The City of Rocks

by Don Travis

  “Yes. Caught him with Bert in Deming. I had a drink and a talk with them at Lena’s.”

  Her broad mouth turned down, making her plump face almost comical. “That place.”

  The Lazy M’s table was a little less democratic today. Neither of the Raels took a seat. Luis remained in the kitchen, and Maria, sporting a starched white apron, buzzed around serving everyone and showing Acosta undue deference. She called him “Don Ector.” Linus and a couple of other hands wandered in to fill their plates and take them back to Bert’s bedroom. A few moments later, we heard sounds of hilarity and good-natured ribbing from that direction.

  “Best thing for him,” Millicent said. “He sure as hell won’t go to sleep while they’re poking fun at him.”

  Heck dominated the dinner conversation. I suspected Millicent wouldn’t have allowed that had she not been in a funk over her son’s near-fatal shooting. The Mexican rancher gradually pulled her out of the doldrums by asking pointed questions about everything under the sun, including news about her prize duck. She shared neither the mysterious note nor the real reason she had been at the City that afternoon. The light from the wagon wheel chandelier caught in Acosta’s lapel pin, periodically discharging rays like the bolt it represented.

  I concentrated on my medium-rare steak and a boiled potato loaded with butter, chives, and sour cream. Chopped chili peppers spiced up the black beans. As I finished a helping of chocolate mousse, I realized I would need to take a long walk before retiring for the night. Millicent had offered a bed, and in view of the hour, I accepted.

  After Acosta’s plane lifted off in a blaze of bright lights, I walked through a black night eased by a canopy of impossibly brilliant stars and a moon lying low on the horizon. I slowed my brisk stride as a couple of shadows moved at the edges of my vision. Bruno and Hilda. Did the big Dobermans remember I was a friend?

  Unless Millicent was capable of sacrificing the son of her loins for a damned duck—or more properly, for $250,000 she’d foolishly bet on a damned duck—then the theft appeared to be genuine. She was crafty but not venal. The handwritten note wasn’t an outright ransom demand, but it looked to be the opening move in that direction.

  What would have happened if Bert hadn’t chosen to confront his mother at that exact moment? Would the situation have been resolved, or would Millicent be lying on an OMI slab up in Albuquerque right now? No. The note didn’t threaten her, merely those close to her. Someone wanted something, and I suspected it was not money. What, then?

  Whatever it was, the thing now pointed away from a duck race down in Florida. Although if the thief knew of the bet, he now realized he held five aces. Millicent would have to do almost anything demanded of her to avoid a quarter-of-a-million-dollar loss. I looked east toward a Mexico that lay invisible in the distance. The threat came from there.

  But maybe the bushwhacker had just taken the Lazy M off the hot seat. If the note could be construed as evidence the duck had been snatched, then GSR would probably have to pay her claim. And Bert’s shooting provided powerful evidence the theft was legitimate. I touched the jacket pocket holding a photocopy of the threatening message O’Brien had given me before he left.

  When I returned from my walk, I looked in on Bert and contributed to the effort to keep him from falling into a coma until the danger of the concussion passed. He was having a hard time of it, especially since the pain pills Dr. Mullens had given him tended to make him drowsy. I put a fresh tape in my recorder and led him through everything before, during, and after the attack. Even though I gleaned little new information, I was satisfied on one point. Bert had known nothing about the mysterious note. Now that he knew of it, he cut his mother some slack about the ruined meeting with the ranchers.

  After half an hour with Bert, I retired to my room to prepare for bed and to call home. The phone rang several times before a masculine voice answered. Not Paul’s. Definitely not Paul’s.

  “Uh… is Paul there?”

  “Yeah, sure, Mr. Vinson. He’s coming in from the garage. He’ll be here in a sec.”

  A moment later, Paul’s throaty growl came across the line. “Hi, Vince. Thought you were gonna be home this evening.”

  “I sent you a message. Didn’t you get it?”

  “Yeah, Hazel called. But I’m still disappointed.”

  “Me too. Who answered the phone?”

  “Oh, that was Niv. You know, Niven Pence, Mrs. Wardlow’s great-grandson.”

