Wall of Glass

by Walter Satterthwait

  “He beat her to death, Rita. Then he dumped her like a sack of potatoes.”

  “Start from the beginning,” she said. “When did you get to the house?”

  I knew what she was doing. Refusing me the absolution that a part of me wanted, because absolution would only validate my guilt. Trying to take the power from the woman’s death by turning it into a dry, dispassionate recital of facts. I was resentful, and I was irritated, and I was grateful. William Faulkner, I think, once said that a good indication of intelligence was the ability to hold at least two conflicting ideas simultaneously. It’s also a good indication of drunkenness.

  But I told her all of it, everything up to the point where I worked the padlock open.

  “And what was inside?” Rita asked.

  “Tax records, bank statements.” I reached into my back pocket, took out my notebook, flipped it open. I spent a moment or two focusing on the columns and rows of numbers I’d scribbled in Griego’s bedroom. “She was doing pretty well for herself. Paid off the mortgage on the house three years ago, fifteen years before she had to. Paid off the mortgage on the gallery two years ago. Stocks, mostly preferred, worth about fifty thousand. Fifteen thousand in seven-percent municipals. Another sixty-five thousand in an IRA. Two thousand in interest-bearing checking—that’s her personal account, the records for the business must be at the gallery.” My mouth was dry from all the talking. I took another drink.

  Rita sipped at her Scotch. “It’s a lot of money for a gallery owner. Even a successful gallery owner.”

  I shook my head. “There’s more. There’s a numbered account at the Credit Suisse in Berne with four hundred and twenty thousand in it. So far as I can tell, it’s undeclared income.”

  “Did you learn where’s it coming from?”

  I nodded, fairly pleased with myself. “Germany. Munich. Something called Liebman and Sons, Art Dealers. She’s been doing business with them for the past five years, and they’ve been depositing drafts directly to the Berne account. The receipts and the bank statements involving the Liebman deals were the only business records she had at the house.”

  “She kept them off the gallery books.”

  I nodded. “What it looks like.”

  “What were the deposits like?”

  “Interesting.” I read them off to her from the notebook. They had begun over five years ago and, for the first year, the deposits had been relatively small, ranging from two thousand to just under five thousand dollars. They had been made approximately every four months, giving her a total of slightly over twelve thousand for the first year. And then, four years ago, in April, there had been a deposit of twenty-five thousand dollars. After that, none of the deposits were less than thirty thousand, and they’d been made, as before, every three or four months. Except for a period of about a year and a half, during which only two deposits had been made. In the past year, there were three more deposits, averaging about fifty-five thousand each.

  Rita nodded. “What was her total worth?”

  I rubbed at my forehead with fingers and thumb. “Not sure,” I said. “She’s got a safe-deposit box at the Bank of Santa Fe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got some cash stashed away there. Maybe some jewelry, too—there wasn’t much at the house. But from the records in the box, counting the real estate, she was worth a little under a million dollars. Nine hundred thousand and change.” I tossed the notebook to the coffee table and sat back.

  “You’re right. She was doing very well for herself.”

  “The records weren’t the only thing in the box.”

  “What else?”

  “For one thing, some coke. Not much, a couple grams.”

  “You put the box back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you called the police?”

  “Not yet.” Too busy brooding and boozing. “I’ll do it now.”

  She shook her head. “It’s too late. And they can make voice prints from the recording. Did anyone see your car?”

  I had to think about that for a moment. After nearly half a bottle of Jack, my mind was finally beginning to sludge up. Thank God for Jack. “Don’t think so,” I said at last. “There was no one driving around. And the driveway’s got a bend in it, trees all over.”

  She nodded, looking off for a moment, thinking, then turned back to me. “I’ll call Pedro and have him phone it in.” Pedro was one of her cousins, usually out of work; Rita sometimes used him for small-time jobs.

  She rolled the chair over to the end table and picked up the phone. “The address?”

