The Other Side of Death

by Judith Van GIeson

  “That boy tried to kill me.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  Tomás looked at the ground. In the moonlight you could see clearly the trail of blood. “He won’t get far like that. Why was he trying to kill you?”

  “I’m a woman. I got in his way.”

  “The world is a bad place.” Tomás shook his head. “Every year we go to Chimayo to say a prayer that it will get better.”

  Somebody had to. My head had stopped pounding enough so I could think about the next steps, getting to the cops, getting home. “He took the keys to my car.”

  “My wife is coming to pick us up soon. We can take you home or anywhere else you want.”

  “How about Santa Fe?”

  “No problem.”

  We walked down to I-25, sat on the ground and waited. I wasn’t in any shape to walk further and neither were they. I kept the gun in my hand and brought the sleeping bag with me. It would have been better not to disturb the crime scene, but it was evidence and the killer might come back for it. “We always go to Chimayo to say prayers,” said Tomás’s friend, whose name I never did learn. “First it was for my brother who was killed in Vietnam, but every year there’s somebody.”

  Tomás’s wife arrived eventually in an old Ford. She kept staring over the top of her glasses like she didn’t know what to make of me and my gun. Although we watched carefully beside the highway while we drove to Santa Fe, we didn’t see Dolby or Jim. Railback wasn’t on duty, but the policeman who was believed my story. No doubt I looked battered enough to be convincing, or maybe Tomás, his wife and friend gave me credibility. We went back to the crime scene and found too much evidence for anybody to screw up.

  20

  THERE ARE PLACES on the high road to Taos where you think your destiny must be the cumulonimbus. Chimayo is in a narrow valley off that road, a sacred place and a kind of paradise, a paradise with poverty. The Adobe of God’s walls are three feet thick and it hunkers down at the center of the valley near a mountain stream. Fruit trees bloom there in springtime. In the meadow across the stream, horses and junked cars graze. There’s a cross in the yard that a penitent carried on his back from Santa Fe, thirty miles away. Inside the sanctuary you can dig into the floor and take away some healing earth. Many leave their crutches behind with pictures commemorating the healing. On Good Friday the Santuario is full of penitents, celebrants and tourists. Railback found Dolby among the crowd with a wounded arm and leg and bloody marks that I’d gouged on his face and palms. He held his palms up and grinned when they arrested him. “Hey, that guy, he’s sorry,” Dolby said. It was the closest they ever got to a confession out of him. He wasn’t so eager to talk in a police station or a courtroom. Dennis Quinlan, however, was a hardworking and thorough prosecutor. He had me for a witness and the sleeping bag with Dolby’s semen stains and Lonnie’s and my saliva.

  Marci Coyle was convicted of bribing a public official and Jorge Mondragon of accepting. They both paid large fines but neither spent time in jail. Rick admitted, to me anyway, that Lonnie had found him at Club West and they had had sex at his place the night she died. He had inflicted the rough, consensual bruises—body and soul. In an angry moment Marci Coyle admitted to Rick that she had stayed in Santa Fe to check up on him and had seen him and Lonnie leave Club West together. He told her that he’d talked to Lonnie and that was all they’d done. Apparently Marci chose to believe it; she stayed with him anyway. Maybe she thought with Lonnie dead she had nothing more to worry about. Tim and Jamie Malone went to Ohio, a couple again, and they seemed to like the Midwest. Tim said that everyone of Celtic origin should have the opportunity to dream life in a green-gray womb. The Ugly Building did not get built, but there was an empty lot on Paloma and it wouldn’t stay empty forever. A shopping mall was waiting in the wings and, if that didn’t get approved, a hotel was right behind it.

  Dolby’s mother went to Texas after he was arrested and never came back. Ci paid for his defense. “Lonnie’s gone now,” she said, “we have to do what we can to create better conditions for Dolby in the next incarnation.” He was tried as an adult, but he acted like a boy, joking all the while and smiling for the cameras.

