In Gallup, Greed

by Tower Lowe

  “Enough!” She wondered if Jerry even realized how self-centered he was. “I’ll stay ‘til the buyers leave. Then I’m closing up.”

  Mirage spent a quiet hour after Jerry left communing with the art, talking to the spirit of her brother Lonnie ... and trying to retrieve memories from the party at Lonnie’s house.

  Almost nothing came back, except one conversation by Lonnie’s fireplace. The room was dark, lit by one lamp in the corner. Lolo argued with Nez, swinging her hand and spilling beer on the pine floor.

  “Cash, said he paid cash. Two hundred thousand bucks. Cash, you understand? And we get 30%. What’s bad about that, huh?”

  “He’s keeping money from us, Lolo. You play the fool for a little cash.”

  “Bullshit. Jerry remodeled the gallery. Lotta money for that. We got plenty.”

  Lolo rushed Nez, stumbled and caught herself on the arm of the couch.

  “God damn it, Nez, you the fool. Money not a sin.”

  “30% is cheating the artists.”

  Lolo threw her beer bottle at Nez, but it narrowly missed his head and broke in the fireplace. Mirage watched the glass shatter into the ashes. The memory stopped there—nothing but a blank, and then the alley dirt and the headache and Lonnie dripping blood on the bed. After that, came the call to her friend Alice in Santa Fe.

  ∆

  Being Another Person

  Alice considered her image in the full-length mirror, pulling bangs from her amber hair, wondering if she looked older and more confident or younger and more foolish. She tossed a hip to the side, stood up straight, faked a stride in the mirror space, and sighed.

  “I want to be someone else,” she thought. “When did that start?”

  At 8 or 10 years old, she remembered asking her father, the eminent Dr. Stuart, suspected also of being Cinnamon’s father, if she could try out for the drill team. For a year, she eyed the girly uniforms—forest green trimmed in white felt with the letters for her elementary school spilling down the front. After school, Alice observed the straight leg cartwheels and high kicks that exposed brilliant green polka dots tucked under corduroy skirts. At home, as dusk descended on the back yard, she played the drill music on her DVD player and jumped and danced, imagining her hair flying, her smile showering all the middle school boys with shivers.

  “No such silliness in my house,” he said.

  Dr. Stuart suggested the chess club. Or perhaps Alice wanted to accompany him on a dig. She did. Accompany him on a dig, that is. Hot sun, hotter sand or dirt. A dead silence. She met plenty of serious women, confident, almost masculine in presentation and style. And a dig is where she eventually met Cinnamon, a quiet ephemeral person, who, nevertheless, appeared to be a rabid follower of Dr. Stuart.

  Alice shoved her bangs back into the straight lines of her hair and turned away from the mirror. There isn’t anything wrong with being confident and masculine or with worshipping a detached but learned man, Alice thought. In fact, a combination of those traits comprised the daughter Dr. Stuart wanted, but not, as far as Alice could determine, the daughter he got.

  Alice, the child, liked lace, popular music, and romance novels. Her father discouraged these passions and attempted to cultivate the opposite. On her 10th birthday, his present personified his desire for a daughter steeped in archeological lore.

  “This is a book about the Mayan culture. It will come in handy to know as much as you can about ancient civilizations when you are grown.” Alice used the book as a doorstop.

  She dreamed of being a make-up artist in Hollywood. While applying dark eyebrows to a shallow but dashing thriller star, Alice imagined falling in love and living a frivolous, cocaine-fused life in Malibu. Dr. Stuart never listened to her dreams. If she dared to speak about her life in Hollywood out loud, her father laughed as if she were telling a childish joke.

  When Alice graduated from High School, they were living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and her father thought UNM an excellent school for anthropology or archaeology – surely she had one of those majors in mind?

  They sat at a pine table her father bought at an auction. The mortise and tendon joints and faded stain gave Alice the feeling of living in a dreary past. How she longed for a garish modern house with glass tables and crushed velvet sofas.

  “Which major then?” Her father offered the choice.

  “I’ll major in fashion design, Dad,” she might have said. But, truly, there was no point in protesting.

