In Gallup, Greed

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In Gallup, Greed Page 17

by Tower Lowe


  “Tell us what you remembered from the party, Mirage.” I moved the conversation away from my attack.

  “I remember a couple more events. For one thing, when I was passed out in the alley, I heard footsteps and breathing, like a person was fleeing fast from Lonnie’s house. At the time, I was scared, but now I wonder if it was the killer.”

  “Was it a man or a woman?”

  “I didn’t see the person, but the footsteps were heavy. My intuition says a man...but I can’t know that for sure.”

  “What else?”

  “Jerry stayed at the party when he brought me. I remember he had a short argument with Johnnie and he went into Lonnie’s room. I think I checked on Lonnie.. He was alive, and we talked about the gallery.”

  “And you left the party right after that?”

  “I’m not sure. But I believe he was killed after I left.”

  “By Jerry, by Clark, by Johnnie,” Alice suggested.

  “Maybe,” she answered. “But would any of those three have needed to break the lock on the door? They were already inside.”

  “They might have come back later,” Alice said.

  “True.... Maybe they came back after Lonnie locked up.”

  “Burro and I keep hearing that Lonnie was upset with Jerry’s plan for the gallery,” I said. “Do you know anything about the plan that upset Lonnie?”

  “Jer had a plan alright. Did Alice tell you about it?”

  I glanced at Alice.

  “I haven’t had a chance,” she explained. “I think she needs to hear it from you.”

  “Holly and Jer are running an online prostitution ring,” Mirage announced.

  “Prostitution?” I remembered Burro saying he “smelled sex” in his vision.

  “It’s called Pleasantly Plump Paramours.”

  “Pleasantly Plump?” I asked. “I don’t get it.””

  “This website pretends to show up the sexy side of big women. And it does that by masquerading as a dating website for men who want to date full figured women. The women are beautiful all right, and sexy, but the website is offering more than a date, basically it’s selling sex.”

  “That’s a big risk to take, don’t you think? Running a prostitution business?” I doubted the story.

  “Not in New Mexico,” Mirage persevered. “I ran a search on the Internet. There was a case recently where a former university professor ran an online prostitution service. There was no house of prostitution, no address, nothing. Because New Mexico law requires a “brick and mortar” address, the guy got off. Jerry circumvented the law. I don’t know the how, but I am certain this is what Lonnie found out. He figured out that the money Jerry claimed to be making had nothing to do with the CGI classes he took. It all came from prostitution fees for this website. Jerry needed to launder the money because there was so much of it he was afraid to call attention to the service and get a lot of negative publicity. Money from the gallery was clean—he could spend it legally without any worries. Lonnie wanted to blow the top off that veneer of respect. He planned to more than close Redemption. He planned to expose Jerry as a pimp and a fraud.”

  “But you said the website is technically legal.”

  “Maybe it is. But that doesn’t mean Jerry wanted to be exposed. And he wasn’t reporting income from the website, probably because there was so much of it. He laundered the money through the gallery, which isn’t legal.”

  I heard the clank of thick china from the coffee shop kitchen. Laughter drifted from a nearby table where two young Navajo women sipped tea and ate chocolate iced donuts.

  “I never imagined,” I admitted. “But Burro mentioned sex in his latest vision.”

  “I’ve been wondering how Jer kept it a secret.” Alice asked.

  “By choosing us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are Jerry’s party friends, but we are also—passive. We accepted his offer of success because it was easy. As for me, I never questioned Jerry. I slept with him, went to work, and went home. I knew the Redemption buyers didn’t know anything about art, and I knew the pricing was arbitrary. Lolo focused on the money, Nez and Lonnie on a fantasy of spiritual art. We let Jerry get away with it.”

  “Lonnie threatened Jerry with exposure,” I said.

  “Yes,” Mirage acknowledged.

  “Let’s see the website,” Alice pulled out her phone.

  She searched with Mirage’s help, and then flashed the page for Pleasingly Plumb Paramours. It contained photos of sexy plump women, each giving the required fetching expression. Links accessed salacious bios and a page for setting dates and, of course, a shopping cart. The fees were a few hundred dollars, with add-ons that could add more.

