In Gallup, Greed

by Tower Lowe

  In Gallup, Greed

  Tower Lowe

  Published by eiffeltowerlowe publishers

  Copyright © 2014 Tower Lowe

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior permission of the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, art works, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, works, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1500151720

  ISBN-10: 1500151726

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  To Nick, Alice, and Rob, because family is everything. | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  . | A | Obviously Dead

  A | Crazy for Momma

  A | I Sense Confusion

  ∆ | Because I’m Lonely

  ∆ | Being Another Person

  ∆ | Money and Scrambled Brains

  ∆ | Not Considered Unreasonable

  ∆ | You Can’t Go on Your Feelings

  ∆ | Big Cut for the Gallery

  ∆ | He Calls Him the Redeemer

  ∆ | I’m a Wanderer

  ∆ | Jubilant, Horrifying, Irresistible

  ∆ | A Gesture of Love

  ∆ | Doesn’t Love Me

  ∆ | You Can’t Lose Something that Doesn’t Belong to You

  ∆ | A Possibility it Really Was Momma

  ∆ | Good Control Over My Women

  ∆ | Are You Here?

  ∆ | He Brought on the Stabbing

  ∆ | Private Help

  ∆ | Haunted, or Possessed

  ∆ | A Waste of Time

  ∆ | Dirty Laundry

  ∆ | Obsessions

  ∆ | Squirmy Snake-Like Creatures

  ∆ | Scrambled Morals

  ∆ | A Complete Stranger

  ∆ | A Sudden Rainstorm

  ∆ | The Spirit Life

  ∆ | Waiting So Long to See You

  ∆ | Gray Pixels

  ∆ | I Wanted to See Momma

  ∆ | Respect

  ∆ | Not Some Monster Murderer

  ∆ | Greed and Deception

  ∆ | Blown Out Old Men

  ∆ | Listen to Her Angels Now

  ∆ | Value Transfers

  ∆ | Who I Am

  ∆ | Trapped

  ∆ | Nothing but Feelings

  ∆ | The Real World

  ∆ | Paralyzed

  ∆ | Twin Witnesses

  ∆ | We Waited

  Ω | Answering Screams

  Ω | Don’t Torture Yourself

  Ω | Serenity, Like Silk

  Ω | Wrong All Around

  Ω | To Be Redeemed

  Ω | A Scent of Spirit

  Ω | When We Find Her

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  In Dulce, Disturbed

  Next in the Cinnamon/Burro New Mexico Mysteries: | In Albuquerque, Abandoned. | Below is an excerpt. | 1

  To Nick, Alice, and Rob, because family is everything.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A special thanks goes to Maize Elford-White and Laurie Lehman for professional guidance and support. The Moms’ Group and all my groups believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Special gratitude goes to Rob, for patience, strength, great food, and faith in my ability. And credit to God, who oversees all things.

  This book has been thoroughly edited and proofread. If you have comments, please contact me at www.towerlowe.com

  .

  A

  Obviously Dead

  Jerry floated before her, a vision of beer and brown leather—cute in an old-white-guy way.

  “Wanna mash me shot fer shot?” he slurred. Mirage laughed at the rich gallery manager.

  "Why not?”

  “Two Johnnie Walker Blue, straight up.”

  She woke up in an alley by her brother’s two-bedroom house on Cactus Drive in Gallup. The relentless New Mexico sun stabbed her eyes and fired a sharp pain in her forehead. Through a fog of nausea she searched black memories of the night before. Jerry appeared, a shirtless vision in electric blue bikini briefs standing in the dim lamplight. Everything else was gone, lost in a blackout. Mirage wretched, bringing up a pittance of bile and regret.

  She dragged her body off the sandy soil clumped with weeds and trailed slowly up the path to her brother's weathered brown door. A long crack ran down the wood by the lock where someone had clearly broken in, leaving the door ajar. Mirage frowned through the headache, her brain slowly filling with remorse.

  Stumbling over the wreckage of beer bottles and pizza, Mirage scouted the coffee supplies and instantly voted for Starbucks.

