The Lies that Bind

by Judith Van GIeson

  It wasn’t that big a step from moving pieces to moving people, I thought.

  “The way kickbacks work is, the developer borrows more than the property is worth, then kicks back the excess to his buddy the banker, or the banker turns it over to his buddy a politician. For example, the developer borrows one hundred thousand more than he needs. He solicits checks from his employees to equal that amount. He gives the checks to the banker, who contributes them to the Republican party or the Democratic party, whoever. When it came to S&L fraud, there was only one party—the fund-raising party. The banker gets a credit with the party for future favors. The developer pays his employees back with the hundred thousand, making it look like a bonus or overtime. The developers were a part of the scam, but the people we were really after were the bankers. In most cases, the developers were more than happy to cooperate. You know Wilson’s bank financed El Dorado, Reid’s development. When the bank went under, the RTC foreclosed, and now they’re trying to get rid of it.”

  “I know. I went out and took a look at it.”

  “It’s a beaut, isn’t it? It was going to be Whit’s little kingdom, a planned development where he could let in whoever he wanted, keep out who he didn’t. He had restrictive covenants to end all restrictive covenants. He wasn’t going to allow his property owners to subscribe to Penthouse or Playboy.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. It says so right in the deed.”

  “So this is what it’s like back in the U.S.A.” We call the state I live in one of the missing fifty, because it so often gets confused with its third-world neighbor.

  “That’s what it’s like in Arizona anyway.”

  “I’ll say one thing about Arizona: your white-collar crooks have more imagination than ours.”

  “It’s amazing how they discover religion and good works when they’re looking at a prison sentence.”

  “What did you settle with the developers for?”

  “As much as we could get, although it was never as much as those guys stole. They went through money like a knife through butter, and a lot of what they owned they bought at inflated prices. They believed in the boom they’d created, but when it came time to sell, the market was severely depressed. We took their cars, their houses, their polo ponies, their boats, their jewelry. Remember they were staring prison in the face, and that scared the shit out of them.”

  “Do you ever take it in payments?”

  “We might give a guy some time to unload his assets, come up with the money he’d been hiding.”

  “What would happen if he missed a payment?”

  “The big house. I may be talking out of school here.” Laswell’s eyes circled the room, either to make sure no one was listening or to keep tabs on the blond waitresses. “But Whit Reid is all paid up.”

  “Recently?”

  “In September.”

  “Do you ever make community service a part of the package?”

  “Often.”

  “Could a person perform that service in another state if he moved?”

  “Could.”

  “I didn’t think Whit Reid was noble enough to volunteer to help out minority small businesses on his own.”

  “Trust me, he’s not,” Jonathan Laswell said.

  ******

  I flipped through the in-flight magazine on the way home and thought about what I would tell Cindy and Saia and Martha. Nothing, I decided. If Cindy already knew, I wouldn’t be doing her any favor by revealing what she’d been trying to conceal. If she didn’t know, what good would it do to tell her at this point? However, if she ever asked me to file for divorce …. As for Saia, I had no need to reveal what I’d discovered to him unless it could keep Martha from being indicted. Whit Reid was a crook and a snitch who’d turned in his banker buddy, but that didn’t make him Justine Virga’s killer. For one thing, he had a good alibi for the night the murder or accident or whatever it was took place. As for motive, if he was as broke as he appeared to be, why hadn’t Martha been the victim? Cindy was her only heir.

  What to tell Martha was more problematical. Martha Conover was not likely to go into business with a crook, and I was pretty sure she didn’t know about Whit’s relationship with the federal government. But what kind of friend would tell her before telling Cindy? If it had any bearing on her case, I’d be obligated to tell her, but as far as I could see now, it had none. As for its having a bearing on her life, that was a gray area. What I should do, I thought, is confront Whit and make him tell Martha and Cindy himself, but I wasn’t quite ready to let him know what I knew. I decided, for the moment anyway, to keep on looking and keep my mouth shut.

  I hung around the gate after I deplaned at Albuquerque, but I didn’t see anybody I recognized getting off the plane. I didn’t see anyone who seemed interested in getting to know me better either.

  21

  THE KID CAME for dinner, and I cooked his favorite meal of Chile Willies. I made it the way I always did—broke the blue-corn tortillas in pieces, sautéed them until they were crisp, added the red-hot salsa, melted Monterey Jack cheese on top—but it tasted better than usual. Maybe adventure makes the taste buds grow fonder.

  “This tastes good tonight, Chiquita,” the Kid said.

  “Thanks.”

  He ate fast, and when he was finished he sipped at his Tecate. When the Kid ate, he ate. When he talked, he talked. And when he made love, well, he focused on that too. “How was your trip to Arizona?”

  “I didn’t take the job with the bank,” I said.

  He nodded; that didn’t surprise him. “Did you think you would?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then why did you go?”

