by Sue Henry
“I have some information I wanted to check with you,” he said, after he had added two spoonfuls of sugar but no cream to his brew. “We got a hit on the fingerprints.”
“That was pretty fast, wasn’t it?”
I had always thought it took hours, even days, for a computerized search of the national bank of fingerprints.
“Well—things are a bit slow right now and this is an interesting case. So when I got back to the station and found the system wasn’t busy I entered the prints we found that didn’t belong to you or Mr. Stringer and left it to search overnight. This morning I found we had a positive result on several of them, for the same individual—a woman.”
Shirley, I immediately assumed, considering that she was the only other female who had been inside the Winnebago since my arrival in Taos.
“Do you know a Sharon Beil? Has she, to your knowledge, been in here in the last few days?”
“No, never heard of her. Is that who was in here last night tearing things apart?”
“Ah . . .” He hesitated, frowning. “Maybe, but those prints were mixed with the smudges we found—they overlapped each other. But you say you don’t know her, so for now we’ll assume that it was. I’m thinking there were probably two people involved last night.”
“Who is this Sharon Beil?”
“A woman arrested in California three years ago on a shoplifting charge—a pretty minor incident.”
“And did you find any unidentified prints from another woman?” I asked. “A friend did stay overnight before last.”
“No one else.”
I knew that I had given the whole motor home a complete spring cleaning before leaving Arizona, and no one but Shirley, whoever had broken in the night before, and Butch had been inside since then. So why wouldn’t the police have found Shirley’s prints as well? Had she been careful what she touched and removed them before she left so abruptly? Could she be this Sharon Beil person simply using Shirley Martin as an alias? What the hell was going on?
“I’ve put out a statewide alert for Sharon Beil,” Officer Herrera told me.
“Do you have a picture?”
He fished a computer printout from his thin pile of papers and handed it across the table to me.
I sat staring down at the police photo of a woman—Shirley! Or was it? The longer I studied it, the less sure I was—but it was close. The woman’s hair was brown and she seemed slightly heavier, a little older, but—with a face-lift and a bleach job? No, maybe not. The bone structure of the face seemed fuller and longer.
“You know her?” he asked, leaning forward attentively.
I shook my head finally.
“I can’t say absolutely, but I don’t think this is my friend—well, she’s not exactly a friend, just an acquaintance who stayed here with me for one night. I think it’s not her, but it’s so similar that for a minute I thought it was.”
“You’re sure?”
“Ah—no, I’m not. But I don’t think so. When was this picture taken?”
“Four years ago. What’s your friend’s name?”
I told him and he wrote it down, along with the address of the duplex, which I hoped would not cause Shirley problems if she was not involved. It would certainly not be to the liking of her landlady, Ann, to have the police show up looking for her tenant. Still, the resemblance bothered me.
Could Shirley have changed so much? It was possible. Maybe she had had surgery done, bleached her hair, and lost weight since then. Still . . .
“Well, let’s see if we have any success in finding this woman, locally or maybe in Santa Fe—or both women, if that’s the case. People sometimes look different in person than they do in a mug shot. I’ll get back to you, but if you see her again let me know, okay? And, yes, you can keep the picture. It’s a copy.”
I promised that I would, thinking that perhaps it was time I made an attempt to track Shirley down—if she was a Shirley and not a Sharon. I still wasn’t sure of that face in the picture. But underneath it all lay a feeling that she either had something to do with the chaos of my living space or would know who did.
Butch drove in as Herrera drove out.
Stepping in the door, he was immediately greeted enthusiastically by Stretch, as if he were still making up for his show of teeth and the growl of the night before.
“Hey there, buster.” Butch knelt on the top step to give him the attention demanded and it was a long minute or two before he turned back to me.
“I saw a squad car leaving. Anything new?” he asked, getting up.
As I poured him the last of the coffee, I told him what Herrera had reported.
“She looks kind of familiar,” he said, leaning both elbows on the table and frowning thoughtfully at the face in the picture. “I think I’ve seen this woman somewhere here in town, but not on this trip. Or else I’ve seen your friend, if this isn’t her.”
I told him what Pat had said about Shirley’s visits to the Adobe Bar and he agreed that it was possible he had seen her there.
Thinking about Pat brought to mind the reception for the weaving show that evening at Weaving Southwest, so I asked Butch if he would like to go. He accepted and suggested that we have dinner afterward, a plan that was definitely to my liking.
“But let’s get going before it heats up.” He drained his coffee mug and got up to set it in the galley.
We made sure the Winnebago was locked up tight, climbed into Butch’s green pickup, and were soon headed north on Paseo del Pueblo, with Stretch resting comfortably on my lap. At the far end, near the Kachina Inn, the street made a wide left turn and became a highway, and in five or six miles we arrived at an intersection with a full set of traffic lights.
“You know,” Butch told me with a grin, when we had made another left turn and were traveling on Highway 64, “when I asked for directions to the gorge at the hotel, they told me to follow Paseo del Pueblo until I reached ‘the old blinking light’ and showed me on a map. That’s how it’s marked: ‘The Old Blinking Light.’ It’s evidently been a local landmark for years and even though its single blinking traffic light is now history they still call it that. It almost gives a new meaning to the term three on red.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, locals seem to think that you should be able to get three cars through an intersection after the light turns red. Now that’s laid-back in my book. There are a lot of laid-back things I like about this town. When and if I ever retire, I might just move here.”
