Wall of Glass

by Walter Satterthwait

  I nodded. “Good. They’re a great group, the I.R.S. Probably clear the whole thing right up for you.”

  “Yeah. Maybe in our lifetime, too.” He unclasped his hands and leaned forward, stroked his mustache with finger and thumb. “You’re not holding anything back on me, are you, Josh?”

  “After all we’ve meant to each other?”

  “I’m giving you a lot of rope here, and I’d hate to see you hang yourself with it.”

  “So would I, Hector.”

  He nodded. “You find anything more about Griego, you let me know.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “And give my regards to Rita.”

  DOWN THE HALL, in Burglary, Sergeant Nolan was out, but I knew the uniformed cop manning the desk, Larry Baca, and after a call to Hector for approval, he used the computer to pull up the reports on the Killebrew burglaries.

  There had been six of them, three art galleries and three private homes. As Nolan had told me, the phone wires had been cut in each case. The wires to the exterior siren had been bypassed at all three galleries, but not at the two houses which’d had sirens, the Garcias’ and the Hammonds’.

  I asked Baca if there had been any other burglaries since Killebrew left prison that matched his M.O. He said there’d been one possible—phone wires cut at a burglary out in La Tierra, an expensive subdivision on the west side—but that Killebrew had apparently been out of town when it occurred. Which, he said, had very seriously pissed off Sergeant Nolan, who’d been trying to get Killebrew back in jail since the day he got out.

  I copied the reports into my notebook, then went across the street to the Public Library and called Rita. Maria answered and told me that Rita was in the pool. I said I’d call back later. I checked the phone book for John Lucero. He was listed, and I called the number. No answer.

  LUCERO LIVED ON Camino Don Miguel, a dirt road on the east side of town. The yard was hedged in and the house was hidden, which suited my purposes just fine. I drove the Subaru about seventy-five yards past the driveway and parked it. I didn’t know how long I’d be in there, and if Lucero or anyone else came along while I was occupied, I didn’t want him blocking my way. Or getting my license number.

  I walked back to the house, a clipboard tucked under my arm. The clipboard was supposed to make me invisible—anybody carrying one is clearly on the up-and-up. But there was no one fussing around in the yards or peering from the windows, and my cunning, as usual, went unnoticed.

  At the entrance to the driveway, I checked Lucero’s mailbox. Empty. Which meant that someone was picking up the mail, or that he wasn’t getting any. But this was an election year, and political circulars were flooding the post office. I threw away at least three or four of the things every week.

  I crunched up the gravel driveway. The air was warm and the smell of fresh-cut grass ran through it like fine silver wires. But the smell wasn’t coming from Lucero’s grass; his lawn was rocky and untended, overgrown with weeds. The house was a single story weather-beaten adobe, limp lilac bushes standing forlornly on either side of the entrance. I knocked on the front door. John Lucero didn’t open it, hand me a diamond necklace, and tell me who had killed Frank Biddle and Silvia Griego. No one opened it.

  I tried the handle. Locked. With a Medeco lock, a nasty piece of hardware to pick. There are people who can do it, but I’m not one of them. I went around to the back.

  The back porch was screened in. The metal latch on the rickety wooden door was no match for my credit card, and neither was the slam-lock bolt on the door to the house. I’ve seen it before. People invest good money in a heavy-duty lock for the main entrance, and they ignore the rear. Hoping, apparently, that thieves will do the same. Or maybe there’s a chain lock, and they figure that’s enough, and, naturally, they forget to use it.

  I was in the kitchen, and there was a chain lock; and, obviously, Lucero had forgotten to use it. Not a real careful guy, it seemed.

  He was certainly a whole lot less finicky about housekeeping than Silvia Griego had been. He was one of those people who waited till all the dishes and silverware in the house are in the sink, dirty, before deciding to wash them. A decision that, in this particular cycle, hadn’t yet been reached. The counters were littered with empty cans, torn wrappers, and discarded TV dinner cartons, and the floor beside the single brown paper garbage bag was strewn with still more junk. Which meant he probably lived alone; two people would be unlikely to share the same appreciation for squalor.

