The Other Side of Death

by Judith Van GIeson

JAMIE WAS IN the driveway at 7½ waiting for me behind the wheel of the Toyota. She hadn’t been able to let herself in the house because I had Tim’s key. We got out of our respective cars, said hello and walked toward the door together. When we got to the stoop I said, “Jamie, I saw the cleat marks from Tim’s running shoes in the snow right here the morning after Lonnie died. What I want to know is, Who was wearing them? Tim says it wasn’t him.”

  “Why don’t we go inside and talk about it?” she replied.

  Some people think bad news can be made better by a cup of tea. Jamie found bags in the kitchen and boiled up some Emperor’s Choice. I seemed to be the only one to notice that the emperor’s bags had no tea in them. The drink was bland and pale as smoke. If I can’t have taste in my tea, I’d at least like color. We sat down in the living room under the melancholy R. C. Gorman portrait and sipped at the hot water. Compared to Gorman’s limp woman, Jamie seemed firm and solid. She sat up straight and brushed her hair back from her face. Jamie doesn’t have hair like Tim’s that reacts to every change of electricity or weather. Her hair hangs smooth and straight; when it’s gone as far as she wants it to, it ends. She sighed, sipped at her choice and then she asked me, “What were you doing here that morning?”

  “I spent the night.”

  “You did? Where?”

  “In the studio.”

  “That explains it. I didn’t realize you were here.”

  “I figured. Tell me about it.” I’d known Jamie for fifteen years. Was I about to discover a far side to her that I didn’t know? She had usually been calm, occasionally angry, always reliable—maybe that had taken its toll. She seemed willing enough, eager even, to talk, as if what she knew was a burden, a burden she was about to pass on to me.

  “Tim and I had a fight after everybody left. We’ve been fighting a lot lately. This one was bad; I got into the white zinfandel at the party.”

  “What were you fighting about?” I asked, even though I probably knew already.

  “Lonnie. What else? I was sick of watching her and Tim flirting. They’ve always been close, but it seemed to have gotten much worse lately. Tim’s business failed, he was having trouble with his writing, Lonnie had broken up with Rick probably for the final time. They were crying on each other’s shoulders and everybody knows where that leads. It was driving me crazy.”

  “You didn’t let on.”

  “Not in front of anybody else, maybe; she was my best friend, he’s my husband, what could I say? If I was even suspicious, he’d say I was paranoid. I’d blow up when Tim and I were alone, though, I couldn’t help it.”

  Jealousy is the worst emotion; there’s nothing ennobling or enlightening about it. It’s a green-eyed monster. Like a parasite you pick up in Mexico, once you let it in it’ll gnaw at your insides and swallow your guts until there’s no you and a lot of him, a large worm that’s gotten fat by eating you.

  “I had to know what was going on before we left here,” Jamie continued. “I didn’t want to be stuck in Ohio with no support group and a husband who was in love with another woman. It’s crazy, I know, but I was afraid Tim wanted to get me safely settled somewhere else and then find some excuse to come back here and be with Lonnie.”

  It was pretty crazy, but jealousy, like the full moon and certain substances, has a way of bringing out the craziness. I’d say it was more likely that Tim wanted to get them both to Ohio and away from Lonnie and his failed business here. “So what were you doing in Tim’s shoes?” I asked.

  Jamie’s hair had fallen in front of her face again. She put down her empty teacup and brushed it away. “We took all the shoes out of the entry way for the party and threw them in the closet and they got mixed up. Tim had his Adidases on when he went out to look for Foxy Lady and he hadn’t put them back in the pile, so I grabbed them and wore them. My feet are almost as big as his anyway. I took the Toyota and drove into town to confront Lonnie. Like I said, I’d been drinking.”

  “Couldn’t you just have asked Tim?”

  “Have you ever tried to talk to a man, Neil, I mean really talk to one about emotions?”

  Had I ever tried to talk to anybody—male or female—about emotions? “Probably not,” I said.

  “It’s the male disease. They can’t talk about how they feel. I’ve tried to talk to Tim, but he wouldn’t respond, not really. He’d always say it was nothing, but it didn’t look or feel like nothing to me, so I came here. I saw Lonnie’s car in the Club West parking lot on my way over and I figured you two had gone there.”

  “You didn’t see Rick’s car there, too, did you?”

