by Don Travis
“Why?”
“I recognized the other man, and since he practices in my brother’s law firm, I decided to resist temptation—should it ever present itself.”
I sat up straight. “You have a brother with—”
“Stone, Hedges, Martinez, Levisohn, and the rest of them.”
“May I ask his name?”
“He’s not involved, so I see no harm in it. He’s my half brother, actually. Same mother, different fathers. His name is James Addleston.”
“Have you mentioned the tête-à-tête with Emilio to him?”
“Absolutely not. While he’s aware of my predilection, I don’t rub his nose in it. That was a personal and private affair.”
“I’ll try to respect that.”
“Thank you.”
“Did Emilio leave anything behind when he took his leave? In the house, perhaps? Or in your car?”
“He drove his own car. He followed me home. And no, he left nothing behind.”
“When he came inside, did he bring anything with him, such as a black nylon backpack?”
Sturgis frowned. “Not that I recall. Let’s see.” He leaned back, examining the club’s massive, carved vigas as he considered the question. “He came inside empty-handed. When he showed me the photos, he fished them out of his back pocket. As I recall there were four of them.”
“So you saw no negatives.”
“No. Just the prints.” He lowered his gaze from the ceiling and met my eyes squarely. “Whoa! There’s a problem with the pictures, isn’t there?” He frowned. “That makes no sense. Everyone knows about Del Dahlman.”
“Would you want photos of yourself like that floating around?”
“Ah, I see the problem.”
“Please keep this conversation private. There is no need for your brother to learn of this, is there?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I should give him a heads-up on what’s going on.”
“Up to you, of course, but I prefer you don’t. No need to roil the corporate waters at this point. Just for the record, I need to ask a blunt question. Do you have either copies of the photographs in question or negatives of such photographs? Or”—I added to cover all the bases—“do you have such photographs stored in your computer?”
“No, of course not. I do not have them and have never had them in my possession. Beyond”—he covered his bases too—“looking at them with Emilio.”
“Do you know of other friends or acquaintances Emilio might have shared the pictures with? Anyone at all?”
He shook his head. “I’ve seen him around town with other people—men. But I don’t know any of them, so I can’t help you there.”
“Thank you for your candor.”
After that, I snapped off the tape recorder and we spent the time discussing how much Albuquerque had changed over the past few years, discovering a few mutual acquaintances as we ate. Then I signed the bill and the professor left after giving a shaky promise to forego speaking to his brother about Del’s plight.
The next task, now even more urgent, was to talk to Del again. He suggested a meeting in a neutral corner, so I remained where I was, absently studying the ornate Mexican tinwork adorning the wall sconces and the three chandeliers in the room. The intricate details in those pieces always intrigued me. I often wished I were creative. Over the years I’d tried everything from painting still life to crafting lumpy clay piles that resembled cow pies more than life forms. I love art but stink at creating it.
When Del showed up, he listened to the tape of my interview with Sturgis and was shaken more by this latest development than by anything thus far.
“Jim Addleston is as close to a rival as I have in the firm. He’s bright, aggressive, fast on his feet, and ruthless.” Del grimaced. “The nature of this thing just changed. Maybe I should warn the partners.”
“Your call.” I sipped my Virgin Mary. I never drink alcohol while on the job except for nursing one now and then during a late dinner interview. “But let me know what you intend to do. It may affect the way I go about the investigation. Of course, if you decide to come clean, there may be no need for any more poking around.”
“Get one thing straight. I want this son of a bitch exposed regardless of what I decide to do.”
The next morning, after a quick call to Hazel to let her know he was on the way, Del showed up at my office again. He maneuvered past my office manager, sat in the chair opposite me, and tugged at an earlobe.
“Two days in a row. I’m honored,” I said in a flat tone.
“Can it, BJ. There’s been a new development. I got another note.”
“I hope to hell—”
“Don’t worry. I saved it for you this time. As soon as I saw the writing, I knew what it was.”
“Was it delivered the same way?”
“No. A messenger brought it to the office.”
“I’ll need the name of the messenger service.”
“I don’t have a name. Nobody saw who left it. Our receptionist was called back to the copy room for a moment, and when she returned to the front desk, the envelope was lying right there.”
“I’ll need her name.”
“Hell, Vince, you can’t question her. That would expose everything. Besides, I talked to her. She didn’t see a thing. I asked around the office, and nobody else did either.”
“So the blackmailer was lucky enough to deliver the demand when nobody was at the front desk? Someone’s always at the front desk, Del.”
“That’s usually true, unless Belinda steps away for a moment.”
“And he just happened to pick that moment? Unlikely.”
“I thought about that too. There are glass panels on either side of the big double doors to our suite. Somebody must have watched from over near the elevators until she was called away.”
“Anyone notice a loiterer?”
“No one from the office did, and we occupy the entire floor. But I absolutely forbid you to question Belinda.”
I made a point of writing the name in my pocket notebook. “That’s the receptionist, right?”
“Dammit, Vince, don’t go near her. You hear me?”
“Okay, but I’ll have Charlie check out her background anyway. Give me the rest of her name.”
He fumed a little more but finally provided her last name: Gerard.
