The Lies that Bind

by Judith Van GIeson

  Mina sat down in a straight-backed chair. I sat on the sofa and picked up the picture. “Justine … did you call her Justine?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She looks like a gypsy.”

  “She was a very pretty girl.” Mina obviously preferred to have the picture in place on the table, so I put it back. “And Miguel was a handsome boy. They were a lovely couple. Romeo and Juliet, I called them. They’re buried next to each other in Heavenly Gate Cemetery. Martha Conover can’t keep them apart now.” I was beginning to understand the decor. Mina was a romantic. Romance causes frustration, frustration leads to violence, violence leads to litigation and litigation leads to people like Saia and me.

  “I understand Justine came from Argentina and her real name was Niki Falcón.”

  “So?”

  “And she killed Jaime Córdova, a general in Buenos Aires.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Emilio Velásquez. I’m an old friend of his and Cindy’s. My friend from Argentina confirmed it.” Mina Alarid said nothing. “You know the Argentines could have set Martha up.”

  “How would they have done that?”

  “They could have taken her car while she was at the AWC meeting or after she got home, killed Justine with it somewhere else and planted the body at Los Cerros. Argentines run the Mighty, where Martha had her car serviced, and had access to her key. Do you know them?”

  “No. I avoid my countrymen whenever possible.”

  “You told the Journal you saw someone driving up and down your street the weekend before Justine died. You thought it was Martha Conover.” Mina folded her hands in her lap and didn’t confirm or deny that that was what she had said. “Could you describe the vehicle for me?”

  “It was a large gray American car.”

  “Did you notice the make or model?”

  “No.”

  “Did you actually see who was driving?”

  “No, but I know it was Martha. She hates us. She always thought she was better than we are. We’re from South America. That means we’re drug addicts and thieves, who have no culture.”

  “You said you could see the car clearly but you couldn’t see who was driving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not?”

  “It had tinted glass.”

  “That’s it,” I said, showing more enthusiasm than a lawyer ought to. “Martha’s car doesn’t have tinted glass. That sounds like the car that I saw when I was inspecting the Atalaya lot, where I thought Justine might have been killed.”

  Mina got up, went to the window, balanced her glasses on her nose, parted the drapes a crack and looked nervously out. She saw nothing, apparently, came back, sat down, dropped the glasses and gripped the arms of her Louis-something chair. “If they’re after you they will get you, you know. They will stop at nothing. Nothing. I never wanted to take in Justine in the first place, but she was my sister’s daughter. What else could I do?”

  There was one more thing I needed to know. “Was there a price on her head?”

  “Yes. A very high price, and every year she remained free the price got higher. The man she killed came from a wealthy, proud and powerful family, who will never forget what she did. They wanted Justine to pay. I told her she shouldn’t come back here anymore; it was too dangerous; but she insisted on visiting Miguel’s grave every year. That was more important to her than whether she lived or died.”

  “Did she know she was being followed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know about the note that was found with her: ‘I knew this was going to happen, but I couldn’t prevent it?’”

  “Yes.”

  “Emilio thinks Justine wrote the note herself. That her death was a sort of suicide. That she jumped in front of Martha’s car.”

  “Emilio is wrong. I wrote it. After Emilio took Cindy home, Justine and I were alone in his apartment. I told her not to go to the cemetery. We argued about it. I pleaded with her, but she insisted on going there and going alone. Maybe she didn’t want to believe she was in danger. Maybe she’d stopped caring whether or not she got caught.”

  “She had a gun. Maybe she thought that would protect her.”

  “Justine was a very reckless and headstrong girl. The more you told her not to do something, the more she insisted on doing it. It was a terrible responsibility to try to look after her. I couldn’t keep her under lock and key, but I wanted my sister to know I hadn’t been a fool, that I had foreseen the danger and had tried to protect her daughter. My sister thinks like a mother, that there is always something you can do to protect your children. Sometimes there isn’t, not if they don’t want to be protected. I was very angry when I gave Justine the note. It was a childish gesture, I suppose, like what is it that children in this country say? I told you so?”