  Gertrude Wardlow had lived across the street in a white brick for as long as I could remember. Tiny and in her seventies, she had an indomitable will. Both she and her dead husband, Herb, were retired DEA agents. She might look as if a puff of wind would blow her and her helmet of blue-white hair over backward, but she’d saved my butt when some thugs, unhappy with the way I was investigating a case, decided to shoot up my place. When she distracted them, they’d put a few rounds through her window, shattering the urn on her fireplace mantel and spilling Herb all over the living room carpet.

  Then last year she had galloped to the rescue once again by yelling at a crazy man intent on beating my brains out with a ball bat in my own backyard. She and Paul had a special connection ever since she phoned 911 when she saw him kidnapped from in front of my place. On the few occasions she had been called upon to introduce him to someone else in our decidedly geriatric neighborhood, she’d judiciously called him my “boarder.” I vaguely recalled her great-grandson, Niv, as a long beanpole with sandy hair and freckles.

  “What’s he doing over there?”

  “When you backed out of coming home this evening, I promised Mrs. Wardlow I’d tutor him in English. He’s a freshman at UNM this year.”

  “Oh.” It came out flat.

  Paul laughed. The bell tones of his baritone rang in my ear. “You’re jealous! That’s great. You’re jealous of a freshman, yet.”

  “Not so loud. He’ll hear you.”

  “He went back in the living room. I’m in your study.”

  “Anyway, I’m not jealous. Not much, anyway.”

  He turned sober. “Man, when are you coming home? I planned on wearing you out tonight.”

  “Probably tomorrow night. There doesn’t seem to be much left for me to do down here.”

  “Hazel said somebody got shot.”

  “Yeah. A rancher by the name of Bert Kurtz. He’s not hurt too badly, but it could have been fatal.”

  “You’re not in any danger, are you?”

  “Nope. They’re not gunning for me this time.”

  We didn’t chat for long, and after I hung up, I realized why—I wanted the English lesson over and done with and that skinny freshman out of the house as soon as possible. I trusted Paul implicitly, but it was impossible to rein in my galloping imagination.

  Chapter 15

  MY MOUNTING sense of anticipation crested at the sight of Paul’s old Plymouth at the curb in front of the house on Post Oak Drive NW late Sunday afternoon. I’d been halfway afraid he would be gone, although he didn’t have weekend classes at the U. I eased into the driveway and barely stopped long enough to retrieve my bag from the trunk before I mounted the back steps and let myself into the kitchen.

  He was there, and like Maria last evening, he wore a white apron—albeit a more masculine one—and held a soup ladle in his left hand. The unmistakable aroma of green chili stew assailed my nostrils. My man had prepared a favorite dish to honor the return of his conquering hero. I registered the big, loopy grin on his face, dropped my bag, and rushed forward. We held one another close without speaking, taking comfort in the warmth of the act.

  “Gotta let me go,” he finally said. “The tortillas are browning, and you don’t like them burnt.”

  I held him at arm’s length and gazed into golden brown eyes filled with love and trust. “Man, it’s good to be home.”

  And it was. I had lived my entire life in this house my father built and remembered every moment of it with ease and comfort. But it had never been as total
ly, as completely my home as in the past two years—after Paul became a part of my world.

  When we sat down to Paul’s stew, the words spilled out as we caught each other up on recent events. He won a freestyle race against the best athlete on UNM’s swim team. Paul was great in the pool, but he seldom participated in organized aquatic events. Odd, because he was a competitive guy.

  He claimed to have found the ideal dancing partner for his boot-stomping forays to the C&W Palace. A pert, vivacious blonde lesbian who loved dancing as much as he did. She had absolutely no designs on his lean, buff body. Perfect.

  He was pumped by the approach of next Friday… his Emancipation Day. His second-session summer school classes ended that day, putting him that much closer to his master’s degree. I’d hoped this would give him a little freedom for the rest of the summer, but he said he needed to work on his thesis. So little chance of that.

  “Did you notice the paint job?” he asked as we pushed away empty stew bowls.

  “I didn’t take time to notice anything except your car out front.”

  He smiled. “There’s a new coat of paint on the front trim and the fascia on one side of the house. The rest of it will be finished in a couple of days.”

