She waved for another drink and turned her attention to the people. Women with big hair and tight jeans. Tourists with shopping bags on tables next to tall drinks and nachos. Two men tilting back longnecks at the bar looked promising. Strong shoulders, large hands, not too much extra weight above their belts. Good butts on both, some sweet man tail just twenty paces away. When her G&T arrived, Montclaire told the waitress to give them a round of what they were drinking.
Cody had interrupted last night’s fun. It was make-up time.
Ten
Bronkowski listened to the copy machine in Fager’s home office burning off pages of what Fager said was “a Geronimo prep sheet and legal research for the worthless DA.” Fager had moved down the hall and given him the dining room table for a work space. He left behind the unopened brown envelope containing the medical investigator’s preliminary autopsy on Linda. He noticed another envelope Fager had not yet opened. It was marked Linda Fager, with the date, case number, and police photographer’s name.
He could not bring himself to view photos of the mutilated woman who had served him many happy dinners at this very same table. He packed the files into a banker’s box and strapped it to the back of his Harley. He dropped in on Fager before he left.
“I’m going to do the DA’s motions and briefs for them,” Fager said without taking his eyes from his computer screen. “Be here at seven. We’ll size up Mr. Cody Geronimo.”
Bronkowski rolled his shoulders, stiff from holding the Harley’s handlebars for fifteen hours straight. “Sure you want to do that?”
Fager hit “print” for the hundredth time today.
“There’s a string of cases out of the Tenth Circuit. Federal law, but persuasive. Mascarenas missed them. Probably never looked. With this he’ll have a head start on a motion to reconsider Diaz’s ruling.”
Bronkowski patted his friend on the shoulder and headed home to shower and force himself to read about the murder of his best friend’s wife.
Bronkowski parked his bike in the Tuff Shed behind his home. He decided to get to work with a thousand miles of road dust caked on his face and arms. He knew he would need a shower anyway after what he was about to read.
He started with the Tasha Gonzalez file and read enough to get an understanding of the case. Then he took a deep breath and opened the crime scene photos from Linda’s store, with her still there, the photographer’s bright lights showing everything.
An hour later he had finished with the homicide detectives’ reports, reviewed the transcripts of radio traffic, the inventory of items seized from Geronimo, the DA’s memos to Deputy Chief Dewey Nobles on legal problems raised by Aragon’s conduct, and the preliminary autopsy. Bronkowski rose from his chair, cracked open the door to his backyard, and threw up on a rosebush Linda had planted for him when he bought the place.
He forced some fruit juice down his throat, then showered and dressed in what he thought was appropriate for a Santa Fe gallery opening: jeans, Doc Martens, and a leather vest over a pressed white shirt, the only article of clothing he had altered from his usual attire. He rode his bike to Fager’s and found him outside, pinstripe suit and dark blue tie, watering Linda’s garden. The landscaping would soon die. Fager was not a man to keep anything alive except clients on death row and the low simmer of anger always inside him.
Fager turned to him, his eyes vacant.
“You’ve got the thousand-yard stare, buddy,” Bronkowski said. “Ya need to connect?”
“I’m okay. I don’t need anything.” Water pooled at the base of the rosebushes as he forgot about the hose in his hand.
“Suit yourself. It wouldn’t hurt to shoot the shit at the VA center. I let it out on Tuesdays. We’ll pull up a chair for you.”
Fager looked past him. Spray from his garden hose drifted toward Bronkowski and he stepped out of the way.
“You take it out on DAs and cops. Other than when you were with Linda, the only time you smile is coming back to counsel’s table after ripping the prosecution’s star witness.”
“I don’t need to sit in a circle of fucked-up vets and hear their shit.”
“And I don’t think kicking ass in a courtroom is gonna be enough to ever make this right for you.”
Fager turned off the faucet and dropped the hose.
“We’ll take my car. You can tell me about Tasha Gonzalez.”
