The Death of Blue Mountain Cat

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  “Bisti was the owner.”

  “Okay. Who do we talk to about getting permission for a look-see?”

  “Kent’s the executor.”

  “Well, then. Let’s call his bluff on his ‘anything I can do to help’ offer.” He picked up the phone and dialed the lawyer’s number.

  When he finally got past Kent’s secretary, Kent didn’t sound convincing. “What warehouse?”

  Thinnes wished he could see Kent’s face as he gave him a carefully edited version of the Redbird case and its apparent connection to Bisti’s death. “Bisti’s name is on the lease, and the warehouse manager said his lawyer handled the paperwork.”

  “That must have been before my time.”

  “We’d like your permission to go in and look around.”

  “Certainly—anything that will help you catch David’s killer. Obviously, I can’t give you a key.”

  “We’ll get a locksmith.”

  “Let me know what you find?”

  “Sure thing.” Thinnes hung up.

  Oster said, “Let’s get something to eat before we do anything else. I’m so hungry, I could eat escargot.”

  Ferris said, “What’s a escargot?”

  “That’s a big, expensive name for snails, Ferris,” Oster said.

  “Snails! Christ!”

  Viernes grinned. “What do they taste like?”

  “Who the hell would eat one?” Ferris said. “I’d rather eat roadkill.”

  “What does roadkill taste like, Ferris?” Oster didn’t keep the dislike out of his voice.

  Thinnes answered for him. “Chrome.”

  The warehouse turned out to be empty. There wasn’t even a cardboard box or a gum wrapper. “Think it’d be worth having Forensics go over it for prints?” Oster asked.

  Thinnes shrugged. “They didn’t leave anything else.”

  His pager went off before Evidence got there, and he answered it from Blank’s office. Viernes.

  “Woman named Moreno wants you to call her, Thinnes. She wouldn’t leave a message.”

  Teresa Moreno was five three and maybe weighed a hundred pounds. When Thinnes interviewed her in her aunt’s living room, she sat on the couch, beneath a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with her feet tucked up underneath her. She was very young and very pretty, in a revealing blouse and tight Levi’s. The yellowing bruise on her left cheek corroborated her claim that she’d been beaten.

  As she recited the details of her sordid relationship with Hale, Thinnes listened for something he hadn’t heard before. Hale had been charming and attentive at first. And he really did look like Elvis. When he got out of jail and needed a place to stay, he’d talked her into putting him up. When he first moved in, he looked for a job—or pretended to. But pretty soon he was spending his days sitting around, watching TV and drinking. He’d first slapped her when she asked how his job hunt was going. He’d begun to suspect her of seeing other men. Finally, he’d asked for money and beat her when she told him to get a job and earn his own. That had been the end. He might have killed her if the neighbors hadn’t pounded on the door in response to her screams. That was novel—someone getting involved. Moreno had taken advantage of the interruption to climb out a window and take off down the fire escape. She hadn’t gone back. Not only did Hale outweigh her by seventy or eighty pounds, he also had a gun.

  “What kind of gun?”

  “A little gun.” Teresa Moreno wasn’t fooled by the size. It was just such a little gun that killed her primo, Emiliano.

  Thinnes made her wait in the hall while he pulled his gun and checked to be sure the one-bedroom apartment was empty. It had been searched—thoroughly but not maliciously. Nothing was cut open or dumped out. He guessed Hale had been looking for Moreno’s valuables.

  Beyond the evidence of the search, the place had the look of a bachelor pad—sink, sideboard, and table piled high with dirty dishes, garbage overflowing, cockroaches. There was a box of .22 shells on the table.

  When he gave her the all clear, Moreno stopped just inside the front door. “Dios mio!” She crossed herself then stood swearing softly in Spanish and quietly crying.

  Thinnes pulled on gloves and held up the box of shells. “These yours?”

  “No!”

  He picked up the phone. “I’m going to get us some help. We’ll need to know if anything’s missing. And I’ll give you a ride back to your aunt’s. Best you stay with her till we get this guy.”

