Wall of Glass

by Walter Satterthwait

  “When did you speak to Romero?”

  “This afternoon. After you left.” Another smile, another tilt of her head. “Does it bother you that I was curious?”

  “No. Why should it bother me?”

  “It shouldn’t. But aren’t you curious about the rumors?”

  “There are more rumors in Santa Fe than there are green chiles. I can’t keep up with them all. But Mrs. Leighton—Felice—none of this is getting us any closer to finding that necklace.”

  A smile. “You really don’t like talking about her, do you? You did the same thing when you were over at the house.”

  “We’re business associates. We work together.”

  “Allan said that when you found the man who shot her, you nearly beat him to death with your bare hands. Is that true?”

  “No. Suppose I ask you a question, Felice.”

  She smiled, then sighed in mock resignation. She waved her drink gently. “All right. Ask ahead.”

  “When did you stop sleeping with Frank Biddle?”

  It was a cheap shot, but she took it well. She stared at me for just a moment, and then she laughed. “I love the way you phrase it. The syntax presumes the guilt. Mr. Jones, when did you stop molesting little boys? What can I say? That I didn’t stop?”

  “Did you?”

  “Well,” she smiled, “after all, the man is dead. That’s about as final a stop as you can get.” She sipped at her drink. “But what makes you think there was a beginning?”

  “The police think there was.”

  “Do they now.” Still amused. “That boring little man, Nolan?”

  “Among others. They think that you and Biddle were having an affair, that your husband found out and fired him.”

  She laughed again. “Then they’re even more ridiculous than I thought.”

  “You never slept with him?”

  “Slept with him? We’re being rather circumspect, aren’t we? Are you asking me if we fucked?” She smiled as she said the word. I think I was supposed to be shocked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “In my circumspect way.”

  “Twice, as a matter of fact.” She tilted her head. “Does that surprise you?”

  “No. You get old enough and nothing surprises you.”

  She smiled. “You’re not that old yet, Joshua. But in any case, he was not a particularly inspiring lover. And two times hardly constitutes an affair. And they had nothing whatever to do with my husband’s firing the man. My husband and I have an arrangement. We sleep with whomever we please.”

  I nodded. “An interesting marriage.”

  “As a matter of fact, it is. Some people may not approve, but for Derek and me, it works out very well. Neither one of us is a hypocrite. We both accept each other for what we are.”

  Whatever that might be. “Why did your husband fire Biddle?”

  She moved her shoulders lightly, in a shrug. “He said it had something to do with the accounts.”

  “Did Biddle know the number code for the alarm system?”

  “No.”

  “Who did?”

  “Only us. Derek and I and the children. And Elena, the housekeeper.”

  “Did Biddle know about the necklace? The real one or the duplicate?”

  “I don’t see how he could’ve.”

  “What about the cash and the gun? Did he know they were in the dresser?”

  “He knew I kept cash there. Sometimes he’d need to buy things for the garden, and he had to have cash to get them.”

  “And the gun?”

  She nodded. “He knew about the gun.”

  “He knew where it was?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I showed it to him once.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled. “Are you asking out of prurient interest?”

  “Were they prurient circumstances?”

  “Yes,” she said, still smiling. “They were. We played with it for a while, the two of us.”

  I nodded.

  The blue eyes watched me over the rim of her glass as she sipped at her drink. “Would you like to know how?”

  “Not really.”

  She shook her head, smiling. “Don’t you ever have fantasies, Joshua?”

  “Not about Frank Biddle.”

  “Oh, Frank had a certain feral charm. Initially, at any rate. And a certain amount of stamina. Unfortunately, he totally lacked imagination.” A smile. “And that, nothing can make up for.”

  “How’d he get along with your children?”

  She shrugged lightly, dismissively. “I don’t think Miranda even knew he was alive. Kevin liked him. He and Frank did quite a lot of male things together. Camping, hunting, horseback riding. At that sort of activity, Frank was actually very talented.