  “No. I had Tim’s key so I came here and let myself in the house. I had no idea you were here. I went into the bedroom … and I …”

  She hadn’t confronted Lonnie, but she did the next best thing. “You took the journal?”

  “Yeah. I was going to give it right back, but then … she died and there was no one to give it to.”

  “What about her parents?”

  Jamie shook her head no. “You’ll see why when you read it.” She reached into her woven African bag, pulled the journal out, handed it to me.

  I took it, but I didn’t want to read it. “Just tell me one thing. Did it say that Rick was a violet lover or a violent lover?”

  “Both. You know they went on sleeping together after they were divorced?”

  It didn’t surprise me. “People do.”

  “Why would anybody want to?”

  “Gets to be a habit, I guess.”

  “It didn’t sound like a habit, the way she wrote about it. According to her it got even better when they weren’t married.”

  That didn’t surprise me either.

  “I don’t think Rick beat her up or anything, but they liked to explore the outer limits, ‘going over the edge’ she called it. ‘Rick took me over the edge last night,’ she says. ‘My bones dissolved in a purple mist.’ Tell me something, Neil,” Jamie asked, “do people really have experiences like that?”

  “Yeah…”

  Jamie sighed. “It’s never been like that for me. I mean I always thought Tim and I were compatible and all, but it’s just a physical release, I don’t see colors or anything.”

  We were on squishy ground now so I moved on. “Did you find what you were looking for in here?”

  “I guess. I found out what she thought about Tim, anyway.” Her hair had fallen back over her face, but this time she left it there. “ ‘Tim thinks he’s in love with me.’ ” She mimicked Lonnie’s voice perfectly, and why not? She’d known her her entire adult life and she’d probably read the passage over and over again. The point of journals apparently is to record your deepest, darkest thoughts, the thoughts you wouldn’t share with anyone, until something happens to you and all those anyones read them. I’ve never kept one myself. Jamie shouldn’t have read Lonnie’s thoughts; Lonnie shouldn’t have written them down or maybe even have thought them. “ ‘I love Tim, but I don’t love him,’ ” Jamie continued in the same mimicking, vulnerable-but-charging-ahead-anyway voice. “ ‘He’s just a friend, a good and dear friend, but I’m not in love with him, even if it weren’t for Jamie, I wouldn’t be in love with him. I couldn’t love a man who writes me poetry. But how can I tell him that and not hurt him?’ ”

  How could you tell Jamie that and not hurt her? Even the hair hanging over her face couldn’t hide it. Thoughts are thoughts as long as you keep them inside your head. It’s when they exit as words that they become bullets, projectiles with velocity and direction, zingers aimed at the target of the heart. It wasn’t pleasant to know your man was in love with another woman. You wouldn’t want him to get it on with her, but it wouldn’t feel good to have him rejected by her either. In my book the odds of falling in love with someone who gives you no encouragement are poor. Flirting walks the thin line, that’s what makes it interesting. Probably Lonnie had encouraged Tim. Like most people she’d done a lot of things she shouldn’t have. And now she was dead. It didn’t make me b
elieve in karma; I was waiting to see about justice.

  “It was just a fantasy of Tim’s,” I told Jamie. “After twenty years everybody has fantasies, don’t they?”

  “I don’t, Neil.” Jamie started to cry. “I love Tim. I’ve never loved anybody but him. I wouldn’t know how to fantasize, I wouldn’t even know who to fantasize about.”

  Jamie’s life had been concerned with perfecting the ordinary, not getting lost in purple mists. She got her satisfaction from doing things like cooking, sanding floors, shaping mud. If you ask me you have to like the ordinary to stay married. On the other hand, it takes a certain affection for the tacky to stay single, and what happens if you love the ugly? As the only man she’d known, Tim had probably been an archetype for all men, and compared to all men, he wasn’t so bad. He’d never make any money, but not everybody cares about that. He was smart, he had integrity and a sense of humor. Better yet, to my way of thinking, he had dreams, but that’s probably what had gotten them into trouble. “What are you going to do now?” I asked her.

  “What can I do? What’s out there for me without Tim? Affairs, living alone? That’s fine for you, but it wouldn’t work for me. I’m used to being a couple; it’s all I know. We’ll probably go on fighting until we get out of here. I’m hoping Ohio will help now.”