“Walt, buddy. I gotta ask. You carrying?”
“No. I can’t trust myself when we get close to him.”
Bronkowski still checked the way Fager’s suit hung on him.
In the Mercedes, rolling down out of the hills, a view across the Rio Grande basin to lights coming on in Los Alamos, Fager asked, “Geronimo’s first. Who was she?”
“Tasha Gonzalez, age forty-nine, single, modeled for Geronimo.”
“Little old for a model.”
“Not for his paintings. All middle-aged Indian women, chunky, no teenybopper bulemics. They found her bones clogging an irrigation ditch near Belen.”
“Geronimo lives here in town.”
“So did Gonzalez.”
Fager drove onto Paseo de Peralta, looped around the capitol and courthouses, past office buildings for state workers and the tourist center of Santa Fe, and headed for the old residential area fanning the center of town.
“Say Goff is right,” Fager said at the next light. “That Geronimo killed Tasha Gonzalez. What was he doing with a dead woman in Belen more than ninety miles from home? What did he do to her?”
“Scratches on the skull and jawbone suggest her face had been cut away.” Bronkowski paused, wanting Fager to see the connection to Linda but not wanting to say it. When he got no response he said, “But animals could have done that.”
“Have you read Linda’s autopsy? Goff hinted something was missing from her remains. I couldn’t get started. I didn’t want to learn the contents of her stomach, or the weight of her brain.”
Bronkowski changed the subject to ask what he thought of Aragon and Lewis.
“I’m glad they’re on the case,” Fager said, “and not losers who’ll screw up and make it easy for the defense. But they better keep a tight leash on Goff. I understand why they brought him in. Goff could get the job done when he was a detective. Just how was the problem.”
Fager turned onto Acequia Madre, the city changing back to something hundreds of years old. These houses were built before this was part of the United States. They may be mud and straw but sold for millions, with expensive cars parked behind artsy grillwork gates. Ancient cottonwoods canopied narrow streets hemmed by adobe walls. A man walking his dog got out of the way so Fager’s Mercedes could squeeze by.
The approach to Geronimo’s gallery was blocked. Teepees and hogans had been erected in the street, with horses tethered nearby and sheep confined to a pen on a floor of dirt trucked in for the occasion.
Fager parked on another street leading into Canyon Road and they walked the rest.
“He’s a one-man theme park,” Bronkowski said as drums and Indian singing cut the night’s stillness.
A drum circle was going between the tents and hogans. Seven men—most hugely fat, one lean and tough, all in faded denim with blankets around their shoulders—sat round a drum the size of a hot tub. With bones and sticks they beat out a complex, persistent rhythm, their high-pitched, wailing voices rising and falling to the drum’s booming bass.
A crowd in western clothing and heavy silver jewelry, even the men wearing bracelets and pendants, watched from inside the gate to the grounds of Geronimo’s gallery. Beautiful young Native American men and women distributed glasses of champagne. A Rolls-Royce was permitted to pass the barricades to discharge a woman who had won an Oscar when the awards show was still broadcast in black and white. Her male companion was forty years younger. A tall Navajo man with long braids and wearing a tux ran to open their do
or.
Over the doorway hung the skull and antlers of a large elk, bleached white from the sun.
“This place looks familiar,” Bronkowski said.
“One of our first cases. The Navajo laundromat.”
“Yeah. This was where Leroy Yazzie laundered coke money through his rug store.”
“Most of these places would be t-shirt and tattoo shops without cash coming in the back.” Fager scowled at a fifteen-foot pink bear rearing on hind legs in the garden of the gallery next door. “Who buys this crap?”
They slipped through the crowd in the wake of the movie star and made their way to the door. A young Indian woman sat behind an antique table signing in guests.
“Welcome to Secret Canyon Gallery. Would you sign our register so we can alert you to Cody’s latest work and upcoming shows?”
