This wasn’t exactly my living room, but it was as close as she was going to get. Here I was ready to talk, and before we went any further there were some things I wanted to know, like when, where, how and who. “When did this supposed homicide take place?” I asked.
“Last night around ten-fifteen, the police say.” Martha peered around her as if the other cars had ears. I continued my line of questioning.
“Where?”
“In the road at Los Cerros, the apartment complex I own and live in.”
She was doing all right with her investments; Los Cerros was one of the largest apartment complexes in town. “How?”
“The police say I ran her over.”
“What do you say?”
“I hit a speed bump. I was going too fast, and I hit a speed bump.” Her blue eyes flashed at me. She spun a diamond and sapphire ring around on her finger.
“Did you see anyone when you were driving up the road or entering your apartment?”
“I don’t have an apartment. I have a town house.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“No.”
“Did the APD indicate that they had witnesses?”
“They knocked on some doors, looking for the owner of my car, but my neighbors were asleep and hadn’t seen or heard anything, except for the one who found the body in the road and called the police.”
“They had to have some reason to impound your car.”
“There were dents in the bumper and the hood.”
Was there any blood on the car, I wondered, hair or fibers that hadn’t washed off in the rain? The DA’s office would have that information sooner or later, but they were unlikely to give it to me, not unless Martha got indicted. There was one other question that always needs to be asked when motor vehicles are involved. “Were you drinking?”
“I had two martinis at the Albuquerque Women’s Club meeting,” she replied, folding her hands in her lap.
“Did the police take a Breathalyzer?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t let them.” Her eyes were defiant and proud of it.
“They did tell you that refusing to take a Breathalyzer means an automatic suspension of your license for a year, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t put you in jail,” I said. She shrugged as if to imply she wasn’t the kind of woman who got sent to jail. “Did the police read you your rights?”
“Yes.”
“You should have called me last night before you said anything to them.”
“I wanted to discuss it with Whit and Cynthia before I called anybody.”
I had a few more questions. “Who was Justine Virga?”
“She was once my grandson Michael’s girlfriend,” Martha Conover said.
“You knew her?” When the accused knows the victim (and they do 86 percent of the time), it puts a different spin on things.
“Years ago.”
“Virga is an unusual name. How do you spell it?” Verga, I knew, means the male organ in Spanish. Virga means precipitation that evaporates before it reaches the ground.
“V-i-r-g-a. It’s not Spanish, is it?”
“No.”
“I think she gave herself an English name when she came here from Argentina. Can we go now?”
I turned the key in the ignition and backed the Nissan out of its space. “Los Cerros is on—” Martha began.
“I know where Los Cerros is.” In the Heights. Those who have money in Albuquerque escape to the Rio Grande Valley or the higher elevations, while the rest of us get stuck in the middle.
Martha kept her silence, and I thought about what I had to work with: a woman who’d been drinking and refused to take a Breathalyzer, a dent in a car, a dead girlfriend. It made me wish I’d kept my nine o’clock.
I found my way to Los Cerros, turned in and let Martha Conover direct me through a maze of two-story Mediterranean-style stucco buildings with tile roofs and grounds that were carefully landscaped and automatically watered. The speed bumps kept me to a boring five mph. A couple of Hispanic guys were trimming the shrubs. The lower part of the complex had ramps leading into the buildings, indicating the handicapped lived there, which could well have been a condition for getting a building permit. The middle section allowed children, and a couple of them raced their toy cars down the sidewalk, screaming. We drove past a swimming pool, a putting green and an empty tennis court. The road climbed sharply, the apartment buildings turned into town houses and the children disappeared. This was where the more desirable tenants—singles, childless couples and old ladies—lived. A couple of them were hanging around a bank of mailboxes (which also had a tile roof), because they needed their social security checks or because they liked the mailman. The older you get, the bigger role the mailman plays in your life.
“Go faster here,” Martha ordered. “I want to show you what happened.” I don’t usually obey orders, but I was curious to see how she’d present her case and no one else was in the road, so I put the pedal to the floor. The speed bump, painted yellow, was about six inches high and hard as a wall. I’d reached only fifteen by the time we hit it, but that was fast enough. Every bone in my body rattled. The frame on the Nissan shook. A piece of muffler fell off.
“See,” said Martha Conover.
“See what?” I replied.
“A body wouldn’t feel hard like that,” she said. “What I hit was that speed bump.” She may have convinced herself, but she hadn’t convinced me. “Over five miles an hour, anything you hit feels hard,” I replied.
“I was driving a Buick,” she said.
“Um,” said I. “Is it possible, given the darkness and the rain, that you didn’t see her?”
“No. My high beams were on, and there is nothing wrong with my long-distance vision either. I only need glasses for reading.”
