Wall of Glass

by Walter Satterthwait

  “So you got him for receiving.”

  He nodded. “That’s correct.”

  “He only did eighteen months.”

  Nolan frowned, nodded.

  “I remember reading in the newspaper,” I said, “about the bust. Weren’t the goods valued at over thirty thousand dollars?”

  Still frowning, Nolan nodded again. “Thirty-three thousand five hundred.”

  “Over twenty thousand dollars makes it a second-degree felony. That’s eight years’ time on a conviction. He plea-bargained?”

  “The D.A.’s office is overworked. A trial costs time and money.” He spoke quickly, and there was a tightness, an irritation, in his voice. At me, certainly, but also at the system he was defending. It had to be frustrating to make a solid bust and then watch the bad guy get off with only eighteen months in prison. But the frustration was cop-frustration, and rather than share it with a civilian, he was giving me the party line. “They let his lawyer plead guilty to third-degree. Three years. He did half of it.”

  I said, “The stuff that was recovered was mostly artwork?”

  He nodded. “And jewelry. He had burgled at least four galleries here in town, and several homes.”

  “Was everything recovered?”

  “No. We estimate that at least another seventy or eighty thousand is still missing.”

  “What about Biddle? Did he have a record?”

  “Nothing here. And in Amarillo, nothing extensive. Drunk and Disorderly. D.W.I.”

  “Did Biddle and Killebrew originally come to Santa Fe together?”

  “No. Biddle came here about six years ago, Killebrew a year later.”

  “Did you talk to Biddle after the burglary?”

  “Not immediately. We didn’t have enough evidence to request extradition. I called him in Amarillo, asked for his cooperation, but it wasn’t until a week later that he drove back here.” Nolan frowned again, remembering.

  “When he did come back,” I said, “he denied having anything to do with the burglary?”

  A small shrug. “I didn’t expect him to confess.”

  “What was he doing in Amarillo?”

  “Looking for work, he said.” Another frown. Nolan clearly hadn’t been fond of Frank Biddle. “If so, he never found it. He returned to Amarillo after I questioned him, but he stayed only another few weeks before coming back to Santa Fe.”

  “And you never got the evidence you needed to tie him to the burglary.”

  “No. Neither him nor Killebrew. But his coming to you as he did, trying to unload the jewelry, is hardly an indication of his innocence.”

  I nodded. “Getting back to the Leightons. You said something about the M.O. of the burglary.”

  “Yes. It matched that of the other burglaries. In every case the phone lines had been severed to circumvent a telephone call from the alarm system.”

  “Did he cut the wires to the siren?”

  “You don’t merely cut alarm wires,” he informed me. “Doing that triggers the system to send an alarm over the phone lines. First you bypass the wires, set up a secondary circuit, and then you cut them.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Did he bypass the alarm wires?”

  “At the galleries, yes, but they’re all located in town, where the sirens would’ve been heard. The private homes, including the Leightons’, were all out of town and isolated. The phone lines were cut in each case, although only two of the houses had alarm systems.”

  “Those two had sirens?”

  “Yes. The wires were uncut.”

  “He pulled the plug on the siren when he got inside.”

  “That’s correct.”

  I nodded. “One thing I don’t understand.”

  “Yes?”

  “If Killebrew had the necklace, if he still has it, then why hasn’t he tried to get rid of it before now?”

  He shrugged. “Waiting for it to cool off, perhaps, and get himself a better price. And possibly he wasn’t the one who was trying to get rid of it right now. Possibly Biddle was acting without Killebrew’s approval.”

  I nodded. “You think Killebrew killed Biddle.”

  “I’m convinced of it,” he said.

  FIVE

  I CALLED RITA from the public library and told her what I’d learned. Then I called Peter Ricard’s house. Still no answer. So I left the library, climbed into the Subaru, and went looking for him. Santa Fa is a small town, and there aren’t that many places to hide.

  Particularly on a Sunday. Except for the bars in the hotels, which few of the locals frequent anyway, most places shut down from Saturday night to Monday morning. One of those that didn’t was Vanessie’s, a big piano bar on the west side, and it was here, at seven o’clock that evening, that I found Peter.

  He was standing up against the far corner of the large rectangular bar as I walked in, staring down into a brandy snifter as though it were a crystal ball. There were no other customers, and Gordon, the bartender, was using the light above the cash register to do The New York Times crossword puzzle in ballpoint. This is a display of arrogance I’ve always found irritating. Rita does it too.

  I walked around the bar and said hello to Peter.

  He looked up and nodded glumly. “Joshua. How goes it?” He was wearing a leather windbreaker, jeans, cowboy boots.

  “Fine,” I told him.

  Gordon abandoned the Times long enough to take my order, a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks for me, another Amaretto for Peter.

  “So,” I said, “you’re looking a little down in the mouth this evening.”