  “We will work together on a journal article in your junior year,” he offered.

  Alice imagined a dark skinned youth, with a heavy accent – Spanish, Arabic, Navajo – no matter. He held her with muscular arms against the twin dorm bed, smothering her throat with kisses. Her eyes beheld walls decorated with garments and patterned fabrics of her creation.

  “By your senior year, you’ll have an academic publication with your name attached, and that will help you get into graduate school.”

  “Archaeology,” she selected, as it hardly mattered either way, and this was the choice she knew her father wanted her to make.

  None of it lasted long. The dread of pretending, the aching nausea of failure, the self-flagellation, it was all too much. By her sophomore year, she was drinking whiskey from a secret box under her dorm bed, having sex with frat boys, and pulling a D- in her easiest class.

  “Why? Why are you failing your classes, Alice? They aren’t that hard. I paid my own tuition in college. I worked long hours at Roybal Construction and still studied and made excellent grades. Why are you failing?”

  “Because you were being yourself, Daddy, the eminent Dr. Stuart, even at that young age. I am being another person, and it’s exhausting.” But she didn’t say that.

  “I don’t know,” she recited.

  “You don’t know! Don’t know! If you don’t know, who does?”

  “I’ll work with you on the digs, Daddy, until I know what I want.” She did say that, for real, because she knew he would agree to it, and then there would be a roof over her head, and food.

  One dig was down in southern New Mexico, south of Roswell. Dad brought along the old friend called Cinnamon. On this dig, Alice realized for the first time that Cinnamon and Dr. Stuart were lovers. Alice thought her dad avoided women because he thought he was superior to the softer sex. Yet, here he was with this soft-spoken southern woman, hidden, but present, since Alice was a girl. Why did this woman put up with her father? Why did she agree to remain in the background, treated in public like a non-essential helper, when she shared his bed and his endless archaeological treatises?

  Alice’s mother, Aster, worked with Dr. Stuart on the digs before she died. Aster was like the flower, purple aster, a shiny disc of gold surrounded by shoots of lavender laughter. Perhaps, Alice pondered, I am more like her. But cancer took Aster at 32, when Alice was 7, so Alice remembered her flower-like mother as an essence more than a living person.

  That’s one reason she wanted to help Cinnamon and Burro find the older Cinnamon, her father’s lover. To lose a mother is to lose the cord that guides a girl’s life. That’s how it felt to Alice, anyhow. There was no cord, no connection, between her existence as the wrong daughter for Dr. Stuart and the purpose for which she was born. A mother might have shown her that connection. Instead, Alice’s life blew about in the southwest winds, a lost petal whose center had shriveled and died.

  That was no excuse for all that drifting, of course. It was a romantic justification for what looked like laziness to Alice and most of the people she met. The eminent Dr. Stuart left her with money enough to live a stable life. He simply forgot – or didn’t know how—to teach his daughter how to tie herself down. Archaeology was the only rope he possessed and that rope was of no use to his orphaned daughter who loved romance and excitement and dressing up like a girl.

  That was another reason she left Carlsbad and jointed Cinnamon and Burro in Santa Fe. She needed family. The remote possibility that Cinnamon was her sister intrigued Alic
e, for Alice was only three years older than Cinnamon, meaning there was a possibility that the good Dr. Stuart drifted a bit in his own life. The possibility that he cheated on her mother both angered and thrilled Alice. Anger, Alice felt for her mother’s sake, thrill, for her own sake—because it meant the two shared an adulterous spirit.

  Lonnie’s death shocked Alice, but she saw an opportunity to bring her newfound “family” and her old friend Mirage together. Alice persuaded Burro and Cinnamon to get involved in the Gallup murder so they could meet Mirage and find out more about Momma. In the younger Cinnamon, Alice saw a chance to find a piece of her past by finding the woman who knew her father best.

  ∆

  Money and Scrambled Brains

  Burro waited for me in front of his apartment off St. Michaels Drive. The place was a former WWII barracks bought up by the Christian Brothers and operated for many years as part of College of Santa Fe. The College closed down a few years back, and the barracks were sold off to Harold Beesting, who renovated the oblong buildings into dingy two bedroom apartments. The buildings are covered in asbestos siding, so tearing them down is impractical, and Harold’s tenants aren’t too particular.

