Home is where
You bury your dreams
For the politicians
To bulldoze
If he’d ever won a National Endowment grant, we’d be hearing from Jesse Helms. I stopped reading for content and began looking at what I came here for—type: a p that was missing part of its tail, an e that didn’t close. I found them in the Royal sitting on an orange crate, an ancient, elegant machine with the brass keys all lined up in a curved row. I took out my copy of the note that had been found on Justine and compared the two to be sure, the same e, the same p, the same faded ribbon. I removed the resident poem, put in a blank piece of paper, typed “I knew this was going to happen, but I couldn’t prevent it,” took it out, returned the poem. The Xerox I had and this copy were identical, except that the Xerox was on paper that had been in my pocket and gotten creased and folded like a road map. I couldn’t prove in court that this was the same typewriter that Emilio Velásquez had taken to Last Chance (unless I could persuade Saia to get a search warrant and dust it for fingerprints), but I believed it. So the note had been typed on Emilio’s typewriter. Why did he do it, if he did do it?
The Kid came inside. “Did you find it, Chiquita?”
“I think so. Look.”
“That’s it,” he said.
The dogs started barking again but with hope instead of fear, as if their master had come home with the kibble. Not wanting to be caught breaking and entering, the Kid and I left the hovel. We’d gotten as far as the tumbleweed fence when Santo came over the top of the rise and stood there for a minute looking ten feet tall, leaning on a crooked stick, king of his own private mountain. He had on a white cotton dress that came down to his ankles and was tied around the waist with rope. His hiking boots were clunky and caked with dirt. His bulging backpack gave him the rounded shape of Kokopelli, the Anasazi flute player. He carried a bunch of plastic bags stuffed to the max. His hair was arranged in long, dirty-blond dreadlocks with bits of paper and fuzz sticking out. The dogs ran to greet him, and he knelt down and patted every one. “Giz,” he said, “and Beau and Jason and Tommie and Polonius.” He reached into a plastic bag and fed them each a snack, crackers and crusts he’d picked up on his rounds. His eyes were an intense pale blue and appeared to be registering the passage of events like tightly wound clocks.
“You from 60 Minutes?” he asked.
It took me by surprise, I’ll admit it. “No. Are you Santo?”
He stood up, shook out his dress and his dreadlocks in a display that made him seem even more voluminous. “You don’t recognize me?” he asked.
He did have a seen-once, remembered-forever look, but I hadn’t seen it, and I didn’t remember. “No,” I said.
“I was in the Journal three times and the Tribune four. I’ve been on CBS and NBC. I was interviewed by Tom Rollins. Look.” He went to the place in the yard where the plastic pinwheel was stuck in the ground, still spinning, and he picked up a rock, exposing a hole, an underground safe where he kept his valuables. He pulled out one of those tubes that zap your deposit from the drive-in window to the teller inside the bank, and he opened it up. It was stuffed full of newspaper clippings about the lengths the city had gone to to evict him. I took a look through them. He had gotten more than his share of publicity.
“If you’re not from 60 Minutes, where are you from?” he asked, narrowing his ticking eyes.
“Downtown,” I said. “I’m a lawyer.” The Kid said nothing; Santo didn’t give him time.
“A lawyer?” Santo recoiled. His skirt swirled, his dreadlocks swung wide, his walking stick vibrated like a dowsing rod on a roll as he pointed it at me. It was the snake-in-the-grass reaction many have to my profession but most try to suppress. Trust a psychotic to reveal a true emotion. The dogs picked up on the vibe and began to growl at me.
“Calm down,” I said. “I didn’t come here to sue or evict you. I’m looking for a typewriter that figures in a case I’m working on. The man at Last Chance told me you collect them.”
“My typewriters are poets. They write poems, not laws. See? The poems are in the typewriters, my fingers find the right keys, and we coax them out.” He spun around like a dervish and waved his long fingers in front of my face, trying maybe to coax some poetry out of me. “You won’t find your laws in my typewriters.”