  "Hey, Lonnie!"

  No answer. No doubt her brother was passed out for the day in his bedroom. She found him there, for sure, but not the way she expected. Blood soaked the gray linens and drained, thick and rouge-brown, in a puddle that flowed from a wound in his abdomen. He was clearly and obviously dead.

  A

  Crazy for Momma

  “I can see it, Cinnamon," Jake said.

  “Where is it? Under the bed?”

  My phone played an electronic version of “The Magic Flute,” but the bed sheets were crumpled and thrown about with such force, it took me until the last moment to pick up the phone and answer. I slipped out of the sheets and walked around the corner, glancing back at the vision of Jake sprawled on my bed.

  Mesh curtains, beige-pink, fell against the Santa Fe casita’s adobe walls, and dropped lightly across the edge of the bed where Jake lay on his side, a white cotton sheet over his narrow hips, his chest glowing in the deep afternoon light. We were drinking Chai, Jake’s favorite. It made the room smell of cinnamon, like Momma. I was happy in that room, lying on the bed with Jake. He sucked the aimlessness right out of me, and his masculine figure in the dim light reminded me of hope, a lost feeling from my childhood. I answered my mobile.

  “What’s up?” It was Burro. A Sunday call from my assistant meant an urgent matter.

  “Hey, Cinnamon – Alice called me. She says we need to take off for Gallup immediately. There’s been a murder.” Alice is my newfound connection to Momma.

  “At that middle school we’re going to next week?”

  “No, not the middle school. This is about Alice’s Native American friend, Mirage. The one who roomed with Momma in Gallup? She thinks she killed her brother last night.”

  “She thinks she killed him?”

  “She blacked out after a party. When she woke up, he was dead. Doesn’t remember if she killed him or not. Alice told her to hire us as private investigators. We need to leave this afternoon.”

  Burro and I were granted our private investigator’s license last month. One reason for this is that we were brought into murder investigations on our last four trips for the state: in Dulce, Zuni, Roswell and Carlsbad. Another reason was the search for Momma.

  I peeked around the corner at Jake’s reclined figure behind the thin curtains. “Can’t we go tomorrow?”

  “Cinnamon, Mirage is the one who took in Momma in Gallup.”

  My mother, named Cinnamon like me, abandoned Daddy and me in Virginia when I was six years old. She ran off from my southern childhood to places unknown. I never heard from her again until Grandma died, and I found 20 letters from Momma locked in her closet. All of them came from New Mexico. I was 30 when I found them, old enough to take off for the southwestern state and get a job as a Civil Rights Investigator. Burro is my assistant and my friend. My real goal i
s to find out what happened to Momma, and Burro agreed to help me with that. The PI license gives us more training, access to information and, we hope, more money to conduct the search.

  “Okay, we’ll go today. I’ll meet you at your place.”

  I pulled on an emerald green sweater with piping at the sleeves that matched my hazel eyes. Sweaters are a Momma thing, too. One of the few things I remembered from my childhood was the soft cotton cardigans she wore every day.

  I sighed a goodbye to Jake, knowing he would be in Santa Fe when I returned. He was starting a business, after all. And I’m crazy to find Momma.

  A

  I Sense Confusion

  A coyote drifted by the front window, cautious, gray-gold, sniffing the dirt. The college campus surrounding Burro’s apartment lay quiet in the late morning. A gray cloud drifted by in the distance, foreshadowing the monsoon. Burro watched, and the cautious animal raised his eyes towards the cloud, and then turned towards Burro, as if to communicate the coming torrent. A coyote vision, Burro thought, based on intuition, evidence, and the inner workings of coyote genes.

  He identified. Burro knew his own visions were part a creation of his genetically corrupted mind, his intuition, and real world evidence. As soon as Alice’s voice came over the phone this morning, Burro had felt a new hallucination wash over him.

  “Hey, Burro. Mirage – you know – the woman Momma roomed with in Gallup? She thinks she killed her brother, Lonnie.”

  He saw the money first, sprouting like weeds from a kitchen floor.

