In Gallup, Greed

by Tower Lowe

  “You said as much.”

  “Why were you looking under the mattress?” Mirage turned a bitter stare on Alice.

  “I get...nervous...well, obsessed...sometimes. A cup of tea calms me down and... look, you don’t have any clean pots to boil water in. I started ripping the kitchen up. Okay, it’s an obsession with me, finding things. I get into a kind of a trance, and I can’t stop myself. There was no teapot in here, so I moved to the bedroom.”

  “Were you looking for a teapot in my bedroom, Alice? Or were you looking for a murder weapon?”

  Burro lifted a hand for peace. “I understand obsessions. I can tear up the bathroom looking for a can opener. It’s like reverse OCD, instead of putting everything in the right place, I put it in the wrong place and then tear everything up looking for it.”

  Mirage frowned.

  “It happens,” Burro panned. “Look, I need to see the knife.”

  The three of them trailed into the bedroom and stood in front of the tilted full size mattress, looking down at a bloody towel and the polished metal blade protruding bloodily from its edge.

  “Call the cops?” Burro tossed out.

  “No.” Mirage was firm. “They’ll think I killed Lonnie.”

  Burro pulled out his phone.

  “No.” Alice put her hand over Burro’s cell phone. “Let’s talk this out first.”

  “Oh my god, oh my god.” Mirage collapsed to the floor again, steadying her fall on the gray upturned mattress “The blackout. I knew important things happened. But I never believed I stabbed him to death, not really. I thought I forgot to check on him...”

  “Does the knife bring back any memories from the blackout?” Alice suggested.

  “No. Maybe...maybe I saw Lonnie...dead...then took the knife, brought it back here, then went back and passed out in the ditch. How could I not remember Lonnie was dead?”

  “That’s all speculation,” Burro insisted. “Right now, we need to figure out what actually happened. Cinnamon and I talked to Nez out at his place, and he remembers that you did check on Lonnie. Also, Lolo told him she planned to walk you home.

  “Does Lolo remember me bringing a bloody knife?”

  “We haven’t talked to her yet, but she didn’t say anything to Nez about a bloody knife.”

  “I think you hid it from her, Mirage. Even drunk, you knew a bloody knife was suspicious.” Alice attacked the artist.

  Mirage, like a finished candle, melted lower into the floor. “I don’t even know if I came back here that night. I don’t know if Lolo walked me all the way here or abandoned me.” Her head fell into her hands. “I can’t remember.”

  “Does anyone have a key to your place?” Burro wondered.

  Mirage revived a moment to consider. “Well...Lolo does and Cinnamon – Momma, too. You—had one. Alice.” She looked at Alice with suspicion.

  “I wasn’t even in Gallup on Saturday night, Mirage.”

  “I know,” she admitted. “I just wish you hadn’t found the knife.”

  “It’s a good bet Momma didn’t kill Lonnie,” Burro scoffed.

  “Wait a minute.” Mirage sat up more. “Lolo left her bracelet here.”

  “The night of the party?” Alice asked.

  “I...I think so. I found it in the bedroom, on the nightstand next to an empty beer bottle. It was silver, stamped with an arrow and lightning design. I thought it was weird, you know? What was Lolo’s bracelet doing in my bedroom? When I called her she said she left it a couple weeks ago when she was over to visit. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? Why would she be in my bedroom taking off her bracelet? Maybe the bathroom sink or the kitchen sink, but not the bedroom. She must have slept here that night.”

  “Why would she do that?” Alice noticed the knife again, silently resting in its towel bed. “Maybe she planted it under the bed and fell asleep.”

  “And that’s why she abandoned you in the alley,” Burro agreed.

  “Did she abandon me?” Mirage doubted. “Is she that cold? Lead me to the ditch, wait ‘til I passed out, and then come back here to plant the murder weapon under my mattress? She’s my friend, you two, not a mastermind murderer.”

  “Lonnie wanted to close the Redemption, right?” Burro tried again.

  “He did.”

  “That threatened Lolo. Nez says the money means more to her than it does to the rest of you.”

  “Maybe she killed him in a drunken fight? Lolo does have a temper when she’s drunk,” Mirage admitted.