  “Adults say it too.”

  She threw up her hands. “Well, I was right, wasn’t I? One thing I have learned in life is that destiny cannot be stopped.” She dropped her hands to her lap. “I can’t say it gives me any pleasure to be vindicated.”

  “You’re willing to let Martha be indicted for Justine’s death?” I asked her.

  Mina held her head high, as if she was balancing something fragile and worth preserving. “Nobody has proven to me that Martha didn’t kill my niece. The fact that my countrymen were looking for her doesn’t rule out the possibility that Martha got there first. I doubt the Córdova family would have had Justine killed anyway. They’d want her taken alive for the pleasure of torturing her themselves.”

  “If the Argentines didn’t kill Justine, then why are they pursuing me?”

  “When they catch up to you—and they will: you can count on it—why don’t you ask them?”

  That was the kind of question that made me think of getting a refill of skunk juice or stopping by Ron Peterson’s gun store for ammunition.

  “And now I want you to leave my house and not come back,” Mina said. “I don’t want those assassins following you here. I’m tired of living in fear; tired of my family, tired of Martha Conover’s family; tired of violence; dead tired, bone tired, tired to death of Argentina.”

  ******

  On my way home I stopped at Heavenly Gate Cemetery and located the graves of Michael Velásquez and Justine Virga. In the villages along the high road, cemeteries are the gayest spot in town, decorated with plastic flowers that never fade or wilt—the Chicano influence, perhaps. In Mexico they have a different attitude toward death. They celebrate it, they look at it, they joke about it, they deal with it. We block it out of our real lives, which may be why we are so obsessed with it in our entertainment. Mexicans eat candy shaped like skeletons and mummies. On El Día de los Muertos they camp out on the graves of their loved ones, eating, drinking, dancing, calling up the spirits.

  I didn’t expect to find any plastic flowers on Michael Velásquez’s grave, and I was right. His life and death were marked by a simple brass plaque in the ground. Next to his grave was a new one, as yet unmarked—Verónica Falcón’s. I wondered who was responsible for putting Falcón here—Cindy Reid, Mina Alarid, Emilio Velásquez, or the three of them together? And I wondered what Martha thought about it, if she knew. She ought to know, but it was hard to figure what got entered and erased from the hard drive of her brain.

  I stood at Justine Virga/Verónica Falcón’s grave and thought about what had happened on Halloween night—what was fact, what was speculation. She had come here (probable fact), fired a bullet somewhere (also a probable fact), fired it that night (speculation). Someone had put the gun in the glove compartment of her car. It was Halloween night, the cemetery was isolated, no one would have heard the shot—if there was a shot—or whoever did hear it might have thought it was part of the Halloween noise. “Were you here that night?” I asked Justine’s grave. “Did you fire the gun? At whom? Did you go to see Martha, or did someone get to you first? Has anybody collected the price on your head? Has anybody paid?” The wind lifted a piece
of paper and spun it around in a gyre, but Justine did not answer.

  She was a big question mark, a person who had committed an irrevocable act. There were three of those that came to mind: creating someone, killing someone, abandoning someone. Things that once done can’t be undone. As Emilio said, doing the forbidden doesn’t make you inhuman, but it does take you over a border, and you’re going to be living by different rules afterwards. Still you’d also be living by some of the same rules, and I wondered if regret was one.

  You’re representing Martha Conover, not Justine Virga, I reminded myself. It doesn’t really matter who Justine was or what she thought or felt; Martha Conover is paying your fee. Your job is to keep the DA’s office from indicting her and, if that doesn’t work, to keep them from getting a conviction.

  I leaned over, touched Justine’s grave, then Michael’s, the star-crossed lovers who’d ended up together in the dirt. “Vaya con Dios,” I said.