  Bunny Darmer sat in the courtroom for the entire trial and never took her eyes off Dolby/Jim. “How could he do it?” she asked me at one point. “How could that young boy kill my daughter?”

  I, who knew better than anyone, had to answer, “I don’t know.” It’s a crime of subjugation and humiliation, some people say, not sex, but it was a long time before I wanted to have sex again.

  Every prosecutor knows it’s difficult to convict a good-looking defendant and that much harder when the defendant is young. Dennis Quinlan had the facts, me and Lonnie on his side. He presented a good case, I thought, and gave an impassioned summation. “He was an evil seed who wanted to prove that he was a man,” Dennis said. “He has the appearance of a boy but don’t let that fool you, he has the power of a man to harm and destroy. He hates women and wants to crush them. He terrorized Neil Hamel. He witnessed and caused the last moments of horror in Lonnie Darmer’s short life.”

  When it was over Dolby was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to fifteen years to be served at the Santa Fe state pen. When he graduated from that place he’d have an advanced degree in sex abuse and a Ph.D. in killing. I began looking at fifteen years—or less—down the road. Bunny Darmer went home to Roswell, got into her bathrobe and began serving her life sentence.

  When spring turned to summer it got hot: 102, 103, 104. A closed car was a death trap. The air became your enemy. It got hot enough to crank up the air conditioner and crawl under a blanket, but I didn’t do it. Anything on top of me—even a sheet—weighed far too much. Through the summer nights I sweated, tossed, and barely breathed. I didn’t open the window either because he was out there. Every night before I went to sleep (if you could call it that) I bolted the door, closed the window, and latched it tight. But he got in anyway, a Superboy who slips through windows and walls. “You shouldn’ta done that,” he said. “This wouldn’t be happening now if you hadn’ta done that.” It was a ritualized and practiced act. His cape swung from his shoulders. He lifted it, grinned, pressed smothering oblivion over my face. I couldn’t breathe; lights were spinning in the void. “No, no, no!” I screamed until I woke up, found myself alone in bed shaking and drenched with sweat. Any counselor will tell you that women shouldn’t sleep alone after experiences like I’d had. It takes more than locks to keep the killers away.

  A light went on in the living room. “Who’s there?” I cried.

  “It’s me, Chiquita. It was too hot in the bedroom. I came out here and opened the window.” The Kid came in, sat down on the bed. “You were having that dream?”

  “Yeah. He’s killing me over and over again.”

  “Think about what they will do to him in prison.”

  I did, but it didn’t help. The Kid was beside me and that did. His skin felt cool to the touch. That’s about all we’d been doing this summer—touching. Sex was a distant stranger, but the Kid had been patient. Night after night he’d slept out there.

  “Chiquita, maybe I could open the window a little and sleep in your bed tonight?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  It had rained earlier and cooled off. Once the window was open to the night air the Kid rolled over and went right to sleep. He always does.

  I curled up behind him and gave his skinny shoulder a kiss.

  “Thanks, Kid,” I said.

  THE END

  Enjoy a free preview of A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #4

  The Wolf Path

  1

  IT WAS 104 where I live, in the Duke City, Albuquerque. Heat vapor flattened the hulking gray mountains and made them shimmer. Cars heated up on the interstate, boiled over and fell off. Outside my office a thistle bloomed with poisonous purple vigor. Inside, the swamp cooler wheezed and tried to create the ambiance of a Carlsbad Cav
ern. The skirts of my secretary, Anna, were rising daily. The clothes of my partner, Brink, wrinkled. When the temperature reached 105 I expected Anna to show up in shorts, and Brink not to show up at all. We sat in the Hamel and Harrison Building, our frame stucco law office on Lead, drinking iced coffee for breakfast—it was too hot for huevos rancheros, too hot for green chiles, too hot for Red Zinger tea, too hot for law, too hot for order, too hot for people.

  “Jeez, getta look at this,” said Anna, skimming the Journal’s front page. “Someone saw God in a flour tortilla.”

  “Happens every summer,” I said.

