Wall of Glass

by Walter Satterthwait

“Do Liebman and Sons handle jewelry?”

  She shook her head. “As far as I know, they only do art.”

  “Have the police asked you yet about the gallery accounts?”

  “No, not really. I talked to one of them this morning, and he mostly wanted to know whether or not Silvia had any enemies.”

  “Did she?”

  A shrug. “Not that I knew of. I mean, honestly, she was okay and all, but I don’t think she was interesting enough to have any enemies.”

  And with employees like this one, who needed them?

  I said, “The police’ll be back.” I knew that if they hadn’t already found the strongbox in Griego’s closet, they would, soon enough.

  She said, “I won’t tell them I talked to you. Honest.” She smiled and showed me her Boy Scout hand again.

  “Tell them anything you want. But if I were you, I’d probably forget about mentioning the Polaroids.”

  “Oh God, yes. What a mistake.” Her face went earnest and she said, “Look, could I at least have that one, the one you’re carrying? I mean, I’ve been straight with you, haven’t I?”

  I reached into the blazer, took out the print, tossed it to the desk. She picked it up, grinning happily, and leaned back to study it. Without bothering to flutter her lashes, still grinning, she looked at me. “At least you can’t say I take a bad photograph.”

  “Nope.”

  She opened a drawer, tossed the print inside, closed the drawer. The grin became a smile, and there was a hint in it of self-satisfaction, of a job well-done. “When can I have the others?”

  “In a few days. Soon as all this is cleared up.”

  She plucked a card from a silver salver on the desk and leaned forward, offering it. “Here. It’s got my home phone number, too.” I think that manipulating me, which she clearly thought she had done, wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to neutralize me, and the only way she knew how to do that was sexually. I took the card, stood up.

  “Call me,” she said, smiling as her glance slid up and down me. “Maybe we could have lunch or something.”

  “Sure,” I said. I wondered which one of us was supposed to be the entrée.

  FIFTEEN

  WHEN I CALLED RITA from my house that night and told her what had happened at the gallery, she asked me what I thought of Linda Sorenson.

  I said, “I don’t think she’s going to become one of my favorite people.”

  “As I recall,” she said, “you don’t have too many favorite people. How many at last count?”

  “Besides you and Tina Turner?”

  “Yes.”

  “None. And to tell you the truth, I’m starting to worry about Tina. She’s not returning my calls.”

  “So what is it, exactly, that’s wrong with Linda Sorenson?”

  “I wouldn’t want her working for me. I wouldn’t want her to be standing behind me with a knife, either.”

  “Could she have killed Griego?”

  “Not that way. She wouldn’t want to mess up her miniskirt. But if it were in her best interest, I think she could’ve poisoned her without losing too much sleep.”

  “But do you think she was telling the truth?”

  “For the most part, yeah. Like I said, I think she was exaggerating the little girl number. From the Polaroids, I doubt she was the novice she’s claiming she was. But about the other stuff, I think she was telling me what she believes is the truth. When I mentioned Liebman and Sons, she didn’t even blink. Unless she’s a much better actress than I think she is, she doesn’t know anything about that account in Switzerland.”

  “And she says that Griego hadn’t seen Biddle since last fall.”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. What do we have so far? Biddle came to Santa Fe five years ago. For four years he and Griego are sometimes lovers. That relationship ends, if Sorenson is right, in the fall of last year. We don’t know why. Griego has been dealing with Liebman and Sons for at least five years, and it looks as though she’s been keeping two separate accounts with them, one legal, the other not. For at least two years, Biddle has been working for the Leightons. Last year, in the fall, the Leightons fire him. We don’t know why. A few weeks later, the necklace is stolen. According to Sergeant Nolan, the M.O. matches that of Stacey Killebrew. But according to your good friend Montoya, Killebrew hasn’t fenced the necklace. No one has. Again, we don’t know why. According to Carla Chavez, Killebrew and Biddle had a falling out after Biddle came back from Amarillo in November.”