  “It doesn’t seem like enough money,” I said.

  “I made a practice date. They contact you by email and phone to offer more. The language in the email is vague. I didn’t make a phone call, but I imagine that’s where the real money is mentioned. The higher fees can be collected through a Value Transfer system.

  “What’s that?” Alice queried.

  “Al-barakat,” Mirage explained. “It started in the Middle East, but they use it all over now. The cash is picked up on one end by a courier who pays the call girl and guarantees the profits on the other end.”

  “So, Mirage, you think that the big money was delivered in cash by these couriers.”

  “Exactly. And then laundered at Redemption.”

  “I think it insults overweight women,” Alice blurted out. “It implies some kind of stereotype about their sexuality – but it’s hard to put into words.”

  “Whatever the stereotype is, this website met up with it and brought in large amounts of cash. Or, at least, that’s what I think happened.”

  “In a way,” I said, “it fits Jerry. The story is real. He is a wildly successful and creative businessman because he’s made a thriving success of Pleasingly Plump Paramours. He honestly needs to invest cash in a business like Redemption. All Jerry did was change the details around a little by saying he made the money in CGI and that he wanted to help out his old friends.”

  “Instead of admitting that he was running a highly profitable prostitution business and wanted to launder the money,” Mirage grimaced. “If you know Jerry, you know he told himself the details that didn’t matter. From his point of view, he told us what was basically the truth.”

  “This is it,” Alice summed up the story. “Jerry’s business partners show up at Redemption with the cash that is owed to Jerry for the escort business. They buy high-priced art. A 30% commission is paid to the artists and the rest of the money is legitimate profit for Jerry and the partners in L.A. Laundered money from the Pleasingly Plump website is making everybody rich.”

  Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto played on my phone. I picked up.

  “Jerry?” I was surprised to hear the gallery owner on the other end of the phone. The rest of the table fell quiet.

  “Hey, Cinnamon. Johnnie and I want to meet you and your partner, Burro, at Redemption. We need to talk over some of these issues with Lonnie dying and all that.”

  “I can come,” I responded with caution. “Burro’s not available. Is Holly coming?”

  “No, no...it’s not about the kid. Like I said, it’s the Lonnie business. Can you meet us in an hour?”

  I agreed.

  “What’s up?” Alice inquired.

  “Jerry and Johnnie want to meet me at Redemption and – he said explain—about Lonnie and the gallery.”

  “Explain what?”

  “Good question. We’re meeting at Redemption in an hour.”

  “Maybe he’ll confess about the website,” Mirage urged.

  “Jerry doesn’t strike me as the confession type,” I said. “A new story with new made-up details is more like it.”

  “Should you get the police involved now?” Alice wondered.

  “Not yet. If Jerry wanted to confess to murder, he wouldn’t call me and Burro.”

 
“No. I guess not.”

  We cleared our cups, and looked around to realize we were the only customers left in The Grounds Café. It was past seven, the hour the cafe closed. The staff were quietly waiting for us to exit so they could clean up for the evening and go home.

  I left the place flustered by a dry desert wind and stopped at the hotel to leave a message for Burro at the desk, telling him I was headed to Redemption to meet Jerry. I didn’t bother to wake him. I spent the rest of the time before the meeting surfing the net and trying to confirm what Mirage had said about Pleasingly Plump Paramours, New Mexico law, and value transfers of money. When I get back from the meeting with Jerry and Johnnie, I thought, I’ll have a surprise for Burro. I’ll match more details against his vision of money, scrambled brains and sex.

  Then I drove out of the hotel. The streetlights glowed green, the sky a deep black purple, and my thoughts wandered out beyond meeting Jerry to the moment out there in my distant future when I might meet Momma.

  ∆

  Who I Am

  Blue. Puff powder blue. For Christ’s Sake, a down comforter in powder puff blue. Johnnie and Jerry pick this crap out of a Pottery Barn catalog, I bet. Blue Johnnie Walker was more his mood.

