16
I LET MYSELF into Lonnie’s, locked the door behind me and sat down on the overstuffed sofa for a long moment. Then I went in the kitchen and found a garbage bag. I took the bag outside, picked the cat up by its legs and put it in, trying not to gag or throw up or touch the dead animal any more than I had to. Next I got a pail of water and a scrub brush, poured the water over the hood and scrubbed the guts off. I put the bag in the trunk and drove to the place where I’d seen the cat come over the wall, hoping no kids lived there. No kid wants to have someone knock on the door and tell them their pet is dead. Of all the bad things that can happen to a child, losing a pet has to be one of the worst. They’d probably know by the sound of the knock that something terrible had happened, but it’s better to know than to wait day after day for an animal that never comes back. Waiting is a virus that saps your energy and kills you inch by inch.
I pulled up onto the sidewalk, leaving the bag in the trunk, thinking that whoever the cat belonged to might not want to see it, then got out of the car, walked around to the gate and pulled at the string sticking through. A bell rang somewhere and a dog barked a couple of times, the deep bark of a large, secure pet.
“Be quiet, Blackie,” a woman’s voice called in musical English. “I’m coming.”
She opened the gate and stood before me, holding onto the dog by a short leash, backlit by a porch light, a tiny gnarled being, more spirit than person, bent over into the shape of the curled-up shrimp she’d been ninety or so years ago. Her eyes were large and unnaturally bright, her face wrinkled like a dried apricot. She might not have been much older than Pete Vigil, but she’d crossed a frontier and entered the no-man’s-land between life and death. I didn’t enjoy being the one to tell her that her cat had gone first and how it had gotten there, or that, in a way, I had been responsible. The dog, a large, black chow with its tail curled and its ears pointed, watched me warily.
“Yes?” she asked, looking up with luminous eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“I’m too old to sleep.”
“I left my car down the street at Lonnie Darmer’s and . . .”
“You were a friend of hers?”
“Yes.”
“She’s dead.”
“I know.”
“She was a good girl, wasn’t she, Blackie? She always asked me if I wanted something when she went to the store. She’s with the angels now.”
“I took a walk and when I got back I found a dead cat on my car,” I said.
“What did it look like?”
“Longhaired, black, with a white spot on the back of its neck. I saw it come over your wall earlier.”
“That’s Manolo. I heard him scream before and I knew something bad was happening to him. How did he die?”
“He was … cut open.”
“Dios mio! Those bad boys in this neighborhood. You never know what they will do next. They get the killing disease and they kill anything: cats, dogs, themselves, each other, their own mothers and sisters even.” She shook her head and wisps of white hair fell loose. “That’s why I don’t let you go out, Blackie, but you can’t keep a cat home; they go over the wall.”
“There’s a cute blond boy named Dolby who lives near here. Do you know him?”
“Dolby? He doesn’t live here. I would know him if he did.”
“I have the cat in my car, if you want to bury it.”
“Where do you live?”
“Albuquerque.”
“You could do something for me and leave him beside the highway on your way home. Find a good place for my Manolo. The birds will eat his body, but the angels will take his spirit.” She wasn’t exactly sentimental about death, but maybe she was close enough to know something the rest of us didn’t. “Your friend, Lonnie, liked cats. She’ll be happy to have Manolo in heaven with her. She talks to me sometimes.”
“What does she say?”
“She likes it there.”
“Did she tell you how she died?”
“She went to sleep. She says she’s waiting for me. It won’t be long now, I can tell you that. I’m ready. Could you help me back to the house before you go?”
“Of course.” Her hand clutched my arm like a claw as I led her across the yard. Blackie followed, still watching me. When we got to the door, the woman released her grip. Her face was tilted toward the porch light, her eyes supernaturally large and luminous. I waved my hand in front of them, but nothing blinked, moved or registered. “Do you want me to open the door for you? Help you in?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I can do that. Find my Manolo a good place.”
“I will,” I said.
