In Gallup, Greed

by Tower Lowe

  ∆

  He Calls Him the Redeemer

  A rust and purple skyline fused with the sand colored building hovering over Gallup’s Munoz Street.

  “Redemption,” Burro mused. “Sounds more like a church.”

  I looked up at the high pine door and felt the cool desert air settle like a pure cotton sheet over the city.

  “I think Momma liked it here in Gallup,” I told Burro. “It’s a little like Virginia – beautiful sunrises and clear air. A little less rain, it’s true.”

  “Less rain and more dust,” Burro mocked.

  Inside the door, up high, I noticed a ten foot oil painting of a graying Native man, looking up and off to the east, an expression of plenty filling his face. The landscape behind him blended together in rich geometric hues, an octagonal purple sun rose on the left side of the painting and was reflected back from his wide brown eyes.

  “Let’s go where he’s looking,” I smiled upward as Mirage greeted us from the lobby.

  “That’s Nez’s work,” she commented. “He calls him The Redeemer – a kind of spirit guide for the gallery. We get offers all the time for that painting, but Nez won’t sell. He says The Redeemer watches over the gallery and the artists.” She looked away from the bronze face. “Didn’t do Lonnie much good.”

  “Redemption must have been Lonnie’s dream come true,” I murmured.

  “Not really.” She shook her head. “Redemption was Jerry’s dream that he sold to Lonnie.”

  “You’re feeling more bitter about the money?” Burro had his vision in mind.

  “Yeah. But I know that’s not how it all got started. Not really. Let’s take a tour and you’ll see that the art is genuine. Jerry was right about that.”

  As we walked through the 2500 square foot space, Mirage reviewed the work of three artists.

  “Nez does the oils. He prefers thick lines and ridges and geometric shapes combined with realism. His works sell for $150,000 - $200,000. The artist gets 30% of the sale.”

  “What?” Burro was shocked.

  Mirage raised her hand to the objection from Burro about the price. “That arrangement’s temporary. And it’s still a lot of money to the artist, particularly since sales are brisk.”

  “No matter the price, that doesn’t seem fair,” I contradicted.

  “I know. Nez and Lolo are on that all the time. But Jer says we are starting out, and he has to cover the expense of the remodel...I’ve been supporting him on that...”

  “Your call, of course,” I surrendered. Mirage continued the tour.

  “Lolo creates silver objects, not to wear, but as an artifact of modern life. Her early life in Zuni, compared to her later years Los Alamos, with a white scientific culture, changed her perspective on cultural conflict. Her work reflects her experiences spanning the two cultures. If you look closely at these tea services, they are delicately inlaid and often have different patterns from different historical periods and cultures – they often show contrast in design but unity of purpose. She also creates silver plates and dishes that are inlaid or stamped. The tea services are her big money makers. Jerry gets six figures for these pieces also. Lolo sold five pieces this year, an income already of $200,000.

  “How much did she get before?”

  “None of these artist made more than $15,000 a year before Jerry and The Redemption came along. They have no reason to complain about the percentage. Jerry finds the buyers that pay these high prices.”

  “A point,” I assented. “Tell me about these L shaped cubbies.”

  “That’s how we display the art. Notice Lonnie’s landscapes on the outer wall here. That invites you into an L-shaped mini-gallery. Come on.”

  She led us inside and I immediately felt that I had entered a small, intimate parlor. A carved pine chair graced the corner, inviting the visitor to sit and contemplate Lonnie’s lyrical landscapes. The space was infused with gray green LEDs and special track lights illuminated paintings.

  “It’s as though we left the gallery behind.”

  “Very intimate,” Mirage agreed.

  “Tell me about Lonnie’s work.”

  “Lonnie does the mixed media landscapes and some abstract portraits. His larger landscapes go for $180,000. The prices embarrassed Lonnie in a way. He started Redemption so native artists could be recognized and get what the art was really worth. But success troubled him. He’s not like Lolo. She says the money inspires her to do more intricate and precious inlay and make a biting commentary on culture gone awry in modern life. I agree with her that the art she creates today is inspired by her sales. And I can see how the money motivates her and even informs her commentary on art and modern capitalism. But Lonnie was starting to think the money poisoned the art.”