  Every year, some group here in town puts out a list of Santa Fe’s most eligible bachelors. Peter Ricard has made the list every year. Not hard to understand why. He was tall, a little over six feet, with boyish good looks that were becoming more interesting as they began to blur at the edges—Dennis the Menace gone slightly to seed. I knew him because he usually swam at the municipal pool about the same time I did, and occasionally we played racquetball. He was bright, articulate, and he was also one of the richest men in Santa Fe. The third richest or the fourth, depending on whom you talked to. Unless you talked to Peter. He would tell you he was broke.

  He nodded. “I violated one of my own cardinal rules last night.”

  “Which one was that?” I asked. Gordon put the drinks in front of us and I paid for them.

  “Never sit down next to an ugly woman when you plan to do some serious drinking. By the time last call rolls around, she’s lost forty pounds and gained a face lift.”

  “Bad night, was it?”

  He shook his head in disgust.

  I smiled. “I thought you’d already slept with all the available women in Santa Fe.”

  “Now I’m down to the ones who are really available.” He tossed back what was left in the first brandy snifter, slid it away from him toward the edge of the bar, moved the full snifter into its place. “We’re talking your basic disaster here.”

  “Look on the bright side,” I told him. “Tourist season starts pretty soon.”

  The thought didn’t cheer him. “School teachers from Cincinnati. Secretaries from Dubuque.”

  “You bring a little excitement into their lives, Peter. Glamour. Romance.”

  “I’ve been seriously thinking about entering a monastery.”

  “The pay’s not all that great, I hear.”

  “Yeah, but the hours are terrific.”

  I tasted the Jack Daniel’s. “I’ve got a question for you. What do you know about the Leightons?”

  He looked at me. “Felice and Derek?”

  I nodded.

  “You working on something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For them, or against them?”

  “For them, indirectly.”

  “You’d be better off working against them. They’d probably treat you better.”

  “Does that mean they’re not swell folks?”

  “Are we talking professionally or personally?”

  “Bot
h.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’re not swell folks in either capacity.”

  “Why?”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “Professionally.”

  He shrugged. “Leighton is one of those people who manages to raise mediocrity to new middles. He’s the guy who put up the Bel Grande.” A new luxury hotel on the outskirts of town, off one of the exits from the main highway. “Everything was substandard. His block, his mortar, even his rebar. The place’ll probably topple over in five years. Kill three hundred school teachers from Portland, Maine.”

  “Peter Ricard found crushed beneath the rubble.”

  “Not me. I’ll be off in the monastery, picking hops. Or hopping picks. Whatever it is they do in monasteries.”

  Peter was in the same business as Leighton, development and construction. Which was, after all, why I’d wanted to speak to him. But there might have been, I knew, some bias blended with his expertise.

  “How’d he get away with it?” I asked. “What about the building codes?”

  He shrugged. “Money.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “Not anything admissible in court. But a fact, yes. The guy’s been involved in more shady land deals than anyone in Santa Fe. And that, believe me, is saying something.”

  “How’s his business doing?”

  “A whole lot better than it should.”

  “No problems, no difficulties?”

  “He was in some trouble for a while last year.” He sipped at his Amaretto. “A note came due on that project of his over on St. Michael’s, those rinky-dink condos, and he was strapped for cash. Overextended, like half the contractors in Santa Fe.”

  “When was this?”

  “Fall sometime. September. October.”

  “Did he raise the money?”

  He nodded. “Probably printed it in his basement.”

  “How much was involved?”

  “Not a lot. Thirty, forty thousand.” Peter, who’s been known to drive all the way to Albuquerque to save twenty dollars on a pair of slacks, could dismiss thirty or forty thousand with a shrug.

  “What about his wife?” I asked.

  “What about her?”

  “The two of them get along all right?”

  “Now we’re into the personal stuff.”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “personally, the two of them are a bucket of worms.”

  “How so?”

  “They’re into kinky.”

  “What kind of kinky?”

  “Derek likes to watch.”

  “His wife and other men?”

  “Other men, other women, dogs, cats. Otters. Woodchucks.”

  “I sense a certain level of exaggeration.”

  He grinned. “Okay, maybe not animals. But anything human the two of them can drag up there to the house. And just to keep from getting bored, both of them play around on the side. Derek likes little Indian girls. Felice likes truck drivers and props.”

  “Props.”

  “Bondage stuff. Handcuffs, paddles. Punish me, you brute.”

  “Guns?”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you speaking here from personal experience?”

  “Almost.”

  “Almost?”

  He sipped at his Amaretto. “I drove her home one night from some charity thing at the Hilton. Derek was out of town. Probably off laundering money somewhere. We had a drink, Felice and I, and started playing around. She’s a good-looking woman, takes care of herself, and I admit I was tempted. But when she told me what kind of games she had in mind, I lost interest.”

  “What kind of games?”

  “Like I said. Handcuffs on the bedpost.” He shrugged, smiled. “I’ve just never felt that I make a very convincing brute.”

  “Maybe if you took up cigars.”

  “They hurt my sinuses.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “Brute is out.”

  He grinned. “Anyway,” he said, “if I were you, I’d do what I could to avoid both of them.”

  SOMETIMES IT’S NOT so easy to avoid people. After I left Vanessie’s, I stopped at the McDonald’s on Cerrillos Road and picked up a couple of quarter-pounders at the window. When I reached my house, about twenty minutes later at nine-thirty, I saw that a gray Saab Turbo was parked in the driveway. It was the same one that had been parked at the Leightons’, or its twin.