  “To work out a better deal for Sharon Amaral.” It wasn’t the entire explanation. He knew it, and so did I. He waited, sipped at his beer. “I also wanted to find out what kind of trouble Whit Reid, Cindy’s husband, is in. I thought he’d been lying to her about his real estate deals, and I found out he had been. I also found out he broke the law, got caught and had to pay the federal government a big fine.” The Kid nodded again, indicating he knew that wasn’t the whole story either. Maybe I was getting too predictable; maybe he was starting to know me too well. Maybe he’d noticed the red finger-shaped welts on my neck, which weren’t quite hidden by makeup or a scarf. I’m not the kind of woman who wears scarves or makeup, and the Kid knew that too. “Somebody was chasing me. I went into the desert to look at Whit Reid’s resort, and I thought I saw a white car follow me off the freeway. But it turned in the opposite direction. Later, when I was alone at the property, I heard somebody drive in and walk down the hallway toward me. I asked who was there. He didn’t answer, but he kept on coming. When somebody else drove up, he ran away.”

  “Why you go there alone, Chiquita?”

  “Because I didn’t have anybody to go with. Besides, what’s the point in living, Kid, if you can’t go anyplace alone?”

  It was a rhetorical question, and he didn’t answer it. “Did you see the guy?”

  “Not very well, but I got his license number. Last night I stayed in a Motel 9, and in the middle of the night somebody called with a bullshit story about my rental car being in an accident. He said he wanted to come by and talk to me.”

  “Did you let him in?” he asked, but he already knew the answer. As he’d told me once before, I never know when to quit. The Kid had warned me, but he’d never tried to stop me. Maybe he knew it wouldn’t work; maybe he didn’t really want me to stop. If I were the kind of woman who took no risks, he wouldn’t be interested in me. If I were more cautious, I wouldn’t be interested in him.

  “Yeah, I let him in; I had a weapon.”

  The Kid raised his eyebrows. We’d had an argument before about my carrying a gun, his theory being that when you have a gun it’s just as likely to be used against you as by you.

  “It was a skunk gun,” I said. “It’s full of skunk juice, and the smell drives an assailant away.”

 
; He shook his head. The things people did in this country remained incomprehensible to him, but it was his country now, whether he liked to admit it or not. “Was it the same guy?”

  “Probably, but he wore a ski mask and I never got a good look at his face. Both guys were the same size and shape, and they drove the same car. They acted like they’d had a slight leg injury. Both walked with a limp and ran without it. I had to fight him off, Kid. He had his hands around my neck.”

  “I can see that,” he said, looking at the marks on my neck, which had gotten more vivid as the day went on.

  “When I pulled out the skunk gun he kicked it out of my hand, but it went off anyway. He had a powerful kick. I never heard him speak, but I did hear someone behind me in the airport when I was going over there talking Argentine.”

  “He could be a soccer player. Some soccer players can forget they are hurt when they are playing, and Argentinos are good at soccer.”

  “I know,” I said. And I knew they could be connected to the guys at Mighty, but I didn’t think Ramón Ortiz was the one to ask.

  “But what they do best is polo. They are the best polo players in the world. Everybody wants to have an Argentino on their team. It’s one way to get out of Argentina.”

  “Do you think he could have been one of Las Manos?”

  “Why would they be after you?”

  “Because I am the only one who is investigating Niki Falcón’s death. If the police are doing anything, no one’s telling me about it.”

  “I don’t know, Chiquita. I think if Las Manos wanted to kill you, you would be dead.”

  “What I don’t understand, Kid, is if Niki Falcón was killed by hit men, why didn’t they just go back to Argentina and disappear afterwards? It wouldn’t make any difference then if I found them out.”

  “Maybe they don’t want to go back to Argentina. Maybe they like it here. Maybe business is better in this country.”

  “But why follow me to Arizona? Why not go after me here?”

  “You don’t go out in the desert and stay in motels alone here, do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  ******

  We took off our clothes later and got into bed. The parking lot’s light filtered in through the curtains, giving the bedroom the ambience of a Motel 9. A car in the lot squawked as a remote unlocked it and then yelled “Break in” in an automaton’s loud voice. There was another squeal, and the remote zapped the voice off. The sounds of high-tech progress at La Vista could make you long for the days before cars found their voice. It got quiet again in the bedroom; I could hear the Kid’s steady and regular breathing. He curled up next to me, sniffed my hair and my skin.

  “You have the smell of…”

  “Road kill?”

  “La hedionda.” Literally that means the foul-smelling one or the skunk, but it also means death, and in New Mexico folklore, death is an old woman. Enough light came in through the curtains so the Kid could see the finger marks on my neck. “People in South America have hard lives, Chiquita,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “The killers there are cruel and brutal.”

  “They are not exactly nice guys here.”

  “Believe me, Chiquita, they are worse there.”

  “Felons are felons. You just think they are worse because you were a boy when you lived there and everything looks bigger when you’re a child.”

  “Why don’t you bring your gun home with you?”

  “You’re the one who complained about guns in the house, Kid.”

  “This is an exception.” He touched the marks on my neck. “Cuidado con la hedionda,” he said. Watch out for la hedionda.