Fager pretended to be distracted by a fountain spouting water between a pair of wings where a bird’s head should have been. Bronkowski signed in as Lee Tomski, a fieldwork alias. He left the street address blank but wrote Malibu as his home.
“I’m moving to Santa Fe. I’m liking a place ’bout half a mile from here, higher up the mountain.”
“Your friend.” The young woman nodded at Fager. “Would he like to be on our mailing list?”
“No friend there. That’s my lawyer.”
“The brochure for Cody’s new works.” She lifted two booklets off the stack in front of her.
“Good, you give prices,” Bronkowski said as he flipped pages. “I’m thinking of one wing in Cody Geronimo, another in more traditional Santa Fe artists. My O’Keefe goes in the great room, no offense to Mr. Geronimo.”
“You’re considering a number of purchases?”
“I’ve got a lotta bare walls.”
Bronkowski returned one of the folios to the stack.
“I don’t want my lawyer seeing this. One Cody Geronimo in his office, I’ll remember his meter doesn’t stop for piss breaks.”
Some signal had passed from the young woman to an older Indian man, tuxedo jacket over black jeans, who glided over. He leaned down to read the guest register then nodded at the folio in Bronkowski’s hand.
He said, “The fourteen new works are explained in addition to Cody’s paintings on display. If I may answer any questions … ”
“I need something in the den.” Bronkowski waved the folio. “Did our boy go through a brown period, something that would match a leather couch?”
The tuxedoed Indian man put a fist to his mouth and coughed.
“Cody’s work is extensive. I am sure you will find a number of pieces suitable to your taste. What is it you do in Malibu?”
“Spend money, mostly.” Bronkowski tapped Fager on the shoulder. “Counselor, whaddya say we stick our noses in the air and poke around?”
Bronkowski headed deeper into the crowd. Fager followed and asked, “How many of these people are here because they think the great artist might also enjoy killing women?”
“Like you said, who buys this crap? People who need their heads filled with the idea they’re in on something special. They want to think they see things other people can’t. They’re enlightened, shit, more highly evolved. Add some blood, a touch of evil: the inner circle’s a very special place for only very special people.”
“Run a con like this on poor people, you go to jail.”
Bronkowski grabbed a flute of champagne. He headed for a spot between an abstract structure of animal skin, rocks, and feathers, and paintings of women drawn with a single, continuous brushstroke.
“Three hundred grand each. Statues, I guess you call them. They’re weird, but listen to the oohs and aahs.” Bronkowski drained his glass and flipped through the folio. “Some of the paintings are actually kind of neat, that one line doing it all. What do red dots mean?”
“Bronk, we’re not here for entertainment.”
“Walt, you work where a judge can make someone talk. I’m the one goes into the real world where nobody talks ’less they want to. We won’t learn anything if they think we’re only here for free booze. I need to get into this.”
“Dots mean the piece is sold.”
Bronkowski traded his empty glass for a full one from the tray of a passing waiter.
“That him?” Bronkowski aimed his chin at a man in a circle of people.
Geronimo also wore the uniform of tuxedo jacket over jeans, but he had added a blue bandana around his head and leather strings encasing his ponytail. A long feather dangled from his right ear.
Bronkowski and Fager moved closer.
“It speaks to me,” said a woman wearing ten pounds of turquoise and silver. “Something deep. Raw. A hidden force.”
“Yes, very good.” Geronimo pursed his lips as he contemplated the woman’s words. “A hidden force. You sense its presence.”
The woman smacked the back of her hand on the arm of the man next to her, a bandy legged guy with no butt and a gut over his buckle. He was grimacing at a price list.
“How about that,” the woman said. “I felt the same thing Cody did. The very same thing. This baby has to come home with us.”
The man checked the price list and eyed the statue.
“Pardon me for saying. It looks like what blows up against my pump jacks.”
“Why Grady Fallon,” the woman said.