“It gets cold in the winter,” I reminded him. “Lots of snow and freezing temperatures. Wouldn’t it bother your leg?”
“Yeah, but we get snow in Santa Fe too, and if I didn’t have to go back and forth to work every day, it wouldn’t be much of a problem. I refuse to let a gimp leg get the best of me to the point of making me live somewhere I don’t like. Small towns appeal to me. I like this place and its people—a lot.”
So did I. I enjoy warm weather, but the idea of snowy winters was attractive as well, considering all the years I’ve had in Alaska to feel at home in them. I don’t think I could settle for the rest of my life in a place like Phoenix where Christmas has no snow. It just wouldn’t feel right.
We drove a few miles farther through broad open space of low rolling hills and mesas that rose up west of Taos, and it gradually turned to dry, brush-covered land that reminded me of much of the Four Corners country with its high desert and the area between Grand Junction and Salt Lake through which I had driven the previous fall. I could smell sage through the open window. A magpie perched on a fence post we passed and there were hawks riding thermals overhead against the brilliant blue of the sky. There is less oxygen in the air at almost seven thousand feet elevation, which accounts for the deeper color of the sky and its sunsets.
We couldn’t see the Rio Grande Gorge until we were all but upon it. Then, suddenly, we could see the railings of the two-thousand-foot-long bridge that spanned it, but there was nothing higher than those rai
lings to interfere with the flat expanse of the surrounding country. It was a graceful bridge in form—metal girders with a pleasing curve to the central arch that met a shorter one on either end. They rested on a pair of concrete piers that rose up out of the gorge, one on each side of the river that flowed between them.
Butch swung into a parking lot on the eastern side and we walked out onto the bridge and looked down at what seemed a heavy thread of water six hundred and fifty feet below.
The power of water to carve its way into the earth always amazes me. Given sufficient time, following the path of least resistance, the relentless erosion of water can slice its way through even the hardest of stone—the volcanic basalt of northern New Mexico, for instance. How long, I wondered, staring down, had it taken this water to wear its way six hundred and fifty feet down, becoming a river in the process and creating the gorge that fell away below us?
The river was not as large as I had anticipated, but confinement within the narrow gorge had something to do with it—and that I had probably seen too many Western movies of cowboys driving herds of cattle across a wider, shallower river that was always pictured as the Rio Grande and probably was somewhere farther south. It was, in fact, so far down that being there felt almost unreal and that dizzy feeling you sometimes get in looking down from a great height was somehow lessened. Still, I knew it would make anyone who was afraid of heights very nervous indeed, especially when the bridge vibrated slightly as vehicles passed over it. The water of the river was not clear, but a muddy caramel brown. The dark walls of the gorge rose over it in huge steps, revealing the volcanic flows that had formed them, one layer after another, all of which the water had worn through and conquered. Fallen stones lay in piles at the bottom, partially covered with the contrasting soft green of sage, rabbitbrush, and willow.
As we leaned there on the rail, watching, a bright bit of blue in the brown water caught my attention as, around the bend, perhaps half a mile away, an inflatable raft came floating. There were several people in it, and the sight finally gave me some perspective on the depth of the gorge, for they seemed very small in a raft that appeared to be only an inch or two long. What had looked like gravel on the riverbank now could be seen to be huge boulders in contrast.
“That’s a long drop,” Butch commented, when we had watched the raft float slowly closer, its passengers waving up at us, and finally pass out of sight under the bridge.
We walked back to the pickup and drove across the bridge to a roadside stop on the other side with restrooms and roofed-over picnic tables. There was parking for hikers who elected to go off and clamber down into the gorge somewhere farther south. Such hiking tempted me not at all, but I picked a large handful of sage to take home with me, disturbing a small, swift lizard that scampered off leaving a trail of tiny, neat footprints in the dust.
“Lunch?” Butch asked, when we were almost back to town.
“Let’s get back together this evening,” I said, begging off. “The reception at Weaving Southwest starts at seven. Let’s go about then, okay? I’ve got an errand or two to run. Then I might just take a nap through the warmest part of the afternoon.”
We agreed that he would pick me up about seven and we’d have dinner later. I thanked him for the trip to the gorge and waved as he drove out of the RV park, still pleased that our paths had finally crossed again and thinking I should let our friend Jessie know that I had seen him and he was doing well.
A nap was appealing, but I had a couple of other objectives first: a visit to Shirley’s landlady, for one, and a conversation with Alan Medina at his gallery on Kit Carson Road, for another. Through them I might be able to somehow catch up with Shirley and get a few answers to the questions that were cluttering my mind—including whether or not she was, or was related to, the woman in the picture that Officer Herrera had given me.
Before total frustration set in, it was time to find out anything I could from the only sources I had.
