Alice Wright dead. A regal woman.
Deal with it later. Right now deal with the fat man.
I went back into the bedroom.
Mendez had pulled the chair out from the flimsy writing desk, turned it around and straddled it, belly pressed against its slats, arms folded atop its back. He nodded to the bed. “Take a pew.”
I sat down, shoulders slumped.
“I talked to the girl,” he said. “Lisa Wright. She told me about the fight last night. You didn’t report it.”
“She all right? Lisa?”
“I’m asking the questions now.”
“Right,” I said. I stood up. “Let’s do the whole number. You bring me in, I get a lawyer, and then you ask your questions. And then maybe I answer.”
“Sit down,” he said, quietly, calmly.
“Listen. I’ve had it. Three goons last night, and this morning I get your boy Farrell. He’s a freak, Sergeant. Someday, and probably soon, he’s going to blow up on you. I don’t need this shit. Come on. Let’s do it.”
“She’s all right,” he said with the same quiet calm. “She found the body, she’s still a little shaken up, but she’s all right. Now sit down. Let’s make this easy on both of us.”
I sat down.
He looked at me, frowned slightly, looked down at the carpet for a long moment. He looked up at me again. He said, “I’ve been a cop in this town for twenty years. My father was a cop here for longer. You have any idea the kind of maggots we get coming through here? Last week, a drug deal went bad. Guy killed a whole family with a pump shotgun. Mother, father, two little kids. Girls. Ten and eight. Farrell’s the one found the bodies. He was crying when I got there. He’s got an eight-year-old girl himself.”
“Yeah. He’s probably nice to dogs, too.”
Something flickered across his face and he looked down again. He looked up. “You’re a private detective. You don’t like a case, you don’t take it. You take it and it gets messy, you call us in. Farrell doesn’t have that option. No cop does.” His eyes narrowed very slightly. “So until you scoop up some little girl and stuff her in a plastic bag, you keep your mouth shut about Farrell. Or about any other cop in my city. I’ll handle Farrell. Right now, you tell me why you didn’t report that assault last night.”
I took a deep breath. I’d been doing that a lot lately. “They were wearing masks,” I said. “No way I could identify them.”
He just looked at me.
“I should’ve reported it,” I admitted. “All right? I just wanted to get to bed.”
His face remained expressionless. “You changed your rooms last night. Why?”
“In case the Welcome Wagon came back.”
“Did you go to Alice Wright’s home after midnight last night?”
“No,” I said. “When was she killed?” I didn’t want to ask the question. The answer would advance the process of making her death real.
“Twelve-thirty. One o’clock. Show me your hands.”
I stood up, awkwardly fished the Swiss Army knife out of my pocket, clicked out the scissors, sat back down and cut the gauze bandage on my left hand. I showed him my palm, the wounds looking now almost as bad as they felt.
He nodded. “Other hand.”
I cut off the bandage, showed him my other palm.
He nodded.
I asked him, “How was she killed?”
“Beaten to death. Some kind of Buddha statue.”
I winced. “When did Lisa find her?”
“Eight o’clock this morning.”
Which meant Lisa had gone somewhere else after she’d left me. I didn’t ask him where. It wasn’t any of my business.
“Tell me about this dead Indian,” he said.
I gave him the abridged version.
He nodded when I finished.
I asked him, “Was anything taken from Alice’s house?”
“Jewels,” he said. “Some cash. Could’ve been a burglary.”
“You think it was?”
“I don’t think anything yet.” He reached into his suit-coat pocket, pulled out a thin plastic Ziploc envelope. He held it out to me. “Mean anything to you?”
Inside the envelope was a small yellow square of memo paper. Written on it in a neat precise script were the words, “Croft—Ardmore.”
“Ardmore’s the name of a trading post in Arizona.” I told him about Peter Yazzie, Alice’s childhood friend, then asked, “Is that Alice’s handwriting?”
He nodded. “We found it next to the phone.” He slipped the envelope back into his suit-coat and stood up.
“I don’t think you did it,” he said. “Not with your hands like that. But you hanging around here, it’s going to muddy up the water. I want you back in Sante Fe.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re telling me to get out of town?”
“Yeah. I’m telling you to get out of town. If I need you, I’ll call you.”
“I’ve still got things to do. How much time do I have, Marshal? Till sundown?”
He nodded, unsmiling. “Sundown’d be good.”
13
After Mendez left, I tried calling Lisa. A man, probably a cop, answered and told me she couldn’t come to the phone. He asked for my name, and I gave it. I asked him to tell her I’d call again. He said he would.
I hung up and looked around the room. I could stay there and brood or I could get out and do something. And try to do it before sundown.
“Jeez,” Grober said. He sat back away from his desk and folded his hands together beneath his belly. “Murdered? Whatta you got going here, Josh?”
