here. That’s one reason I don’t leave Los Cerros. I like to come here.” Emiliano was connected to another life that had screeched to a stop in midflight and kept him from going forward. “I’m glad I’ve gotten to the point where I can come here again,” he said. “The old lady hardly ever watched Miguel play, only she came the day he scored all the goals. She’s too dignified to yell, but you should have seen her shake her little fists. It was something. I was parked in my van on the other side of the field, and I had to try real hard not to let on that I was Miguel’s dad.”
“You weren’t as subtle as you thought.”
“She knows?”
“Yeah.”
“No shit? And she never let on?”
“I guess not.”
“She’s tough.”
“Maybe, but nobody comes in tough, and nobody goes out that way, either,” I said.
“Some do. I’ve seen some go out that were real tough.” He shook his head. “You have to give the old lady credit. She doesn’t miss much.”
Not when all her circuits were connecting anyway. “She says she didn’t want to make a martyr out of you by kicking you out of your apartment.”
“Maybe she just wanted to keep an eye on me.”
“Maybe.”
I hated standing over Emilio and looking down at him, so I sat on the grass, which happened to be damp from a watering system or dog piss. I felt around for a dry spot, but I couldn’t find one in the shade. “You haven’t seen any dogs go by here, have you?”
He laughed. “Not recently.”
“Good,” I said.
He stared at me with his whiskey-colored eyes. “What’s on your mind, Nellie?”
“Martha thinks Michael and Justine were into drugs,” I said. I’d already tried this approach with Cindy, and it hadn’t worked. I was hoping Emilio either knew more or would be more objective.
“She’s wrong. I would have known if they were. I know a lot more about drugs than the old lady does.”
“About some kinds of drugs.”
“That’s true, but those are the kinds of drugs Miguel and Justy would have been into—if they were into drugs.”
I tore off a couple of blades of grass and squeezed them between my fingers like the whistles I made as a kid. I was getting to the hard part. “When did Michael buy the Porsche?” I asked him.
“About a month before he died.”
“You’re sure Martha didn’t give it to him?” It was a diversionary tactic. I knew
that Martha didn’t give Michael the Porsche and Emilio knew that I knew, but I wanted to take his mind off the previous question, a question that, if I’d believed Emilio, I wouldn’t have had to ask. He stared at me with his Jack Daniel’s eyes, and once again I had the feeling the color was about to bleed out.
“I’m positive,” he said. “Can’t you ever forget that you’re a lawyer, Nellie?”
“Yeah, but not when I’m working. There’s one more thing. I was wondering if you could give me Mina Alarid’s address and phone number. I tried information, and she’s not listed.”
“Why do you want to talk to her?”
“I was hoping she could confirm that Niki Falcón assassinated Jaime Córdova and that hit men were after her. The deputy DA doesn’t want to believe me.”
“Nobody believes anybody in this case, do they?”
“No,” I said.
A player in a blue jersey broke away from the pack and ran down the field. He had long muscular legs and kicked the ball with a perfect sideways kick. The goalie lunged at it, fell on his face, the ball went in. Emilio was running in place, sliding his leather gloves up and down the edges of the wheels. “All right,” he yelled. “Did you see that kick?”
“Yeah.”
“I bet your boyfriend can play soccer.”
“You’re right.”
“Would you love him if he ended up like me?”
Would I? Would the Kid love me if I ended up a paraplegic? Did we love each other now?
“Cindy loves me. She’ll always love me, and there hasn’t been a damn thing we could do about it,” he said.
******
The next morning my Bic pen drew circles up and down the lines on my yellow legal pad while I thought about Michael Velásquez. If Emilio had told the truth, his son bought the Porsche a month before he died. If he paid five hundred dollars for it, he’d had a lucky break one day that turned out to be fatally unlucky a month later. If Emilio was wrong and Michael had paid what the Porsche was worth, where did he get the money? The obvious answer was drugs, the backbeat of the American economy. A lot of the money that got laundered and squandered in S&Ls came from drugs. It’s convenient and tempting to blame drugs for everything that goes wrong, but it’s a path I don’t like to take; it’s too easy.
I left work in the middle of the morning and walked over to the library. Before I did, I loaded my pockets with change. Nobody walks in Albuquerque, but it was only a few blocks, and for the duration I pretended I lived in a city where people did walk. I kind of like the renovation of downtown and the new tall buildings. Now it looks like anywhere, U.S.A., when it used to look like nowhere. The skyscrapers make deep shadows, pockets of cool in the middle of the day. I walked past the parking lot where three pastel smokestacks vent air against a brick wall. It had the look of another decade, and so did the guys in camouflage gear sitting in front of the library with their hands out. I didn’t begrudge them the change, but I hate the process of fumbling through my purse, looking for it. I reached deep in my pockets and put quarters in some grubby palms, but not all of them; I hadn’t brought enough.
I entered the library, climbed the stairs to the second floor and went to the microfilm file for the Journal which was organized in drawers of six years and rolls of three months. I opened the most recent drawer and found the roll for July, August, September, three years back. To give myself leeway, I started in mid-September and cranked my way through the Sunday classifieds: lost and found, auctions, money wanted, garage sales and flea markets, until I came to automobiles. I didn’t find any Porsches for sale on September 14 or 21, but on September 28 I did. There it was, exactly as Emilio had said, used Porsche for sale $500, 55,000 miles, with a phone number in an exchange I knew to be on the fringes of Porsche country. “All right,” I said, loud enough to wake the man at a nearby table from his morning nap. I copied down the phone number, put the microfilm back, ran a couple of dollars through the copier change machine, and dropped the quarters in the palms of the guys I’d missed on my way in.