  “I’d like to talk to your son.”

  She frowned. “I thought we were discussing fantasies.” She smiled again. “And somehow Kevin doesn’t strike me as your type.”

  “You were the one talking about fantasies. I was the one talking about getting your necklace back. Could you ask him to come to my office tomorrow?”

  “I suppose so. If you think it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “I do.” I stood up. “And now, Felice, I’m sorry, but it’s been a long day.”

  She glanced at the watch on her wrist, a small gold Rolex. She smiled. “It’s not even eleven.”

  “Beauty sleep.”

  “You don’t need it,” she said. She set her glass down on the end table and stood up, turning to face me. “I know something that’ll be even better for you.”

  I’m not sure how I would’ve handled the situation. It’s not very often that I have to fend off attacks from attractive women, and the few times it has happened, I haven’t succeeded very well. I feel fairly preposterous acting the coy maiden.

  But the question suddenly became academic. As Felice Leighton swayed toward me, the bullet smashed through my window and shards of glass went ripping through the room.

  SIX

  TAKING A SIP of his bourbon and water, Hector Ramirez nodded to the window. “I kind of like the cardboard there. You should smash out the glass in all the windows and put cardboard up everywhere. And the duct tape adds a nice touch. Elegant.”

  The cardboard had come from a box I’d found down in the basement; the uniformed police had let me tape it to the window after they finished taking their measurements and digging the slug out of my wall from just beneath a framed black-and-white photograph of Canyon de Chelly. I would’ve been annoyed if the picture had been shattered. It’d been a gift from the photographer friend who took it.

  I was annoyed anyway. The two uniforms and the plain-clothes detective, Parker, had taken almost two hours to finish their preliminary investigation. It was two in the morning now, I still hadn’t had a chance to eat my quarter-pounders, and the adrenaline that had pumped through me earlier had washed away, leaving me limp and slack. I sat slumped down on the sofa, Raggedy Andy in his dotage, my drink in my lap, my feet on the coffee table.

  “I think what I’ll do,” I said, “is smash all the windows and put up steel plate.”

  “It’s too bad you didn’t get a good look at the guy.”

  “I had a few other things on my mind, Hector.”

  Mrs. Leighton for one, and my gun for another. I had reached for the woman and dragged her down with me as I went to the floor, and she was lying beneath me, her breath coming rapidly, her arms clutching at my neck. My gun was in the bedroom closet, thirty feet away. There’s never a gun around when you need one.

  “Are you all right?” I’d asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think so.” We were both speaking in whispers. I could feel her heart beating against my chest. Or maybe it was my heart.

  “You stay here,” I told her. “Don’t move.”

  Her arms tightened around my neck.

  “You’ll be all right,” I said. “Just don’t move.”

  “That was a bullet,” she said. There was fe
ar in her voice, her throat muscles tight, but she was dealing with it. The control that had served her all her life was serving her now. I felt a flicker of admiration for the woman, reluctant but real.

  “Yes it was,” I said.

  She swallowed. “What if he comes in while you’re gone?”

  Good question.

  “If he were going to come in,” I said, “he would’ve come in already.” Not really unassailable logic, but she seemed to buy it. The tension began to leave her arms. I said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  She let out her breath in something like a sigh, and nodded. Her arms slid away from my neck.

  I got up into a crouch, keeping below the level of the window, and smiled down at her to show her that everything was just swell. My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.

  She smiled back weakly, and licked her upper lip.

  Awkwardly, I scurried across the living room into the hallway. Straightening up, I ran down the hall to my bedroom door, swung through it into the darkness, remembered the window, and realized that the shooter could have circled the house. I went into a crouch again to cross over to the closet. Opened the door, found the shoebox in the dark, opened that, slipped out the revolver, flipped open the cylinder, checked by feel to make sure it was loaded, flipped it back. Duckwalked over to the window. Waited for my breath to return. It didn’t.