Geronimo reached back and stroked his ponytail. A light flared in his dark eyes. It passed. He brought the ponytail around across his shoulder, heavy with all the leather wrapped into it. With a patient smile he said, “Some of the greatest artists of the genre don’t hesitate to call their work trash. The scholarly term is object trouvé. Found objects. Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray—”
The woman cut in. “Grady.” An elbow to the man’s ribs. “Picasso!”
“—are among the masters who have shown the world that everyday objects we cast aside as trash are capable of transformation into profound art. I am the only Native working in the genre.”
Bronkowski felt Fager stiffen. The thousand-yard stare returned.
“Dang,” the oil man named Grady Fallon said, and scratched his head. “Guess that settles it. But Ginger, darling, we’re not putting this in the bedroom. I’d be sleeping with one eye open.”
The Indian salesman materialized from the crowd and led the lucky couple to a table for a check to be written. Another assistant affixed a red dot to the base of the statue.
Bronkowski stepped up to Geronimo. He pointed into the folio of artworks.
“Is this ‘Inner Being’ or ‘Spirit Wing’?”
“‘Spirit Wing.’ May I?” Geronimo eased the folio from his hand and turned to the right page.
Bronkowski said, “These things are kind of spooky.”
“You’re feeling their spirit. Each is unique. Unlike a painting, you will never see a reproduction. Impossible. They are truly one of a kind.”
“Explains the price tag.”
“I leave economics to others. I choose the creative realm.”
Bronkowski checked on Fager. He had moved against a wall. His hands were balled into fists. He felt the tension in Fager’s body across the room.
“You’re from Malibu?”
Geronimo’s salesman must have briefed the artist on one of the night’s promising marks.
“Until I find the right place in Santa Fe. You put these together here?”
Geronimo delivered a condescending smile.
“I ‘put them together,’ as you say, in a very special place, one with its own heartbeat. This gallery has too many old voices,” he waved at walls of paintings, “competing with new voices I want to hear.”
“I get it. Secret Canyon Gallery. Your secret getaway.”
“We all need some place separate from our public lives, especially those of us who know so little privacy.�
�
Bronkowski checked again on Fager. The spot where he had been pressed against a wall was now occupied by a woman in a jean dress and a red hat sipping wine through a straw.
“So, my Malibu friend, do any of these pieces speak to you? Perhaps I may translate.”
Bronkowski wanted to strangle him with that blue bandana. Grab that ponytail and swing his head against a wall. He searched for something to keep the man talking and his own emotions under control.
“This one,” Bronkowski gestured toward the closest statue, a concoction of grasses, willow reeds, tumbleweed, baling wire, and things he could not identify. “‘Spirit Wing.’ I don’t see a wing.”
Geronimo seemed pleased with the inquiry. He stroked his chin and admired his own work.
“You’re limiting yourself. You seek what you recognize. But a spirit wing, what is that? The title doesn’t describe a thing. It acknowledges a presence.”
“A presence.”
“The fourteen statues together, unified, concentrate their sympathetic energy, like drops of water combining to form a pool. Together, they are transformed. And transforming.”
“Together, that’s,” Bronkowski paused to do the math. “Four point two mil.”
Geronimo shrugged. “This is my most serious work.”
Bronkowski couldn’t keep it going. He would drive his fist through Geronimo’s face in another second.
“Thanks for the talk. I gotta find my friend. He’s a mess when he’s not suing somebody.”
Geronimo didn’t let him go without again shaking his hand.
Outside, the beautiful woman at the sign-in table looked strangely at Bronkowski when he poured a glass of wine over the hand that had briefly held Geronimo’s. He caught her staring.
“The alcohol fights infection,” he said. “So I don’t have to cut it off.”
Bronkowski found Fager in the Mercedes, behind the wheel, ramrod straight, staring through the windshield at nothing. He wondered how long Fager had been out here, alone. He slipped into the passenger seat and joined him looking through the windshield.
The Drum Within Page 6
