“What did she make?” asked Anna.
“Roast chicken with squash, cranberry sauce, corn bread and apple pie for desert.” It sounded to me like she’d been to Boston Chicken.
“Stop,” said Anna. “You’re making me hungry. Who was that with Terrance Lewellen?” she asked me.
“His half-sister-in-law,” I said. Or his soon-to-be ex-half-sister-in-law, I thought.
“Cool jacket,” Anna said.
“It looks like a dead soldier’s jacket,” said Brink.
“It is,” I replied.
“I bet it cost more than my suit.”
“You’re right,” I said.
******
I burned up the afternoon dialing and redialing the Relationships line, wishing I had a button to do it for me. It wasn’t till after five that I heard the miserable, digitally engineered voice say, “Not enough. Double or nothing. Indigo dying without mate.”
4
“SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND!” said Terrance Lewellen. “No bird in the world is worth more than a hundred.” It was Friday evening, but we were still in our respective offices talking on our respective-but-disparate phones. Mine doesn’t have a visual image, but the thought occurred to me that Terrance’s might, and it provoked an automatic reaction. Before I knew it, I was smoothing my hair and cranking up a smile.
“You asshole,” I mumbled to myself, since only one of those would be vain and stupid enough to primp for Terrance Lewellen.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Didn’t you tell me that a pair of macaws is worth more than the sum of two individuals? You’re getting a pair when you get Perigee back, since Colloquy is so miserable, maybe even endangered, without her mate.”
“Yeah, but even a pair, even the only pair, isn’t worth six hundred thou.”
“There is a woman’s life at stake.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll offer Brown four hundred to get this business over with and to make Colloquy happy again, but it’s my top offer. I won’t pay him one penny more.” I couldn’t see him, but I knew what he was doing, stabbing the air with the butt of his cigar.
“I’ll place the offer,” I said.
“You do that,” he replied. And then, since the weekend was upon us, we exchanged numbers where we could be reached.
Before I went home I called the R line and left my message. “This is Neil Hamel. Four hundred thousand is our final offer.”
The weekend—and the wait—began. The Kid worked, so there was nobody to watch me punching numbers into my home phone like I’d gone on a Relationships bender. The R line had the addictive pull of popping bubbles in bubble wrap or culling a cigarette from the pack. The first thing I did when I got up on Saturday morning was dial in; the message remained the same: “Not enough. Double or nothing. Indigo dying without mate.” I called while I was having a cup of Red Zinger tea after my shower. Same unhappy voice, same message. What the heck, I was doing my job, I rationalized, and fifteen minutes later I dialed again. The only way I know how to quit something is to do it to wretched excess. By midafternoon I’d reached the saturation point. I made one more call, got one more message, put on my running shoes, went up to Miranda Martinez Canyon and took a hike.
Miranda Martinez Canyon is a green V wedged deep into the rocky brown Sandias, a woman’s canyon at the base of the wind woman’s peak. At the parking lot the only vegetation you see are the skinny, porous arms of the cholla and an occasional juniper the size of a boulder. The farther you climb, the more piñones and scrub oaks appear. Bushes turn into trees, the vegetation gets greener and lusher, until the pine needles have the shimmering weight of fur. I never hike to the end of the canyon myself, only far enough to forget I’m in a city. I don’t know much about Miranda Martinez or why a canyon was named after her, but my name on a canyon is a mark I’d like to leave behind. Since it was a weekend the trail was full of chattering hikers and barking dogs, but I can wander fifty feet off the trail and convince myself I’m in a wilderness, and that’s what makes Albuquerque a livable city—go fifteen minutes in any direction and you’re out of it. I climbed to a favorite hiding place and hid behind a rock. The gray sprawl of the city was visible through a notch in the boulders. I looked once at the shimmering river and the monoliths of the downtown buildings, turned my back and looked away. Two hang gliders circled the Sandia peaks, red on top, white-bellied as a hawk underneath. They caught the wind, turned and drifted in and out of vision. The wind goddess was up there lazily exhaling and puffing the hang gliders up, inhaling and dropping them down. She was in a relaxed mood today, but I’ve seen her when she was pissed. Who hasn’t? Those are the days when she tosses boulders down the mountain, smashes tumbleweeds into your fender and trash in your fence, when she flaps open the chinks in your armor and her fury invades your soul. Some religions worship at the altar of the ornery goddess.