We were in his office. He shared the brick building with a bail bondsman and a “painless dentist” downstairs and with a chiropractor across the hallway. This probably wouldn’t be considered the choicest piece of downtown real estate in El Paso, located as it was southwest of the railroad tracks, near the warehouses and junkyards along the river. But the office itself was neat and clean, and the furniture was heavy and solid and dark, comfortable if not exactly new. The wooden ceiling fan overhead gave the place a raffish 1940s feel. You half expected Lauren Bacall to sidle in, plunk herself down on the big walnut desk, and cross two long legs while she lit the Fatima angling from the corner of her smile.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But things are happening.” I told him about the slashed tires and the three men in stocking masks.
“How come you weren’t carrying?” he asked me.
“No carry license for Texas.”
“I got a little Raven I could let you have. A throwaway, be impossible to trace. Only a .25, but you get a troglodyte comin’ at you and you put three or four of those little pellets right up his nose and I guarantee it’ll give him pause for thought.”
“A troglodyte, Phil?”
“Reader’s Digest,” he said. “It pays to increase your word power. You want the gun? Give you a good deal on it.”
I shook my head. “I’m in enough trouble with the cops as it is. Mendez wants me out of town.”
He nodded. “He’s a tough cop, Mendez. Honest too. And that’s always a pain in the ass. So you’re gonna split?”
“For now. Back to Santa Fe, and then off to the Navajo Reservation, maybe. You think you could run a few errands for me?”
“Depends on what it’ll cost me. Nothing personal, Josh, but I figure all that time over at the library, messing around with dead guys, we’re even now. I got expenses to worry about. And there’s this new parabolic mike I want to get hold of.” Grober had always been fond of gadgets—fountain pens that were actually FM transmitters, tiny tape recorders that could nestle inside a paperback copy of Harold Robbins. “I mean, friendship is one thing and business is something else, am I right?”
“You can bill us, Phil. Just so long as you don’t get carried away. This is for me, not for a client.”
“’Kay,” he nodded. “What you need?”
“Do you have any contacts in the police department?”
I said, “I want the report on Alice Wright’s death.”
“Which one? Crime Scene? Autopsy?”
“All of them.”
“You want actual copies or like summaries? Copies gonna cost you more.”
“Summaries’ll be fine for now. And see if you can find out from the phone company whether she had a measured line.”
“You’re looking for a record of local calls?”
“Long-distance, too.”
“Long-distance is no problem. Take a few days for their computer to bring up the numbers, is all. But almost no one’s got a measured line anymore.”
“Whatever you can get,” I said. “Any calls she made recently. Especially last night.”
“’Kay. That it?”
“Yeah.”
“You coming back here?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, lookit, next time you come by, let me know up front. I’ll make reservations over at this place I know in Juarez. They got a girl there does things with parakeets you wouldn’t believe. She goes through two or three of ’em a night.”
“Pretty hard on the parakeets, sounds like.”
“Hey,” he grinned. “They all die happy.”
Back at the motel, I checked at the front desk to see if anyone had left me a message. No one had. From the room, I dialed Lisa’s number. No one answered.
Since the phone was already in my hand, I got out my notebook and found the Michigan number Grober had given me yesterday, for Lamont Brewster, the last of Lessing’s field-trip students. I dialed the number. No one was answering the phone in Michigan either.
I slammed down the receiver. A brilliant move that sent pain flashing up my arm.
I needed to keep moving. As soon as I stood still, the last twenty-four hours would catch up with me. Faces would start materializing at the back of my mind. The grinning face of the red-haired cop, Farrell. The three distorted faces beneath the stocking masks. The lined aristocratic face of Alice Wright.
I went to the desk, opened the folder that Martin Halbert had given me yesterday, and glanced through it, turning the fragile yellow pages carefully. Maybe, buried somewhere in all that technical language, there was a reason why an apparently harmless professor of oil geology had been battered to death sixty years ago. Maybe there was a reason why his daughter had been battered to death last night.
But I doubted it. And even if there were, I knew I’d never find it.
I put the folder under my arm and went out to the Subaru to carry it back to Martin Halbert.
Martin Halbert wasn’t at home, the Asian manservant told me. I handed him the folder and asked him to thank Mr. Halbert for me. He nodded and then waited, polite and unblinking, for me to turn and leave. I did.
I drove back down the mountain to the motel. This time there was a message. From Lisa. With a phone number for me to call. I went to my room and called it.
She answered on the second ring. “Hello,” she said tonelessly.
“Lisa, this is Joshua.”
“Hello, Joshua. I’m glad you called.” She sounded neither glad nor sad nor anything at all. Her voice was as flat as the line on a heart monitor after the patient has died.
“I heard about Alice,” I said. “I’m sorry.” The phrase, no matter how well-meant, no matter what the circumstances, is always inadequate. It can’t rearrange the past.
I heard her take a deep breath against the mouthpiece. She said nothing.
“Are you all right?” I asked her. Brilliant question.
“No,” she said. Then, “Yes. Yes, I guess so. I’m all right. The doctor gave me something. It was hard, before. When I … when I found her. But right now I just feel numb. Like I’m wrapped in cotton.” The words she spoke sounded as though they too were wrapped in cotton, each battened away from the others.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” she said, and then a moment later, like a small child remembering her manners, “Thank you. I’m all right. I called a friend of mine and she brought me here. I couldn’t stay at the house.”
