The Other Side of Death

by Judith Van GIeson

  “He lied and cheated and broke her heart. That’s why she took Valium and went to the ruins. For some reason I’ve never been able to understand, she was crazy about that jerk.” Rick was rotten enough to be a good object for guilt projection. It was easy to say he was a scumbag and blame him for Lonnie’s death, but the fact that we hadn’t saved Lonnie didn’t automatically make him guilty even if he did have a lousy alibi. Projection was emotionally satisfying, but it wasn’t evidence and it wasn’t admissible in a court of law.

  “The Darmers have hired me to look into Lonnie’s death,” I said. “It probably makes you feel better to accuse Rick of killing Lonnie, but I need facts. There were eight hours between the time she left me and the time she was found dead. I still don’t know where she went and who she saw.” And none of her friends were admitting anything yet.

  “Why don’t you ask Rick?”

  “I did. He says he didn’t see her.”

  “Says. That’s the key word.” He ground the cigarette out in the ashtray, picked up my purse and began looking for another. “You’ve got everything else in here, how come you’re not carrying condoms?”

  “I don’t carry condoms.”

  “Maybe you should. Sex has gotten dangerous; you never know when you’ll be overcome by desire.”

  “When that happens these days, it’s the Kid.”

  “Gettin’ in deep, are you?”

  “Not that deep,” I said.

  He continued searching through the purse. “I don’t see a gun in here either.”

  “Why would I want to carry a gun?”

  “If you’re chasing a murderer, you ought to be armed.”

  “I’m armed with my brain,” I said tapping my head.

  “Oh, that. Well, from what I’ve seen in the war between smarts and guns, brains haven’t won yet.”

  “Listen, Tim, I’m asking everybody else who knew Lonnie this, and I’m going to ask you. Did you see her or talk to her again that night?”

  “No. The last time I saw her and ever will see her was when she left with you.”

  “Did you come to her house later?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause while I put my own cigarette out. Tim filled the void. “I’m not lying, Neil. You ought to know me better than that.” Maybe, but like I said, when it comes to someone else’s husband there’s always a far side to them you’ll never know. I knew him well enough to think he wouldn’t murder, but I also knew that murder isn’t the only way to be responsible for someone’s death.

  We’d reached the Old Pecos Trail turnoff. A car came over the hill as I left I-25 and its headlights hit Tim smack in the face. I looked at his blinking newborn’s eyes, thought about how well I knew him, and that not lying isn’t the same as telling the whole truth. But it was time to move on to the next question. “Lonnie also told me she had proof that Jorge Mondragon had been paid off to approve the Ugly Building. Did she ever talk to you about that?”

  “Yeah, she told me, but she didn’t tell me what the proof was.”

  “Or where it was?”

  “No.”

  “I’d kind of like to get in her house again,” I said. “Probably whatever she had is long gone, but I want to take a good look just to be sure.”

  “You can have my key.”

  “You have one?”

  “After my business went belly up, I used to go over there and hang out when Lonnie was at work and I needed to get out of my house. You get tired of sitting around your own place day after day looking at space, poking around in your subconscious. That’s what I do, you know. It gets old and sometimes I need a change, a room with no view. But I’m not the only one who had a key to Lonnie’s. There’s Rick for starters. There’s Ci.” Tim took a key ring out of a pocket and took Lonnie’s key off.

  “You want it back when I’m done?” I asked him.

  “What for?” he said.

  15

  IT WAS AMATEUR night at Babe’s. The amateurs had brought their claques along; Jamie and I were Tim’s. By the time we all got there she was again her calm self, as if she’d driven her anger away on the road over—you can do that on the lonesome highway.