“Her fingerprints are probably on the envelope, so I can run them through the system. Who else handled it—and the note?”
“I don’t know how many people handled the envelope before I got it, but nobody’s touched the paper inside. I used tweezers to extract it.”
“Let me see it.”
Del pulled two clear plastic sheaths from his attaché case and slid them across the table. He touched one. “These are the instructions for payment of the five thousand.” He tapped the other. “That’s the envelope it came in.”
The blackmailer was getting craftier. The envelope was addressed in handwritten block letters, but the note created by pasting words cut from magazines and newspapers read:
Mail $5,000 in cash to Occupant at 3301 Juan Tabo NE #2223, by Friday. The negatives to two of the juicy pics will be sent by return mail. And call off your private eye or else.
“This could be a break.” Del’s voice held a hopeful note. “All we have to do is find out who’s in apartment 2223, and we’ve got the guy.”
“Too simple. It’ll probably turn out to be a UPS or Ship-n-Mail store or something like that. Here’s what I want you to do. Mail a nine-by-twelve manila envelope to the address, with a note inside saying the arrangements are unsatisfactory. You need a better guarantee you’ll get what you’re paying for. Throw in some nonsense about not making any more copies of the photos. Sound confident, but show enough vulnerability so that you don’t spook the blackmailer.”
“Okay, sounds simple enough. But why a nine-by-twelve?”
“It’s easier to keep an eye on a big envelope.”
“You’re going to be ab
le to do that?”
“With any luck.”
“Fine, when do you want me to mail it?”
“Today’s Thursday. Tomorrow would be a good day.”
“The instructions say payment has to be made by Friday.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. The blackmailer will expect a little negotiation. But the delay gives me time to visit the site and get the lay of the land. By then we should know if the demand note and envelope reveal anything about our friend.” I paused before adding, “Look, make up your mind. This thing is going to come out into the open. And that’s not all bad. When it does, this bum loses his leverage over you. We’ll get him, but I can’t guarantee the pictures won’t show up first.”
“Well, we know one thing for certain. This payment is to validate the blackmailer’s advantage. He’s only promising to return two of the photos. If I pay the five thousand, he’ll come back for a hell of a lot more.”
I spent the next hour with a man who was more nearly the tough, determined Del I had known and loved. It was almost like old times, when we had shared meals at our favorite restaurant, the Maria Teresa, located in a former residence built in the seventeen hundreds near Old Town. The place was supposed to be inhabited by a couple of ghosts, and more than one diner had claimed to have been surprised by spectral images. As much as we hoped for and anticipated such an event, no wraith was ever so bold as to reveal himself to us. I shuddered involuntarily as I remembered how it all came to an end.
The excruciating pain. The bitter taste and sharp smell of sweat and blood and fear when the bullet struck my right thigh. The terror of descending into hell as I writhed on a gurney. The paralyzing fear of soaring heavenward when they hoisted me into the ambulance. I woke in the ICU with carpet-to-carpet cops pacing the hallway outside. My captain was there, the lieutenant as well. Even the desk sergeant, with whom I hadn’t exactly been on friendly terms. But the ranks close when a cop goes down.
My partner, Detective Eugene Enriquez, hovered at the foot of the bed. I opened my mouth and spoke in a shaky, barely recognizable voice.
“Did you get Williams?” Nestor Williams was the killer we’d been chasing.
“Nope, you did,” he said. “Got him a second before he winged you. Probably saved your own life. He’d have nailed you for sure if you hadn’t ruined his aim with a chunk of lead to his chest.”
As things began to go out of focus, I spotted a tall figure standing against the wall. The swelling in my heart vied with the throbbing in my thigh. The pain won; I passed out.
When consciousness returned, Del was still there, only now he was sitting patiently in a chair beside my bed. It must have been the middle of the night because he was uncharacteristically disheveled. The faint lamp glow turned his stubble into gleaming gold. Over the next few weeks, I often found him hovering near as I fought to beat the odds and reclaim my life. My life with him.
He did his best, caring and concerned and supportive during my fierce struggle, but when I left the hospital and needed his assistance, Del shut down. His love—and I harbored no doubt it had been real—withered beneath his fear of my pain and suffering. It ended irrevocably when he brought Emilio into our home.
The camaraderie that had been building over the course of the last hour evaporated, leaving me chilled. Del gave me a peculiar look; he must have sensed my change of mood.
Shortly thereafter we walked over to the Albuquerque Police Department. I wanted a full set of his fingerprints for elimination purposes, and those guys were the experts in that kind of thing. One of my friends accommodated us, and then I put the fingerprint card, together with the glassine sheets containing the envelope and ransom instructions, into my attaché case.
Since cops tend to go on the record when crimes are committed, my best resources for examining and testing the blackmail note were of no value to me at the moment. Even approaching my ex-partner, Gene Enriquez, would put him on the spot, so I planned to go to a private lab for a forensic examination.
I said good-bye to Del and went straight home, where the situation changed abruptly. Lying right on top of the rest of my mail was an envelope with my name printed across it in large block letters. No postal worker had shoved it through the mail slot in my door; this had been hand delivered, just like Del’s. The message inside was simple and direct.