I watched the hang gliders rise and fall and wondered where the other players in the kidnapping drama were and what they were doing. Colloquy would be squawking, pulling out her feathers and taking a chunk out of any stranger who got too close. Perigee might well be doing the same. Terrance could be dialing the Relationships line obsessively or he could be as in control as he pretended to be and playing golf. Sara Dumaine might be selling some rich tourist some bad art. It was a Saturday in August, high season for the art market in Santa Fe. What about Deborah Dumaine and Wes Brown? I wondered. Where were they? Maybe he had her locked in or tied up somewhere near the border in Door. Maybe she was a pissed-off wind goddess who’d had the wind knocked out of her. Maybe she was in serious danger. Maybe she was dead.
There’s always the possibility that a kidnapper will get paranoid and kill the hostages, a danger that appeared to concern me more than it did Terrance Lewellen. It couldn’t be in the hostages’ best interests to drag out the negotiations. What’s two hundred thousand if you’ve got it and lives are at risk? But I wasn’t representing the hostages’ best interests. I was representing my client’s, and that’s the trouble with being a lawyer. It puts you in the middle of the action, but not necessarily on the right side, if there is a right side. Representing my client while keeping the big picture in mind was a straddling act. Would Baxter, Johnson handle it any better? I asked myself. Probably not was my answer.
I don’t wear a watch, but the piñones’ shadows were spreading like a Navajo woman’s skirts and telling me I’d stayed too long. Miranda Martinez closes at dark. While I’d been thinking about my case, everybody else had been going home. I was all alone as I walked down the trail. While being up there alone at dusk might be dangerous, it was also what made it interesting. As I walked I watched the lights of Albuquerque spread across the Valley and twinkle on one by one. The colors I saw were red, yellow and blue, the colors of stars in the blackest of skies. For one brief moment there was a balance, the number of lights on the ground reflected the number of stars in the sky, but the lights multiplied like bacteria, reducing the stars to a pale imitation. The lights that came on in the city extinguished the lights in the sky. The spotlights from the Sandia pueblo power bingo parlor were doing their spinning gambler’s dance, annoying a lot of people and outshining the stars. Who would ever have thought the Sandias would be guilty of stealing the night? It could, from one perspective anyway, be considered sacrilegious.
When I got home my place at La Vista was dark. The red message light on the machine blinked on and off. I punched the Play button, and Terrance Lewellen’s voice said “Call me.” Before I did I turned on my lights and tried the R line again. I didn’t get the same message. I didn’t get any message. All I got was a ringing void, the buzzing black hole of the audio world.
“You get that buzz?” Terrance asked me when I reached him on his C phone.
“Yeah.”
“Damn Wes Brown’s hide,” he said. “I went to see Colloquy this afternoon, and she was as sorry as a plucked chicken. Her feathers were all over the floor. She wouldn’t even eat the granola I took her. Rick�
�s getting ornery and making more noise about calling the police.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“Wait it out.” The feral yellow at the center of Terrance’s eyes was probably gleaming somewhere inside his dark, purring Jaguar. The backbeat I was hearing was the sound of the lonesome highway. Terrance would enjoy talking from his car phone; if he didn’t like the way the conversation went he could always say he was going into a tunnel. We don’t have tunnels in New Mexico, but that wouldn’t be likely to stop him. “Brown’s got us by the short hairs—for now,” he said, “but I’ll get mine before this is over.”
