Natural Causes

by Jonathan Valin

  It was a bathroom, like I’d thought. The shattered glass on the tile floor gave me pause for a second. That was what it must have looked like in the Belle Vista on Monday morning, I thought, only there would have been blood everywhere and Quentin’s torn-up body lying in the middle of it. I walked quickly over to the bathroom door and opened it. It was very hot in the house, and I broke into a sweat immediately. There was a short hall outside the bathroom, with a low ceiling overhead. The hall stopped abruptly at the rear of the living room—a huge room, with a cathedral ceiling that made it seem even larger. A balcony ran around the walls, like a cut-out second story. A staircase on the west wall led up to the balcony.

  I went into the living room, dripping sweat from my arms. There was a huge stone fireplace on the east wall, with a thirty-foot-high chimney running up to the roof. An Indian rug was laid out in front of it with a couch and two chairs arranged around the rug. The rest of the flooring was hardwood, polished like gunmetal. There was a study area on the east side of the room—a Plexiglas desk and chair and a couple of wood file cabinets. The desk was littered with papers.

  A small picture of Marsha Dover was propped on the edge of the desk. I picked it up and looked at it for a moment, then put it back down. Most of the loose papers were ‘Phoenix’ materials—breakdowns and scripts. But there was a copy of a manuscript on top of the heap that looked too big to be a breakdown. It was stapled on the side and someone had written “Here it is” in the margin. I sat down and skimmed it. It was some sort of story line—not a very good one, as far as I could tell. But it was definitely a story line.

  I folded it up and stuck it in my back pocket. Then I went upstairs. The balcony ran back to a small bedroom area at the rear of the house, above the john and what was probably a small kitchen. The bedroom was just a mattress on a wooden frame, a bureau, and a chair. The sheets on the mattress were rumpled, as if someone had slept in the bed recently. I went through the drawers of the bureau. They were filled with clothes, men’s jewelry, and toiletry items.

  I walked back downstairs to the study. My shirt was completely soaked by then. There was a phone on the desk. I started to copy down the number and then realized that I already had it—it was the same number Quentin had forwarded his calls to.

  37

  AFTER CHECKING out the kitchen, which was spotlessly clean, I went back into the bathroom and climbed out through the window. The open air felt good after that hot, cramped place. I could feel the sweat start to evaporate immediately, as if the sunlight were a kind of breeze. Dover had spent the night in the house, but as far as I could tell he’d been there alone. There was no indication that he’d had visitors—Gene Clark or anyone else. No liquor glasses lying about. No cigarette butts in ashtrays. No dishes in the sink or food on plates. It made me wonder if Quentin had done anything more than sleep there on Friday night and then go someplace else on Saturday, after he’d spoken to Feldman and before he’d had Ramirez take him to the airstrip. There should have been at least one liquor glass in that house—Quentin’s. There wasn’t even that small sign of habitation. Only the rumpled bedclothes and the papers scattered on the desk.

  But as I was driving back to Las Cruces, I realized that somebody else had been in the house—at least once, on Monday morning. Feldman had talked to him—a man who spoke Spanish and who hung up on Feldman when he mentioned Quentin’s name. Unless Ramirez had been lying to me, it hadn’t been him. He’d claimed that he didn’t even have a key to the house any longer. The house hadn’t been ransacked—before I broke the window—so whoever had been there hadn’t been there by accident. That meant that somebody else had a key and a legitimate reason to be in Dover’s house on Monday morning.

  I decided to talk to Ramirez again and see if he could explain it.

  ******

  It was almost five when I got back to Las Cruces. I stopped at the City Hall before I went to the hotel—to make one last attempt at locating Gene Clark. I checked with a Mexican woman in the Office of Titles and Deeds to see if the sale of the ranch had been registered there. But she had no record of a sale and seemed surprised that Dover would have put the ranch on the market. He’d really loved the place, she said.

  When I got to the Holiday Inn, I went up to “Maximilian,” took the document out of my pocket, and put it in my overnighter. I took a quick shower, then phoned Ramirez. A woman answered the phone.