  He wanted Molly bad last night.

  “I only now got into Gallup, Blue Dog, honey. You running around, asking me to make phone calls and that, I’m tired as a workhorse. Hold off ‘til tomorrow and I’ll heat up your Harry.”

  He let her refuse, because he knew they’d end up camped out here in the bed with puffy blue covers, his big girl in a cotton candy boudoir. Molly was worth the wait.

  Maybe I’m in love with Molly, he acknowledged. She takes me like I am, no bullshit, and laughs at my jokes. In her eyes, there’s admiration, affection, delight...could those be love? He sure didn’t know. Loving a prostitute was madness, but what is a prostitute but a woman who makes a living with the skills she has available. Molly didn’t claim to love the job.

  “I need the money, so I do what I do, hon. That’s no different than anybody else doesn’t like their work. You can say it’s different, but no, it’s not. Some folks have a passion for what they do – love their job. But, look it up, hon. Survey after survey, people don’t like their jobs. They do it for the money. That’s me.”

  He never broached the subject of love with her – too humiliating. Man like me, great education, Stanford Law, plenty of money, style, a man like me can attract a woman of class. But can a man like me love a woman of class? That was the big question to which he thought the answer was “no”. He needed a woman with appetites – for food, for the erotic, for knowledge, for laughs, for bawdy benders. Classy women don’t like that stuff at all. They want solemn affairs with polite politics and intellectual garbage that passes for brains.

  He was a fake – pretending to live as a man with discriminating tastes while being a man with vulgar tastes. He flew Molly in to join him on every trip to Gallup. Met her through the website. But it was all mucked up now. Damn Lonnie complaining all the time, then ending up dead; Jerry speeding around denying everything, playing dumb. Bunch of nut cases all of them. Jerry’s Pleasingly Plump cash infused Blue Dog with special powers, calmed him down. All this trouble riled him up.

  He couldn’t relax was the thing. The doctor said it was the OCD. Constantly, he thought he forgot his driver’s license or left his credit card at the store or in the car – checked his wallet every few minutes. This minute, he worried that he forgot to extend the dates on his rental car. Did he call? No memory at all of it. Yet, he didn’t think he forgot to do it because he’d been worrying about it since this morning. Of course, he worried so much sometimes that he forgot to call or called twice and didn’t remember that either. Last Sunday, he worried so much about his credit card that he walked back here and left the car downtown. Didn’t even notice it ‘til he went out for a quick trip to the liquor store, get whiskey. Out the front door – ZAP – no car. For a bit he stood on the curb, thinking it was stolen, and what a hassle that would be – talking to the cops about a stolen rental car. That was until he remembered the damn trip downtown, sex with a different girl, all that. Crappy day.

  Now he walked to get to his car, which was parked in front of the house where it was supposed to be parked. He was off to get more Johnny Walker Blue and Dos Equis. He thought about how his life got off course when he was a kid because he loved to read and talk. Reading and talking impressed his angry dad, kept the bastard off his back. Blue Dog studied at the library all the time, schmoozed his teachers. His early adult years felt like a dream really, all the scholarships, the trip to UC Berkeley undergrad, waking up in Palo Alto, a sexy law student. All that time he had no idea what he wanted. The tasks he needed to accomplish for college and law school came easy to him. Playing the intellectual was a cool game. People thought his sexual adventures with low-life women were “antics.” When he put on the redneck act, his heady friends laughed.

  Now he wanted to change, to be a simple, hard-working man on a construction site or a plumbing job – nothing that required too much thinking. He wanted to be practical, earthy, crude. That’s it. He wanted to be crude. That’s who I am, he concluded. And now, now, I have the power to change.

  He knocked back a six-pack, thinking about how he ought to drink cheap whiskey and cheap beer, complete the act. Hell, no, he thought. No need to go that far. What with the website money, the value transfers, Blue Dog had enough to live well and play any part in the book. He’d be a redneck worker with a trust fund. A laugh escaped into the silent house. With Molly and a construction job, he’d have it made, at long last. He felt called to this new life. A special power engulfed him. He’d give Adele all the fancy houses, cars, furniture – art, for god’s sake, that she wants. He needed to be his crude, honest, gritty, sex-crazed self.