  I told her. As she talked to Pedro in Spanish too rapid for me to follow, I sat and stared at my bourbon.

  She hung up and rolled the chair back to the coffee table. She glanced at my drink. “You shouldn’t be doing that, Joshua. Not after a head injury.”

  “Right,” I said, and swallowed what was left in the glass. I picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and poured myself some more.

  Rita sighed. “When you were at Griego’s gallery, did you give your name to anyone else?”

  I had to think about that for a while, too, before I remembered the Pepsi-Cola girl and the card I’d given her. I told Rita.

  She nodded. “So Hector or one of his people will probably be in touch with you. You’ll have to act surprised about Griego’s death. We don’t want him charging you with obstruction.”

  “Obstruction’s not the only thing he could charge me with. I did a little evidence tampering too.”

  “What evidence?”

  “These.” I slipped the Polaroid prints out of my inside jacket pocket and flipped them onto the table. “They were in the box.”

  Rita leaned forward.

  You can buy photographs like that almost everywhere now. If your local newsstand doesn’t carry them, you can get them shipped to you, in a plain brown wrapper so your neighbors never know. Probably everyone has seen people doing those particular acrobatic things to one another.

  The only surprise, for me, had been who these partiecular people were. Felice Leighton. Derek Leighton. Silvia Griego. And a few others.

  “The cute little naked guy in the cowboy hat,” I said. “With the vibrator. That’s Frank Biddle.”

  ELEVEN

  NORTH OF SANTA FE, the High Road to Taos lopes through badlands where ragged sandstone ridges rising up from the bare arid countryside look like the spines of mammoth fossilized lizards. Now and then it dips down into small neat adobe villages huddled among lush cottonwoods, but always it climbs again, heading up through the sandy high desert to the distant mountains.

  Directly overhead that morning, the sky was a clear enameled blue, only a few sedate white clouds loafing across it. But far off, beyond the raw red gullies and the empty red buttes, where the mountains surrounded me like the rim of a bowl, thick gray tumbles of storm clouds were lowering. The thickest and grayest of these were directly ahead, just above the nose of the Subaru, up there in the shrouded peaks where Las Mujeres lay.

  Quite a few of the Anglos in Santa Fe don’t like travelling in the northern New Mexico mountains. Living here are descendants of the original Spanish settlers, many of whose families saw their private land stolen by the United States government, their grazing land appropriated by the Park Service. Some of them, not surprisingly, still bear a grudge.

  And up here, too, live Los Hermanos Penitentes, the Penitant Brothers. They’ve inspired a lot of talk, some of it distrustful, and some of it horrified, with a ribbon of boogie-man excitement running through it. I’ve been told, by more than one Anglo, and with complete conviction, that up until recently the Penitentes were offering human sacrifices.

  It’s not very likely. Humans, up here, are too precious to waste.

  Whatever the truth might be, for hundreds of years in these isolated villages they were the sole source of religious comfort for the sick and the dying. And apparently the only people they’ve ever actually hurt, collectively or individually, have been themselves. Which i
s a good deal more than most of us can say.

  It’s a hard country. Where the green stops, not far from the banks of then arrow rivers and the tiny streams, the desert begins, unrelenting and unforgiving. A sudden shift in the weather, a brush fire, a flash flood, a pack of wild dogs savaging the livestock, almost any fluke of nature can mean disaster. The emphasis on atonement, on making peace with an all-powerful God, isn’t difficult to understand.

  I was doing a certain amount of atoning myself that morning. The piercing headache that had greeted me when I woke up on Rita’s sofa had softened itself to a dull gray shadow, somehow slightly larger than my skull. But my stomach was still queasy, my mouth still lined with material torn from the inside of an old sleeping bag.

  We had talked for a while last night before I collapsed. I had wondered whether the Polaroid prints might’ve had something to do with Griego’s death.

  “Blackmail, you mean?” Rita had asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?” It wasn’t the world’s most persuasive argument; but I was a long way, just then, from being Perry Mason.