  “Jes?” she said.

  “Mrs. Ramirez?”

  “Jes?” she said again.

  “My name’s Stoner, Mrs. Ramirez. I’d like to speak to your husband.”

  “He’s no’ here,” she said and hung up.

  I copied Ramirez’s address on a Holiday Inn notepad, got dressed, and walked down to the lobby.

  “Can you tell me how to find this street?” I asked the desk clerk and showed her the address I’d written down on the pad.

  “Sure,” she said with a smile. “I’ll draw you a map.”

  She drew a diagram for me on the pad and printed some instructions beneath it. I thanked her and walked out to the lot.

  It was cooling off outside. The heat had been so ferocious at the heart of the day that the sudden chill seemed as miraculous as a change of season. I stared at the map and gazed into the desert. It was deep brown now, in the setting sun. The El Capitan mountains were still lit brightly on their peaks, but the slopes were beginning to purple into shadow. A few houselights flickered in the valley at their feet. According to the map, one of those lights was where I would find Jorge Ramirez.

  I followed the instructions of the map, getting back on the expressway in front of the hotel and driving east ten miles to Exit 2-B. There was a Shell station at Exit 2-B and a paved two-lane road, running south parallel to the mountain range. I stayed on the two-lane road for about three miles, until I came to a four-way stop sign. I turned left at the stop sign onto another two-lane road that went east toward the mountains. There were a few deserted ranch houses along the road, with dusty, wind-bellied fencing surrounding them. Eventually the fencing disappeared and the road turned to hard-packed dirt and I was out in the open desert—among the sage and the agave—heading into the shadow of the mountains.

  Five miles farther on, I could see the lights of a ranch house at the foot of the mountain range. An old, rusted horse trailer and a broken-down wagon littered the road leading to the house. The house itself looked adobe. As I drove up to it, I could see that it was a Pueblo house, with rounded doorways and rounded windows. Vigas projected out of the walls beneath the flat roof. The place was a little larger than Maria Sanchez’s bungalow, but far more weather-beaten and run down. A maroon Chevelle, stripped of all its chrome, was parked in the front yard. I didn’t see the Jeep.

  I pulled up behind the Chevelle and got out. It was cold in the shadow of the mountain, and the wind made me shiver. There was still enough daylight in the sky to see clearly, although everything looked slightly gray and washed out, like on a cloudy winter’s day. I walked through clumps of sage to the door of the house. It was standing open. Through it I could see a truncheon table with a kerosene lamp on it. The lamp lit up the walls of the ranch, turning them yellow and casting deep shadows on the spots where the adobe was cracked or chipped. A woman stepped into the lamplight. She was wearing a gingham skirt and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt read “Arizona State University.” When she looked out the door and saw me standing in the twilight, she took a step backward. She had a high-cheeked, pretty face and long black hair, braided in back.

  A couple of children came running to the door to see what had frightened their mother. They were small and brown—a boy of about six in underpants and a torn T-shirt and a girl of about four in a nightgown with ruffles on it.

  “Mrs. Ramirez?” I said.

  She nodded without moving from where she stood.

  “I’d like to speak to your husband.”

  “He’s no’ here,” she said.

  “Do you mind if I wait?” I said.

>   “No. I don’ mind.” She stared at me for a moment, then herded her children back in the house.

  I went over to the Mustang, sat down on the hood, and waited.

  About ten minutes later, I heard the sound of an engine. The woman heard it, too. She came to the door and gazed into the desert. Far out on the plain a pair of headlights was making bright, jouncing flashes in the twilight. As the Jeep got closer, I could see a plume of dust rising behind it, like the rooster tail of a speedboat. It took the Jeep several minutes to get to the ranch. The woman watched it intently, glancing now and then at me. When Ramirez pulled into the yard, she called out to him in Spanish. He looked at me, then got out of the Jeep.

  “How’d you find us?” he said, walking across the yard to the Mustang.

  “The girl at the hotel drew me a map.”