“Where is here?”
“A kind of clinic, I guess. It’s very nice, like a resort hotel. The walls are two-toned. Cream and blue. There’s a courtyard with Russian olives.”
So she’d called a friend, and the friend had taken her to someplace where she’d be looked after. I ought to be glad for her and grateful to the friend. Why should it bother me that she hadn’t called me for help when she needed it?
“Lisa,” I said, “I’ve got to leave town today.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice still affectless. “Will you be coming back?” No real curiosity in the question; only a vague dreamy politeness.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Is there anything I can do before I leave? Should I come over there?”
“Hmmm?” She was drifting off into the escape of sleep. “No, that’s all right, Joshua. Thank you. Will you call me later? In a couple of days? I guess I’m sort of fogged-in right now.”
“I’ll call,” I said.
“At ease with the dead,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s what she told me once. Alice. I asked her if she were afraid of dying. She said she was at ease with the dead. It’s from a poem. A Norse poem, I think. Joshua?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to go to sleep now.”
“Take care, Lisa.”
“Uh-huh. Bye.”
She hung up. After a moment the connection was broken and the dial tone was droning in my ear. After another moment I hung up the phone and stood there. Remembering her the way she’d been last night, the tease in her smile, the sheen of her hair, those eyes of cornflower blue staring into my own with the unguarded seriousness that only youth can own.
Later. Deal with everything later. Right now, keep moving.
The main branch of the public library was on Montana Avenue, downtown. There were men outside it, on the bright green grass and along the broad concrete steps. Shabby in their hand-me-down clothes, battered and looking resigned to being battered forever, they sat there in the thin sunshine, some of them beside stuffed plastic bags that served as luggage, and with empty rheumy eyes they watched the traffic rumble by. None of the cars would be stopping for them. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
For a moment I was tempted to sit down and join them. Forget about the job, the life back in Santa Fe, forget about everything. Just sit there until the sun warmed my bones, and then just sit there some more.
Why not? What was the point? You asked some questions, scribbled some answers down in your notebook, and then suddenly a remarkable old woman was dead.
What was it she’d said?
I could hear her strong precise voice saying it now: “The acquisition of knowledge is invariably a destructive process. The question is, finally, what value do we assign to the knowledge acquired, and what value to the thing destroyed …”
Nothing. That was exactly the value I assigned to the knowledge acquired.
It was also the knowledge itself.
Later, I told myself. Deal with all of it later.
The microfilmed back issues of the local paper were downstairs. I filled out a request form and a young woman ambled off with it. She returned a few moments later carrying a small rectangular box. She handed it to me and I brought it over to one of the machines lined up against the wall. I took the spool out of the box, hooked it up to the reader, and started cranking the knob.
Some things were different in September of 1925. Harding was president. Barney Google was still alive. You could buy a used 1924 Ford for $429. A Chrysler Imperial, brand new, would set you back $1,995. At the Wright Kitchen Cafe, you could pick up a Sunday chicken dinner for twenty-five cents. In Jamestown, North Dakota, a woman could be fined, and one was, for smoking cigarettes in public.
Some things were the same. A flood struck the Rio Grande valley on the third of the month, killing off livestock, d
estroying homes, ruining the cotton crop.
The flood held the headlines until the ninth, when the murder of Professor Dennis Lessing took over.
I read through the account. Most of what was there I’d already heard from Alice Wright. The only new thing I learned, and for some reason it came as no surprise at all, was that the name of the detective who investigated the case had been Mendez.
PART II
14
La Jornada del Muerto. The Journey of the Dead. That’s what the conquistadors called the long trek between El Paso and Albuquerque.
There hadn’t been anything here then, and there wasn’t much here now—a few small towns, Mesilla, Hatch, Socorro, and between them only sagebrush and flat baked trackless wasteland stretching to the rim of the world. After the sun disappeared, the wasteland stretched to the rim of the universe, out there where tiny isolated stars burned in the cold empty silence.
The car was hurtling down the tunnel of light drilled through the darkness by my headlights, but I had stopped moving myself. And, like the tail of a suddenly immobilized comet, my past had, all at once, caught up with its source.
I had liked the woman. I had admired her intelligence and humanity, her serenity, the swiftness and easiness of her laughter. All of it gone now.
If I’d never met her, never gone to El Paso, her death would’ve meant nothing, would’ve been just another one of those inevitable exits from the stage by an unknown extra. People were dying all the time, all around me lives were winking out; no matter how you felt about it, death was part of the scenery.
But I had met her, and liked her, and admired her.
On the other hand, if I hadn’t gone to El Paso, she might still be alive.
Guilt is sometimes a secret sort of self-esteem. If I weren’t such a bad little boy, Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t be so unhappy, and gosh I sure do feel rotten about it. But at least I know, from the depths of my impotence—and finally all of us are impotent—that I have the power to cause pain.
I tried to be objective. I hadn’t wished for Alice Wright’s death. I hadn’t had any way of knowing, before I went to El Paso, that my presence there might lead to it.
At Ease with the Dead Page 11