  “I’m surprised you found the time.”

  “Not me. Niv Pence. When Mrs. Wardlow asked me to tutor him, I refused to take any money. But nobody gets out in front of that old gal, so Niv’s painting all of the wood trim on the outside of the house. And doing a pretty good job of it too.”

  Finally sated with verbal conversation, we retired early to communicate in other ways, and I had the pleasure of studying the fascinating dragon tattoo on his left pec prowl with the movement of his torso.

  “WELL, IT’S about time,” Hazel announced Monday morning when I got to the office. I wondered if she referred to my being out of town longer than planned or to the late hour of my arrival. Probably both.

  “Good morning to you too.”

  Hazel had been my mom’s best friend—both of them were teachers—and my surrogate mother after my parents died in a car crash a few years back. She recently changed her hairstyle to something a little more… puffy… the only word I could think of. But it suited her. Her gold-framed glasses made her gray eyes seem bigger. The transition that began last year was now complete. She went from dowdy-dumpy to chic-dumpy. But perhaps a little less so. She’d lost a pound or two in the week I’d been away. I pecked her fondly on a powdered cheek.

  Charlie peeked over her shoulder. “Welcome back. Everything all tied down on the Great American Ducknapping Case?”

  “As tight as it’s going to get.” I handed Hazel my expense reports and asked her to prepare a bill for me to deliver with my final report to Del later.

  “To Del? Don’t you want me to send them to the insurance company?”

  “No, this isn’t the usual deal. GSR will probably end up paying our bill, but right now this seems to be a private arrangement between Del and the GSR VP. I’ll give the report and invoice to him and let him sort it out.”

  “You want the bill or the report first?”

  “You can start on the bill while I review the tapes and finish dictating the report. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. You can add that to the bill.”

  I was surprised they allowed me to go straight to my private office without assailing me with a myriad of details about other active cases. Maybe there weren’t any other active cases. The question came into sharper focus when I found a couple of files containing completed reports and final billings. One, a missing daughter from Chicago, Charlie located living with a man in Old Town. The other was a background check on a potential upper-level manager for a public utility company. I read and signed off on them before settling down to work on the report to GSR.

  Later, as Charlie and I sat in my office munching corned beef on rye sandwiches from the City Hall Deli, we talked over the current caseload while Hazel transcribed my dictated report. I was relieved to learn we had a full plate. Thanks to my friends at APD, I had plenty of referrals. So many, in fact, Charlie proposed bringing in Tim Fuller part-time. Tim, a retired APD sergeant with a PI license, helped us out now and then. I readily agreed to his recommendation.

  When we finished, I left for my one o’clock appointment with Del at the Stone, Hedges, Martinez offices on the top floor of the Albuquerque Plaza two blocks down the street on Third NW. I stewed for a few minutes in their plush waiting room. The law firm had invested more money in the green travertine floor and the corded, overstuffed beige chairs and couches than I had in my entire office.

  Finally, Del rushed in and apologized for keeping me waiting. The first sight of him always threw me. He never seemed to age. His sapphire eyes and fresh-scrubbed, boyish face seemed unchanged. Once we were seated in his elegant private office, rich with modern artwork and gleaming sculptures, we exchanged a few pleasantries before he speed-read my report. As he laid it aside and examined the invoice, his eyebrows climbed.

  “What’s this? A final bill? Isn’t that a bit premature?”

  “Why? The investigation’s complete, as you can see from the report.”

  “But you haven’t found the thief.”

  “So far as I’m concerned, I have. Liver Lips Martinson stole the duck on orders of one of the Mexican drug cartels.”

  “Why a drug cartel?”

  “To intimidate Millicent and the other ranchers into allowing them free access.”

  “What about this Miami developer?”

  “I don’t believe he shoots people from the border. No, the cartels make more sense.”

  “Which cartel?”

  “I don’t know. And unless GSR is willing to pay a serious hazardous-duty premium, I’m not going to find out. The report is clear. It contains a copy of the extortion note Mrs. Muldren received.”

  “But that infers the duck is alive and presumably recoverable. Our client may be able to avoid a claim.”