  “Yes?” He studied me for a second. He was dressed as he’d been dressed that morning, in jeans and the oversized white shirt, except that he’d put a cracked leather flyer’s jacket over the shirt. His jeans were dirty and his hands were caked with dirt, as if he’d been digging. “What can I do for you, señor?”

  “I’ve been checking around town,” I said, “trying to get a lead on this man, Clark. Nobody I talked to ever heard of him. In fact, no one even knew the ranch was for sale. And Dover didn’t register any sale with the county.”

  “Maybe he didn’ sell it after all,” Ramirez said. “Or, maybe Clark registered the sale in Santa Fe.”

  “I couldn’t locate Clark in El Paso. He wasn’t listed in the phone book.”

  Ramirez shrugged. “Coul’ be he don’ have a listed phone number.”

  “It could be,” I said. “When did you say that Dover mentioned the sale to you?”

  “On Wednesday,” he said. “I come up to see him. In Ohio. Make my report. I come up twice a year, you know? This time, he say there was somethin’ important we gotta talk about.”

  “And it was the sale?”

  He nodded.

  “Did Dover tell anyone else about the sale? His wife? His mother?”

  “Not while I’m around. I think maybe he wanted to keep it a secret.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Ramirez stared at my face for a moment. “How well do you know Señor Dover?”

  “I never met the man.”

  “He was a very proud man,” Ramirez said. “When he had troubles, he didn’ wanna worry other people. I think maybe he was havin’ some trouble—that’s why he needed to sell the ranch.”

  “I think he was having trouble, too,” I said. It was fully dark by then and the only light on the whole vast desert seemed to be the warm yellow light spilling out of the ranch house door. Ramirez’s sober, inexpressive face was lit by it. “Did you see Dover at all on Saturday?”

  He shook his head. “Only when I took him back to the airport.”

  “And you never actually met this man, Clark?”

  “Like I tol’ you this morning, I picked Señor Dover up and dropped him off. That’s all I seen him. He tol’ me he wanted to be alone.”

  “Is there any other place in Las Cruces that Dover might have gone to on Saturday? Outside the ranch?”

  “He was meetin’ with Clark, man,” Ramirez said. “Where’s he gonna go?”

  “Did anyone else have a key to the ranch—outside you and Dover?”

  “Just us,” he said. “Senor Dover, he was a generous man. He let me stay at his casa when he was not there.”

  “You liked him, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t answer me, but it was clear that he had liked Quentin Dover a great deal.

  “Someone answered the phone in Dover’s house on Monday morning,” I said. “Was it you?”

  “No, it wasn’ me. I didn’ have a key no more.”

  “You don’t have any idea who it could have been?”

  “Maybe, Señor Dover gave a key to someone else.”

  Ramirez’s wife called to him in Spanish from the doorway. The two kids were sitting at the truncheon table. Bowls and plates of food were arranged in table settings.

  “We gotta eat now,” Ramirez said politely. “You coul’ stay, if you want.”

  I shook my head. “No. Thanks for the invitation. I better be getting back to town.”

  “Señor,” Ramirez said. “Señor Dover had some trouble, maybe. We all have trouble, you know? You don’ judge a man by his troubles.” He looked at me sadly. “You understan’ what I’m saying? It don’ make no difference whether the patron sold his house or not. Maybe he just wished he could, you know? Leave it alone, señor. Whatever he done, it ain’t hurtin’ you. It ain’t hurtin’ nobody.”

  Ramirez understood Dover a lot better than I’d thought. “What did he do, Jorge?” I asked.

  The little man shook his head. “I tol’ you what I know. That’s what I believe. What difference does it make now? We all gotta do things we don’ wanna do.”

  He walked into the ranch to join his family. I opened the car door and sat down on the seat. Ramirez had been a good friend to Dover. And maybe, he was right—what difference did it make? I started up the car and clicked on the headlights. As I was backing up in the yard, the lights lit up the rear bumper of the Chevelle parked by the house. The license plate glowed like phosphorus.