She directed me to her place, at the very top of Los Cerros. It had a hundred-mile view, the kind of view that makes you want to think the big thoughts or earn the big bucks it takes to pay for it. We walked down the sidewalk that led from Martha’s parking space to her town house. The grounds were impeccable, the walls of the town houses freshly stuccoed, and there were no cobwebs in the corners. Martha, I figured, didn’t do that kind of work herself, but whoever did took pride in it. She turned the key in her lock and let me in. Her town house smelled of Lemon Pledge and was the kind of neat that made me long for La Vista. The carpet was pink pile and didn’t have a hair on it. The polished furniture had spindly little legs. The sofa was upholstered in flowered chintz. Ivy in a brass pot sat on the coffee table. The drapes were drawn to keep out the long and dusty view. It was the kind of living room they do well back East where the view is limited to a lawn and the trees at the end of it, ladylike and formal, expensive but comfortable. Martha seemed to be one of those people who take the East with them wherever they go. She offered me a cup of tea.
“Do you have any Red Zinger?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Can I use your phone?”
“Yes.”
While she made her tea, I called the office to tell my secretary, Anna, what she already knew, that I’d missed my nine o’clock.
Martha brought the teapot into the living room, sat on the sofa and poured the tea into a china cup translucent enough to see her fingers through. She took one spoon of sugar, one slice of lemon.
I took out my yellow legal pad and put it in my lap. “All right,” I said. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“When I left the AWC meeting on Siringo at ten, it was pouring rain. It was ten-fifteen when I got home. After I hit the speed bump, I parked, came inside and went to bed. I fell asleep and woke up when the police rang the doorbell.”
“What time was that?”
“I don’t know. I’d been asleep, but I don’t know for how long. It seemed like a bad dream. Men in uniform were standing at my door, telling me that girl was dead and it was my fault. T
hey made me go outside in the rain and look at the body. I hadn’t seen Justine for years, but I recognized her.”
“Did you identify her for the police?”
“No. They already knew who she was; they found her identification inside her car.”
“Why did they ask you to look at the body?”
“I think they were trying to frighten me into making a confession.” Martha took a sip of her tea. “They also showed me my car, with the dents in the bumper and the hood.”
“Can you describe Justine for me?”
“Yes. Her body was crushed, and she was lying flat on her back. Her eyes … her eyes were open.”
“Was there much blood?”
“No; the rain had washed it away.” She put her cup down. “After they finished examining the body and the scene, the police asked me if they could come inside and look around.”
“You let them?”
“Yes.” Another mistake that could have been avoided if she’d called me sooner. An attorney would have made the police get a search warrant. “I had nothing to hide,” Martha said.
“What did they look at?”
“My typewriter. The police found a note in Justine’s pocket inside a sealed envelope. They put it in a plastic bag, showed it to me and accused me of typing it on my typewriter. It was obvious that the type didn’t match, but they took a sample from my Selectric anyway.”
“What did the note say?”
“‘I knew this was going to happen, but I couldn’t prevent it.’”
That was the kind of message that sent the desert lizard racing down my spine. “Do you have any idea who would have given Justine a note like that?”
Her eyes met mine without a flicker. “No. After the police left, I called Whit and Cindy and they came over.”
“They came over here?” Phoenix was almost five hundred miles away, the last time I’d checked.
“They’re living here now, in a house I own at Los Verdes Meadows, the golf course development on—”
“I know where it is. When did they move to Albuquerque?”
“About a month ago. Whit is in real estate, and business has not been good in Arizona. They’d been out to dinner, and they were in bed when I called. They got up anyway and came over. It was suggested that I call you, but it was the middle of the night by then. In the morning no one answered at your office and your line was busy at home, so I looked up your address, got a cab and went to your apartment.”
“Why didn’t Cindy come with you?”
“I didn’t ask her to.”
“How is she?” I asked.
“All right. It’s been difficult since Michael died, but—”
“Michael died?”
“Three years ago. He was her only son, my only grandson.”
“Oh, God. How did that happen?”
“In a car accident. Cynthia and Whit want to get together with you, and I suggested you all come here for dinner Saturday. Well, are you going to represent me?”
Was I? She was my old friend’s mother, but we hadn’t liked each other back then and it looked as though we weren’t going to like each other much now. On the other hand, homicide is more interesting than real estate and divorce, and she obviously could afford to pay. “I’ll require a retainer,” I said.
“I’ll pay it.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to the DA’s office, and I’ll be in touch.”
“Dinner will be here Saturday night at six,” she replied. “You will have spoken to the DA’s office by then, so come at five and we’ll have a chance to talk before Whit and Cindy arrive.”
“I’ll check my calendar,” I said.
I drove out of Los Cerros in slow motion, taking the speed bumps at a pace the Nissan’s aging shock absorbers could absorb. I wondered who the DA would assign to this case and why Cindy Reid hadn’t called me when she moved to town. I saw a man putting on the putting green. It was a warm enough day to swim, and kids were playing Marco Polo in the pool. “Marco,” one kid yelled. “Polo,” another one answered. A dark-haired, heavyset guy in a wheelchair was rolling across the tennis court. He stopped and stared at me as I drove by.