  “I’ll tell you what. You strap on a six-shooter and come with me, and we’ll run those south-of-the-border banditos to earth. Del, these people were willing to kill her son just because they figured she double-crossed them by calling a meeting! What do you think they’ll do to us if we go poking around on their turf?”

  “You’re sure the duck is across the border?”

  “The duck or the duck’s carcass. She’s probably pâté by now. If it were you, wouldn’t you take her where the American authorities can’t reach you?”

  He frowned as he aligned my invoice and report precisely in the center of his blotter. “I guess. Hank Grass isn’t going to be happy.”

  “Even if the duck is alive, there is still no way to recover the insured’s stolen property. So your good buddy, Hank Grass, is going to be held responsible for his own actions. Why in the world would he insure a damned duck for such an outrageous amount, anyway?”

  “No idea. Oh well, I’ll submit this to him and see what he says.”

  “In the meantime I will consider my assignment at an end.”

  He seemed inclined to talk, but I’d been away from the office for several days and needed to get some work done. I took the elevator down to the ground floor and exited the Plaza by the Third Street door. I turned left, and as I reached the corner of the Hyatt Regency, I noticed someone had tied a yellow ribbon around the outstretched finger of the construction foreman, one of the nine bronze statues of the Sidewalk Society. Had some of our boys returned from Iraq? Hopefully the whole cockeyed nonsense had ended while I wasn’t paying attention.

  I made another left and walked back to my office. It felt good to be home as I settled into my comfortable chair and picked up the file Hazel had left on my desk. So far as I was concerned, I’d be happy if another out-of-town job never crossed my desk.

  The case Hazel had elected to give me was a personal-injury lawsuit filed by a fellow named Jordan Carl Vermillion, a fifty-two-year-old college-educated man who claimed to be unable to work due to a back
and neck injury caused by tripping over some shoe boxes in Strother’s Clothiers, one of Albuquerque’s upscale men’s shops. He had taken a tumble over the Independence Day weekend, an accident witnessed by several other shoppers and half the store’s staff.

  My problem with the case? This was not his first such accident. Hazel’s online check of the state judiciary records showed he’d had a similar incident the prior year, that time in a big-box store. My natural paranoia came to the fore when I noticed the previous accident had occurred almost precisely one year ago.

  I examined his bland, unremarkable face in the photograph the store’s surveillance camera captured. It had a bloated look. Deep laugh lines framed the mouth, running from nose well down into the chin area. Pale eyes stared owlishly through thick, frameless lenses. He looked like your neighbor down the street or your slightly weird Uncle Oscar from Omaha. But he didn’t look like a criminal.

  Of course, most criminals don’t look like criminals. They don’t have a “look.” They appear to be the neighbor or Uncle Oscar because they are the neighbor or Uncle Oscar. There are exceptions, of course: the bad boys, the down-and-outers, the street bums. But those are not the people who normally show up on my radar—they usually have a lot more in common with Jordan Carl Vermillion than the hard cases.

  I hate surveillance jobs because they start early in the morning and go on forever. Even if you catch the subject with the goods or in the act—whichever applies—lawyers and insurance companies don’t want a “gotcha moment”; they want a videotape of more than a single incident.

  SOMETIME AFTER dawn the next morning, I parked down the street from Vermillion’s brick-fronted stucco house on La Charles Avenue NE in a middle-class neighborhood with a mix of residents. Kids came and went from movies or sports fields or whatever summer vacation activities consumed them, while ripe old senior citizens puttered around in adjacent yards. The door to 4313 remained firmly closed.

  According to Hazel’s Internet research, license plate numbers on the red 2007 Toyota Corolla parked on the right side of the double driveway matched the vehicle registered to Vermillion. I took out my recorder and noted the time of my arrival, ticking off the exact minute. Lawyers and courts were big on precise times. Nothing happened until 7:07 a.m. when the front door opened and a man matching Vermillion’s description and photograph stepped out onto the porch. He looked around carefully before marching out in his jammies and a robe to bend over and pick up his newspaper—without the aid of a neck brace or cane or crutches of any sort. He unfolded the paper and read the headline before going back into the house. I recorded it both visually and verbally.