******
“Where have you been?” Anna asked when I got back to the office. I was the boss. I was the one who was supposed to ask suspicious questions.
“The library,” I said. If she wondered what I had been reading, she didn’t ask.
The number I had copied was three years old. It could have been reassigned many times in three years, but I dialed it anyway. “Hello,” growled the voice of an angry woman.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Neil Hamel. I’m a lawyer and—”
“You’re not representing my ex-husband are you? ’Cause if you are, I’m gonna hang up right now.”
“No. I don’t even know who your ex-husband is. I’m investigating a Porsche that was supposedly sold by someone at this number three years ago.”
“Some Porsche has been in an accident, and you think you’re gonna sue me for it? I got news for you: somebody already died in that car when it got totaled.”
“Thanks. That’s what I wanted to know. Just one more thing: did you really sell it for five hundred dollars?” If she had, I’d have to eat my cynicism.
“I didn’t. My ex-husband did. That son of a bitch sold off everything he could get his hands on. This is a community property state. I got half of what was left, and you know what that amounted to? Three thousand dollars. That’s what I got, plus a house that was mortgaged up the ying-yang.”
“Why didn’t you put the car title in both your names?”
“Because he bought it with our joint savings while I was in Oklahoma visiting my mother and he registered it in his name. Any more questions?”
“No. But I have a suggestion. If you ever get divorced again, get yourself a good lawyer.”
“I’m never gonna get divorced again, and you know why? I’m never gonna get married again. I don’t even talk to the sons of bitches anymore if I can help it.”
23
I LEFT WORK early that afternoon and went to see Mina Alarid. She lived off Tramway in a subdivision that was tucked into the crotch of the Sandias where the view on one side is boulders and cacti and on the other the endless sky, where you don’t dare let your pets out because they’re coyote fodder, where the diversion channels turn to class-ten rapids in the rainy season. A powder-blue Ford was parked in the driveway. Her house was vanilla stucco in substance and California modern in style; it had a lot of glass and five or six different roof angles, combining the roundness of a dome with the sharpness of an A-frame.
Her bell had a musical chime loud enough to set dishes rattling in the depths of the house. Mina Alarid came to a window beside the front door with her glasses dangling from a ribbon around her neck. She picked up the glasses, balanced them on her nose and looked over my shoulder into the driveway, where my car was parked. She seemed to relax when she saw I was driving a yellow Nissan, enough to open her inner door anyway. She dropped the glasses to inspect me, one of those people, apparently, who can see up close but need glasses to get the long view. Obviously I wasn’t selling Girl Scout cookies. So what are you doing here? her wary eyes said. The outer door, a combination storm/screen, remained closed. Most people don’t bother with storm doors in New Mexico. Since this was fall, you’d expect to find glass in the door, not screens, but I would have been willing to bet my Nissan that the glass stayed in this door year round and that it was locked too. The puffy clouds drifting across the horizon behind me reflected in the glass and obscured Mina Alarid’s face.
“I’m Neil Hamel,” I said. “I’m a lawyer representing Martha Conover.”
Mina Alarid stiffened right up when she heard Martha’s name, and she started to close the inner door. “I can’t help you,” she said.
“Wait,” I replied. “I think whoever killed Justine has been trying to kill me.”
“Martha Conover killed Justine.”
“I went to Arizona a few days ago, and I was followed and attacked by a man who spoke Argentine Spanish.”
“What d
o you know about Argentine Spanish?” Her English was crisp and precise and had no noticeable accent.
“I have a friend from Argentina.”
My hand was still on the inner door; her face drifted in and out of the clouds. She sighed and unlocked the storm door. “All right. Come in.”
She was a slim, elegant, erect woman. Her black hair was pulled straight back in a tight bun, and a few gray wisps curled loose around her face. She wore a white silk blouse with a scalloped collar and a gray skirt. I followed her into her living room, which was as soft and cluttered as the view outside (if she ever opened the curtains) was spare and empty. The knee-jerk femininity of the house probably came from the same impulse that made pioneer women plant flowers and attempt to civilize the windy prairie. I was reminded of a house I saw once in Santa Fe, where the owner was watering limp petunias and trying to keep them alive when across the road wildflowers grew in abundance. My own personal style is about as stark inside as it is out, but then I hadn’t been through what Mina had.
She wasn’t a woman who opened her windows in rainstorms to let the ozone blow in. The air in the living room was sealed-tight stale. The long white curtains dripped like candle wax onto the off-white rug. The chairs were in the ornate style of some French despot, white upholstery with gold arms and legs. A large mirror with a gilt frame hung over the sofa, also white, with sleeves across the arms to keep them clean. The lamps on the end tables were painted with pictures of plump maidens sitting in a swing. A vase of pink silk flowers sat on the coffee table. If this room were a pet, it would be a clipped white poodle. It was a city room, but that of a closed-in European city, not the Duke’s wild West. The softness and fussiness might have been an attempt to keep bitter reality at bay, but it made me feel I’d eaten too much and was wearing tight underwear. The only harsh notes in this room were me and a picture of Justine with her wild gypsy eyes. Justine was wearing a pink dress in this picture, and her long hair swung loose. She was smiling and looked younger and softer than in any of the other pictures, but the eyes were the same. I looked into those eyes and wondered what she had thought of her aunt, of this room, and how confined a woman reckless enough to have blown up Jaime Córdova must have felt in a house like this. All I knew of Justine came from the picture and from other people. It wasn’t enough.
The Lies that Bind Page 19