  A game I like to play when I go out in Santa Fe is guessing who’s an artist and who wants to be mistaken for one, who’s a pauper and who’s a patron, who’s from L.A. and who’s from Texas. The first amateur to perform looked like an L.A. native to me. He had a table full of fans dressed in black who cheered him loudly. Maybe amateur night at Babe’s was the equivalent of the Taos ugly truck contest with first going to worst. If that were the case I’d give it to this guy without even seeing anyone else. I didn’t think it was possible to get any worse than him. It was a minimalist act; he stood on the small stage, dressed in black, smiling at his cheering friends and holding a boom box, also black. He put a wastepaper basket (black) over his head and tried to play something on the boom box, but he couldn’t find the right buttons because he had a wastepaper basket over his head.

  The claques tended to get up and leave after their amateur had performed—with good reason. There was a folk singer, a saxophonist, a storyteller, a guy who created a painting right before our eyes by throwing paint at a cringing canvas. By the time it was Tim’s turn, there weren’t many of us left. It’s a lonely life being a poet.

  He read poems about love, Foxy Lady and the view from Dolendo. And then he said, “This poem is dedicated to my friend Lonnie Darmer who died suddenly last week.”

  ONLY ALWAYS

  Only in moments

  when the party conversation lags

  in predawn flashes of blind loss

  as day perfects itself from light

  Only during queasy days between seasons

  witnessed rare places like mountaintops

  well-achieved deserts, at kitchen sinks

  driving, mating, in every automatic act

  Only in the throes of distinction

  wrenched from that second place

  tucked between soul and the bone

  as we grudgingly separate from sky

  Only at moments when purpose peeks

  from between the folds of a task

  as the one true stranger

  whispers along the blood: Live

  Only there, Only always, Only now

  am I allowed to freely grieve you

  “That was beautiful, darling,” Jamie said when Tim was finished.

  “I liked it, too,” said I.

  “I hope you weren’t disappointed that more people didn’t stay,” Jamie added.

  “No. That poem was for us, not them.”

  We paid our bill and went outside where the lopsided moon hung on over Canyon Road. A jet had passed by earlier, leaving a long trail that stretched out and notched like silver vertebrae beneath the moon. We walked to our cars and said good-bye. Tim and Jamie, who’d become a couple again, drove back to Dolendo in the Toyota.

  I, who had rarely been part of a couple, went over to the West Side alone. I bumped down Lonnie’s rutted driveway, parked and climbed the stoop where the cat had been found and the Vs had been imprinted between the snow’s fall and melt, Vs that were probably put there by one of my friends, that had been seen by no one but me, that existed like certain colors only in my mind. Tim’s key turned easily in the lock, no cats leapt out when I opened the door; they’d gone to Roswell with Bunny and Arthur, where they’d be safe. Sooner or later the Darmers would have to clear all the stuff out of here and take it back to the flea market. It made no sense for them to pay rent on a place that wasn’t used, but if I told them that keeping the place exactly as it was would help the investigation, they’d do it forever. Everything was as it had been, only neater. The drawer that once held the journal contained nothing, the R. C. Gorman print was on the wall, the refrigerator was clean and empty, the toilet seat was down. I suspected that if Lonnie had had any evidence to incriminate Jorge Mondragon, Marci Coyle and/or anybody else, somebody had been here already and take
n it, but I searched anyway. I looked in the drawers and in the closets, the books on the bookcases, the boxes of food left on the shelves. I looked under the pillows and under the bed, behind the pictures on the walls, the photographs on the bureau. I looked for hidden compartments, but found nothing. I went into the studio. The screens were on the windows, the hammock on its hooks, the spray cans on the card table. There was nothing hidden or incriminating to be found here, either. What I needed to do next was get outside, try to get into Lonnie’s mind and follow her steps, enter the vacuum she had left behind. Where had she gone and why? She’d been here and ended up there—dead. I still didn’t know what had happened in between. Lonnie, Lonnie, Lonnie, I thought, who should you have been warned about? I had brought her sweater with me, intending to leave it in the closet, but I put it on instead. Then I picked up a can and left the house, locking the door behind me, even though everybody who wanted to get in probably already had a key and anyone who didn’t have their own could have easily used their husband’s or lover’s.