  “At about the same time Biddle stopped seeing Griego.”

  “Yes. And once again—”

  “—We don’t know why. Are you reading this out of a book?”

  “Six days ago,” she said, “Biddle comes to you with an offer to return a piece of jewelry to an insurance company. The next day, he’s dead.”

  “And we don’t know why. And we don’t know what Montoya meant about ‘birds of a feather.’ Personally, I think all that staring at empty walls has affected the guy’s brain. Turned him into a road company version of The Inscrutable Oriental.”

  “You’re going to have to talk to the kachina artist, Lucero.”

  “Hey, I knew that already.”

  “Aaron called tonight from the bank with some information about Leighton.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Apparently, Peter Ricard was right. Leighton was in financial trouble last year. In order to cover his note, he had to unload some stocks. They were down at the time, and he took quite a loss.”

  “This was when?”

  “September. A month before the necklace was reported stolen.”

  “So maybe he got pissed off and decided to recoup the loss by faking the theft.”

  “I don’t think so. A week later, he sold a piece of property to some developers from Dallas, and according to Aaron, he made a tidy little profit on the deal.”

  “If he had the property to sell, why unload the stocks?”

  “Aaron says he’d had the property for over a year. The sale to the Dallas people was unexpected.”

  “So he wasn’t hurting for money when the necklace disappeared.”

  “He was tight, Aaron said. He’d had to cut back on a few of his projects, but no, he wasn’t really hurting. And Joshua, I spoke again to Romero, at Atco. He’s convinced there was no fraud involved.”

  “He okayed an insurance payment of a hundred thousand bucks, Rita. He’s not going to start saying, ‘Holy cow, maybe I screwed up.’”

  “You just don’t like Derek Leighton.”

  “I like him fine. I think he’s swell. But if Killebrew took that necklace, why didn’t he fence it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that Killebrew took it. You’re talking to Hector tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Making my statement.”

  “After you do, talk to Nolan again. See if he’ll let you look at the reports of the other burglaries, the ones he knows Killebrew committed.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Whatever you find.”

  “Shit,” I said, “you’re not going Zen on me too, are you?”

  “Maybe he missed something.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  She hesitated for a moment, and then said, “Joshua, how are you doing?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re sure? Do you want to come over for a drink?”

  “No thanks. I’m not drinking tonight, Rita. I’m going to hang out here and try to get some sleep.”

  “All right. But don’t be more stoic than you have to be. If you need to talk to someone, call me.”

  “I will. Thanks, Rita. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  I brought a book to bed with me, a mystery by K. C. Constantine. It was a good book, canny and wise, but after the day I’d had, no book would’ve been good enough to keep me awake longer than ten minutes.

  I WAS BACK in Norman Montoya’s house in Las M
ujeres, standing before the broad wall of glass in the living room, looking down at the clouds as they swirled through the dark towering pines. The Four Seasons was floating from the stereo speakers, and I was feeling secure and protected, isolated and detached, in my hilltop fortress with the world spread out like a Japanese painting beneath me. But suddenly there was movement out there, off to my right, a tiny faraway figure sliding through the mist.

  I saw that it was Rita, and that she was running. She looked back over her shoulder at the unknown thing that was chasing her, and even from this distance I could see that her face was twisted with terror. She was running along a narrow path that wound down through the trees toward the ribbon of river at the valley bottom. Somehow I knew that this was the wrong direction, that the thing she was trying to escape had circled around and that it was waiting for her there, where the cold gray water tumbled over the cold gray rocks.

  And then I was out there, in the mist, running downhill after her calling out her name. Clammy branches smacked against me, drenched me with water so chill it burned like acid. The mist had grown thicker, billowing from between the trees, and I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her ahead of me, her quick terrified breath, her feet against the rocky ground. I could hear the water now, too, drumming relentlessly along the ragged riverbed.

  And then I heard her scream. A long sustained shriek that knifed through the whirling fog and pierced my heart.