  Mirage waved her hand at a 2’ by 3’ watercolor with black and white feathered clouds over a gray dawn light streaked with black crepe de chine. “I think Lonnie loved his 3-D landscapes and wanted to share them with the world, like we all did. Her hand fell. “He didn’t feel inspired by making money, though. He said it was killing him.”

  “Killing him?”

  “Crazy Lonnie. Actually he craved money, and then, when he got it, he hated it.”

  “Maybe that’s why he died,” Burro ventured. “If he hated the money and somebody else liked it.”

  “That means one of us killed him,” Mirage said, then quickly changed the subject. “Come on to the back. I’ve got tea and coffee and gallery food.”

  “Gallery food?” Burro asked.

  “Earl GreyTea and Walker’s Shortbread Biscuits,” Mirage smiled. “Jer’s wife, Holly, buys the stuff. They could be featured in one of Lolo’s art works on culture class.”

  “Not New Mexico food, for sure,” Burro laughed.

  “Holly thinks the buyers like British tea biscuits. My opinion is, she plans to transform Gallup into a white man’s paradise.” Now we all laughed, releasing the tension around Lonnie for a moment.

  We followed her to the licorice smell of Earl Grey and milk. There were a variety of English biscuits, as Mirage had promised, displayed on a white linen cloth. The lounge was furnished with oak and leather, a European man’s haven for art appreciation. It appeared that in order for Holly to redeem native art, she thought he needed to westernize the surroundings.

  “Did the artists resent all this?” I wondered.

  Mirage laughed it off. “It’s Holly. The art speaks for itself. This is a only a place to sit down.”

  With that, we sat down near a small kiva fireplace, the only local architectural feature in the room. After we all ate a few British cookies, Burro asked Mirage if she had retrieved any more memories from Lonnie’s party.

  “No, and what I remember is not so unusual either. The two of them fought about money right from the start.”

  I nodded. “Did it surprise you that Jerry made it big with computers?”

  Mirage sipped Earl Grey from one of Holly’s thin china cups. “Look, I know Jerry pretty well—no ambition, a party guy. I honestly don’t see how he hit it big with CGI, but he did.” She looked around. “This place is evidence of that. Jerry built it with his own money. He’s trying to make it back with the high gallery percentages, but he did the remodel with cash. There are no loans on Jerry’s dream art gallery. Jerry redeemed himself with this building and Lonnie was his native front man.”

  “Why only the three artists? There must be others who want to get in on the deal. Especially with the high priced sales.”

  “Jerry and Holly were together on this one. They wanted to help the four of us. Like I told you, we’d been friends since high school. Jerry said that if Redemption did well and we got the respect we deserve from local and international buyers, then all the artists in Gallup and all native artists would benefit.”

  “Did that happen?”

  “Not yet. Jerry got a few well-to-do buyers who paid whatever price he set. It was odd from the start, I’ll admit that.”

  “What makes you say t
hat?”

  “Why were these guys willing to pay so much for the work of unknown artists? Plus, there were ten or twelve patrons on the first visit, but then it dwindled to the same four people over and over again.”

  “Did you ask him about it?” Burro easily saw a relationship between his vision and the money generated by Redemption gallery. I knew he was looking for evidence of scrambled brains or confusion.

  “Sure.”

  “What did he say?”

  “’Be patient, babe.’ I hate it when he calls me ‘babe.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “Oh, he said there were more buyers coming, but, even if nobody else ever came, what was wrong with the money these four were paying? I told him four people could only buy so much art, but he said I didn’t understand rich people.”

  “Was anyone else suspicious?”

  “Lonnie.”

  “How did Jerry handle that?”

  “Same as me. Told him to be patient.”

  “Did they fight?”

  “Yeah. They were all fighting the week before Lonnie...passed....”

  “Jerry fought with Ronnie?”

  “Not a physical fight. Over the money,” Mirage clarified.