  With that, he stood up, facing Friday night full of vim and purpose.

  ∆

  Trapped

  Redemption loomed before me in the purple night. I pushed the front door, and it cried out from where the pine had expanded in the heat. Dim light and silence greeted me. If the door is open, I thought, Jerry must be here already.

  “Jerry?”

  A sharp crack answered my call, but no voice.

  From above, the old man with wise eyes gave me a cautionary look. I hesitated and called out again.

  “Jerry!”

  I continued into the interior, again admiring the little L-shaped inlets advertised by an alluring work of art on the outer wall that invited visitors in to see more of the artist, an intense look at his or her vision. My shoes tapped the pine floor as I walked across to Lonnie’s first “L” room. The outer wall showed a pastel painting, long and narrow, of a native woman dressed in turquoise blue jeans and a black woven shawl. Her face was tilted upward to a sky the color of her jeans and her face was dotted with red coral tears, hot red buttons surrounded in silver. Inlaid at the center of her chest, a small framed oil painting, with thick brush strokes, outlined the Catholic sacred heart of Jesus with thick coral red brushstrokes to match the button tears. The painting was so narrow that the woman looked trapped, as if she wanted to escape her little turquoise and red world. I had no idea the meaning, but the image sucked me into Lonnie’s little room.

  Rounding the curve into a cove of feathers and felt on canvas, I heard a loud snap, as if wood peeled away from the wall.

  Soft footsteps sounded from the conference room, across the main floor. Hidden in Lonnie’s L, I sensed the presence as a small woman, not Jerry at all. Standing very still I heard more sounds rising up from the gallery floor. First, a quick intake of breath, then a quiet, almost imperceptible moan and a sound very much like a slice, like the slice at my throat when I went to find Momma in the house on Cactus Drive. I had a moment or two to wish Burro were with me, and then the lights came on.

  ∆

  Nothing but Feelings

  After Jake scurried off on his bike, and Friday faded into evening light,
Jerry called Cinnamon and set up a meeting at Redemption. The meeting was to be about Lonnie, and Johnnie partnered with the idea for as far the parking lot, going along with Jerry’s plan to give a made up confession. Then he backed off.

  “Look, Jer, I don’t want anything to do with these two City Different detectives. I’m not confessing to anything, true or false.”

  “It’s a meeting, Johnnie. A sit down, a powwow. We say we fired Lonnie that night, he got upset, suicidal – stabbed himself. We took off.”

  “It’s pitiful, Jer, okay? Listen to the story. We’re running a quasi-illegal business and laundering money. Lonnie found out about it, threatened to turn us in and, before all was said and done, he stabbed himself? Who’s gonna believe that?”

  Johnnie didn’t trust Jerry, and he sure didn’t like the idea of protecting the man by confessing. More than likely, Jerry planned to frame Johnnie for the stabbing when he or his kid probably sliced Lonnie.

  Jerry fought back. “Lonnie was depressed, right? By all accounts he complained about Redemption even though he was making a pickup load of money ... guy complaining when he’s got that kind of money? Has to be depressed.”

  “I’m not coming along for this, Jer. It’s a bad idea.” Johnnie stood next to his old partner in the breezy parking lot of Sammy’s Bar and Grille, waiting for a miracle.

  “Here’s what we’ll do, brother.” Jerry bounced another crazy idea at him. “We’ll tell Cinnamon we had nothing to do with Lonnie’s stabbing or this horrible event at the house on Cactus Drive. Now I know you’re worried about the house, but we don’t say anything about owning the house, you know, we just say we don’t know anything about it...I know you’re gonna say...”

  “No.”

  “We’ll figure out a story, see, a story that the do-gooder detective will eat right up. Talk about Redemption and how it’s a spiritual thing, and Lonnie was mad when he was drunk....”

 

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