“You could be right. Well, thanks anyway,” I said. What did I care? The type sample I needed was already deep in my pocket.
“How do you like my place?” Santo asked, waving his arms around him in an expansive gesture.
I took a good look. Up close I saw boulders, lizards and high desert cacti. In the far distance I saw Mount Taylor in the west and the Manzanos in the south and beyond that the purple haze. It was too far and too wide to take in without opening the mind’s wide-angle lens, the kind of high desert where people have historically come to seek wisdom and/or God. It doesn’t hurt to remind yourself now and then that we exist on the edge of a vast desert, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Home ought to be a sheltered space. I limited my vision to what I knew to be Albuquerque, starting at the bottom, the green valley where the runoff ends up and turns south. The Rio Grande curled like a silver ribbon thrown to the ground by a cavalier goddess. I saw the white slabs of the downtown office buildings, which looked like tombstones in a not-so-distant cemetery or monuments of a once-meaningful religion. Next came the red-tile roofs of the subdivisions. Farther up, the irregular roofs of the Heights architectural statements. Albuquerque is full of zones: life zones, pollen zones, wealth zones. I remembered when the sky used to be bluer. I also remembered when there was no pollution haze, when the Duke City didn’t have auto emission standards, or a 98 percent occupancy rate, or the homeless either. Santo had a rich person’s view, but he didn’t have a rich person’s sensibility. He couldn’t turn on the VCR and turn off the view. His eyes had been looking too far for too long, and they had started to tick.
“You do have a great view,” I said.
“It’s choice,” he replied. “And that’s why my choice is to live here, and why my poems are buried all over this arroyo. It’s a holy place. This place belongs to me and to God. The city can never evict me, because God’s law is in effect up here.”
But man’s laws were in effect down there, and they’d send their minions up if they chose to. “I wouldn’t count on it,” I said.
His eyes turned crafty. He spread his fingers and twisted them as if he were pulling a trump card out of the air. He smiled and exposed some brownish stumps of broken teeth. “I can play by their laws too. I have lived on this land long enough to make it mine by their law of adverse possession.”
Maybe. But the law of adverse possession applies only to private property, not to property owned by the city. I handed him my card. Real estate, after all, was my profession. “Let me know if you have any problems. Maybe I can help.”
He put the card in the tube with the newspaper articles, stuck it back in the ground, replaced the rock cover, righted the pinwheel, which began to whir and spin.
“Can we go now, Chiquita?” asked the Kid. He’d been more than patient.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Mucho gusto,” said the Kid to Santo, and “Ándale” to me.
“Come back again,” replied Santo.
The Kid and I walked down the arroyo, past the pink-faced boulders, through the sandy place where water flows in summer. One of Santo’s dogs followed us, and when Santo called him he sat down, threw his head back and began a long, lonesome howl.
The Kid shook his head. “People in this country are crazy,” he said.
13
I’D FOUND EMILIO’S typewriter. The next step was to find Emilio and tell him. He was on Los Cerros tennis court, where he had challenged the ball machine to a game and the machine had met the challenge. When I got there on Monday afternoon, the match was on. Emilio’s concentration was intense, and I leaned against the fence and watched for several minutes before he noticed me. The balls
hit the ground and bounced one after another in the exact same spot. Emilio didn’t have to move around much, but even so he’d probably had to set the machine to its slowest setting. The machine hiccupped, exhaled a ball. The strings thunked when the sweet spot of Emilio’s racket connected. He brought his racket back, narrowed his eyes and swung hard. His intensity made me wonder if he wasn’t seeing someone’s face on the ball. Martha’s, maybe, or Whit’s. He noticed me out of the corner of his eye, dropped the racket in midstroke, rolled around to the other side of the court and turned the ball machine off.
“See that?” he asked. “I’m taking the dis out of disability.”
“Go ahead and finish the set,” I answered. “Don’t mind me.”
“It’s okay. I’ve had enough.” He wheeled up close so I was looking down at him again. If the purpose of exercise is to break a sweat, he’d achieved it. His shirt clung to his body, his dark hair formed Greek-god tendrils on his forehead. “Tennis is okay, but I’d rather be talking to you.”