  “Like when she threw that beer bottle at Nez?”

  “Yeah. I still can’t believe she stabbed Lonnie or planted this knife here.”

  “Want to call the police, Mirage? Because I don’t,” Alice added quickly. “I like to stay off the grid.”

  Mirage hesitated. “What do we do with the knife if we don’t call the cops?”

  Burro stood up. “Leave it there until somebody else finds it, or until we want to turn it in.”

  “We don’t actually know that it has anything to do with Lonnie,” Alice suggested.

  Alice helped Burro lower the mattress back onto the bed while Mirage stayed on the floor, eyes on the spot where the knife rested. Finally, she spoke.

  “That’s not my towel. And it’s not Lonnie’s either.”

  ∆

  Squirmy Snake-Like Creatures

  He parked his Jeep Cherokee in front of the garage and sat in the car with the air conditioning on, watching the sunset on his two-story stucco. Johnnie thought they were all a bunch of pussy artists. He’d always thought that.

  They came from hard lot families, like he did, but those kids were spoiled rotten and encouraged to waste their time painting and such. He’d been raised with an iron fist. No way his dad let him mess with paints or jewelry making.

  “Be a man, Johnnie,” was his dad’s refrain.

  His dad wasn’t mean or anything. The man worked construction every day in the summer, even Saturdays and Sundays. In the dead of winter he collected unemployment and plowed driveways for cold cash. Johnnie helped with the plowing. Mom made hot chocolate for him and hot coffee for Dad. It was a simple life. There wasn’t any money for frills and his parents didn’t have the stomach for fancy ideas.

  “Work hard and pay your dues,” his dad lectured Johnnie.

  “Go to church and pray to the Virgin when something goes wrong,” was his mom’s advice.

  When Dad had his first heart attack from all the hard work, his mom went right to church and prayed the rosary every day for a week. Dad got better that time. Johnnie believed in prayer more or less. He still went to church, and he said a rosary for Lonnie. It was the right thing to do. The Lord needed to take Lonnie home. That’s the way Johnnie saw it.

  He opened the door of the Cherokee, stepped onto the concrete driveway, thinking about the statue of the virgin at Cristo Rey Church, dressed in light blue robes, staring down on him with compassion and love. Johnnie figured she forgave him

  “Hey, buddy!” A rental Lexus 450 circled fast into his drive and parked behind the Cherokee.

  Blue Dog and Drew again, calling him buddy. These two were possibly bigger fancy fielders than the artists.

  “Ugh,” Johnnie remarked.

  “Hey, buddy, what’s up? We can’t find Jerry, and we need the party place tonight.”

  Blue Dog and Drew needed a place to bring the girls. Frankly, Johnnie was tired of Jerry leaving this task for him. Like leaving him the task of firing Lonnie. Johnnie thought Lonnie was an ungrateful wimp, but he didn’t want to fire the kid. Hell, he planned to quit anyway. The artist thought he could talk his good old friend Jerry into shutting Redemption down. Lonnie actually thought Jerry was an honest guy.

  “Umph,” he groaned again at the two buyers. “What you need?”

  “The house, man, we need the house.”

  There it was again. Johnnie knew, as soon as the wives left for California and the husbands stayed behind, an interest in women would replace an interest
in art.

  Lonnie was right about Drew and Blue Dog, of course. These characters didn’t understand the art they collected or have any critical taste at all. They bought what Jerry told them to buy, or what the wives liked, and paid the price Jerry asked. Johnnie thought Pat and Adele did research and lived in a fantasy of art collecting, but not Drew and Blue Dog. Those two were into money and sex.

  “What about your hotel room?” Johnnie suggested, knowing that location was too public for these two pretend big shots.

  “Awww, buddy, lighten up,” Blue Dog slurred. Powerful consumer of scotch, that man.

  “Okay. I’ll set up Jerry’s place.” Johnnie was against buying that place for a dozen reasons. For one reason, the house was just down the street from Lonnie.

  “One day, Lonnie’s gonna figure it out, Jerry. He is.”