  “They all started this gallery together: Mirage, Lonnie, and some friends. Lonnie gave a party – he did that all the time – with pizza and beer, that sort of thing. Mirage drank too much, blacked out, and apparently passed out in an alley outside Lonnie’s place. When she went back in the house, she found Lonnie dead.”

  An open concept kitchen appeared, and the money sprouts grew more quickly, shedding large bills onto the carpet, the sofa, and the countertops. The room oozed money and shame. That’s how the vision felt – like money and shame. Burro steadied himself on his clean kitchen counter, as Mirage continued to explain the crime.

  “Lonnie was in bed, Mirage says, stab wounds to his stomach. The police don’t suspect her or anything like that. There’s no weapon. All the gallery people were at the party, some others dropped by, so there’s no reason to think Mirage killed her brother. It’s just the blackout, I guess. It scares her that she might know something and not remember it.”

  Brains oozed up out of the center of a large iron frying pan and began to scramble on the stovetop. Burro sensed confusion, damage, a lack of understanding, missing pieces of information – it was hard to express what he felt when he saw the brains oozing and frying in the money filled kitchen and dining area. The floors started to tilt.

  “I sense confusion,” Burro spoke tightly into the phone.

  “You have a vision?”

  “It’s forming now.”

  “Okay. That’s good, I think. Mirage wants to hire you and Cinnamon as private investigators to find out if she killed Lonnie. Or who killed Lonnie. Like that.”

  “There’s money involved,” Burro edged out the words.

  “Yeah. The artists ran a pretty successful gallery.”

  Burro held the edge of the counter and, using his foot as a hook, pulled one of the metal chairs over to him and sat down.

  “I’ll call Cinnamon.”

  “We need to go today, Burro. You two were planning to go to Gallup anyway for another job, and Mirage was Momma’s friend. So it’s a good way to get to know her and find out what she knows about Momma.”

  “Today,” Burro repeated faintly.

  “Call me and let me know, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Burro placed his smart phone carefully on the counter. Money poured through the windows of the vision, busting out glass, invading every space, beneath the sofa, under the coffee table—pushing open cabinet doors, covering every surface. And, still, the brains oozed and fried, overflowing the edge of the pan, as if the money fed the confusion, fed the loss of order and sanity.

  Burro breathed, practiced bringing up pleasant memories. He thought of his childhood, reflecting back on the adobe house on the east side of Santa Fe where he grew up. He tried to visualize his mother, peeling green chile at a white porcelain sink. His mother was brown-eyed and slim. Both his parents were brown-eyed, actually, and Burro’s light hair and blue eyes were said to be the legacy of ancient blond ancestors from Europe.

  Thinking of his mother at the sink, and his grandfather’s stories of bold blond ancestors, Burro’s breath returned to normal, his blood pressure lowered, and the brains and money slowed, transformed into a still life drawing. Burro picked up the phone to call Cinnamon. As it rang, he noticed the coyote, spooked by a sound, slip quickly into a row of juniper trees, gone in a second, a mirage of orange dust and gray clouds, like a trick of the mind.

  ∆

  Because I’m Lonely

  Mirage dragged her guilty thoughts over to Redemption because Jerry wanted her there to interrogate her about Lonnie, or that’s how she saw it. Facing Lonnie’s death made her pretty honest, like asking herself the question, “Why do I sleep with a guy who’s married and has a kid?”

  Because I’m lonely.

  She stood at the gallery entrance, off Munoz Street, looking inside. Carved pine obelisks framed a southwest portal facing one-story high pine doors. The Saltillo tile floors stared out at her, reflecting the summer heat and the red and purple geometrics in the background of a portrait hung high near the entrance.

  “Baby, baby, baby.” There he was – the rounded chest, skinny arms—gray hairs escaping his dye job and doubt in his slate gray eyes. He hugged her and she detected the scent of sour alcohol and sweat, a kind of fermented decadence from this man who claimed to bring prestige and money to the Gallup art scene.

  “Mmm,” he hummed with his hug.