SIXTEEN
I TOOK STRETCH ALONG BUT, REMEMBERING THE landlady’s reaction to him on our last visit, left him in the car when I reached the duplex Shirley shared with Ann Barnes. As I parked in front I could see that the drapes were closed, as was the garage door, so I couldn’t tell if Shirley was there, but knocking on the front door brought no response.
I knew the other half was occupied, however, for I saw a curtain twitch as Ann peered out to see who was stopping by. She was, as I expected, the sort to keep careful track of all her neighbor’s comings and goings, and of Shirley’s visitors as well. No wonder she had been the one to hear a car running in a closed garage on the other end of the building in the middle of the night. She was also the only person I knew who had actually met Anthony Cole and might be able to tell me something about him.
She kept me waiting on the front step—not showing up to open the door until I had knocked twice, and then trying to look surprised to see me.
“Oh,” she said. “Mrs. McNabb, isn’t it?”
I think I mentioned she was big on oh.
“Yes. I’d like to have a word with you, Mrs. Barnes.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She took a step back and narrowed the opening of the door with one hand as if she were about to close it. “I’m really very busy at the moment.”
“It won’t take more than a couple of minutes,” I promised, stepping forward onto the doorsill.
As I invaded her comfort zone she backed away, as I’d expected she would. Most people, Americans at least, have an instinctive reluctance to being crowded that can be useful at times.
“Well—all right, but only for a minute or two. I really must ...”
She allowed the sentence to trail off as she turned and led me into a living room that was an exact reverse copy of Shirley’s, but shape was as far as the similarity went.
Almost every surface I could see held something.
The walls were filled with the embroidered mottoes Shirley had mentioned—large and small, framed and on pillows. LIVE EVERY DAY AS IF IT WERE YOUR LAST—TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE—BEAUTY IS ONLY SKIN-DEEP—HASTE MAKES WASTE—those were only a few, but I quit reading at that point, wondering if Ann had picked them for what they said or was just compelled to do needlework.
The furniture was covered—tables, chairs, the sofa, even the shelves of a bookcase—with antimacassars and bits of bric-a-brac—bone china cups and saucers on shelves, porcelain figurines—the floors, carpeted or not, with throw rugs. Even her grandfather clock had a dust ruffle.
It was a truly amazing sight, almost awe-inspiring—and very sad. The woman must have had years of time by herself, with little else to do. I began to understand how having a tenant next door whose life she could vicariously share had become her obsessive focus.
“Oh,” I said.
“You like the mottoes?” she asked, with a smile. “I’ll make you one, if you like.”
Oh damn, I thought, thinking it would probably read, BIRDS IN THEIR LITTLE NESTS AGREE.
“It’s very kind of you to offer,” I told her, “but I travel in a motor home and not only is space limited, but there’s no way to put a nail in the wall to hold one.”
“I could do a pillow.”
“Thanks,” I said, thinking fast in desperation, “but I’ve more of those than I need. You could help more by telling me a few things about Shirley Morgan.”
“Oh, I don’t know much about her,” Ann said quickly. “I make it a rule to stay out of the lives of my tenants, you see.”
Sure you do, I thought. And if my granny had wheels she’d be a bicycle. Now there was a motto that might be useful.
“Have you seen her since yesterday? Was she here last night?”
“How would I know that?” she asked stiffly, determined to maintain a detached pose.
“When I was here with Shirley you said you had heard water running.”
“Oh, well—yes. I suppose I have heard it from time to time.”
“So—have you heard it running ye
sterday, or today?”
“I might have, I guess. I don’t pay much attention.”
In a pig’s eye!
Getting any information out of the woman was like playing hide-and-seek blindfolded.
“Look,” I told her somewhat sternly, “Shirley stayed with me night before last, but left without telling me where she was going and hasn’t been back since yesterday morning. I’m trying to find her, to make sure she’s okay. Can you help me? Or should I call the police and tell them she’s missing? They’d probably show up and leave fingerprint powder all over her half of this duplex. Tough to clean up—fingerprint powder—you know?”
That got her attention.
“Oh dear,” she said with a frown. “All right. Shirley came back yesterday morning in a taxi. Water was running over there and I heard her talking to some guy on the phone before she left.”
How, I wondered, had Ann been able to tell who Shirley had been talking to, or even hear her, for that matter? I didn’t ask.
“What makes you think she left?”
“I went to the grocery store and came back just before noon. She must have left while I was gone, because I haven’t seen or heard anything else—yesterday or today. Maybe she found another place.”
“Let’s go and find out. You’ve got a key, right?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not legal for me to go in without notice.”
Bicycle-granny wheeled through my mind again.
“Look,” I told her, “you didn’t see her leave. You’re just assuming she did. Supposedly she tried to commit suicide once already. Don’t you think she could have made another attempt, a quieter one this time that didn’t involve carbon monoxide? I think we have enough of a reason to find out, don’t you?”
She stared at me, eyes wide. Then she turned without a word and went into her kitchen. I heard a cabinet door open and close, and she came back with a key in her hand.
As we went across to the front door of Shirley’s half of the duplex I noticed that Ann was not using the cane she had carried when we met. Evidently, she either had good days when she didn’t need it, or she didn’t need it at all and used it to solicit sympathy, which I would not have put past her.