  “I hope so,” I said. If you were into perfecting the ordinary, Ohio seemed like a good place for it. There were a couple of questions that remained to be asked. “I’m curious about something. Where did you get the money to fix up the house?”

  “Borrowed it from Tim’s brother. He made a killing when he sold his house in L.A.”

  “Did you find any more papers while you were here, say about Jorge Mondragon or the Ugly Building?”

  “Yeah. They’re in the back.”

  I opened the journal and found the papers folded up there like old maps. There were copies of paid hospital bills for Maria Mercedes Mondragon, over $100,000 worth, and a copy of a $200,000 second mortgage that Jorge Mondragon had recently paid off. Anybody could copy a paid-off mortgage note in the county court house. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to get the hospital bills either. Lonnie could have stopped by, said she was Mondragon’s secretary, that she’d lost the originals and didn’t want her boss to know. Jorge Mondragon had had his reasons. He hadn’t come cheap, but there seemed to be plenty of money where that $300,000 came from. The documents were a good motive for murder, only that murderer would have gotten them before killing Lonnie.

  “I’m glad you called, Neil,” Jamie said. “And I’m sorry I didn’t call you first. I was just too embarrassed to admit that I’d come here and taken the journal. I’m not a secretive person and I’m glad to get it out. Also, this could be the proof needed to stop the Ugly Building, couldn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know what to do with it.”

  “I do.”

  “Good. It was Lonnie’s dream and I’d like to see it come true. It may be hard to believe, but I loved her, and I could understand why Tim did, too. She was so … so vulnerable, not like me. I’m competent.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Everybody depends on you. When you’re vulnerable you can depend on them.”

  I believed in competence myself. “Listen, Jamie, there’s another thing,” I said. “The toilet seat was up. Did you do that or was someone else in here?”

  “It was me. Lonnie always bitched about men leaving the seat up. I had to go to the bathroom and it was kind of a last-minute thought. I figured if I did that she wouldn’t suspect me of taking the journal anyway.”

  “What does Tim know about all this?”

  “He knows I took the car and went out in his shoes. He knows I came here. I told him Lonnie wasn’t home, that’s all.”

  “There’s one more thing. What did you do after you left here?” It was the last question that had to be asked of the woman who paid attention to the small things, the woman who smashed a hole in the wall when she wanted a window.

  “Went to Dunkin’ Donuts on Alcazar, had a cup of coffee, read the journal. Around three I went home.”

  “That’s it? You never saw Lonnie again?”

  “Well … actually I did. When I came out of Dunkin’ Donuts I saw her turn down Miranda. She was alone in the car. I figured you had met someone at Club West and she was coming back here.”

  “She didn’t come into the house if she did. Your footstep was on top in the morning.” If Lonnie was the someone Rick picked up at Club West he must have brought her back to her car afterwards. She was on her way home alone, only something happened between the corner and 7½, some fatal decision was made, unless, of course, one of my best friends wasn’t telling the truth.

  “Maybe she did go out to the ruins alone,” Jamie said.

  “Maybe.”

  “What are you going to do with the journal, Neil?”

  “Keep it for evidence,” I said, although I wished I could throw it in the fire and watch it burn.

  ******

  Jamie got in the Toyota and went home to Dolendo, part of a couple again. I did what the police should do at the start of an investigation—when they conduct an investigation: I went out to interview the neighbors.

  My first stop was the garage-size hovel where the cute stray who called himself Dolby said he lived. There was a wall shedding stucco between 7½ and that building. It had an opening in it and I went through. Home was an adobe building that had begun the long slide back to dirt. The Harley-Davidson eagle had landed in the driveway. As I walked toward the door, I heard a woman yelling in one of those angry voices that’s annoying during the day, terrifying when it wakes you at night. “Get out of here, you fucker,” she screamed.

  A man came outside and the door slammed behind him. He was a big guy with greasy black hair and a wide leather belt holding up his jeans. “Bitch,” he said. “I paid her fifty bucks and she wasn’t worth ten.” He got on his motorcycle, gunned the engine and drove off.