******
I’d like to reserve a hole in the black volcanic rock of the malpais for people who make me wait. To me, waiting compares to lying in the hot sun watching the vultures circle overhead. The longer the wait, the more dangerous for the hostages, the more nerve-racking for me. When the Kid showed up with stuffed sopapaillas from Tomas’s on Sunday night, I told him they tasted like monkey chow. When Anna showed up with a new hairdo (narrow on the sides, high on the top) on Monday morning, I told her she looked like a clipped poodle. When Brink tried to tell me about his weekend with Nancy, I told him to buzz off. On Tuesday the man from the gas company blasted Rush Limbaugh from his car radio while he read our meter.
“Turn that right-wing asshole off or get out of my yard,” I yelled out the window with the bluster of a pissed-off wind goddess.
“Jeez, what a bitch,” he said, leaving the scene and driving down Lead with Rush Limbaugh still blasting his propaganda. It was a change from the usual booming basses.
The week’s divorce was a woman named Roberta Dovalo from Ruidoso, a city whose name always gets mispronounced in New Mexico.
“I hear you do divorces,” she said.
“That’s right,” I replied.
“Can’t get me a lawyer in Ruidoso.” She had a country girl’s twang, but she got Ruidoso down.
“Why not?”
“They’re all friends with my husband, Jimmie.”
“You got any kids?”
“Twins,” she said. “Jimmie’s been cheatin’ on me. I want to git him for every penny I can git.” It had the sound of a country and western song. I envisioned Roberta on my mental screen, wearing cowgirl boots and a short red dress with a full skirt and silver tips on the collar.
“New Mexico is a community property state,” I said. “Unless there’s a prenuptial agreement, it all gets split right down the middle.” People have been known in the heat of separation anxiety to take an ax and split everything (including the refrigerator) in two.
“Damn,” she said.
“We should be able to get custody of the children and child support.”
“That’s good.”
“Who’s your husband’s lawyer, do you know?”
“You ain’t gonna tell him what I tell you, are you?” The nervousness in her voice made me wonder if she hadn’t been doin’ some cheatin’ herself.
“Everything you tell me is in confidence,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said.
“Can you get up here sometime so we can talk about it?”
She made an appointment for the following week, left her phone number and hung up.
******
Whenever I slept, Deborah and Perigee invaded my dreams. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I made a string of phone calls to the R line but there were no new messages, only the same black buzz. Wednesday night my dreams got tangled up. I dreamed about a red-haired parrot, a blue-feathered woman and a telephone that wouldn’t answer. On Thursday morning Anna handed me a manila envelope as I came in the door.
“This was on the floor,” she said. “Someone dropped it through the mail slot last night.”
“Did you open it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It’s from the kidnapper. I have a feeling. Who else drops envelopes through the slot?”
I was conscious of the evidence-destroying nature of fingerprints, but I also had to read the message, so I took a letter opener and lifted the flap. I picked the envelope up gingerly by the corners and shook. A lock of hair and a feather fell onto the clean piece of computer paper I’d laid on Anna’s desk. The feather was a match for my indigo plume. The hair was dyed red. Proof that the kidnapper had the hostages except that the feather could have come from Colloquy and the hair could belong to anybody who used Clairol. The message, which was on an unfolded piece of Xerox paper, read: “Offer accepted. Indigo dying without mate. No police. Put two hundred thousand in Deborah’s BankWest account. Will pick up at ATM on Tramway or at Midnight Cowboy or Page One between eight and nine P.M. Friday. Thousand-dollar bills. Will deposit black-light instructions for rest of ransom and mates’ return.” The words had been clipped from a newspaper (most likely the Journal), taped to a piece of paper (I could see the corners of the tape) and xeroxed.
“Why’d he send a copy?” Anna asked.
“With all that cutting and pasting, the original had to be full of fingerprints. Also, a xeroxed copy would pick up less hair or anything else that could identify the perp.” The Xerox, in fact, was antiseptically clean. The perp wasn’t as dumb as Terrance had indicated.
I sent Anna out to buy some clear plastic folders. We put the letter in one, the hair and feather in another and taped them shut.
“If I have to put the ransom in all three of those machines, it’ll cost me six hundred thousand,” said Terrance when I reached him on his C phone. He had to be at home; I didn’t hear the telltale whoosh of traffic or wind. He could be plopped in a leather armchair in his den with his legs on an ottoman, smoking a cigar and admiring his art collection. “I can’t get that kind of money unless I sell the Lochovers.”