  I leaned forward and tugged a pillow off the bed. Waved it once in front of the window. Yoo hoo.

  Nothing happened. Either he wasn’t out there or he didn’t have a grudge against pillows.

  Standing up, stomach to the wall, I snaked out my left arm and pushed back the latch at the top of the window. Brought the heel of my left palm against the frame, pushed. The angle was wrong but after a moment I felt the window give. I slid it up as far as it would go. It made no noise.

  No shots, no sound from outside.

  The idea was to get out there and take a look around. I could go slowly and try for quiet, or I could go quickly. Quickly seemed better. The rocky ground below the window would play hell with my Woolrich chamois shirt, and possibly with some bones and ligaments, but so would a bullet or two.

  I dove, tucking my chin against my breastbone. I hit with my shoulder, lost some more breath, rolled in a sloppy somersault, scrambled to my feet, and scuttled into the trees.

  Panting, the pistol raised to my shoulder, I waited.

  Nothing.

  I waited some more, panted some more, with the same result.

  After a while, moving through the trees, keeping close to the ground, I checked the front. No one there, either. Whoever he was, he was gone.

  I looked back at the house. The picture window was untouched, but the smaller window that adjoined it to the right was shattered. Beyond them both was the brightly lit living room. Standing there, outlined by the frames, the two of us had been an easy shot.

  I glanced around, searching for tracks. Found none. And there was no point searching for a spent shell casing by moonlight.

  I called out toward the broken window, “Felice? It’s okay.” I headed for the front door.

  Felice opened it, stood there in the rectangle of light looking down at me. Her hair was mildly disheveled, as though she’d run her fingers through it, but otherwise she looked as cool and self-possessed as she had when she first stepped from the Saab. She let out a deep breath. “Well,” she said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts, “you certainly know how to show a girl a good time.” Her smile was a bit shaky, but it was a smile.

  “You all right?”

  She nodded. A tough lady. She said, “What happens now?”

  “Now,” I said, “we call the cops.”

  And so we had. And the cops at the station had called Hector, who was off duty. He had showed up half an hour after the others arrived. Parker had asked the questions and the uniforms had taken the measurements and searched the yard and driveway with flashlights. No tracks. No spent casing. The missing casing wasn’t much of a surprise, though, because the slug they dug out of the wall had come from .38 revolver. Everyone was gone now but Hector.

  I asked him, “How long will it take for Ballistics to compare the slug with the ones that killed Biddle?”

  Hector shrugged. “A week, if I’m lucky.”

  I nodded. It was only on television that a ballistics report came in overnight. The State Crime Lab, like crime labs everywhere, has a backlog to contend with, and comparing any two slugs requires taking literally hundreds of photographs of each.

  Hector stroked his bandit’s mustache. “There is one thing,” he said, “that disturbs me some.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The driveway’s only about twenty feet away. You and Mrs. Leighton were standing up, and the lights were on.”

  “And he missed.” I took a sip of bourbon and nodded. “Yeah, the same thought had occurred to me. But maybe he’s just a bad shot.”

  “He didn’t just miss. He missed by a good six feet.”

  I drank some more bourbon. “A warning of some kind, you’re saying.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but what kind?”

  “Beats me. My book club payments are all up to date.”

  “Jealous husband?”

  “Leighton? No. According to her, they’ve got an open arrangement.”

  “Does he know that?”

  True, I had only her word for their arrangement. But there was another objection. “We weren’t doing anything, Hector. We were just sitting here, talking about the theft of the necklace.”

  Hector smiled. “Maybe he suspected you had lust in your heart.”

  As indeed I had. And the bullet had come through the window just as Felice leaned toward me. But I shook my head. “I don’t buy it, Hector. It’s possible, but it doesn’t feel right.”

  “Maybe next time, the bullet’ll hit you, and you’ll feel better about it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’d feel a lot better about all this myself, Josh, if you and Rita would forget that finder’s fee.”