  I started looking in there. Fifteen minutes later, hidden back toward the corner on the top shelf in one of the cabinets, I found a round red metal fruitcake tin. I opened it. The fruitcake had been replaced by a neat pile of hundred dollar bills. Forty-two of them. Four thousand, two hundred dollars. I put the bills back in the can, put the can back on the shelf.

  I moved through the house. None of the other rooms were any neater than the kitchen. There was a living room, a bedroom, and a second bedroom that was being used as a studio. Smell of cut wood in the studio, and the sharp odor of turpentine, then two identical kachinas, unpainted, standing atop a stained drafting table covered with carving knives and paint brushes.

  Now that I’d found his stash, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, and didn’t know if I’d recognize it if I found it. Whatever it was, I didn’t. Not in the studio, not in the bedroom.

  In the living room, a phone answering machine sat on one of the end tables. I rewound the tape and played it back.

  The first voice was a woman’s. “John. We’ve got to talk. Call me.” A click and then a dial tone.

  I rewound it, played it once more to make sure.

  It was Silvia Griego, and there was an urgency in her tone that might have been fear.

  I also recognized the next voice on the tape, the flat west Texas accent, the lack of emphasis in the words that somehow made them sound more threatening. Only one sentence. “Just keep your mouth shut and stay outta sight.”

  Killebrew.

  The next message was a woman, her voice unfamiliar and brittle with anger: “Thanks a lot, Johnny. I waited there for an hour. Do me a favor and go fuck yourself.”

  The last message was the same voice, the anger gone, a pleading tone taking its place: “Johnny, this is Bev again. Call me when you get a chance?”

  The last three messages on the tape were empty, each only a click and a dial tone as someone hung up. Bev, still trying to locate Lucero?

  All right. Assume that the message from Griego came on the day I’d talked to her, Tuesday, two days ago. That meant that the next message, from Killebrew, could’ve come that night. After he’d killed her?

  Killebrew tells Lucero to lie low. And Lucero does, even missing his date with Bev, whoever she is.

  It fit, but only the assumption that Griego’s call had come in on Tuesday. For all I knew, it could’ve been there on the tape, waiting, for a week.

  I went back to searching.

  Finally, under the sofa and pushed back all the way to the wall, I found a large blue-and-yellow beach towel, folded into a long flat rectangle. I tugged it out and opened it up.

  Inside were a pair of wings. Bird wings.

  They were big. I fanned them open, side by side. The feathers were dark brown streaked with stripes of lighter brown. The undersides were a still lighter brown, with stripes of creamy white. The longest feathers, at the wing-tip, were over two feet long. The wings had apparently come from the same bird, which meant that the thing had possessed a wingspread of over four feet. An eagle?

  Was this what Montoya had meant up in Las Mujeres?

  Birds of a feather?

  SEVENTEEN

  “You WANNA KNOW about eagle feathers, huh?” Winnifred Gail was in her mid-fifties, a big woman maybe six feet tall who needed that height to carry her weight, which had to be at least two hundred and fifty pounds. She was sitting back in her office chair, behind an eight-foot-wide slab of four-inch glass that served as her desk, and she was wearin
g a bright yellow dress printed with big bright red carnations. Her lipstick was the same color as the carnations, and her hair, piled up in a 1940’s bouffant, was the color of steamed carrots. The one thing that kept her from looking like a cartoon was the intelligence, shrewd and hard, that glinted in her small eyes.

  I nodded to her. “Rita said she’d call you.”

  “Oh she did, she did. Talked to her a little over an hour ago.” She nodded, eyeing me. There was the hint of prairie in her voice, Oklahoma or Texas. “So you’re the Croft fella works with her,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Heard a lot about you,” she said. “You carryin’ a torch for Rita, like they say?”

  “We work together.”

  She barked at me. Arf, arf, arf, like Little Orphan Annie’s Sandy. It took me a moment to realize that she was laughing. “I like that,” she said. “No denials, right? And no admissions neither. Slippery, but honest.” She nodded approval. “We’ll get along, Croft. Just what is it you wanna know about eagle feathers?”

  “First of all,” I said, “is possession of them illegal?”