******
I stopped when I got to the top of La Bajada, pulled the car off the road, climbed a knoll and dumped Manolo out of the garbage bag. It seemed as good a place as any to join the ranks of those who’ve turned to bone beside the highway. Once you’re dead, it probably won’t make a shitload of difference to you where you end up or how you end up, but I’d like a witness, anyway, someone to know for sure that I’m gone and where the remnants are. “Adios, Manolo,” I said. “Vaya con dios.”
The highway, some people say, is the best place to think. As I drove home to Albuquerque I thought about murderers and ways to catch them. One way is to track down witnesses to the crime. There are always two at least—the victim and the killer—but the victim can’t talk and the killer won’t. Another way is to find incriminating evidence, but the evidence I had gathered so far existed either in my mind or in an envelope in Detective Railback’s desk. It looked like I might have happened upon the third and least desirable method—to get the killer to come to you. If I was going to solve this crime, that was one way to do it. The killer seemed willing enough to oblige. Girls don’t go out to ruins alone to die, cats don’t climb up on cars and gut themselves. Lonnie had found a cat on her stoop, Lonnie was dead. I’d found one on my car, I could very well be next. I’d been conducting an investigation and, for all anybody knew, had incriminating evidence by now. I also fit the victim profile: an independent, white female in her thirties who had a past, who lived alone, who’d written UGLY on the wall. I needed protection, but didn’t know where I’d find it. Detective Railback wasn’t likely to provide me with an armed guard. The Kid would tell me to get out of the murder business and go back to deeds and divorces. Where he came from they had no illusions about what life is worth on the open market, on any market.
I passed Budaghers, the exit that goes nowhere, and around the time I reached San Felipe the radio offered a solution, one of those disembodied voices that appears to answer your prayers. When the listener is ready, the voice speaks. This one came from KJOY-FM. “Ladies, if you’re looking for a firearm for personal protection, consult Ron Peterson Guns.” I made a note to do just that tomorrow.
There were still a few peregrinos beside the highway even though it was after midnight. I’ve always wondered whether someone picks them up and takes them home to sleep in their beds and return in the morning or if they walk all night. The ones I saw weren’t carrying any bedding. The highway didn’t seem like a safe place to be after midnight, even for a man. Maybe they carried personal protection, too.
When I got back to La Vista I locked up tight and said good night to the mantel before I went to bed. The rose was floating in its forever-red solution, the vertebrae were zeros surrounded by bone. The Kid leaned against a wall smiling. I kissed his picture, got into bed, watched the light crawl across the ceiling and dreamed about cats: bloody cats, screeching cats, clinging cats, cats that were out and wanted to get in, cats that had been in and climbed out.
******
I woke early and drove to work in the dawn’s flamingo glow looking for the combination of sun and wall that would transform Lead to Gold; I didn’t find it. At Baja Tacos I got a Red Zinger and an egg burrito with extra chile to go, hoping the chile would light my fire. The law offices of Hamel and Ha
rrison have wrought iron over the windows that might pass for decorative grillwork, but it’s really bars. I like to know that what I find in the morning will be what I left behind at night. Bars keep them out, us in. We also have Anna to screen the undesirables. She has an image of the kind of client Hamel and Harrison ought to represent. Unfortunately it bears little resemblance to the kinds of clients who ask us to represent them. I was the only car in the driveway, but that’s what I expected so early in the day. I fumbled in my purse for my key chain, unlocked a couple of locks, let myself in, sat down at my desk and ate the burrito. The chiles weren’t as hot as those little green zingers they eat for breakfast in Central America. They pop those in their mouths and onto their tongues because if your lips ever touched one they would burn and blister. But the burrito was hot enough to open my eyes and ready me to face the day. It was still early to be making calls, but there was one person I knew who was ambitious, hardworking and conscientious enough to be in, Dennis Quinlan, the DA for Santa Fe County.
He answered his own phone. “Dennis,” I said, “you’re in early.”
“Not for me, but I thought you had your own practice so you didn’t have to get to work early.”
“I thought so, too.”
“I don’t have anything new on the Darmer case, I’m sorry to say.”
“That’s why I’m calling. I ran into Railback yesterday and I think it would be better if you left him alone. Pushing is only making him hostile. It’s not helping me and it’ll cause problems for you down the road.” I’d said I’d do it; it was done.