  ******

  It was the Kid’s night to play the accordion at El Lobo. Since he wasn’t going to be around to warn any intruders away, I’d taken his advice, loaded my LadySmith and brought it home. I dead-bolted myself in, got into bed, turned out the light and began drifting down the lonesome highway, when I heard the sound of a cricket chirp. It can’t be a cricket in November, I thought, until he chirped again. The crickets we have in New Mexico are giant, Texas-sized athletes, and they have a sound to match their size. You have to put up with them all summer when they sneak into the bedroom, their favorite place, but by now they should have gone south or underground or wherever it is that crickets go when summer is over. This one sounded way loud, even for New Mexico, as if he was singing into an amplifier. It’s the males that make the noise, I knew, by rubbing their legs together. Maybe his was the last cry of summer, maybe he was looking for a mate and was getting desperate, maybe he was trapped somewhere and screaming to get out. Whatever, he was making me long for a hard frost.

  I’d been through the dance of the cricket-in-the-bedroom before, and I knew where it led—to sleeplessness and swearing. Crickets are the ventriloquists of the insect world, and their sound is never where it appears to be coming from. I’d ripped my bedroom apart before, looking for them. I also knew that as soon as the light goes out they start to rub their legs together, and they don’t stop until you turn on the light or you catch them and flush them down the toilet. Maybe this cricket was worn out from a long summer of chirping, I thought optimistically, and would wind down and shut up. He didn’t. He chirped and chirped, louder and louder. “Go away. Leave me alone,” I said. Chirp.

  I turned on the light, prepared to hunt him down if it took all night. As soon as the light went on, the cricket shut up. I got out of bed and turned the light off. There was enough light from the parking lot to find my way around. The cricket began to chirp again, in excitement or joy or fear or whatever it was that motivated him. The sound seemed to be emanating from the southeast corner of the room, behind the television set. I walked over there and pulled the TV stand away from the wall. No intruder jumped out at me or crouched silhouetted against the baseboard. He continued to sing, but now from the opposite corner, in my clothes closet. I went into the closet, turned on the overhead light. He wasn’t behind my shoes or in the laundry basket. The sound, in fact, now seemed to be coming from behind the bed. This guy was a trickster, the Houdini of the insect world, and he was making a fool of me. I yanked the bed away from the wall and found three used Kleenex, a safety pin and a Bic pen. I pulled out the dresser and exposed its dust balls next. He wasn’t hiding there either, but he was somewhere in this room, his mating song throbbing, as predictable as summer, as elusive as the truth, right under your nose when you think it’s out there somewhere. I turned southeast, northwest, stopped in the middle, under the ceiling fixture. “Where the hell are you?” I asked. “Here,” came the answer, loud and clear.

  The sound hadn’t been coming from the north, south, east or west. It was directly overhead, in the ceiling fixture, but how had the cricket gotten up there? I turned on the bedside lamp, climbed up on the bed. True to form, as soon as the light went on, the cricket shut up. I saw him, a black lump about an inch long behind the plastic in the ceiling fixture, eight feet off the ground and six feet off the bed. Either someone had put him there to torment me or he’d taken a monumental leap, but why had he bothered? Did he think true love was waiting in the ceiling fixture? Someone else might have taken the .38 and blasted him to bits, but I’m a lawyer, after all, reasonable and precise. I unscrewed the knob that held the plastic and the cricket in place. We were face-to-face. He was a big, fat, lusty specimen. I was tired and irritable myself. I put my hand over him, jumped off the bed and flipped the plastic shade over on the floor before he had a chance to leap out. Now that he was trapped and at my mercy, what was I going to do with him? On the assumption that any cricket stupid enough or brave enough to jump into a ceiling fixture deserves better than the toilet bowl, I opened the window and threw him out. I noticed as I did that the parking space next to the Dumpster was filled. La Bailarina had come home.