  Lonnie had taken off into the shadows behind the main house, but the houses were so close here that in a few minutes you could cover most of the neighborhood if a dog, fence or wall didn’t get in the way. It seemed a little early to go snooping around backyards, so I decided to take a walk instead, wait for the dogs to settle down and the neighbors to go to sleep. Besides, I had something I wanted to say. I walked down the hard-packed driveway that would soon be turning to red New Mexico mud and when I got to Miranda I turned right and headed for town. There were street lamps here and there, shedding just enough light to make the darkness seem darker. Miranda had been a street long before there were automobiles and it was so narrow in places only one car could get through. When you drove up to one of the bent-elbow corners you had to stop and hold your breath and hope you wouldn’t meet someone coming around the bend, or beep your horn, but that lacked guts, and besides you’d be honking into somebody’s bedroom window. In other spots Miranda was wide enough that two cars could pass each other—if one of them pulled up on the sidewalk—but you couldn’t do that if cars were already parked there. When anybody entertained here, all the neighbors knew about it—they could hear the noise and the guests’ cars would be scattered all over the street. It was close to eleven and it was relatively quiet considering there was an almost full moon. There were few cars parked on the street and not that many passed me, either. When they did, I had to look away because the light hurt my eyes.

  I walked down a narrow strip of sidewalk next to a wall the height of my head. Suddenly a wail came from beyond that wall, disembodied like the screams I heard or dreamed the night Lonnie died. Only those screams were full of anger; this moan was thick with pain. It was one of those cries that comes out of the night, stabs you with primal fear and sinks back in, a cry with an inhuman dimension to it. There was another wail but from a more confident voice, the victor, the victim. A cat leapt up and landed surefooted on top of the wall. It walked along next to me for a minute curling its tail. There was a vicious yowl from behind the wall and the cat—the victim—jumped down and ran away. It was longhaired, black with a large white spot at the back of its neck.

  I kept on walking and at the end of Miranda stepped onto brightly lit Alcazar and crossed the bridge over the Santa Fe River, noticing the sliver of black water that trickled through. In some places this body of water would be called a stream, in some places it wouldn’t be noticed enough to be called anything, but it was water and it moved and if you followed it long enough it would lead you to the Rio Grande, to Texas and out to sea. I walked down Alcazar past a Dunkin’ Donuts that must have gotten built long before there was an HPB. I passed Climb High Hiking Gear and Sunshine Natural Foods and turned onto Paloma. On Alcazar the lights were a high, even canopy like rain-forest trees. Paloma was more like Miranda, the lights were scattered and lonely. There was nothing to illuminate here anyway but a wall—gray, slapped-together, ugly. Lonnie’s graffiti had been painted over and, for the moment at least, the wall presented a uniform surface of gray, too uniform to suit me. I walked up close, took a look down the street—empty. At the state office building across the way the windows were blank. All alone on Paloma, I removed the top of the can, pressed down hard on the nozzle and sprayed in large, ten-mile orange letters, a four-letter word. “You’re ugly,” I said, “ugly, ugly, ugly.” I wasn’t as fast or as skilled as Lonnie, but I think she would have been proud.

  As I stepped back to admire my work something flashed. A blinking blue light came out of nowhere, around the corner and down the street. “Shit,” I said. The car’s headlights turned toward the wall and spotlighted me with a can of spray paint in hand and no place to hide it or me. The wall was too high to jump over, too strong to knock down, and there wasn’t any gate through it. The unmarked car stopped and someone opened the door and stepped out, leaving the blue light flashing on the dashboard. Like the car, he was in civilian camouflage, but I recognized him anyway. He had an overly developed upper body, short legs, a macho walk. His name was Detective Michael Railback.

  “Ms. Hamel.” His smile expanded to suit the—for him—happy occasion, finding me at the crime scene with a dripping paint can in my hand. “What a pleasure to see you again.”

  “The pleasure is all yours.”

  “What brings you out tonight?” A rhetorical question. “I’d like to see that can you’ve got there.” I handed it over. He was prepared with a plastic bag that he opened up and dropped the can in. “Evidence,” he said.

  I said nothing. What was there to say?