  She nodded and pointed to a large open carton on the coffee table. “Esa no es mía. Er…That’s not mine.”

  The carton contained half a dozen ceramic bowls, seemingly identical to the Anasazi artifact in the evidence lockup.

  Fifty-Six

  “Dr. Caleb, Mr. Patrick is here.”

  A little shock of pleasure caused Caleb to shiver. He hadn’t seen Rick since Tuesday night, after he’d tried to compensate Caleb for the missed opera, an effort that had left Caleb literally as well as figuratively breathless. “Send him in.”

  The door opened and all the clichés used to describe the feeling he felt rushed to mind. He inhaled sharply and mentally sighed—ahhh!

  Rick was beautiful, hatless, in a black leather jacket and boots, charcoal-gray slacks and scarf, and a pale gray, hand-knitted sweater. His eyes were the color of the lake reflecting winter skies. As he crossed the room, Caleb told himself that part of Rick’s attraction was his fierce beauty, and the indefinable something that reminded Caleb of Christopher.

  “I’ll be out of town for a few days,” Rick said, after kissing Caleb. “Think you can live without me?”

  Caleb sighed. Whenever he’d almost convinced himself they could work things out, Rick said something like that. It, too, reminded him of Christopher, but Chris’s intimacy had been the genuine thing—born of long association and mutual…What? Respect? Sensibility? Christopher had been an artist. Rick referred to himself jokingly as a hack and didn’t seem to take his gift for words seriously or see his work as art. It was a form of insecurity Caleb found off-putting. He said, dryly, “I’ll try.”

  It didn’t take a genius, much less a psychiatrist, to recognize that part of Rick’s attractiveness was Caleb’s own loneliness, but the metaphors of psychology’s great pioneer seemed especially apt. To use Freud’s terms, he was exhausted by the war between his id and ego—the conflict between his human need for warmth and touch, to be cared for by one special other, and his intellectual misgivings about his lack of fit with Rick. Rick was certainly capable, intellectually, of learning to appreciate opera. And perhaps in time, Caleb would come to see the finer points of hockey. In time. That was the problem. Rick was twenty-seven, Caleb forty-two. He didn’t have the time.

  “I checked on something for you,” Rick said. “The name Wingate struck a chord, so I called a friend in Albuquerque and asked him to refresh my memory.”

  “And?”

  “The name was familiar because when I was there last, it was in the news and on signs at construction sites everywhere. Wingate is very big down there. They really didn’t have much bad to say about him. He employs a lot of people.”

  “But?”

  “Among other things, there’s a rumor that he’s a thief of time. And he was arrested, once, for DUI, but there’s no longer any record of it. He obviously paid someone off to have it expunged—of course you didn’t hear any of this from me.”

  After Rick left, Caleb made a few calls—people he knew in development and zoning. What they had to say about Harrison Wingate confirmed what Rick had said.

  A crated painting had been delivered for Caleb when he got home that afternoon. Mr. Wang flagged him down as he waited for the elevator and offered to bring it up. “I’ll get it,” Caleb said.

  Wang seemed surprised, as he had the first time Caleb refused help with a menial task. Caleb easily carried the crate upstairs. It was five by five by one foot—awkward but not heavy—and decorated with a huge red bow and the caricature of a gift tag with Caleb’s na
me on it. Margolis Gallery was scribbled in the upper left-hand corner. There was no note or packing slip.

  The crate contained David Bisti’s painting of a storm over the desert that Caleb had last seen at Anita’s. He felt enormous pleasure. He unpacked it in the living room and wondered where to put it. The obvious place—over his mantle—was occupied by Christopher’s self-portrait. He leaned the landscape against the fireplace and sat on the couch to consider the problem.

  A soft thud—the sound of a small body hitting upholstery—interrupted his rumination, and was followed by a larger thud. Then a tiny, silky head—orange and white and black—rubbed against his hand. Psyche. Freud was right behind her. He crowded in and began to wash the kitten’s head and ears vigorously.