  “Don’t be a worry wart, Johnnie, my boy. I got it under C, under control.” When Jerry started talking like that, there was no reasoning with him. Jerry had an answer for every disaster.

  “This house is gonna come back to bite you, Jerry...all I’m sayin’.” Jerry never listened to Johnnie’s advice.

  Blue Dog followed Johnnie into the house and accepted a beer while Johnnie went back into his bedroom, where he kept the keys to the house. He opened the special black lacquer box, painted with dragons and stored in the bottom drawer of his dresser. They were there, as usual, but Johnnie had a brief feeling that the box was tilted on top of the t-shirts. The fleeting thought passed quickly, as he heard Blue Dog walking down the hall. He shut the drawer quickly, moved to the center of the room.

  “I got it.” Johnnie looked up at Blue Dog, standing right in the door. Johnnie thought Jerry needed to give the key out and be done with it. But Jerry was against that because the house was a brick and mortar dwelling that could be traced to the business, and, while Jerry was protected as long as his little side business was in cyberspace, he wasn’t protected if the cops found a real-life building of any kind.

  “Blue Dog and Drew are careless, might share the key with an undercover cop or something. Keep it, man, okay? What’s the big deal?” So Johnnie kept the key. Jerry paid him well. Why ask questions.

  Blue Dog wanted to open the place himself, but Johnnie kept to Jerry’s rules. He got in the car and Blue Dog followed. Opening the door he smelled a light scent of cinnamon – maybe air freshener from Zanet, the cleaning lady. He looked around. The place looked disordered. He’d have to talk to Zanet. She tended to get lazy about the details since no one lived in the house to inspect her work.

  Blue Dog followed, carrying a paper bag from Owl Liquors.

  “Don’t forget to lock up,” Johnnie reminded. He knew he’d have to check later himself.

  Back at home, in front of the TV, hypnotized by “Storage Wars” and a six-pack of Dos Equis, Johnnie tried to resist the sense of panic that followed him since the party, since Lonnie. He succeeded for an hour or two until he punched up his pillow and closed his eyes. Then squirmy snake-like creatures crawled from the rafters. One of them crawled into the bottom drawer, propped open the lacquer box, opened it’s oval shaped mouth, and spouted a loud, hysterical, laugh-scream that kept Johnnie awake until the silent, lonely hours of Friday morning.

  ∆

  Scrambled Morals

  Slightly charged after my conversation with Jake, I went to the room to dress for dinner with Alice and Lolo. I met Burro by the elevator and we headed for the fake Hampton Inn hearth.

  “Miss?”

  We kept walking.

  “Cinnamon?’

  I turned. “What is it?”

  “A message.” The desk clerk was a young Navajo man dressed in a green cotton shirt and black pants, awash in hotel etiquette, but puzzled by the task at hand.

  He held out an envelope. “It was left at the desk for you.”

  “Left?” I questioned the passive voice. “Who left it?”

  “That’s the thing,” the young man waivered. “We – Raymond,” he pointed to a gray haired white man juggling a phone and desktop computer, “found it sitting on the front desk with your first name on it. So I wasn’t sure...”

  “Okay,” I accepted the offered envelope. “I wasn’t expecting anything.” She gave the missive a doubtful look.

  The clerk backed off, glad to be rid of the burden.

  Carrying my message like a poison-ivy branch, I joined Burro sitting on a gold couch near the faux stone fireplace.

  “What do you think it is?” he pondered.

  “Only one way to know.” I pried open the lip and pulled out a piece of white printer paper.

  Meet 10:00 in the morning. 1418 Cactus Drive. Momma

  This time I dropped the paper and it deflected against my lavender sweater, catching on the sequins.

  Burro bent forward and pulled the paper off my sweater, staring at the print. “It’s a hoax,” he pronounced.

  I breathed in and out slowly. “Of course. But who wrote it? Who knows I’m in Gallup?”

  “One person doesn’t know you are in Gallup...and that’s Momma.”

  “How can we be sure? What about the phone call?”

  “You don’t know that was Momma. It’s the same person, trying to trick you.”

  “Why do they want to trick me?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it has to do with the scrambled brains – and Lonnie.”