  ******

  I stopped by Martha Conover’s in the morning to tell her what had happened since the last time I saw her, as much as I thought was advisable anyway. I didn’t feel especially guilty about withholding certain facts at this point, because she hadn’t always told me the whole truth. Martha measured out the truth the way she measured out her love—using the bottom line of the measuring cup. I looked around me as I drove up the Los Cerros road. She maintained her property a lot better than the absentee owners of La Vista did. The grounds were manicured, the sprinklers ticked, there were no pets, there was no litter, the children and the handicapped were confined to a limited area. In my hallway the paint cracked and peeled, the indoor/outdoor carpeting was stained, the night watchman got drunk. As I parked the Nissan in a space marked for visitors, I remembered what Jonathan Laswell had said about every real estate venture containing the seeds of its own destruction, and I thought about who would look after this place if Martha went to prison. She’d have to give someone power of attorney; she wouldn’t be able to collect her rents, pay her bills and harangue her staff from a prison cell. There were people who could manage Los Cerros, but was there anybody who would do it as carefully as she had?

  As I walked toward her town house I saw Martha standing in front of her door, clutching her keys in one hand and her purse in the other. In front of her was a locked door and behind her a view that went into the next county. The getting old resemble the very young: they change so quickly that the person you see today is not necessarily the one you saw a week ago. Martha stared at me as if she didn’t know who I was. A window opened up in her eyes, and I was able—briefly—to peer into her interior world. It looked as though an intruder had disconnected the wires, broken in and ransacked her brain. The hand that held her keys trembled like a frightened bird. She was talking, but she didn’t know whom she was talking to. “I can’t remember whether I was coming in or going out,” she said in a dazed voice.

  “Let’s go in.” I reached to take the keys from her hand, but she wouldn’t release them. She clutched them tight in her fingers and stared at me as if she was thinking: I know you, I know you and I don’t approve of you. Then she snapped out of it, the wires reconnected, the juice came back on and she was her old self again.

  “I can open my own door,” she said. The change from Martha’s confused, vulnerable self to her bossy, in-control self was rapid and extreme. Every way-out form of behavior contains the seed of its own opposite, but swinging from one extreme to another is no way to create a balance. I couldn’t blame her for overreacting, however; I wouldn’t want to be old and infirm and depending on me for help.

  She opened the door to let us in, and a pink Post-it fluttered to the floor. She put her purse down on the table and walked toward the kitchen. “Can I get you a drink?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Life sucks, and then you lose your body or your mind, I thought as I listened to her open the freezer door, take out the vodka and pour herself a large one with no ice. She might have just had a slight stroke. She might also have had one the night that Justine died. The part of her brain that stored the events of that night, that had or had not registered Justine in the headlights, could be a burned-out microchip inaccessible to her or anyone else. Someone should tell her she needed medical help, but the someone was her daughter, not me.

  She sat down on her chintz sofa, crossed her legs at the ankles, straightened her back, swallowed some vodka.

  “We can talk some other time if you’re … sick,” I said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing,” she said. “What did you want?”

  “I took a trip to Arizona to talk to some bankers, and I think someone followed me over there. Whoever it was attacked me in my motel room. I fought him off.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Young … skinny.”

  “Spanish?”

  “Latin American. Look, I’ve asked you this before, but I have to do it again. Is there anyone you think could have set you up? Anyone with anything to gain by putting you in prison?”

  “I’ve told you before that Mina Alarid hates me and would do anything to destroy me.”

  “But she didn’t hate Justine, did she? Why would she destroy her?”

  “Emilio Velásquez had a disturbed
relationship with that girl. He’s probably the one who turned her on to drugs. Maybe she knew too much and he had to get rid of her. He hates me too, and by blaming it on me he could get rid of both of us at once.”

  If you accepted the premise that Emilio was a scumbag, it had a certain kind of logic.

  “I’m not a fool,” Martha continued. “I know he was living here and seeing Cynthia and Michael. I know he went on seeing Justine after Michael died, but I wouldn’t make a martyr out of him by kicking him out.”

  “If you know Emilio is living here, you should tell Cindy that.”

  “I’ll tell Cynthia what I want to tell Cynthia.”

  This family was a raw onion. Peel off one tear-inducing layer of deception, and you found another. Real estate and divorce were looking better all the time. “I have to go,” I said.

  Martha walked me to the door, carrying her half-finished vodka. Maybe she didn’t use ice because she didn’t want to hear it rattle in her trembling hand.

  ******

  When I got back to the office I called Cindy. “I think Martha might have had a slight stroke,” I said.

  “My mother?”

  “I just came from her place. When I got there she was standing in front of her door extremely confused. She said she couldn’t remember whether she was going in or out.”

  “She gets absentminded sometimes. It happens to everybody.”

  “This was more serious than that.”

  “Maybe she’d had a Halcion or a drink … or both.”

  “Maybe, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a doctor look at her.”

  “She wouldn’t go. I know my mother.”

  “That could be what happened the night Justine died, you know. It’s kind of hard for me to figure out what took place if Martha doesn’t know herself.” But what happened happened whether there was anyone home to register it or not.