  “And it got so hot in Phoenix yesterday,” she continued, “they had to close the airport. The planes couldn’t get off the ground.”

  “How hot is that?”

  “A hundred twenty-two.”

  “Shit.”

  “Once it’s over a hundred what difference does it make anyway?” Brink’s fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows humped—they do that when he asks a question. “It’s only a matter of a percent, just a degree.”

  “Yeah? And what’s the difference between life and death, reason and insanity, happiness and drugs?” I asked him. “Just a degree.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” said Anna. “You had a call yesterday from March Augusta.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “You’d already gone home.”

  “Right.” I got up, went into my office, closed the door, lit a cigarette and opened the window where we’ve installed wrought-iron bars to keep us in and them out. Swampy hot air mingled with desert hot air, but thinking about March had a cooling effect. The last time I had seen him was in November in Fire Pond, Montana. Snow was on the ground and it had gotten cold, but not as cold as it would get. March was a former client, an environmentalist who had been accused of murdering a poacher. He has a great voice, a Western voice, a voice with a lot of space and time in it.

  “Neil Hamel,” he said, when I got him on the phone. “How the hell are you?”

  “Pretty good. I hope it’s cooler up there.”

  “One-oh-two in Fire Pond yesterday.”

  “A hundred and two in Montana?”

  “Makes you wonder about global warming, doesn’t it?”

  “I do my part. I never use hair spray and I don’t drive an air-conditioned car, either.”

  “I have some good news. Katharine is pregnant.”

  “How nice.”

  “And we’re getting married.”

  “Married? Well. Congratulations.” You had to expect that sort of thing from men you were attracted to: they got married and they had kids. Happens all the time. They’re in motion when you’re standing still. Well, whenever I get a twinge of marriage envy, I remember what another Katharine, Katharine Hepburn, said: “If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.”

  “How’s your friend?” he asked.

  “The Kid? He’s fine.”

  “Good. The reason I’m calling, Neil, actually, is to ask your help for a friend of mine, a guy I knew years ago in California. He was pretty radical in those days and the federal government had a file on him a foot thick. He’s straightened out now, gotten interested in wolves, and he has an educational program where he travels around the country with Sirius, a young timber wolf. There’s a plan in New Mexico to try to reintroduce the lobo, the Mexican gray wolf, near Soledad. Juan’s going to be down there next week giving his program.”

  “Juan? Is he Hispanic?”

  March laughed, a good sound, muffled by a thick red beard that I remembered well. “No, but he calls himself Juan Sololobo. Like I said, he’s from California. Did you know, by the way, that Sirius is the Wolf Star, the brightest star in the sky?”

  “No.”

  “The Pawnees thought the wolf came out of the spirit world in the southeastern sky every night and crossed the Milky Way, only they called it the Wolf Path.”

  It was the kind of thing March would know. He’d told me once that Venus was bright enough to be visible during the day but that most of us had lost the ability to see it.

  He got back to his business. “Juan has to have a permit to keep a wild animal in every state he visits. Sometimes officials hassle him over this, particularly if they are antiwolf. If they decide the permit is incorrectly filled out, they could confiscate Sirius. It’s happened before with other wolves and Juan’s a bit paranoid. I was wondering if you would mind going down there to help him out with the permit and just be around if he has any trouble. There’s a lot of antiwolf sentiment in Soledad.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s the kind of guy who goes looking for trouble?”

  “He’d probably say that trouble went looking for him.”

  Well, if there were no people like that there’d be no work for people like me.

  “I told him what a good job you did representing me,” March added.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “What exactly did this Sololobo do in his radical days, anyway? Kidnap heiresses?”

  “Robbed a couple of banks. People who robbed banks back then were radical, remember? Now they’re the presidents and CEOs.”

  “And guess who’s paying for it? How does Sololobo know the federal government has a file on him?”

  “One of his ex-wives got it through the Freedom of Information Act. So, will you go?”

  “Well…” I said.