  Burro has treatable schizophrenia. The meds keep him on track, but he still gets psychotic visions. At times these hallucinations are bad for his mental health, and at other times Burro claims the visions bring him a kind of knowledge born of facts and intuition. Over time, working together with him for the state of New Mexico, I discovered that Burro’s visions do give clues to the case we are working on, whether it’s a civil rights violation or a crime. The visions bonded us, in a way, because I took them seriously. And he took my search for Momma seriously.

  Burro jumped off the front stoop and ran to the car.

  “Money and scrambled brains,” he called out as he got in the passenger side of my red Corolla. He curled the single braid in his blond hair with his forefinger and frowned at me.

  “A vision.”

  “Yep. Money is everywhere in a run down kitchen/living room combo and the brains well up out of a frying pan – it’s confusion – maybe damage to someone’s brain.”

  “Like Traumatic Brain Injury?”

  “Yes ...TBI ... and more than that. A confusion of thoughts....I don’t know.”

  “It came to you when Alice called you about Mirage and her dead brother?” I started the car to head over and pick up Alice.

  “Right. The kitchen counter, the trash and all the bowls and pans and every surface are filled or covered with hundred-dollar bills – except the frying pan. And it’s sitting there, frying brains.”

  “Sound’s like a bad dream.”

  “Based on reality,” he reminded me.

  We picked up Alice and arrived in Gallup three hours later. Burro and I stayed at the Hampton Inn and Alice took off to stay with Mirage. We met the next morning for breakfast at the locally famous Earls.

  “Like I told Burro,” Alice began, “Mirage found Lonnie with stab wounds in his abdomen. She doesn’t know if the wounds were fatal or if he passed out and bled to death.”

  Alice is the daughter of Dr. Stuart, who lived with Momma for a while in New Mexico. An elder in the Zuni tribe told me he is my father, making Alice my stepsister, but I’m not certain I believe that story. Still, I like Alice.

  “Is he a drug addict?” I asked.

  “Nah... parties a lot.”

  “Why does Mirage think she killed him?”

  “Guilt. She thinks if she found him sooner or if she wasn’t so drunk, she could have saved him. On top of that, she blacked out, so she doesn’t remember what happened. She was sobbing on the phone to me, hysterical. I suggested she hire you two.”

  Earls serves diner food, and local jewelers and potters sell their art, passing by the tables as you dine. We ordered huevos rancheros – Christmas – which means red and green chile in New Mexico. Burro explained his vision to Alice while I studied a turquoise and crimson beaded belt.

  “I see money everywhere. That’s key to the murder, I’m sure of it. You said something on the phone about Mirage and Lonnie involved with large amounts of money from an art gallery?”

  “Absolutely,” Alice assured him. “Lonnie was part of a new art gallery in Gallup. The building renovations cost a fortune. Plus, some of the artwork sells for six figures. Lonnie got hooked up with a wealthy L.A. investor named Jerry Luster.”

  “What’s a wealthy L.A. investor want with a gallery in Gallup?” I puzzled.

  “He was an old friend of Lonnie and the other artists. Claimed to love native art —wanted to help the native art scene in Gallup, according to Mirage.”

  “Was Lonnie in debt?” Burro got back to the money.

  “I doubt it. The artists in the gallery were making real money. Lonnie didn’t live high, either—stayed in that little house on Cactus Drive, drove his beat up Subaru.”

  “What do you know about this Jerry Luster?”

  “Seems like a nice guy. I met him through Mirage. He’s been coming to Gallup from California since he was in his 20’s. Made lots of money in a business out there recently and he wanted to give back, like I said, to the artists he loved.”

  “Single guy?” Burro asked.

  “No, wife and 12 year old boy,” The steaming huevos arrived.

  Alice lifted a fork with streams of cheese and green chile. “I invited Mirage to join us. There she is—at the door.”