Stop working for that queer Dahlman or die!
Chapter 7
STILL STEAMING over some thug believing he could intimidate me, the next morning I handed over the blackmailer’s envelopes and notes, along with Del’s fingerprint card, to Gloria McInnes. She looked down her thin-bridged nose at me like an English blue blood. She wasn’t. She was born and raised in the little community of Algodones, north of Albuquerque, and was as common as shoe leather. I often wondered at the ribald jokes she must have endured after fifteen years of working in a place called K-Y Lab. The joint was named after its founders, Sol King and Jacob Young, not the water-soluble gel that prompted erotic reactions in countless giggling teenagers and horny young adults. I asked her to print me too, because I’d handled the envelope before tumbling to what it was. I wanted her to test the documents for whatever forensic evidence they might contain.
“Hmm.” She ran a casual eye over the crude death threat. “Somebody’s getting personal.”
“Yeah, and that was his mistake. I’m going to get the bastard.”
“And I’ll bet you do. Okay, BJ, I’ll run a prelim for you, but I’ll need forty-eight hours. Of course, if I pick up DNA, I’ll need some extra time, but I’ll give you what I can Monday afternoon.”
“I need it a little quicker.”
“Saturday’s the best I can do.”
“Didn’t know you were open on Saturday.”
“Just for you, sweetheart. Give me until about six o’clock that afternoon, okay?”
With that promise I set off for 3301 Juan Tabo Boulevard NE, which was, indeed, a Ship-n-Mail store in a strip mall of the kind architects call decorated sheds. There I ran into a stone wall. The thin-chested teenage clerk refused—under penalty of law, he claimed—to reveal any information about the box holder. There was nothing to do but plan on spending Saturday hunkered down in the parking lot to wait for someone to pick up Del’s envelope.
Stymied for the moment, I headed for the country club. On the way I used the hands-free phone to call Charlie and ask him to check out Belinda Gerard. He had nothing to report on the Royal Crest yet but said he was working on it.
The summer day was chilled by the monsoon system that usually arrived in July or August to deliver a fair portion of our nine and a half inches of annual rainfall. As the thunder and lightning cooperated by hovering to the west over Mt. Taylor, one of the Navajos’ four sacred mountains, I braved the elements and swam for a while, hoping Paul would show up to relieve the youth occupying the lifeguard’s chair. He didn’t.
On my way out, I paused to view the mural in the club’s foyer. Done in a primitive style, it portrayed the founding of the Villa de Alburquerque in 1706. It took us over 150 years to lose the first r in the city’s name. The dark earth tones of the mural failed to work their usual magic. My spirit remained troubled.
That changed later that evening when Paul answered my phone call to his dorm and agreed to come over. He showed up at my place around nine, and my heart clogged my throat as I watched him bound up the steps and follow me into the house. In the foyer I turned, forcing him to stop in the narrow entryway. Caught unawares, he almost ran into me but managed to stop just inches away. I cupped his head in my hand and pulled him forward. In my thirty-odd years, I’ve kissed a lot of people, but this was different. Touching Paul seemed to awaken nerve endings that had long lain dormant. My lips came alive with sensations I don’t normally associate with a kiss and transmitted this revelation to every part of my body.
He moaned and wrapped me in his arms. A long minute later, when we broke apart, we stood eye to eye, studying one another. My mouth formed one set of wor
ds while my viscera cried out for another.
“How about a drink?”
He leaned his forehead against mine. “One,” he answered simply. “Scotch rocks.”
One. Was that a self-imposed limit, or did it imply an urge to get on to other things? I rested a hand on his hip as we moved into the den. He sat on a stool on one side of the small bar while, after fixing our drinks, I stood resting my arms on the top a moment before suggesting we move to more comfortable chairs.
As anxious as I was to get physical, I soon found myself lost in the history of this engaging young man. His father died of tuberculosis when he was still a child, and his mother worked hard to keep a roof over their heads in Albuquerque’s South Valley, sometimes coming home from one job clerking in a novelty store to change clothes and go waitress in a nearby café. Paul had pitched in, finding odd jobs after school and mowing lawns every summer as much as he could. His list of part-time jobs was truly amazing.
As he talked I found myself growing more comfortable with the boy… man. The urge to touch and feel and experience marvelous sensations remained, but my interest in Paul Barton grew as he revealed more and more of himself. He’d fallen in with a tough crowd, some of them relatives, and was heading down the wrong path when something happened to bring him to his senses. He and two buddies rolled a man in an alley one afternoon. The guy was drunk to the point he couldn’t defend himself as Paul’s companions beat him bloody. For no reason. For something to do.
Even though he didn’t lay a hand on the man, Paul was so shocked, he quit hanging around with gang members and started visiting boys’ clubs and the school gym, where he discovered a love for swimming.
When he paused in his story, I moved over to sit beside him on the couch. “When did you discover you were gay?”
He turned to look at me. “Is that what I am?”
“Well… I—”
He broke out laughing, wrinkling his nose a bit as he did so. “Yeah, the evidence so far points that way. Maybe we should explore that theme a little more.”