  “Don’t worry about the money; Juan can afford it. He figures lawyers’ fees into the cost of doing business.”

  “Well…” I said it again.

  “Have you got something else on?”

  I flipped through my calendar—divorce, divorce, real estate closing, divorce. “Not much.”

  “Well?”

  “March, it’s 104 here, it was 122 in Phoenix yesterday. Soledad is practically in Mexico. It will be an oven.” For once in my life I didn’t feel like going anywhere.

  “Neil, you’re not gonna let a little bit of heat scare you off, are you?’’

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Good. Then you’ll go?”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “Give me one good reason why you won’t do it.”

  I had a reason, but a good reason? “Oh, all right,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  “Great. Juan’s first wife, Jayne Brown, has a ranch near Soledad—that’s J-a-y-n-e, by the way. Juan’s going to be staying there and there’s plenty of room for you, too.”

  I took a look at my clock, which told me I had a closing to go to five minutes ago. “Nice talking to you, March.”

  “You, too, Neil. Juan will be in touch about when and where to meet him, but you’ll let me know how it all works out, won’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  ******

  The Kid and I spent the evening on my deck at La Vista Luxury Apartment Complex watching cumulonimbus building up over the Sandias and sipping Jell-O shots. Jell-O shots are a summertime favorite in the Duke City, a mixture of Jell-O and an appropriately flavored liquor: orange Jell-O and Cointreau (or Cuantro, as it’s spelled around here), lemon with vodka, lime with triple sec and tequila (a.k.a. Margarita shots). It’s a way of having your Cuervo Gold and eating it, too. They’re dessert and cocktails together, forget about the dinner. I served them in wineglasses and we sucked them down. As the day came to a close, the clouds darkened, the cicadas screamed, the beat went on, a primitive, insistent undercurrent that was omnipresent in this summer of $15,000 car stereos that pulverized the pavement. It was music that I didn’t listen to so I didn’t hear lyrics, only beat, not a heartbeat, just a beat, a deep, dark, summertime beat.

  ‘‘Kid, how many people can there be out there with $15,000 car stereos?” I asked him, since he was an auto mechanic and knew about these things.

  The Kid shrugged. “When they’re that loud, Chiquita, it doesn’t take very many.”

  That was true. We live in a time in whi
ch virility is measured by the things boys are able to buy or steal: the boom of a bass, the power of an amp, the speed of a car, the caliber of a gun, the air in a shoe. Music had become a weapon. Maybe it had always been a weapon, but technology had ratcheted up the escalation, as I recently heard a general say. Technology had made one man’s pleasure or power trip or stereo everybody else’s pain. It made me think of Jell-O and a simpler place.

  “Kid,” I said, “remember March, the guy I defended in Montana?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “He called me today.” The Kid waited. I told him the news. “He’s getting married and they’re expecting a baby.” The Kid nodded as if to imply that was good for them. “He has a friend he wants me to represent who educates people about wolves. The friend is going to be in Soledad with a wolf next week giving his program and March is expecting some problems about a permit.”

  “Is he going to be there?”

  “Who? March?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. Just the friend and his ex-wife.”

  “Soledad is very near the border, Chiquita,” the Kid said.

  I cut him another shot of Cuervo green, plopped it in his glass. “You’ve been there?”

  He ignored the question, which he tends to when his past comes up. “The wolves that lived down there are the Mexican wolves, the lobos,” he said. “They are smaller than the wolf of the north. There are not many left. I hear them sometimes in the Sierra Madres when I was a boy.” What he was doing in the Sierra Madres as a boy I didn’t know. As far as I did know the Kid grew up in Mexico City, one of numerous offspring of a Chilean father and an Argentine mother, political exiles who disappeared from their country before their country disappeared them. Any extra money he had went back to Mexico still. The Kid threw his head back, faced the sky and howled, a long, eerie cry that was one of the loneliest sounds I’d ever heard. A dog across the arroyo answered back, a dog in La Vista answered him—and this was supposed to be a pet-free complex.