  I drove the wagon onto the side of the road, left it there, and carried the McDonald’s bag up the moonlit driveway. Nothing like a bag full of hamburgers in your fist to give you that feeling of accomplishment and that air of mystery.

  Mrs. Leighton opened the car door and stepped out, wearing the same clothes she’d had on earlier, with the addition of a white fox jacket and a dark scarf at her throat. In the moonlight, the jacket seemed to glow with a light of its own. She wasn’t carrying a McDonald’s bag, and she looked as if she probably never had.

  “I came to apologize,” she said. “Your address was in the phone book.”

  “No need to apologize,” I said. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  She shook her head. “Five minutes. I’ve been thinking all day about the way Derek behaved this afternoon, and I finally decided to come make amends.” She smiled. “He means well, Derek, but sometimes he can be overprotective.”

  I had circled around her, and now I leaned my hip against the Saab’s front fender. Curious, I put my hand out along the hood. Not cold; but not five minutes warm, either. I said, “It happens to the best of us.”

  “You are still going to help me with this, aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to try to find the necklace, yes.”

  “Good. Thank you.” She smiled. “Is there anything I can do to help?” She said it seriously, with no erotic undertones in her voice.

  “Well,” I said, “since you’re here, you could answer a few more questions.”

  Nodding to the bag I carried, she smiled again. “I don’t want to interrupt your dinner.”

  “This isn’t dinner,” I said, lifting the bag. “I just cart this around once in a while to make myself seem poignant.”

  She smiled. “ It succeeds.”

  I smiled back. “Come on in.”

  Inside the house, I said, “Let me get a fire started. The heating system here is a little primitive.”

  The Sunday New York Times lay on the sofa where I’d left it, unread. I tore sheets from the business section—I’m not usually planning a merger or updating my portfolio—crumpled them into balls, and tossed them into the kiva fireplace. Hands in the pockets of her jacket, Mrs. Leighton moved across the room and stood in front of the bookcase, scanning the titles.

  “A private detective who reads books,” she said.

  “Only the ones with pictures.” Squatting, I arranged some pinon logs in a tepee formation above the newspaper, then lit the paper with a kitchen match from the box on the banco.

  I stood. “Can I fix you a drink?”

  She turned from the bookcase. “Please. Scotch?”

  I nodded. “No soda. Water all right?”

  “Fine.”

  I went into the kitchen, built a Scotch and water for her, a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks for myself. When I returned to the living room, the fire, burning nicely now, had taken some of the chill from the room. Mrs. Leighton had removed the scarf from her neck, the fox jacket from her shoulders, and she was sitting back on the sofa, her long legs crossed. I handed her the drink, she thanked me, and, since the only other available chair was occupied by the jacket and scarf, I sat down on the sofa beside her. It’s always been a small sofa, but it seemed even smaller today.

  She smiled at me and said, “Well.”

  “Well,” I said.

  It was the standard scene. Two strangers alone for the first time, crackle of fire off to the side, click and tinkle of ice cubes in the drinks, the bedroom and its promise only a few short paces away.
Except that one of the strangers knew a great deal more about the other’s private life than any stranger had a right to.

  It wasn’t my place to judge the woman. At any given moment, all over the world, people are getting off in every way you could imagine, and quite a few you couldn’t, if you were lucky. So long as no one got hurt, so long as everyone had voluntarily bought his own ticket, or hers, then best of luck to them all. But personally I’ve always found the need for props—handcuffs, paddles, beanies with propellers, whatever—somehow rather sad.

  And yet, maybe because what I knew about her was sexually oriented, it was impossible for me not to respond to her as a sexual presence. I was very conscious of the firm tanned flesh beneath her sweater, the faint herbal smell of her perfume, the intelligence and energy alight behind those impossibly blue eyes. She was, as Peter had said, a good-looking woman and, like him, I was tempted.

  “My husband,” she said, “doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “Ah,” I said. Master of the Witty Riposte.

  “As I told you, he can be overprotective. He’s a good man, and an understanding man, but the burglary last year, the police investigation, it all upset him terribly.”

  “So I gathered.”

  She smiled. “Have you ever been married, Joshua?” She tilted her head slightly to the side. “Do you mind if I call you Joshua?”

  “No to both.”

  “Engaged?”

  “No.”

  “Does that mean you’re a cynic?” She smiled again. “Or simply a romantic?”

  “So far as I can tell, they’re both the same thing.”

  She smiled and nodded approvingly, either at the answer itself or at the fact that I actually had one. Her eyes narrowed slightly, quizzical. “What sort of relationship do you have with Mrs. Mondragon?”

  “We work together.”

  She nodded. “Allan Romero said something interesting.”

  “That surprises me.”

  She laughed. It was still a good laugh. “He’s not really a very interesting man, is he? But he does know Mrs. Mondragón, apparently. And he knows you, at least of you. He tells me that there’re all sorts of rumors about the two of you.”