  The photographs, maybe fifty of them, were spread out on the coffee table. Leaning forward, Rita pushed through them with her fingertips. “They all knew about the camera. Some of them are posing for it. So the photographs weren’t shot secretly. And they were all shot in the same room. Her bedroom?”

  I nodded.

  “But you can tell from the light behind the curtains,” she said, “that they weren’t all shot at the same time.”

  “No,” I said. I took another hit of bourbon. “Three separate occasions, I figure.”

  She pointed to one photograph. “That’s Peter Ricard.”

  I nodded. “Sure is. And that’s Felice Leighton with him.”

  She looked up. “Didn’t Peter tell you he’d never been involved with her?”

  “Uh-huh. But he looks pretty involved right there, doesn’t he?”

  She stared at the photograph. “I wonder why he lied.”

  “People always lie,” I said. “It’s easier than telling the truth.”

  She looked up at me, frowned. “Maybe you should have some coffee.”

  I waved my glass, somehow managing not to spill any liquor. “Never touch the stuff.”

  Another frown, a glance down at the pictures, a glance back up at me. “Did the house look like it’d been searched?”

  I squinted at her. “Searched?”

  “By someone else. Before you got there.”

  “No. Don’t think so. Why?”

  “Which is it?” she said. “No, or you don’t think so.”

  I considered it for a moment. “No. I would’ve noticed.”

  “If someone killed her because she was blackmailing him with these, wouldn’t he have searched for them before he left?”

  I lifted my eyebrows, dropped my mouth open. “You astound me, Holmes.”

  She looked off, frowning at the thoughts she saw. “Except that he was still there when you arrived.” Looked back at me. “Maybe he didn’t have time.”

  “Ah,” I said, and nodded sagely.

  “Stop it,” she said, more amusement than irritation in her voice. Or so I told myself.

  I said, “I thought we were trying to find that stupid necklace. I’m pretty sure Silvia Griego didn’t know anything about it. Maybe she was blackmailing somebody; maybe she wasn’t. But I don’t think it had anything to do with us.”

  “She was involved in something with Biddle. Something that frightened her.”

  I pointed my glass at the photographs. “Those, maybe.”

  “Maybe. But it looks like Biddle wasn’t there every time.”

  “Maybe he was the one taking the pictures. Someone had to.”

  “Unless the camera had a timer.”

  “Oh,” I said. It had. “Yeah.”

  “How many of those people do you recognize?”

  I sighed. Concentration was becoming more and more of an effort. “Let’s see. The Leightons. Biddle. Peter. Silvia Griego. That little curly-headed blonde is the Pepsi-Cola girl from Griego’s gallery. The redhead with her, I don’t know who she is.”

  She nodded. “If we accept the possibility of blackmail, any one of them could’ve had a motive for killing Griego.”

  “Can’t see Peter beating anyone to death. Not over photographs like that, anyway. He probably wanted a couple copies for himself, blow-ups, to hang in the den. And I can’t see Felice, either.”

  She nodded. Once again, as usual, I couldn’t tell whether she was agreeing with me or placating me.

  “So what should we do with these?” I said, nodding to the photographs.

  “We’ll hold onto them for a while. We can always mail them in to the police later. But right now, we’re going to bed. Both of us.”

  “Aha,” I said, and stood up, grinning merrily, and weaving only slightly. “Proud to be of service, ma’am.”

  Rita smiled. “Down, boy. I’m sleeping in my room, and you’re out here on the sofa. Joshua, sit down.”

  I sat. Sitting was a lot better. I said, “But what if you need something during the night?”

  “Then I’ll get up and get it.”

  “What if I need something during the night.”

  “Then you can get up and go home and get it. And stop leering. Take your boots off and lie down.”

  I grumbled for a bit more, then sat back, wrestled off my boots, stood them up beneath the coffee table, and swung my legs onto the sofa. Lying down was even better—I must’ve passed out right away.