“You haven’t heard what I have to say yet.”
“That’s right.” His smile was a quick, hard flash. “Here or my place?”
“Your place.”
“See you there.” He went to his car; I went to mine. It took him longer, and I arrived at his apartment first. I waited for him at the door, wondering how I was going to explain that I had tracked down his typewriter, hoping that Dorothy wouldn’t come to her door. All was quiet behind the facade of 53C, no sound of metal scraping or death walking. Maybe Dorothy had fallen asleep, or she hadn’t gotten up yet, but that seemed unlikely, since there appears to be an inverse relationship between the amount of sleep you get and your age. By the time you reach ninety you’re lucky to sleep at all. Thinking about Dorothy kept me from thinking about Emilio, and when he showed up and let me into his apartment I hadn’t a clue how I was going to say what I’d come here to say.
“Want a beer?” he asked, heading for the kitchen. “I have some Tecate.”
“Got anything else?”
“Lemonade?”
“I’ll have one of those.”
There was a John Callahan cartoon lying on the coffee table, and I picked it up. It was a picture of a dog lying on his back with a pane of glass sticking out of his chest. “How much is that window in the doggy?” the caption read. Emilio heard me laugh.
“I’ve got a joke for you, Nellie,” he said. “There was a guy with no arms and legs who had to give up his effort to swim the English Channel. You know why?”
“Dígame.”
“His ears got tired.” I heard him open the refrigerator door. “Not drinking these days?”
“Not when I’m working.” I sat down on his sofa, picked up the picture of Justine with the gypsy eyes and put it down.
He came back with the drinks and handed me mine. “Seeing me is work?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” I took a big sip of lemonade. “I found your typewriter, Emilio.”
He looked at me over the top of his Tecate can. “My typewriter?”
“A man named Santo took it from Last Chance. He wears a dress and lives in a hovel in Coldwater Arroyo. He thought I’d come there to interview him for 60 Minutes.”
“Glad to know someone is using it,” he said.
“He is. In fact there was a poem in the typewriter that he says he coaxed out.”
Emilio shook his head. His curls remained stuck to his sweaty forehead. “You’re a good investigator, Nellie. How did you even know I had a typewriter or where to look for it?” Not being such a bad investigator himself, he quickly came up with the answer. “Dorothy?”
“Yeah.”
“Hijole. It’s worse than living at home with your mother. She’s got nothing to do all day but watch me go in and out.”
“When I came here the other day she told me you’d gone to Last Chance with the typewriter. I have to ask why you got rid of it, Emilio. That typewriter typed Justine’s note.” The next question was, Did you type it? But I didn’t ask.
“I was afraid of that,” he said.
“If you give me a sample of something you’ve typed, I can prove it.”
“You don’t need to prove it; I believe you.”
“Who typed it, Emilio? I have to know.”
He put his Tecate down on the table, leaving a wet ring, but it didn’t matter because the veneer that masqueraded as wood was grade A plastic. “Justy, I think,” he said. “She was here all alone that morning.”
“Was her English that good? Wouldn’t someone who didn’t have very good English have said ‘stop’ rather than ‘prevent’?”
“Her English was fine. Better than mine.”
“Why would she write herself a note like that?”
“As sort of an apology to me.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s a long story, Nellie.”
What did I have waiting for me at the office anyway? Real estate and divorce, Anna and Brink. “Dígame,” I said.
“Justy and I got real close after Miguel died. She was like a daughter to me. She came here every year on the anniversary of the accident, and we spent it together. Justy was a marked woman. She might of taken steps to protect herself, and for a while she did. But after Miguel died she didn’t care whether she lived or not. I think the note was telling me she knew she was going to die and that she didn’t care enough to prevent it.” He took a long sip of his beer.
“Who wanted to kill her?”