  I tore through the black brambles at the waterside, and she was lying there, facedown in the river, her long red skirt fluttering at her ankles like a pennant in the gray current, and I felt a sense of grief stronger than any I had ever felt. It was as though all the losses of a lifetime, all the failures, all the regrets for missed opportunities and for vanished friends and lovers, had melded together in one moment of overwhelming, infinite despair.

  The river no longer drummed; sound had stopped. I fell to my knees beside her, the icy water piling up against my thigh, and I bent down and gently turned her over.

  Her face was the face of Silvia Griego and bright red blood was spilling from the wicked wound at her temple. And as I knelt there holding her, immobile, paralyzed, her eyes opened and she smiled up at me, a wide red triumphant smile.

  I woke up, my skin oily with sweat, my heart slapping at my chest. It took me a moment or two to realize where I was. And even after I did, even after I understood that it had all been a dream, I couldn’t shake the sense of dread, or the feeling of total, irredeemable loss.

  I glanced at the clock. Two o’clock. Too late to call Rita. Particularly to whimper about a bad dream. I turned on the light, staggered out into the kitchen, poured myself a drink, staggered back to bed. Lay there for a while wondering why on earth I did the kind of work I did.

  It was a question I usually asked myself only on those long nights when I sat stakeout in the Subaru, surrounded by cellophane wrappers torn from 7-Eleven sandwiches, and waiting for something, anything, to happen.

  You sit there in the car and you look at the windows along the street, some of them lit by the shifting flickering blue light of a television, some of them bright with snugly ordered living rooms or cozy pine-paneled dens; all of them, it seems, opening onto a security, a protected warmth, that you yourself have never known, not even in memory. And you stare at those blank black walls and you wish that, magically, you could turn them all into glass, transparent, so you could see what really goes on in there, the reality beyond the seeming.

  And you ask yourself, why? Why the desire, why the need, to poke and pry and peer into these other lives?

  And the answer, simply, is that it’s what you do, and that you do it well. Maybe it’s the only thing you do well. Maybe it’s the only thing you can do well.

  You can’t see inside the minds of other people. But if you do this job well, you can discover what goes on inside their lives, inside their houses. You can turn those sheltering protective walls into walls of glass, and sometimes that amounts to the same thing.

  I picked my book up off the floor and, for an hour or so, I followed Mario Balzic around the bars of Rocksburg, Pennsylvania. At last, around three-thirty, I was able to fall asleep again.

  WHEN THE ALARM went off at seven o’clock on Thursday morning, I woke up feeling better than I had any right to feel. I’d been avoiding the thought of Griego’s death, been keeping from my mind’s eye the image of her lying, brutalized, in that bathtub. The night before last I’d used bourbon to help with the process. Yesterday I’d used movement. But the dream had brought the image back to me, more real even than I remembered it, and somehow, by making me confront it, had burned at least some of the horror away.

  Psychology 101. Puttering about the bathroom, trying not to mistake the athlete’s foot cream for the toothpaste, I wondered what a good analyst would make of the thing. Rita hadn’t only been up on her feet, she’d been running. With me running after her. And talk about your sexual symbolism. Brambles by the waterside indeed.

  Whatever the reason, I felt good. I felt lightened. I felt that Something Important would happen today.

  I put on jeans, boots, a pale yellow oxford buttondown, a red V-neck sweater. Preppie Goes to the Rodeo.

  Out in the kitchen, I took an English muffin and a couple of chorizos from the freezer. I zapped the muffin in the microwave for a minute, until it was thawed, then took it out, split it with a fork, and slipped the halves into the toaster, ready to go. I wrapped the chorizos in paper towels, thunked them onto a plate, opened up the microwave again, lay them inside, set the phaser on Kill and the timer on six minutes, and hit the button. I cracked three eggs into a bowl, went into the living room, and slid a Willie Nelson tape, Always on my Mind, into the stereo. I hit the play button and went back into the kitchen.