  When I woke up, it was seven in the morning and someone had thrown a blanket over me. I flipped it off, scooped up the photographs and staggered out to the Subaru. After a hot breakfast at my house, and a hotter shower, I still felt as if I’d been kicked down a stairway. I didn’t really want to contend with Hector that day, so I decided to vacate town for a while. But before I slipped on my windbreaker, I strapped on the shoulder holster and tucked the .38 inside. I’d been banged around enough already this week.

  I had the High Road pretty much to myself. It was too early in the year for tourists to be making the drive up to Taos, and with the rain coming, none of the locals would be out.

  The road climbed higher, clouds gathering overhead and casting black shadows that lumbered up and down the hills. I left the tiny village of Cordova behind, and then the village of Truchas, and then I was in the mountains, green ponderosa pines thick around me, gray clouds thick overhead.

  The village of Las Mujeres perches on the side of a deep pine-covered valley, and from it, on a clear day, you can see all the way to Albuquerque, over ninety miles to the south and maybe a hundred years in the future. But this wasn’t a clear day. Just above me, not fifty yards away, the clouds were trailing between the dark tree trunks like the tentacles of some enormous smoky beast.

  On the outskirts of town was a small cemetery, the forest looming around it, the flower wreaths on the graves looking drab and somber in the gray. After that came the houses, the first of them fairly new, of cinderblock or framing. Very soon these gave way to squat brown adobe structures, some with thickets of bushes growing atop their flat roofs, all with woodpiles of piñon logs. For most of the year up here you needed a fire in the hearth.

  I drove through town to the general store, as Carla Chavez had directed me, and turned right into a dirt alleyway.

  Her brother’s house was like the houses that flanked it: a small square adobe building. But unlike those, whose tiny front yards were littered with rusting auto parts and deceased kitchen appliances, the yard here was neat and well-tended, with a narrow rectangular garden running along the wooden fence. And here the future had arrived; a satellite dish was tilted back, ready to receive signals from the stormy sky.

  I parked the station wagon in front, got out, went through the gate and up to the door. Knocked on it. Nothing. Knocked on it again.

  A window swung open in the house to my left and a heavy-set woman, gray hair pull
ed back in a bun, poked her head out.

  “Benito Chavez?” I said.

  Without a word, expressionless, she pulled her head back in and shut the window.

  “Have a nice day,” I said.

  LA CANTINA was on the other side of town, set far enough away from it that the sounds of revelry wouldn’t vex the villagers, but close enough for the villagers doing the revelling to totter home when the night had ended. Lying just off the road, it was a ramshackle rectangular wooden building with a rambling wooden porch and a neon Budweiser sign in one of its two dusty windows. In the gravel parking lot in front were two Chevy Impala lowriders, one candy apple red, the other midnight black.

  I parked the Subaru, got out, and stood for a moment admiring the cars.

  What you do is you find yourself a ’63 or ’64 automobile in good condition—Impalas and Monte Carlos are popular—then you go down to Albuquerque and you locate a junked Citröen. You strip away its hydraulic suspension system, including the interior switches, and you slap everything onto the Chevy’s frame. You add three or four batteries to the electrical system. You customize the interior with a steering wheel six inches in diameter, and wall-to-wall carpeting, or wall-to-wall fur. You slide a stereo cassette player into the dashboard and install speakers, as many as you can afford, anywhere they’ll fit. You customize the exterior with flared fenders and an ornate grille and bumpers. You buy a thousand dollars worth of spoke wheels and a couple hundred dollars worth of white-wall tires. You paint the body with three or four coats of irridescent paint. You sandblast and seal the underbody, and, if you’re really a purist, you chrome it, along with anything else that’ll take a coat of chrome. For the finishing touches, you might drape a pair of foam rubber dice over the rearview mirror, or stick a marijuana leaf decal to the rear window. The whole deal will run you, not including the original cost of the car itself, at least ten thousand dollars.