  “Depends,” she said. “Depends on who you are. If you’re an Indian, a Native American with your name on the census polls, and you got a warehouse full of the things, the Fish and Wildlife people might stew about it some, but there isn’t a whole lot they’d be able to do. See, you could find yourself maybe eighteen thousand reasons why you needed those things for religious reasons, and Fish and Wildlife, they know that the courts all say you got a right to practice your religion, even if it uses raptor feathers.”

  “Raptor feathers?” I said.

  “Raptors, birds of prey. Eagles, hawks, owls, vultures. They’re all protected, see, by the federal government. Most of them since nineteen-eighteen, when the Migratory Wildlife Treaty Act went into law. The Indians are allowed to own the feathers, but they can’t sell ’em, and even the Indians aren’t allowed to kill the birds.”

  “If they can’t kill the birds, then how do they get the feathers?”

  She grinned. “There’s the rub, huh? Tell you a story. I was on a buying trip once, up to Chinle on the Navajo reservation, and this ol’ boy, frenna mine for years, comes up to me with an eagle claw, right? ‘Bout so big, size of my hand, ugly as sin but it had some nice silver work on it, he’s good with silver. I say to him, ‘Harold, you know damn well I put that in my gallery, the Federales’ll be all over me like warts on a horny toad, and besides, where’d an ole fart like you get that sucker anyway?’ He tells me, this is with a straight face now, he tells me he was just walkin’ out along the hills and this big ol’ eagle keels over out of the sky and plops down at his feet.” She barked. “Tells me it was probably sick.” She barked again.

  I smiled. “So an Indian,” I said, “is allowed to own the feathers. What about someone who isn’t an Indian?”

  “Then,” she said, “Fish and Wildlife can bust your ass good. They think you’re selling the things, you’re lookin’ at a five thousand dollar fine and five years in the pokey.”

  “The eagle feathers,” I said. “They were once used in kachinas.”

  “Right,” she nodded. “You still see some of the old ones hangin’ around, eagle feathers all over. Worth a pretty penny. And legal, too, long as they’re pre-nineteen-eighteen. But you gotta have certification, see, something that proves the kachina is old enough. Last year, frenna mine on the Plaza, nother dealer, he had one in his window, and I know the damn thing was a hunnerd years old if it was a day, and Fish and Wildlife came and carted it off anyway. Confiscated the thing, just like that.” She shrugged her heavy shoulders. “Guy didn’t have any proof.”

  “Would it be illegal for an Indian to sell a kachina made with eagle feathers, one that wasn’t certified?”

  “Sure would. Get the same penalty as a white guy.”

  “You buy all your kachinas, the ones in your gallery, directly from the Indians?”

  She nodded. “For thirty years now.”

  “Have any of them ever offered you kachinas, new ones, that had eagle feathers?”

  “When I started up, sure they did. And ever so often one of the ol’ guys like Harold tries to sniff me out, but that’s a game with ’em now, mostly. They all know I wouldn’t touch the things.”

  “Have you heard of any dealers here in town who might be selling eagle feather kachinas?”

  Her eyes narrowed, nearly disappearing between folds of skin. “Everyone in town knows the score. Don’t make any sense to sell something for a thousand bucks that’ll cost you five thousand in fines and maybe some time in the pen.”

  “But what about overseas sales? Wouldn’t it be possible for a dealer to sell eagle feather kachinas somewhere overseas—to Germany, let’s say—without much risk?”

  “You know,” she said, her eyes still narrowed. “I’m startin’ to get kind of a weird feeling about all this. Couple days ago Silvia Griego dies, and I know for a fact that Silvia’s a heavy dealer to Germany, probably the heaviest in town. And suddenly you show up here asking questions about dealing kachinas to Germany.”

  “Would it be possible?”

  “Sure it would. Even if the things are checked at customs here in the States, no one’s gonna know the difference. A feather’s a feather, right? And once they’re in Germany, Fish and Wildlife can’t do a whole hell of a lot about ’em.”

  “The eagle feathers make the kachinas more valuable over there?”