  “Who else was angry with Lonnie?” Burro pushed the point.

  Mirage hesitated. The deep brown and gold in the room bore down on us with the weight of Western mores and money. Then she stood up and tossed a plate of Mcvities Custard Creams into the trash.

  “Lonnie wanted to close the place,” she said finally. “’The spirits know,’ he said. ‘Soon Jerry will know, too.’”

  “What did he mean?” Burro wondered.

  “Lonnie started the whole thing for spirit, like I said. He was serious about it. Nez was on his side, but Jerry was furious with him. Lolo likes the money, so I don’t think she cared for the idea. And Jerry’s right hand man, Johnnie Tru, hated the idea.”

  “Who is this Johnnie Tru? What’s he like?”

  “A hard nose who does Jerry’s dirty work. He’s known all of us for years, but I don’t trust him.”

  “And what did you think about Lonnie’s spirit ideas?” I asked.

  “I need a job, of course. And this whole thing,” she waved her hand to include the gallery and all its contents, “does have a spirit, I think. The difference between Lonnie and me was, the spirit depresses me. It would be a relief if we closed it down.”

  “If he believed in the spirit, why do you think Lonnie wanted to close Redemption?”

  “He said it was rigged.”

  “You think he meant Jerry was skimming too much money from the artists with that 30%?”

  “No...Lonnie didn’t care about the percentage.”

  “What did Lonnie think was rigged, then?”

  “The spiritual part for sure. It was a big deal to Lonnie and Nez that the spirit guides our venture. Lonnie told me he thought Jerry browbeat the buyers into buying the art. To Lonnie, that meant the spirit wasn’t guiding it.”

  “You don’t really think you killed your brother, do you?” I guessed.

  “No.” Mirage looked exhausted. “I don’t remember, though. And people do crazy stuff when they’re drunk.”

  “What exactly happened when you found Lonnie?”

  “I was hung over and full of remorse when I woke up in that ditch. So I stumbled over to Lonnie’s to make coffee. I remember the door lock was jimmied, which I was weird, but you know how it is, Burro, at parties. I figured it was some kind of drunken drama.”

  “Was Lonnie careful about locking the door to his place?”

  “Sure, most of the time he locked it, but not always after a party. Particularly if he passed out before the last person went home. Jerry’s paranoid about Lonnie locking his door because of the art, but Jerry wasn’t there late, so it doesn’t make any sense that the door was locked and it doesn’t make any sense that the lock was broken.”

  “Unless the murderer broke the lock.”

  Mirage shuddered. “I could have done it. I simply don’t remember.”

  “Do you have a key?” Burro asked.

  “I do,” Mirage answered.

  “Then I don’t think you broke the door lock, do you?”

  “I suppose not. It’s not so much that I think I stabbed my brother. If I hadn’t been so drunk myself, and my morals weren’t so scrambled,” Burro glanced at me, “I might have found Lonnie earlier in the evening and called 911. He would have lived.”

  “We don’t know exactly what time it happened, Mirage,” I encouraged. “For all you know the stabbing happened after you left the party.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Could the stabbing be the result of the fight you remember between Nez and Lolo?” I continued.

  “The police asked me that. But, like I said, that was an old fight between the two of them. It didn’t really have anything to do with Lonnie.” Mirage shrugged. “The police took fingerprints and blood samples and all that. Not that it mattered, since all of us hung out at Lonnie’s from time to time. There’s no knife at the house that could have served as the murder weapon. Lonnie bought cheap kitchen knives. He was stabbed with a sharp blade, apparently.”

  “Do you remember who else was at the party?” Burro asked.

  “Only vaguely. Maybe Johnnie. He never misses a chance to get free food and booze.”

  “Is he violent?”

  “Johnnie? Harmless. Irritating. He’s a lonely guy – doesn’t have any friends except Jerry and the bartender at Sammy’s. There’s no one that hated Lonnie, no one who got violent on a regular basis. We partied; we fought; we passed out.” Mirage sucked in a huge gulp of air. “This can’t have happened. Lonnie can’t be dead, and one of – us – can’t be the killer.”