  “Okay, Jerry, take it down a notch.” Mirage wanted less Jerry juice and more calm comfort. But Jerry was juiced.

  “Walk with me, baby. We’ll mark the time together. I feel his spirit with us, right here up against this wall with this painting of the elder that we all loved.” Jerry’s hand arched upward to a six-foot high oil on canvas of the native leader, Nez’s fantastic wizened elder, facing Mirage now, his gentle old man’s eyes linking to her thoughts.

  “Get off it, Jerry,” Mirage chided.

  Jerry backed off then, shaking his whole body in protest. Mirage retreated into the conference room and fell into a leather chair that looked out over polished floors and middle-eastern rugs chose by Holly, Jerry’s elitist wife. We sold out to this guy, Mirage thought, for a substance as ephemeral as money.

  “Talk to me, baby.” Jerry was still there, standing over her, gesturing madly at nothing. He owns us, she thought.

  “I killed my brother.” Mirage put it simply.

  “Look, baby...”

  “Stop calling me that. I’m a grown woman.”

  “Course you are, honey, I understand.”

  Mirage let the “honey” stand. Why bother?

  “What I’m sayin’ is you’d never hurt Lonnie. This is an accident, and it’ll all get sorted out by the police and turn out to be a horrible mistake, an accident of some kind. We’ll never be the same without him, I know that, babe ... darlin’.”

  “Getting stabbed in the abdomen is not a mistake, Jerry. Plus, somebody broke into the house, for Christ’s sake – the lock was busted. I’ve hired a couple of detectives from Santa Fe to figure out if I killed Lonnie or not.”

  Jerry moved into the back office then. Mirage didn’t care why. While she waited, her eyes consulted the words by Nez’s oil portrait.

  A prayer feather points to the east. The background is his homeland, broken into a series of cubist frames that surround a dark face that reflects the coming purple sun.

  The words appeared next to the narrow, six-foot oil face
that Jerry had motioned towards when he referred to the spirit. The bronze face was set in a purple glow, his eyes reaching out to Mirage. The feather appeared to point towards Lonnie’s house and the unanswered questions there. Mirage slumped into the leather and cried silently, perplexed by Lonnie’s death and her own purpose in all this. Did she kill her kind-hearted younger brother?

  “Look, sweetie—look at these.” Jerry again, this time carrying two beaded leather pouches.

  “Lonnie bought these. Medicine pouches, sweetie. I want to give one to you. As a symbol, you know, of his healing soul and powers of intuition and...”

  “Jerry,” Mirage interrupted the monologue and brushed aside the pouch. “Douse the native healer stereotype, okay? Why did you ask me to come here?”

  Jerry switched his gaze toward the elder, as if he sought his next lie there. “I need somebody to watch the place,” he admitted finally. “I’ve been abandoned by Nez, Lolo, and Johnnie since yesterday morning. I guess they are mourning and, believe me, baby ... uh ... believe me, I understand that, but I’ve got big buyers coming in this afternoon. You always got a head on your shoulders Mirage. I count on you.”

  “Can’t you close the place, Jerry? Why do you leave it open when one the major artists is dead?”

  “Look, hon, I’m sorry, but it’s business, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know.” Mirage looked at the gallery owner, eyes desperately searching the room as if the words she needed might be written on the wall by one of the paintings or engraved into the tile floors. She simply gave up. It was becoming a habit.

  “Okay, Jerry. Whatever. I’ll stay ‘til the buyers leave, okay? But then you gotta close up. Money isn’t everything Jerry. For a few days, let it go.”

  “Of course. Yeah. You’re so right.”

  “Before you go, Jerry, one more thing.” She wouldn’t give this question up. “What happened last night at the party?”

  “I don’t know, sweets. An, an accident. You remember, I dropped you off at the house after we, uh....Let’s see it was around midnight, I think. You went running up to the door, all happy, and I waved, but you didn’t look back at me. I saw you open the door and walk in. That’s it. I was thinking that our – get together—didn’t mean much to you, maybe it was for the best. You mean the world to me, Mirage, but I have to think of my family, of course....”