  I knocked on the door and the woman yanked it open. She had a pale, undeveloped, teenager’s body—I could tell because she was wearing a miniskirt and strapless top that showed most of it. She had skinny arms and legs and skinny breasts, too, that barely held the top up. Women who don’t have great bodies and advertise them anyway have a certain kind of nerve … or need. Under the mini she wore a black garter belt, the straps hanging down and holding up matching nylons. Pieces of skinny white thigh poked through. She had spiky blond hair. The body was childlike but the hair was dyed and the face was hard, pale and angry. She looked burned out, which isn’t the same as looking old. I placed her in her early thirties, just old enough to have a teenage boy—if she’d started early. “Whatta you want?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Dolby,” I said.

  “Don’t know him.” She started to slam the door again.

  “He’s a cute blond kid who told me he lives here.”

  “Calls himself Dolby now?” She laughed, showing dark crevices between her teeth. “Christ, where’d he get that?”

  “You two related?”

  “You could say so, only to me he’s Jim.” And maybe that was why the blind old lady down the street didn’t know who Dolby was either.

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “That fucking kid in trouble again? Well you ain’t likely to find him here. Me and this place are too messy for him.” From what I could see over her shoulder, the house was messy all right, and a TV that was probably on twenty-four hours a day was blaring, too. “He’s sixteen years old, got his own car, I can’t do nothin’ with him, never could, and he don’t tell me nothin’ never.” She probably didn’t tell him anything either, probably hadn’t since she was his age and he stopped being a doll she could cuddle and coo to. “All he does when he’s here is hang around and watch me. He oughta get himself his own place and soon, too. So, whatta you want him for?” She looked me over, and I hoped it wasn’t a lawyer she was seeing. One of the
reasons I like to go out in plain clothes is that nobody wants to tell anything to lawyers, even their own.

  “I’m a friend of Lonnie Darmer’s. Her place was broken into the night she died. I thought maybe Dolby—Jim—saw or heard something.”

  “When was that?”

  “Saint Patrick’s Day, weekend before last, the night it snowed.”

  “I don’t remember for sure but that mighta been the weekend he slept all day. I never saw anyone sleep like him.” She started to shut the door.

  “Wait. Do you have any idea where I could find him?”

  “Church?” She laughed and slammed the door in my face.

  “Thanks,” I said to the wood.

  19

  I GOT ON the interstate and headed home. Out here where the sky is big and empty, you can watch the moon in all its phases. Tonight it was full; a hole in the sky, as some American Indians put it. The moon’s light dimmed the stars but spotlighted the falcon clouds hanging on over Ortiz Mountain. The peregrinos beside the highway would have to do some fast walking—faster than springtime—if they were going to make it to Chimayo; tomorrow was Good Friday and they still had thirty miles to go. The flashlights they carried in their hands flickered like fireflies from a wetter place.

  People who are in the business—cops, psychiatrists, emergency room nurses—say the full moon brings out aberrant behavior, but it wasn’t creating any desire to howl, take mood-altering drugs or cross frontiers in me. What I wanted more than anything was to go home, lock myself in, dream of nothing. I thought about how I could get Dolby/Jim to tell all he’d seen without the aid of a police interrogation. At a time like this it’s always tempting to fall back on the man in your life, and I had a flash of the Kid grabbing Dolby by the collar and shaking the truth loose. The Kid might even do it if I asked. I also saw me pointing my LadySmith and getting what I wanted. I’d fired a gun before, but I hadn’t connected. Before any of this could take place, however, Dolby would have to be found.

  As I attempted to climb La Bajada the legger balked and brought back thoughts of the ordinary, automobiles. The Kid expected the carburetor tomorrow and on Saturday intended to repair the Rabbit. Would it be worth it? I wondered. That car had been a piece of shit when I bought it and wasn’t improving with age. It was three hundred for parts versus seven grand minimum for a new car. I’ve never had a new car, but it was an experience everyone should enjoy at least once in a lifetime. You could take good care of it, wash it every week, get the oil changed often, take it back to the dealer for all its service checks. A car like that would last years and be dependable. It wouldn’t leave you stranded on the interstate or abandoned in Dolendo. It would be a loyal husband instead of a philandering lover. I thought about what I’d like to own, a black Saab turbo, maybe. They’re big, heavy, solid—if something hits you you have half a chance, and they don’t reveal too much about the driver either. But the Kid says they’re a pain in the ass to work on. He likes Nissans and Toyotas. “They’re good cars,” he says. “And anybody can fix ’em.”