“You’ll only need four hundred of it for an hour. Don’t you know a banker who’ll stake you for that length of time?”
“I don’t know anybody who’ll do it without bleeding me dry. Of all the bankers in Albuquerque, we’ll have to deal with Charlie Register at BankWest. Deborah would have to have her account with him.”
“What’s wrong with Charlie Register?”
“He’s got a hankering for my Lochovers and a crush on my wife.”
“Can the ATMs be programmed to make the transaction?” I asked him, since he knew more about the computer highway than I did.
“Sure. To arrange the ransom transfer, the bank could substitute thousand-dollar bills for the twenties in those three ATMs. Register’s programmers can set it up so that no card but Deborah’s can access the ATMs for that hour. As soon as the money comes out of one machine, the others can be programmed to shut down until the four hundred thousand goes back to the bank. Brown’s only going to nail me once. Besides, my security men will be watching those machines and following Brown like hawks. If I don’t get Perigee back alive and well, Brown’ll be dead meat.”
“And what happens if Deborah doesn’t come back? Will you agree to call in the FBI then?” I asked.
“Only if I have to,” he said.
“You do.”
“Okay, okay.”
“What’s a black light?”
“A way of reading invisible ink.”
“Do you think Brown has accomplices?”
“Naah. Brown’s a loner. He’s too screwed up to work with anyone else.”
“Then why involve three machines? They’re too far apart for Brown to get to all of them in one hour.”
“He’s so stupid he thinks that’ll make it harder for me to track him.”
Then we got to what I thought was the deep wrinkle in the fabric of this plan. “Why would Brown set up such an obvious way to make a money transfer?” I asked, thinking even as I said it that the most obvious is often the hardest to see.
“Because when it comes to brains, he’s down a quart,” Terrance said.
******
Terrance, who was by no means a loner, asked me to go to Charlie Register’s office with him. The office was in BankWest’s Tramway branch in th
e high Heights and had a view that went into the last century. I had the feeling that a pair of high-powered binoculars would show Apaches galloping across the horizon with the cavalry hot on their tail. There was a thick gray carpet on Charlie Register’s floor. His desk and credenza were made of teak and devoid of clutter. There wasn’t a single sheet of paper or Post-it to mar the surface of his furniture. The only object in view was a polished petal-shaped bowl of Nambe ware on top of the credenza. It was a change from the usual collection of Indian rugs, pottery, snakes and coyotes that straddle the border between good taste and bad. The room was lit by ceiling fixtures and a long-necked halogen lamp that balanced as gracefully as a crane on its skinny leg. There was only one painting, and it took up half a wall. It was a painting I’d hang on my own wall if I had a hundred times more house and a thousand times more money. Close up it was an Impressionist’s abstraction of feathery brush strokes and dabs of paint. From a few feet back, the brush strokes became ripples, twigs, branches, grass. Across the room the painting evolved into winter marsh colors and the reflecting ponds of the Bosque del Apache. It was subtle and exquisite. Not all New Mexico scenery is grandiose. There’s a delicate, hidden side. As far as I was concerned, there was only one flaw in the painting—the artist, Albert Lochover, had scrawled his name in large letters and large ego across the corner.
Terrance, who could no more stop negotiating than an Amazon could stop imitating, walked up to the wall, sank his boots into the carpet and inspected the painting. “The later work is better,” he pronounced.
Charlie Register looked at me and chuckled. Maybe the joke was that he too saw through Terrance, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he saw what I saw. “Eat your heart out, Lewellen,” Charlie said. “I wouldn’t trade three of your late Lochovers for my early Bosque.” He extended his hand to shake mine. Terrance hadn’t been any better at man to woman introductions than he’d been at woman to woman. “I’m Charlie Register,” he said.
“Neil Hamel,” I replied, shaking the banker’s smooth hand.
“Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”
Parrot Blues Page 5