  It wasn’t until I was a half mile down the road, with the lights of the ranch house already fading into the darkness, that I let myself admit that it hadn’t been a New Mexican plate. It had been a California plate—BBB82305. I pulled over and scratched it down on a piece of notepaper. After what Ramirez had said, it made me feel bad to do it—the way I used to feel when I was a cop.

  ******

  When I got back to the Holiday Inn, I ate some dinner in the little cafe—a steak and some of the spiciest gazpacho I’d ever tasted. I had to drink three Dos Equis to cool off. Well, I didn’t have to. But I did it anyway. Then I went up to my room and phoned Seymour Wattle.

  “Stoner?” he said with surprise. “I thought we were dealing through Jack Moon.”

  “We were,” I said. “We’re not anymore.”

  “Did he tell you the latest about the Pacoima killings?”

  “I haven’t talked to him in a while. What do you have?”

  “The Pacoima cops say it was definitely a gangland killing—Mexican maf. They think maybe the Ruiz kid is dead, too. There’s been some talk on the streets that he got himself involved in a drug deal that didn’t go down right. You know, they’ve been putting a lot of heat on dealers here in L.A. lately. And a lot of people are showing up dead.”

  “And that’s why Maria and her son were killed? Because of a drug deal?”

  “Apparently,” Seymour said. “You never really know with these things. Maria and Ruiz lived together—part of the time, at least. So whatever he’d gotten into, she was probably into, too. They knew something they shouldn’t have. They had something they shouldn’t have had. They did something to make the wrong people nervous. What difference does it make?”

  I laughed dully. “Someone said the same thing to me a couple of hours ago.”

  “How’s it going in Beanville?”

  “Dover got in on Friday night. His overseer picked him up at the airfield and dropped him off at his house. He told the overseer that he’d come to Las Cruces to sell his house—to a rancher from El Paso named Clark.”

  “Did you talk to Clark?”

  “There is no Clark,” I said. “At least, I don’t think there is. The whole story was just more of the same—another alibi to fool the overseer and free up some time in Las Cruces. I think the overseer knows that, too. He just doesn’t care.”

  “What was Dover really up to?”

  “Some deal,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever find out, for sure. I don’t know if I care, either.”

  “You sound kinda wore out,” Wattle said.

  “I am. I’m weary of Quentin Dover.”

  “Did Moon tell you that the Ruiz kid picked Dover’s car up at the
airport?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I been thinking about that. Maybe you were right about the Sanchez girl. Maybe she was killed ‘cause of Dover. Ruiz, too. I mean, if they were all involved in a drug deal, that could have been why the two greasers were bumped off and why Dover killed himself. Christ, what a bunch of amateurs. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, I know. They’re all dead.”

  “I gotta friend with the Texas state troopers,” Wattle said. “You want I should have him check out this guy Clark for you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Do that. Gene Clark in El Paso.” The California plate popped into my head. I pulled the slip of paper out of my shirt pocket and stared at it for a moment. “You better run a plate for me, too. California BBB82305.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just call me in the morning, O.K.?” I gave him my number at the hotel and rang off.

  38

  BEFORE I went to sleep, I read the document through—the one that I’d found in Dover’s home. It was a banal story about a man running from some crime he’d committed in his past. He shows up disguised as a lawyer in a new town and a local girl falls in love with him. Then another man shows up who knows about the lawyer’s past. He starts blackmailing the lawyer. The blackmailer is killed; the lawyer is accused of his murder; and his secret past is revealed. It went on like that for almost a hundred pages. After about forty, it began to put me to sleep.

  That night I had a very bad dream about Marsha Dover. I didn’t remember all of it when I woke up, but the bad feeling lingered on. Around eight-thirty the next morning I phoned her. This time she answered.

  “Yeah?” she said groggily.

  “This is Harry.”

  “Harry?” she said. “Hi, Harry.”

  “Are you O.K.?”

  She laughed. “Sure, I’m O.K. I’m always O.K. I’m sorry about the other night. I fucked up.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Are you O.K.?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t come back to see me—I thought maybe you were pissed. I wouldn’t blame you if you were pissed.”