  I spotted a young native woman, with purple black hair to her shoulders, a blue linen shirt, jeans and silver stamped belt.

  “That’s her,” Alice followed my eyes.

  Mirage joined us and scanned the menu.

  “Thanks for coming out here,” she offered.

  “I left behind a new man in my life named Jake. So it was a big sacrifice,” I joked.

  Mirage gave a small smile. “That cute, huh?

  “Don’t worry. He can wait,” I reassured her.

  “That’s a relief.”

  I suppressed the urge to put question about Momma first, and jumped into the issue of her dead brother.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your brother Lonnie. What happened?”

  “I guess Alice told you that I only remember a few moments from the party,” Mirage confided. “I remember arriving and witnessing a fight between Nez and Lolo. I’m afraid I saw who killed Lonnie or, worse, that I killed him and don’t even remember. Can you guys help me?”

  “We can try,” Cinnamon reassured. “Who are Lonnie and Nez?”

  Mirage swirled her coffee, but didn’t drink. “Part of a group of friends. The group includes me, Lonnie, Nez, Lolo, Jerry and Johnnie Loco. All of us went to high school together except Jer – Jerry Luster. We all met him when he came to Gallup in his early 20’s.”

  “Tell us a little about the group.”

  “After high school Lonnie, Nez, Lolo and I went to UNM and studied art. Then we dropped out together, convening what we called an “art powwow”. Sounded good at the time. It was okay when we got back here to Gallup, too. Then money ran short, and we all partied too much. Nez and Lolo stopped speaking to us for a while...then Jerry showed up.”

  “Why did they stop speaking to you?”

  “They thought we’d lost our way. Or thought Lonnie had lost his...they didn’t think I’d ever found my way. See, I never really became an artist. I studied business and I claimed I was on the marketing end of things. To be honest, I never worked that hard at it and we didn’t sell enough to make a living. We were stuck in a rut.”

  “How did Jerry change things?”

  “The first visit, it was his spirit – his enthusiasm—that saved us, really. Jerry is a glad hand, but it’s contagious.”

  “‘The future is all in front of us,’ he’d encourage. ‘What’s money? A means to an end, okay? Money is not what defines us. Come on!’”

  “Sounds sappy, but it worked. And Jerry was in the same boat as us at the time. He worked in the family business in L.A. – scene paint
ing. There’s not much call for hand painted scenes anymore, so Jerry went to school to learn CGI – computer generated imaging. He came out here to escape his studies.

  “Right away, he bought a lot of our art – with his parent’s money, but he bought it. And that got us on our feet for a little while. Lonnie cut back on his drinking. Jer left town and it didn’t last. Lonnie went back to getting loaded, Lolo called us all lazy, and Nez said we were apples.”

  “Apples?”

  “A native slur. Red on the outside, white on the inside. Nez thinks he’s better than the rest of us. Even though they are friends, Nez particularly thinks he’s better than Lolo. Says she’s all about money and status.”

  “Is she?” Burro followed his vision.

  “No. Maybe. Lolo grew up with a Zuni mother and a white scientist father. They split up when she was a teen. Her dad lived in a nice house down in Los Alamos and her mom lived outside Zuni Pueblo in a little two-bedroom run down adobe place. Lolo never got over losing her middle class creds. Or that’s what Nez thinks.”

  Mirage’s green chile and papas arrived, a dish of sliced pan-fried potatoes smothered in Hatch chile and asado cheese. We all paused to eat and murmur about the food.

  “How did Jerry change things, Mirage?” I asked.

  “He changed us with money.”

  “Exactly,” Burro affirmed.

  “How?” I frowned.

  “The CGI generated money for Jerry and his family, and he wanted to give back to his friends. He bought that building on Munoz Street and remodeled it. I became the sales manager. I didn’t have to do much in sales, because Jerry brought in buyers and they paid a lot of money for the art. He said we needed to be recognized as international artists and to have our art redeemed in the eyes of the art buying public. See, Jerry believed that native artists were undervalued; that we suffered from a stereotype about native art as trinkets or crafts. There’s truth to that. Jer said we needed to be redeemed. Redemption Gallery was built to change all that.”