  Suddenly they were wrestling—feinting and boxing, claws withdrawn—and pretending to bite. Freud grabbed the kitten by the throat, and she stretched out along the edge of the couch, then rolled off. He let go. She took off as if demons were chasing her, and he sat and began to wash himself with exaggerated dignity—like an elder statesman settling his suit coat.

  Caleb picked up the phone and dialed Anita. When he’d thanked her for the painting, she said, “You remember the woman at the museum who called David a wolf-man?” It was a rhetorical question; she didn’t wait for an answer. “Ivan may have a picture of her.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know, but I came across an old list of David’s paintings, and one was titled A Portrait of Irene. I called around and found out Ivan bought it.”

  “So he may know the story behind her fight with David?”

  “Yes. I’d ask him but…”

  Caleb laughed. “I’ll ask him.

  “And you’ll tell the police?”

  “Surely.”

  People on the museum board, mutual acquaintances, told him Ivan had bragged of owning paintings of several of David’s mistresses. Caleb stopped at the critic’s condo/office and bullied his way in.

  “What do you want?” Ivan said. His body language belied his curt tone.

  “I want to see your etchings.”

  Fifty-Seven

  Thinnes laid everything he had on the Bisti murder out on one of the squad room tables. It made an impressive collection. There had to be something he’d missed. Bisti was killed in a small space, containing a limited number of people. And of those, there were few who had the motive or the stomach to stick a sharp object in Bisti’s chest.

  He picked up the guest list and read it over. Nothing. Then he started in on the list the secretary had made of people leaving early and a name jumped out at him. Thomas Redbird! He would have been willing to bet Redbird’s sister was right on. He had known who killed David Bisti. And the knowledge had gotten him killed.

  Ferris, Ryan, Swann, Oster, and Thinnes were sitting around the squad room when Caleb came in.

  “Well, if it isn’t our new pet shrink,” Ferris said. “How’s business, Doc?”

  “Business is always good in this city, Detective Ferris.”

  “You making house calls now, Doc?” Ferris looked pointedly at Thinnes.

  “No, but I’m having a special this month on neuroses, phobias, and personality disorders. Half-off. You ought to come in and take advantage.”

  Thinnes, who was sipping his coffee, couldn’t help laughing, making the coffee go down wrong. He coughed, suddenly, spraying it all over the table in front of him and over Ferris.

  Ferris didn’t laugh. “She-it!” he screeched, before snarling at Caleb, “Tell Thinnes.” Then he headed for the door.

  “There’s a first, Thinnes,” Swann said. “No one in recent memory,” he explained to Caleb, “has gotten Ferris’s goat like that.”

  “What can we do for you, Doctor?” Thinnes asked.

  “I made a few inquiries. It may be irrelevant to David’s death, but rumor circulating in Albuquerque has it that Harrison Wingate’s projects are never held up by the discovery of archeological artifacts because anything found on his sites disappears on the black market.”

  “Told you, Thinnes,” Oster said. “Son of a bitch…”

  Caleb continued, “There’s been speculation that he helped finance more than one development by selling artifacts to Japanese collectors.”

  “They have the money,” Oster said. “But why the Japs?”

  “Wingate has several Japanese investors. And you said it—they have money.”

  “And why should we expect Japanese collectors to be any more virtuous than the American kind?” Thinnes asked.

  “I think David knew about it, but couldn’t prove anything. Hence the installation. He may have hoped he’d call enough attention to Wingate to stop him or to interest the authorities.”

  “It sure gives Wingate a motive,” Oster said.

  “Among others,” Thinnes said. “We heard Bisti was using black-market stuff in his work,” he told Caleb, “though his wife swears they were fakes.”

  “What do you s’pose the connection is between those two items?” Oster asked. “And not to change the subject—what’s your professional take on this Ivan character, Doc? Without all that psychobabble, what makes him tick?”

  “He hates himself. And because he can’t love himself, he can’t believe anyone else can love him. In order to avoid the pain of being rejected—as he’s sure he will be by anyone who knows him intimately—he keeps everyone away with his hurtful remarks. Essentially, he rejects everyone else before they can reject him.”