  “The thing is, Burro, what do we really know about Lonnie? Nothing. We came here for Civil Rights work and to comfort Mirage by looking into Lonnie’s stabbing. I know my reason was because Momma used to live with Mirage and I...felt like I owed her...or worse, I wanted to be nice to her so she would tell me more about Momma. I never cared that much about Lonnie. Now we have two clients, and not much more information than the police.”

  “Not entirely true.”

  “What information do we have?”

  “We have the murder weapon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Burro filled Cinnamon in on finding the knife under Mirage’s bed, and Mirage’s belief that she killed Lonnie until she remembered a stamped silver bracelet she found on her nightstand with an empty beer bottle.

  “Lolo apparently claimed she left the bracelet on an earlier visit, but Mirage says it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Now it looks like Lolo killed Lonnie?”

  “Mirage is afraid she did.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure. Lolo stayed at Mirage’s place the night of the party. The knife under the mattress is wrapped in a towel, and Mirage is certain the towel doesn’t belong to her or to Lonnie.”

  “Yeah, but would Lolo take a towel with her to the party? That would mean she planned to murder Lonnie all along.”

  “True.”

  “Let’s write down what we know so far.”

  “Done.” Burro pulled out his phone, and twisted his blond braid. “I put the high points in my notepad. First,” here he smiled at me, “There are scrambled brains and cash. “

  I met Burro’s eyes. The delusions, once a source of conflict, were now real to both us. “That’s first,” I assented. “And second?”

  ”We know Lonnie went into his room early in the evening,” Burro continued, “to talk with Johnnie. After that conversation, Lonnie stayed in his bedroom for the rest of the night. We know from Nez that Mirage went in to see Johnnie when she arrived at the party with Jerry. Mirage was in a blackout and remembers nothing about visiting Lonnie, so she can’t tell us what went on during that conversation. She can’t even tell us if Lonnie was alive or dead. Again, according to Nez, Clark apparently got out of his house and entered Lonnie’s bedroom around 11pm. Jerry dragged Clark out of the house. We don’t know if Jerry came back to the house or not. The next information we have is that Mirage found Lonnie dead the next morning around 8 a.m. That’s it.”

  “So, if we plan to help Mirage find the killer, even if she is the killer, we need to talk to Lolo, Jerry, and maybe this charact
er Johnnie.”

  Burro shifted his gaze to the lobby, watching three white men in khaki pants and polo shirts exit the elevator and head for the door, laughing. When he continued to stare out the door, I interrupted his silence.

  “Another vision?”

  “Not exactly. This time it’s more of a feeling about the scrambled brains. It was a funny vision at first – brains that are all mixed up, like Clark. But now, watching those guys exit the hotel, I began to feel that it’s more than brains. I sense that it’s brains that are morally scrambled. It’s intuition combined with all this suspicion about the money involved in Redemption. The artists scrambled their morals with this venture – scrambled integrity.”

  “Scrambled integrity. But what does it mean? That the artists are thieves and they are stealing from the buyers? Or Jerry and the buyers are thieves and they are stealing integrity from the artists?”

  “No. I think the buyers are stealing integrity...but my vision is about greed and confusion about morality, identity...that’s what I sense.”

  “Morality and identity? It’s clear that Mirage is having an affair with Jerry, and that’s not moral in the conventional sense. Lonnie thinks that the money is not really for the art, and that’s not – ethical. Lolo wants the money more than anything, and that may be greedy, but not immoral. Her art indicates that she’s confused about her identity, but who isn’t? I don’t think scrambled morality and identity are enough to go on, if you see what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I do.” Burro bit his bottom lip and twisted his braid. “As usual, the vision isn’t that specific.”

  We headed out to the car, Burro in front, which allowed me to follow behind and carefully fold the note about Momma and tuck it into the outside pocket of my purse.

  ∆

  A Complete Stranger

  Alice and Lolo joined Cinnamon and Burro in a booth at Earls about half past seven. Cinnamon ordered fried chicken and sweet tea. The rest ordered enchiladas “Christmas” with red and green chile.

  “Hi, guys,” Lolo spoke in a low, shy voice. “Alice says Mirage hired you two to find out who stabbed Lonnie.”