  “It sounds like even the police don’t really think you murdered Lonnie.” I said.

  “No. The detective who talked to me said he didn’t have any idea who did it. He questioned everybody who was there. I got the impression he thought we were a bunch of crazy Indians.”

  “We’ll keep on it,” I promised.

  But Burro and I left the gallery more confused than ever.

  “Let’s catch a light lunch at The Grounds Café. Talk this out,” he proposed.

  “Right,” I agreed. “And I have something to tell you about Momma.”

  ∆

  I’m a Wanderer

  Jake exited the Fort Marcy Complex in north Santa Fe, greeted by white clouds and turquoise blue sky. He felt pure and clear after working out – a match for the sky and clouds. His life got complicated when he worked a job or got in a committed relationship. Commitments and obligations trapped him—like he was in a big black box with no air. Not now, though. Out of Fort Marcy, staring at the distant mountains, he was prepared for a bus trek to Gallup to catch up on his current relationship. For now, Cinnamon was an adventure, not a shackle. That could change quickly, he knew, but for today, he felt gallant, off to save his lady in distress. His knapsack was packed with protein bars and bottled water. He bought a box to store his bike in the hold.

  On the phone with Cinnamon, he had sensed anxiety about this case she was working on with Burro about a stabbing. She sounded down, worried about what happened. On top of that, he knew that Cinnamon always worried about whether she could find Momma. So the Lonnie stabbing was only a part of her anxiety.

  Jake liked to rescue a woman he imagined to be in trouble. Made him feel needed. After he put the phone down, Jake concluded he’d better get there now and be a hero to the rescue. This new romance with Cinnamon fit Jake’s constant revision of his image. He was born again, out of past failures, into a fresh and compassionate role. Jake became a new man – a knight in shining armor, a kind and compassionate companion to a Civil Rights Investigator abandoned as a child by her mother. He was a natural for this, he felt confident, certain, decided.

  Using his own unique combination of biology and delusion, Jake breathed grandiosity from the stale Greyhound air. The bu
s arrived in Gallup before dark carrying a Jake assured of his success at any task. In the Gallup bus windows, he viewed low brown buildings, commercial signs, and empty parking lots, all waiting for Jake’s adventure. When he got out at the Gallup Greyhound station, dust and pollen rolled into his lungs; it was the smell of the west and independent men. Jake stood under the chipped “Route 66” sign, watching the driver pull his bike box out of the luggage bay. He screwed on the pedals, stopped for a minute to look out at the empty blue sky that oversees so much of New Mexico. This is a new start, he thought. My time has come.

  “Let’s start by quenching my thirst,” he invited out loud to the dry wind that pedaled with him to Sammy’s.

  This wasn’t Jake’s first visit to Gallup. On his way to Santa Fe from a bad scene with his father in Arizona, Jake had gotten off the bus here in Gallup and located Sammy’s Bar and Grille as the best watering hole for a man who needed to drown his thoughts. Jake met an interesting character at the bar – a white guy named Jerry with wiry, gray hair who ran some kind of new art gallery. Jake figured this could be the Jerry that Cinnamon mentioned on the phone.

  He talked to the guy for a while over a beer, indulging his habit of making up stories about himself to impress other people. After all, he reasoned, nobody knew his true story. Creating a new Jake for a stranger and watching the reaction made him feel a little better about the real Jake, who didn’t have much of a story to tell. On their first meeting at Sammy’s, Jake told Jerry that he was a woodworker who carved small animals and jewelry. It wasn’t a total lie. In his twenties, during the two years he spent in college and the two after that married to Monica, he did carve beautiful hair accessories, pendants and even patterns into furniture. He could fake being an artist if the moment required. True, it was 15 years since he’d picked up the tools for wood. But he worked on his bike all the time. That’s an art.

  Jake entered the bar on this second trip to Gallup, sat in the same seat at the bar as last time, and ordered a cool Corona. A guy about 40 the color of light pine with a bushy brown hair sat next to him.