  “We’ve been getting a lot of complaints about people defacing this wall. We’ve been watching for ’em and we all take a drive by here when we’re downtown. Every time someone paints ‘ugly’ on there, somebody else has to come by and paint it over. Makes a lot of work for the painters. Gets to be expensive, too. When the damage costs more than a thousand to repair, it’s a felony.” He shook his head slowly while he watched me.

  It’s not advisable for an attorney to be caught in a felonious act holding the smoking gun. It could well be the end of a career … or a living. “A thousand dollars?” I said. “It’s not going to cost anybody a thousand dollars to paint over that.”

  “It could. You might have to paint the whole wall to get it right. People are fussy about their walls and their paint jobs in Santa Fe.” He walked up to my hastily sprayed-on UGLY and looked it over carefully, analyzing the thickness of the paint, the size of the letters, the balancing and articulation of the word. “But on the other hand if it’s less than a thousand dollars’ damage, it’s a misdemeanor, not the kind of thing anybody’d form a task force over, not the kind of crime a DA’s gonna be calling me up and harassing me about either. I guess now I’ve seen it up close, it don’t look like no thousand dollars to me. So I’m gonna let you go, but remember, I got this.” He held up the Baggie-enclosed spray can with my prints all over it. “And I sure hate having the DA on my case. I sure hate having anyone on my case. You call them off, I’ll let you off. Got it?”

  “Yeah, I got it.” Like I said, it’s a city where they don’t take crime seriously. Sometimes that works for you, sometimes it doesn’t.

  He got back in his unmarked car, turned off the annoying blinking light and leaned out the window. “Give you a ride somewhere?” he asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  He took off and I walked back down Alcazar wondering how I’d been so stupid as to get caught spraying paint on a wall and how Railback had been so lucky as to catch me doing it, wondering how deeply involved he was in all this, if he’d been watching Lonnie’s house or tailing me, if his failure to investigate had been due to stupidity, laziness or plain old greed. If I got Dennis and the Darmers off Railback’s case no one would help me solve Lonnie’s death, but no one had helped me anyway. I was back where I’d started from and where I’d always been—having to solve it myself.

  A low rider with a chain-link steering wheel and a pair of si
gnature fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror cruised down Alcazar. The back of the car was hanging so low it scraped the pavement and shot off sparks. The driver hunkered behind the wheel and gave me a look that said he’d come back and soon; so I cut across the Santa Fe River and turned down Miranda before he did. It was quiet here now, even the dogs had shut up. I listened to my footsteps on the pavement, hurried under the lights, raced across the shadows, eased around the bends in the street. There were no vehicles pulled up on the sidewalk, all the guests on Miranda had gone home. A car came around a corner suddenly and I found myself staring into the headlights, widening circles of light, like the ripples stones make when they’re dropped in the river. I was blinded to everything but the light, although the driver could see me clearly—my running shoes, my jeans, the pissed-off look on my face. The car continued on and so did I, down the narrow sidewalks where you brushed adobe from walls.

  I turned down Lonnie’s driveway, walking toward my car and blinking away the light. There was a dark spot on the hood of the white rent-a-Ford, one of those black holes you see after looking at light, only as I got closer I realized it was a cat. Its back was to me, the legs and tail spread out over the hood. Cats like to crawl onto cars and sleep on top of the warm engine—you find their paw prints all over your vehicle in the morning. I doubted if the engine would still be warm, but maybe the cat was sleeping too soundly to notice. “Get down, cat,” I said. There was no response. “Get down,” I said again. The animal didn’t budge. Starting the engine would get him off, I figured, and if that didn’t do it, moving the car would. I got out my keys, walked up close and took a look. The cat was longhaired, black with a white spot on the back of its neck, the same one I’d seen coming over the wall. There was a stain under the body spreading across the hood, a stain that had once been red but was turning black. The cat didn’t move now and it would never move again. I grabbed its legs and flipped it over. The stomach had been split open with surgical precision from crotch to throat, and its guts spilled all over the hood.