“In all honesty, Neil, it does look like a bad combination of substances, an accident or a suicide.” To him maybe.
“Thanks for your help, Dennis.”
“Glad to do it,” he answered with what sounded like a sigh of relief, one less problem for an overworked public servant.
Since I’d been spending so much time on the highway lately I had a lot of paperwork to catch up on. It was a good time; the phones weren’t ringing, nobody was around. It would be interesting, anyway, to see what time Anna and Brink arrived for work. It surprised me when Anna showed up at nine fifteen and poked her moussed and pouffed head in my office. “You’re here early,” she said.
“I have a lot of paperwork to do.”
“That’s right. We haven’t seen much of you lately. You haven’t heard my dead lawyer joke yet, have you?”
“You’re going to tell me a dead lawyer joke?”
“Yeah. You know how to tell the difference between a dead lawyer in the road and a dead armadillo?”
“The lawyer has tougher skin?”
“No. There are brake marks in front of the armadillo.”
“Ha, ha. Close the door on your way out.”
“Jeez,” I heard her say as she shut the door. “What’s the matter with her?”
By noon I’d done what I had to do and was left with a bottomed-out feeling that even green chile wouldn’t lift, so I went out and took a ride around the Duke City. I stopped at Old Town, parked and walked through the narrow streets that tourists find so appealing and where you’re not likely to see anyone who actually lives here. There was a wedding finishing up at the Adobe of God and the bride and groom were standing out front receiving guests. They were young and beautiful. She had naturally auburn hair and wore an ivory dress with some sort of embroidery that sparkled tastefully in the sun. They looked like they came from what my aunt Joan called a good family, the kind of family that directed their young toward a clearly defined goal, whose members stayed married, reproduced, spent holidays together; a family who never committed or was victimized by a crime, who didn’t get addicted or murdered. I never believed people like that actually existed, but looking at this couple could almost convince me.
I left Old Town and drove over to 12th Street, the one area of Albuquerque that doesn’t look like it. It has the kind of pastel Victorian bungalows with second stories and lace curtains in the windows that are endemic somewhere else, the Southeast maybe. I come here sometimes when I get the feeling my life is a desert, when the pastel and lace seem not sappy but snug, when I need to experience the opposite. White irises, lilacs and tulips were blooming all over people’s yards. Fruit trees were the color of black raspberry ice cream and birds were lapping it up. I parked on Roma, went to Mary Fox Park and sat down under the wisteria arbor. This was a place women pushing babies in strollers came during the day to sit around and gossip. Would there ever be a place for me in a neighborhood like this? I wondered. In spite of welcoming spring with a reckless afternoon of unsheathed love, I hadn’t gotten pregnant. Did I wish I were? Sometimes you get tired of thinking and planning, sometimes you feel like turning your fate over to a reckless act; careless love is as reckless an act as most people are capable of. But when you’ve done it and it’s too late to change what you’ve done, you’d probably start wishing you hadn’t. What would the Kid make of this neighborhood? I wondered. What would this neighborhood make of him? Would it find him young and greasy fingered? I got up, drove to Ron Peterson’s pink-and-turquoise building on Central and bought myself a gun.
The person who sold it to me was a large, secure male with a diamond in his ear and a courtly manner. He was such a gentleman that he made me feel like a lady, a lady in need of protection.
The gun I bought was a Smith & Wesson LadySmith handgun, a .38, practical, yet elegant, matte deep blue, with a custom grip specially designed for the female hand. It cost about as much as repairing my car. I couldn’t afford it, but, as the catalog said, it was “the answer to [my] special—and very contemporary—needs.” I paid with plastic and walked out with the LadySmith in my purse. All it took was some credit and my signature on a paper stating that I wasn’t a convicted felon and neither a marijuana nor a cocaine addict. If I’d had a holster I could have walked down the street with bullets in the gun. In the Land of Enchantment a loaded gun is legal as long as it is not concealed. You’re not supposed to carry one in your purse, but the offense is only a misdemeanor, the equivalent of a traffic violation. You can keep a loaded gun in your house, however, and your car is considered your house here. Time is of the essence in matters of personal protection; an unloaded gun is a waste of precious time. When I got in the legger, I put the bullets in my LadySmith.