  While Willie was singing about Do Right Women and Do Right Men, I turned the toaster on, turned the microwave off, rotated the chorizos, turned the microwave back on. Opened the refrigerator and got out butter, a jar of Scottish lemon curd, and a plastic container of apple cider that looked like sewage but tasted exactly like apple cider. Clearly, in this day and age, a flawed product. I poured myself a glass, carried it out into the kitchen, set it on the coffee table, and came back just as the muffins popped up in the toaster. Buttered them, spread them with lemon curd. The microwave chimed. I took out the chorizos.

  Chorizos are Mexican sausages whose main ingredients are red dye number two, trinitroglycerin, and parts of the pig that even its mother wouldn’t recognize. I sliced these two open, scraped the meat from the casings, which are made of the same material that goes into bullet-proof vests, and dumped the meat into the bowl with the eggs.

  I slapped some butter into a frying pan, turned the gas up to max, waited until the butter bubbled up and began to scent the room, then dropped in the eggs and meat. Stirred quickly with a wooden spoon. After a minute, when the eggs had set, eased everything onto a plate, next to the English muffins. Grabbed a clean fork from the dish drainer beside the sink, carried the plate into the living room, set it on the coffee table, sat down. Willie was asking someone to Let It Be Him. I took a bite of breakfast. Perfect.

  The doorbell rang.

  At a quarter to eight?

  When I was eating?

  I got up, crossed the living room, opened the door. Derek Leighton stood outside, looking bigger and broader than I remembered him. Over a nicely tailored dark gray three-piece suit, he was wearing a fawn colored topcoat, open, that had to be either camel hair or cashmere. I would’ve bet cashmere. His hands in its pockets, he bobbed his head abruptly once and said, “Croft.”

  I bobbed my head back and said, “Leighton.” I could keep that up as long as he could.

  “I’ve only got a few minutes,” he said. “I’ve got to get down to Albuquerque to catch a Dallas flight.” He moved forward, inviting himself in.

  I sighed. “Right,” I said, backing away from the door. “Come in.”

  He stepped in and I shut the door. He glanced ar
ound the room, not quite managing to conceal his disdain. He noticed the breakfast plate and turned to me. “You’re eating,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m trying to quit, but now and then I backslide.”

  He frowned, tightening his dewlaps. “All right,” he said. “We got off to a bad start the other day, Croft. I admit that. But I see no reason why both of us can’t behave like adults today.”

  I knew that this was as close as men like Leighton ever came to an apology. I nodded to him. “Have a seat.” I circled the coffee table and sat down myself.

  Without taking off his coat, he hiked his trousers up a bit, just above the knees, and sat down in the chair that had held his wife’s jacket and scarf last Sunday, when she was the one interrupting my meal. Maybe this was a conspiracy: the two of them trying to starve me to death. He crossed his legs, right ankle over left knee, and I saw that today’s boots were ostrich, gun-metal blue. I didn’t think they went all that well with the business suit, but he was headed for Dallas, after all, and down there they wear cowboy boots when they’re doing the backstroke.

  He waved grandly at my eggs and sausages. “Don’t let me stop you eating.”

  In a way I felt sorry for the man. Even when he was trying to be pleasant, he came off like a finalist in the Asshole Olympics.

  “Can I get you something?” I said. “Juice? Tea?”

  He shook his head curtly. I said, “What can I do for you?” and took a bite of eggs. They had tasted better before Leighton showed up.

  “You know, of course,” he said, “about the death of Silvia Griego?”

  I nodded, chewing a chunk of chorizo.

  “My wife tells me that Silvia phoned her earlier this week. Apparently you’d spoken to Silvia about the necklace.”

  I nodded, drank some cider.

  He said, “I wouldn’t want to think that the necklace had anything to do with Silvia’s death.”

  “Then don’t.”

  He shook his head. “Silvia couldn’t have been involved in something like that.”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?” I ate some more eggs.

  He frowned again. He took a breath, his stomach swelling against the vest. “I’d like your assurance, Croft, that your investigation and Silvia’s death are unrelated.”