  “’Course they do. More authentic, right? You think the kachinas the Indians use on reservation land, the Hopis and the Pueblos, you think those suckers are put together with dyed goose feathers? Or turkey feathers? And the Krauts, see, they’re ape-shit about Indian stuff. Only it’s gotta be authentic, know what I mean?”

  “What do you think of John Lucero’s work?”

  Eyes narrowed again, she said, “You wanna tell me what this is all about?”

  “Would it surprise you if I told you that I think Silvia Griego was dealing eagle feather kachinas to Germany?”

  She looked at me for a moment. At last she said. “Surprise me? No. I gotta admit it wouldn’t surprise me much. Depress me some, maybe. I liked Silvia.” She frowned. “Well, no, that’s puttin’ it too strong. You gotta respect somebody, I guess, before you can like her. I felt sorry for her, is what it was, probably. She was a widow, see. Husband died ten years ago. She bought the gallery with the insurance money and she’s been runnin’ hard ever since, tryin’ to prove something. And the way she proved it, see, was with sex and money. Now you gotta figure sex and money, they’re at the bottom of most’a what folks do, right? And Lord knows I don’t mind makin’ a buck or two myself, or slippin’ into the sack for a quickie now and then—” grinning, she winked at me “—we could talk about that a little later, if you got the time—but with Silvia, both of ’em had become almost like obsessions. New men and more money. New kicks, new tricks. And more money.”

  “Would John Lucero make kachinas using eagle feathers?”

  “The thing you gotta remember here, about Johnny Lucero, is that he’s good. I mean he’s real good. Too good.”

  “How so?”

  “Well now, most of the artists who do kachinas they’re gonna sell, they leave stuff out. Little details, you know? Maybe some paint here and there, or some beadwork. Nothing major, nothing an Anglo buyer might spot. But always something, you get me? And makes sense, too, you think about it. I mean, these things are religious, they represent the important spirits, and they’re connected, see, to the spirits they represent. And the more accurate the image is, the stronger the connection is. So no Indian’s gonna want a real accurate image of one of the spirits sitting on some Anglo’s coffee table, right next to the empty beer bottles. It’s like blasphemy, right?”

  “And you’re saying that Lucero’s kachinas are too authentic.”

  She nodded briskly. “Too authentic, right. Lot of the other artists hereabouts, they don’t care much for Johnny. What it is,
they think he’s selling out their religion. Some people, seems to me, are born with some important parts missing, and Johnny’s one of ’em.”

  “So Lucero is capable of making the kachinas with eagle feathers.”

  She frowned at me. “Didn’t I just get through sayin’ that?”

  “What would an eagle feather kachina be worth in Germany?”

  “Depends on the quality. A good piece, one of Johnny’s, could bring in maybe five thousand.”

  I frowned at her.

  “’Smatter?” she said. “Sound like too much? You gotta remember, like I said, those Krauts go bonkers over this stuff.”

  “No,” I said. “It sounds like too little. How long do you think it takes Lucero to make one of these things?”

  She shrugged. “Start to finish, carving the wood, painting it, decorating it, embroidering the cloth, maybe a month.”

  “So in four years, if he made only the illegal kachinas, he could put out forty-eight of them. At five thousand a piece, that comes to—” I looked away, calculating.

  “Two hunnerd and forty thousand,” she said immediately.

  I nodded. “Right. So let’s suppose that Silvia Griego had some money tucked away in a Swiss account. And let’s suppose that it was over four hundred thousand dollars.”

  She eyed me. “We’re talkin’ hypothetical here, huh?”

  “Right. Now if she had it hidden away, then the money probably came from illicit sales—why hide it otherwise? But let’s say she’s been putting it into the account for a period of five years. Even if Lucero worked faster than you say he does, he couldn’t have put out enough kachinas to bring in that much cash. And besides, in order to show where his income was coming from, he had to make legitimate sales, too. Legitimate kachinas. And I know he was, because I’ve seen them. So where did the extra money come from?”

  Winnifred Gail picked up a ball-point pen, stared down at it, clicked it a few times. “Over four hundred thousand, huh?”

  “Four hundred and twenty. Hypothetically.”

  Frowning, still looking down at the pen, she shook her head sadly. “Poor Silvia.”