I was sitting on my living room sofa examining it when the Kid showed up early for dinner.
“What are you doing with that, Chiquita?” he asked.
“I think Lonnie was murdered and I’m afraid the killer might be after me,” I told him.
“Why would anybody murder her?”
I gave him the most logical explanation. “It could be because she found out someone had been paid off to approve the Ugly Building.”
“People kill for a building?” the Kid said.
“People kill for anything, people kill for the sake of killing.”
“Why don’t you call the police?”
“I tried. Either they don’t believe me, or they’ve been paid off, too.”
“I have some money, Chiquita, if you need it.”
It was simple where he came from: when you needed help from a public official, you paid them. Here that kind of corruption is available only to the seriously rich. “Thanks, Kid, but I think it would take a lot more money than you and I’d ever be able to scrape together.”
“If you think someone wants to kill you, stop the investigation, go to Colorado or someplace till it’s over,” he said, even though he probably knew what my answer would be.
“I can’t,” I replied.
He shrugged. “I know you, Chiquita, I know how you are. You never stop, but when you carry a gun someone can use it on you.”
“Probably no one will ever use it on anyone. It just makes me feel better to have it.”
The Kid picked up the weapon and turned it over in his hand. “This is a woman’s gun.”
“I’m a woman. What do you know about guns anyway?”
“I know you should neve
r have them in the house. Someone gets mad one minute, they do something like that…” He pointed the gun at me. “And they are sorry about it forever.”
“Kid, that gun is loaded. Don’t point it at me.”
He put it down. “I don’t like this in the house.”
“It’s not your house,” I reminded him.
“I’m here, but I won’t stay here with that gun.”
Was he saying that he didn’t trust me, himself or people in general? It’s hard to tell sometimes what the Kid is thinking, but not hard at all to tell when he’s made up his mind. He’d be out of here in two minutes once he’d decided to go. His past was Mexican, mysterious, overloaded with images of birds, flies and people. He grew up on the edge of the biggest slum in the Western world and had crossed a border illegally God knows how many times. I didn’t know what violence and misery he’d seen and I probably never would; his eyes turned cloudy when the past was mentioned. Whatever had happened, his spirit had remained lighthearted, and I wouldn’t want to mess that up.
“All right. I’ll lock it in the car,” I said.
He shrugged as if to imply that would do for now, but not forever. I took the gun out to the La Vista parking lot and locked it in the rent-a-Ford glove compartment. Considering the activity in that lot it could only be considered a temporary solution.
17
DURING THE NIGHT spring turned to summer, for a little while anyway. When I left for work at nine thirty it was already eighty degrees, shirt-sleeve or, in some places, no-sleeve tattoo-baring weather. The Kid and I had made our peace about the gun, it wouldn’t come into the house when he was there. I checked the glove compartment and found the LadySmith—my personal protection—in place. I rolled the windows down and waited for the air conditioner to kick in as I drove across town. I was kind of enjoying the sounds of the street so I kept the windows down and turned the air conditioner off.
When I got to the office Anna was trying to get rid of one of those people she thinks we shouldn’t represent. You have to have a bigger income than Hamel and Harrison’s to afford pro bono work, and that’s what that guy looked like—someone who had big problems and couldn’t afford to solve them. He had a scruffy way of dressing that said either deeply committed hippie or long-term homeless. Hippie to me, hopeless to Anna. She was too young to know the difference between those who dressed that way out of necessity and those who did it by choice. Anna’s revolving miniskirt wardrobe made her statement about materialism, buy cheap, buy often. The guy she was showing the door to was a medium-size Anglo. His hair was pulled into two ponytails and wrapped with leather thongs that had feathers sticking out. I’d seen his ugly truck parked on the street so I knew he wasn’t entirely homeless. He had an income, too, selling bones at the flea market. It was the guy with a spiderweb tattoo, the Vietnam vet who might have a clue for me, or might only be an attempt on Pete Vigil’s part to hold my attention—the bone man.
The Other Side of Death Page 16