  “So how do you like him for our murderer?”

  Caleb shook his head. “If he ever let anyone get close enough to become intimate, and that individual betrayed him, he might be sufficiently enraged to commit violence. But otherwise, I doubt it.”

  “Maybe he and Bisti were an item.”

  “I rather doubt that. David wasn’t gay. And Ivan wasn’t enamored of his talent—although he owns quite a few of David’s pieces. Including compromising portraits of Lauren Bisti and Irene, the woman David quarreled with the night he died.”

  Thinnes finally jumped in. “What’s the story on those?”

  “Ivan told me David painted the women he slept with. When he broke up with them he sold their portraits.”

  “Jesus!” Oster said. “He sold his wife’s picture and started painting Kent’s wife.” He looked at Thinnes. “I told you the wife did it. What about that, Doc?”

  “It’s a possibility, but…” Caleb took the Polaroid snapshot of an unfinished nude portrait out of his pocket and handed it to Thinnes. “Ivan gave me this.”

  Thinnes recognized the unfinished painting they’d seen in Bisti’s studio.

  “Ivan swears David gave him an option on that painting.”

  “He say who it’s of?”

  “Amanda Kent.”

  “So our killer could just as well be Mrs. Kent,” Thinnes said. “Or Kent. We’ll have to go back and talk to them all again.”

  “Maybe Ivan killed Bisti to drive the prices up,” Oster said.

  Caleb smiled. “Not for another ten years. In ten years, David might have been a name.”

  It took Thinnes a while, long distance, to locate Officer Tso, the Navajo Tribal Policeman Swann had talked to. He figured it was worth the wait when Tso told him it was rumored Wingate’s projects never got held up by strikes or requests for zoning variances, and confirmed what Caleb had said about archeological remains. “And it’s common knowledge that mysterious, nameless investors are lined up waiting to help him with funding.”

  “Money laundering?” Thinnes asked.

  “Search me,” the cop said. “But you’d think the IRS would be on to him if that were the case.”

  For kicks, Thinnes asked him to look up David Bisti.

  “Arrested for criminal trespass to property. Hel-lo. Harrison Wingate’s property.”

  “See if you can find out how it turned out.”

  “I can tell you that already. Probation.”

  After he finished other business in the buil
ding, Caleb stopped back in the squad room. Ferris was back. “Doc,” he asked, “how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

  “Just one, but he has to be really motivated to change.”

  “How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  Coming back from the coffee machine, Swann joined the game. “Just one—he stands still while the whole world revolves around…”

  “Naw,” Ferris said, “you’re thinking of attorneys. Lawyers don’t screw lightbulbs, just people. How many ex-wives does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  Swann shook his head. “I don’t know about lightbulbs…And let’s not talk about ex-wives screwing.”

  Oster glared at the two of them. “Lady present!”

  “That’s no lady, that’s just Ryan.”

  “Thanks, Ferris.”

  “What do you think, Ryan? How many cops does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  “What time warp have you been in, Ferris? Lightbulb jokes came and went decades ago.”

  “Some guys are slow studies, Ryan,” Thinnes said.

  “You just don’t know the answer, Thinnes,” Ferris insisted. “How ’bout it? How many cops does it take?”

  “Cops don’t do lightbulbs—against union rules.”

  “Yeah,” Oster added, glaring at Ferris. “We’re all sick of lightbulb jokes, and lawyer jokes, and Rock Star jokes. And I don’t want to hear one more damn word about priests.”

  Ferris had gotten what he wanted. He laughed and said, “I’ll see if I can’t come up with something about old dicks who can’t get it up anymore.”

  Oster turned to Caleb. “You’ll have to excuse Ferris, Doc. The department’s toughened up its standards on who it hires, but some of the old assholes are grandfathered.”

  Fifty-Eight

  When Thinnes and Oster walked into the squad room after lunch, Viernes hailed Oster. “Carl, some suspect you busted is screaming for you down at County. Name of Leon. Mark Leon.”