“A lot of people. When she was sixteen years old she fell in with a group of Argentine revolutionaries or terroristas, whatever you want to call them. It was the time of the dirty war, and Argentina was a mess then, run by a bunch of assassins. Justy’s real name was Verónica Falcón, but she was known as Niki.”
“She was named after her grandmother?”
“Yeah. She came from an upper-class family. Jaime Córdova, her best friend’s father, was a general in Buenos Aires and a notorious pig and torturer. She went to visit her friend and took a book with her. She excused herself to go to the bathroom and planted the book under the old man’s bed. It was a bomb, and it blew him up.”
“Oh, God.”
“Her boyfriend, who made the bomb, got caught. They probably hooked him up to the torture machine and fried his balls, but Justy escaped and she came here and lived with her mother’s sister, Mina Alarid. Alarid is not the family name. He was someone Mina was married to years ago. Mina’s been in this country for thirty years. She teaches Latin American literature at UNM. I guess Justy hoped the assassins wouldn’t trace her here or would forget about her, or maybe she knew they would find her someday and she stopped caring.”
“If it was Argentine hit men, why not just run her over themselves? Why set up Martha Conover?”
“They have a sense of humor? I don’t know, Nellie. The other possibility, which I hate to even consider, is that Justy stepped in front of the car herself. Justy knew that the old lady was going to the meeting that night and would probably be coming home loaded and driving like the Terminator. The note doesn’t make much sense, does it, if you think Martha Conover murdered Justy in cold blood?”
“No.”
“And it wasn’t given to her by the psychic if it was typed on my typewriter.”
“Did you really believe it was?”
“Let’s say I hoped it was.”
“Tell me what happened the day Justine died.”
“She got here about eleven-thirty. I went out to get some tacos for lunch. I’m not much of a cook. When I got back, Mina Alarid and Cindy were here. Mina picked Cindy up because Cindy doesn’t like to leave her car parked outside when Martha is around. We had lunch and talked and cried about Miguel. Around four, I took Cindy home. Whit was downtown, doing his charity work. Justy and Mina stayed here for a while, and then Justy left to go to the cemetery. She liked to go alone. I never saw her again.” He picked up Justine’s picture and stared at her. “You would have liked her, Nellie. She remi
nded me of you when you were sixteen. You might of been a terrorista too, if you’d grown up in Argentina. Remember how you hated the war?”
“I still do.” And looking at the limp legs in his wheelchair, I hated it even more.
“The guy she killed was a pig and a brutal assassin, who deserved to die.”
He was also her best friend’s father.
“She did the world a favor by getting rid of him. El muerto al pozo y el vivo al retozo.”
The dead to his hole and let the good times roll.
“It took a lot of courage to do what Niki Falcón did—and she was just a kid—but it ruined her life. Loving Miguel helped, but you never really recover from something like that. I know because I’ve killed too. Justy and I had that in common. Only her victim was an assassin and mine was a VC who wanted me to get the fuck out of his country. She paid with her life. I lost my legs, which in a way made it easier for me to deal with it.” He looked down at his lap. “The old lady’s got nothing to worry about now. As the doc in rehab said, sex will always be a distant memory for me. It’s hard to get into it when you can’t feel a thing and you’ve got a catheter in your dick.”
“Sex isn’t everything,” I said, echoing Martha Conover, but her voice had had more conviction than mine did.
“It’s a luxury,” Emilio said, “for people who’ve got something left to lose.” He finished the Tecate, squeezed the can together and threw it at the trash container visible through the open kitchen door. The can hit the edge, bounced off, landed on the floor and gave a death rattle while it rolled to a stop.
“When Miguel died too, Justy felt like she was the kiss of death and there was no reason for her to go on living. But she was wrong, Nellie, there were reasons. There’s me, there’s Cindy.”
It’s easy enough to see why people believe in reincarnation. Who likes to think you’ll only get one shot when the hand you’re dealt is stacked with cards like that? “Did Justine usually carry a gun?”
“Wouldn’t you if you were her?”
“Probably.”
“I have a gun. Don’t you?”
The Lies that Bind Page 12