3
IN BERNALILLO COUNTY there’s always some controversy surrounding law enforcement. The police catch the blue flu and call in sick because they didn’t get the pay raise they wanted. The sheriff promotes his wife to chief deputy with a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary. That could happen anyplace, but what makes Bernalillo County unique is that the sheriff holds a news conference to announce it. The latest episode had to do with a guy named Jimmie Solano, who, in the midst of an attempted suicide, lunged at police officers with a three-inch pocket knife. The officers shot and killed him and kept him from killing himself. It was only one of a number of fatal shootings recently that have given the APD one of the worst records in the West. In the past few years the Duke City police have killed more people than the police in Tucson, Austin, El Paso, Tulsa and Colorado Springs combined. Often domestic violence is involved. Usually the victims are distraught or intoxicated. The APD are trained to “shoot to stop” when they believe they or another person is being threatened, as opposed to shooting to wound. Stopping means aiming at the largest part of the body, where the vital organs are located. A police officer from Tucson was quoted in the Journal recently as saying that perhaps the Albuquerque police had more victims because they were better shots. “It could be when they ‘shoot to stop,’ they’re connecting more,” he said.
Deputy District Attorney Anthony Saia, who had been assigned the Justine Virga case, was an old friend and my favorite deputy DA. He had a creased, rumpled, unmade-bed kind of face. He always looked comfortable—even in his suit—as if he were sitting around on Sunday morning in his bathrobe, reading the paper, eating sugar doughnuts, drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes. That was one reason I liked him—he had bad habits to equal my own. There aren’t many people left to smoke with anymore. His office made me feel right at home too; his desk was a city dump, his ashtray overflowed with ashes and butts. I also appreciated his world-weary, jaundiced attitude. You could call it cynical, you could call it common sense: depends on your point of view.
When I went to his office on Friday morning to talk to him, he was standing in front of a mirror, brushing his hair. It was black with gray highlights, thick and wiry, the kind of hair that reacts to every change in moisture, electricity or wind. Saia didn’t pay much attention to his clothes, but he was vain about his hair.
“Hat head,” he said, finishing up and putting the brush in his drawer.
“Pleasure to see you too,” said I.
“Hey, Neil, you know you’re my favorite defense lawyer.”
“That’s not saying much.”
He laughed and sat down at his desk. I sat in front of him. He lit a Camel with his Bic lighter. I lit a Marlboro and blew out the match.
“So the APD has the best shots in the West,” I said. Just because I liked the guy didn’t mean I couldn’t give him some shit.
He winced. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. A man charging police officers with a weapon is asking for trouble.”
“When the weapon is a three-inch penknife?”
He shrugged, flicked an ash at his ashtray, missed.
“If the APD shot him to keep him from killing himself, what do you call that—murder or suicide?”
“Self-defense. You know, sometimes it’s just a matter of luck whether a suspect dies or not.”
“Then the APD is lucky?”
“I’d say unlucky.” He laughed. “I don’t think your luck’s going to be so good on this one.”
“Tell me what I’m going to be reading in the papers.” So far Justine’s death had gotten only a brief notice in the Journal and the Tribune, but sooner or later they’d find out she’d been the girlfriend of Martha’s grandson, and that was likely to move the story up to page one.
“That a witness saw Martha Conover’s
car entering the Los Cerros complex at an excessive rate of speed around ten-fifteen. That a neighbor called the APD at eleven to say she’d found the body in the road.”
He could give me the names of the witness and the neighbor if he chose to. But he wouldn’t choose to unless we were talking plea bargain, and he wouldn’t have to unless Martha Conover was indicted. It’s tough to get any information out of the DA’s office while a case is under investigation. “The body wasn’t found until eleven?” I asked.
“Yeah. There’s not much traffic on that road at night. Nobody lives up there but old ladies, and they don’t go out.” Saia picked up a rubber band from his desk, stretched it between his fingers and began moving the fingers back and forth like a sideways seesaw. “There were no brake marks on the pavement. Your client didn’t even slow down.”
“Have you gotten the results of the autopsy back yet?”
“Yeah. Death on impact due to massive injuries to the vital organs.”
At least he wouldn’t be able to depict Martha Conover as a heartless woman who’d left the victim lying alone in the road to bleed to death. “Did the OMI find any drugs and/or alcohol in Justine’s blood? “
“Some antihistamines. That’s all. She was Michael Velásquez’s girlfriend. Did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“And three years ago, also on Halloween, she was driving the car he died in. Did you know that?”
By the time I thought of faking it, it was too late. My expression had given me away. “No,” I said.
“You’re slipping, Neil. I thought you’d know your clients better than that.”
“Me, too.”
“One of the investigators thought Virga looked familiar, and he traced her to the previous accident. She was a beautiful girl; someone you’d remember.”
“Was Justine charged with any crime for that accident?”
“Nothing to charge her with. The Porsche came over Lopez Hill, a semi was jackknifed across the road. No way to avoid it.”
The Lies that Bind Page 2