  “We’ve already signed a contract with Atco.”

  “A speculation contract. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “It means ten thousand dollars if we find the necklace.”

  “Ten thousand should buy you a real nice funeral. What do mourners go for these days?”

  “Last I heard, you get a discount on groups of six.”

  “Should be quite a soirée.”

  “I think I’ll pass on it, myself.” I sipped at the bourbon. “You find out anything more about Biddle?”

  “Like who killed him, you mean? Nope. We’re still leaning toward Killebrew, but his alibi’s tight. We’ll talk to him tomorrow, find out where he was tonight.”

  “Probably out playing poker again.”

  “Probably.”

  I asked him, “Did Biddle have a girlfriend?”

  Hector frowned. “Why should I give you that?”

  “Because you’re a prince?”

  He snorted. “Try again.”

  “Because you want to find Biddle’s killer and I want to find the necklace. Maybe the two things aren’t connected and maybe they are. But it looks to me like a little cooperation could benefit both of us.”

  He drank some bourbon. “Silver-tongued bastard.”

  I nodded. “That’s what Mom always said.”

  “Chavez,” he said. “Carla Chavez. Biddle lived with her. On Fremont Street. Two thirty-one.”

  “Did she give you anything?”

  “A pain in the neck.”

  “But nothing helpful.”

  “No. She says she doesn’t know anything about Biddle. They’d been living together for two years and she doesn’t know anything about the guy.”

  “You have anything on her?”

  “She was working the night he got killed. Plenty of witnesses. And she’s clean. No record. Her brother’s got one. Benito. Works for Norman Montoya, up in Las Mujeres. But we don’t h
ave any connection between Biddle and the brother.”

  “Montoya’s a fence.”

  “No one’s ever been able to prove it.”

  “He’s also coke, I hear.”

  “No one’s ever proved that either.”

  “Was Biddle selling coke?”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “Shit, anything is possible. As far as I know, Biddle got iced by creatures from Venus. Listen, Josh, talk to Chavez if you want, but stay away from Stacey Killebrew. I don’t want to be prying you up from the sidewalk.”

  “A tender sentiment, Hector, and I appreciate it.”

  “You’re good, Josh, but I don’t think you’re that good. Killebrew would as soon pound your face in as look at you.”

  “I’ll try to bear that in mind.”

  IN THE MORNING, I drove downtown to the police station, signed the first statement I’d made, about Biddle’s visit to the office, and then dictated another, about the shooting incident last night. Hector pointed out that I was making more statements lately than a politician.

  Afterward, I drove out to Allwood’s on Cerillos Road and picked up a new pane of glass for the window. Fitting it in occupied most of the morning, and I didn’t get back to work till after twelve.

  Fremont Street lies to the west of St. Francis Drive, in what local Anglos, with a certain smug complacency, once referred to as the barrio. Until fairly recently the area was entirely Hispanic; but now, with land prices inflated everywhere else in town, those same Anglos are beginning to move in. Two-story adobe haciendas with clerestory windows and solar heat collectors are sprouting up next door to tiny, carefully tended frame cottages. Jaguars and BMW’s prowl down the narrow streets, coolly ignoring the Chevy lowriders and the Ford pickups that slumber along the sides.

  Carla Chavez’s house was neither a hacienda nor a cottage. Even in its better days, three or four decades ago, it would have barely qualified as a hovel. A small, square, featureless building, it sat on a small, square lot surrounded by a rusting chain-link fence. Two small, square windows, one on either side of the front door, stared blankly out at the street. The brown paint that was supposed to make the walls resemble adobe had flaked off in large irregular patches, revealing the gray cinderblock beneath. There were more cinderblocks to the left, these holding up a red ’58 Chevy, missing all four tires and blotched with primer. To the right of the house an ancient refrigerator lay on its back, its door yawning open. The yard was brown dirt, still sodden from the meltwater, and bare, as though not even weeds would grow here.