  24

  WHEN I WOKE up alone the next day, Saturday, thinking about means and motive, I decided to take a trip to Santa Fe. I didn’t tell the Kid I was going; he had to work, and I knew what he’d say anyway: Cuidado con la hedionda. I wanted to know if the price on Justine’s head had been paid and who had collected. My questions could best be answered by an Argentine, and there were two places in New Mexico where I knew they hung out. One was Mighty, but I wouldn’t go there without a police escort. The other was a polo field. As the Kid said, Argentines play polo better than anyone else. There was a field in La Cienega, just south of Santa Fe, that being the one place in New Mexico rich enough to play polo. It was open space, in danger of being turned into a Las Tramponus development but tied up in litigation at the moment. Polo was played there on weekends, I knew. “How dangerous could a polo field be in the middle of the afternoon?” I asked myself. “Not very,” I replied, but I took my gun anyway and put it in my purse. It’s illegal to carry a concealed weapon in New Mexico, but it’s only a misdemeanor, the equivalent of a traffic violation.

  It’s been said that the highway is the best—if not the only—place to think, and the Big I between Albuquerque and Santa Fe used to be a thinking person’s road. It still is, late at night or early in the morning. In the old days you could get on the interstate in Albuquerque at any time, day or night, turn your mind loose and get off in Santa Fe with the answer to your question. Now there’s traffic to think about and road construction and exits leading nowhere. The construction on I-25 was supposed to have been completed by fall; it hadn’t been. From Placitas to Algodones it was one lane in each direction, with a concrete divider down the middle to separate the outgoing from the incoming. Threading my way between a hard place and the orange barrels of construction, I watched a tall crane beside the road lift a large weight and drop it to the ground. The purpose was either to test the soil or to flatten the ground for the new road. Some people got so engrossed in watching it that they drove off the interstate and into the orange barrels, but not me. I kept my mind on what I was doing. The highway opened up again after Algodones, and the traffic went from single file to double and picked up speed. At La Bajada it expanded to three lanes and herd formation. La Bajada is the ultimate test of a car’s age and power and ability to function at higher elevations. The Nissan got a B minus, but still I had enough horsepower to pass a pickup truck with three cowboy hats balanced like sitting ducks in the cab and a junker with a stupidly smiling Garfield stuck to the window. I had my moment in the fast lane until a turquoise Honda got on my tail and forced me to pull over. On my right, in the climbing lane, was a long red horse trailer in immaculate condition, pulled by an equally red and immaculate truck. Coming down the other side of La Bajada, the Honda was long gone and the horse trailer picked up speed and passed me. The trouble with a subcompact is that you can pass them going up but they
catch up to you going down. You can never get up enough speed to get rid of them forever. You could play interstate truck tag like that from one end of the country to the other. The trucker you were playing it with would think you’d fallen in love, when all you wanted was to go at your own chosen speed. As the trailer passed me I counted the faces of the horses in the windows—twelve, more than enough for a polo team. The rig was going a lot faster than I would have with twelve horses behind me. I watched it pull off at the La Cienega exit.

  It was lunchtime, so I continued on to Santa Fe and stopped at the Indian restaurant on Cerrillos. I wanted to see what their hot food was like. Not as hot as ours, but hot enough and subtly spiced. The vegetable samosas came with a tamarind sauce to leave home for. The Indian waiter hovered over me with a politeness that bordered on obsequiousness and invaded my space. While I ate I willed him to back off and thought about India and colonialism and what I knew about polo, which wasn’t much except that it was a rich man’s sport and they played it in India and in Santa Fe, two places with an explosive colonial past. I’d heard somewhere that the pieces of turf that the horses kick up are called divots and the periods are chukkers. It’s the kind of useless information you file in the recesses of your brain, only to surface at those moments when you can’t remember your best friend’s name.

  I finished my lunch and got back on Cerrillos, the motel and junk food strip that could be anywhere U.S.A. Tourists don’t go there because it’s too much like home. The natives go there because the tourists don’t. I turned right on Airport Road and looked for the polo field. After I passed the airport turnoff, I could see it in the west, hovering between dust-colored foreground and purple mountains. One of nature’s laws in Santa Fe is that the better the neighborhood, the worse the roads. Dirt roads are a status symbol here, along with horses and Mercedes-Benz jeeps. I turned down this one, rattled by ruts and pursued by my own personal dust devil.