Land of Burning Heat

by Judith Van GIeson

  “It’s interesting,” he said, “but it doesn’t compare to having a gangbanger in custody who tried to fence Isabel’s VCR.”

  “Have you found any record of Isabel depositing money or calling anyone who might be a suspect?”

  “No deposits and the only people she called were you and family members.”

  “You could examine their records.”

  “They’d have to be suspects first.”

  “What about May Brennan? Have you examined her bank account or phone records?” Claire’s despair over Isabel’s death was greater than her guilt about implicating May.

  “She’d have to be a suspect, too,” Romero said. “What you’ve come across is real interesting for a historian and an academic, but I don’t think Lieutenant Kearns will see it as motive for homicide.” He moved to the edge of his chair. “Anything else? I need to get going.”

  “That’s it,” Claire said.

  She walked him out to the exit and said good-bye. He hadn’t seemed totally unsympathetic, just busy, preoccupied about his boss like anybody else with a job. She was glad her own boss was at a meeting, and she didn’t have to worry about him seeing her with a policeman. On her way down the hall she glanced at the wall clock. Four. She couldn’t stand another minute in her hermetically sealed office. It was either open the door and the blinds, let the world in, or leave. She picked up her keys and her purse and left.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  ON HER WAY HOME SHE STOPPED AT PAGE ONE, TOO to see John Harlan. He wasn’t a historian, but his work took him into the past. When she told him about her conversation with Tey Santos, he ran his hand over the top of his head, making his hair stand up like it had been electrified.

  “You’re lucky to find someone who would talk to you about that subject. It’s not information they reveal to just anybody.”

  “I don’t know if I’m lucky or unlucky. I think the Santoses’ background has something to do with Isabel’s death, but it’s hard to get the police to see it that way.”

  “A gangster in the hand is worth a lot of speculation in the bush,” said John.

  “She also told me the Jews were known as the people of the book.”

  “Just like you and me,” John said.

  Claire sat down, cleared a space on John’s messy desk and rested her arm there. “I read Peter Beck’s book on the Inquisition last night.”

  “Is that why you look so tired?”

  Do I look that bad? she wondered. “Not exactly. Beck’s description said Joaquín Rodriguez was led through the streets to the burning ground with a green cross tied between his hands. He encountered a young man also carrying a cross. Something about that encounter convinced the Inquisitor Manuel Santos that Joaquín had converted and it saved him from being burned alive. I did a computer search for more information and discovered that Peter Beck published an article in the Historical Journal of the Americas titled “The Identity of the Man in the Crowd at the Inquisition of Joaquín Rodriguez.”

  “But you couldn’t find the article?”

  “I put out an interlibrary loan request but haven’t gotten the article back yet. Sometimes it takes awhile.”

  “And you want me to help?” John had the ability to spot a customer from across the room. He turned his nose up like he’d caught the scent of a rare and sought-after document.

  “Right.”

  “Is it ephemera?”

  “That would depend on how you define ephemera.”

  “I define it as printed material that doesn’t have a spine thick enough to display writing.”

  “Then I would say that it is. As I remember the Historical Journal of the Americas didn’t have a spine.”

  “Do you care if I ask Warren Isles? If the article has anything to do with New Mexico he may have picked it up somewhere. That journal occasionally published articles about our state, which would be enough for someone as obsessive as Warren to collect every issue.”

  Warren Isles gave Claire the same uneasy feeling as Peter Beck. She didn’t trust either one of them. “I’d rather you didn’t. Warren will connect you to me and if he has anything to hide, I don’t want him to make that connection.”

  “Warren has a devious mind, but I can see right through him. If he has anything to hide, I’d know it.”

  “It would be better if you didn’t contact him.”

  “Okay. I suppose you’ve got some reason for not asking Peter Beck himself.”

  “I don’t trust him either.”

  “He teaches at Berkeley, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Combine Berserkeley with academentia and what do you get?”

  Claire’s brain was too tired to wrap itself around that crazy thought. “You tell me.”

  “Double jeopardy, double insanity.”

  And what would that produce, Claire wondered, a paranoid schizophrenic? Alzheimer’s could be considered a form of insanity, too, she supposed, as the mind slipped farther and farther from its moorings.

  “What are you doing for dinner?” John asked.

  Claire hadn’t gotten to dinner yet. She was so tired all she had thought about was going home and going to bed. “I’m hoping I’ll find something delicious in my freezer.”

  “You want to stop at Emilio’s? It’s on your way home.”

  “I’m so tired.”

  “Have a glass of wine. It’ll revive you for a little while.”

  “Okay,” Claire agreed.

  She waited for John to finish his business, then they walked across the parking lot to their vehicles.

  As she reached for the door of her rental car, John said, “Wait a minute. Where did that come from?”

  “Did I forget to tell you that my truck was in a wreck?” Claire asked, wondering what else exhaustion had caused her to forget.

  “How’d that happen?”

  “Someone ran me off the ditch road on Friday night. I had just passed Isabel Santos’s house on my way to Tey’s. I wasn’t hurt, but my truck was wrecked.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with you. You’re suffering from Chevy deprivation.”

  “Maybe,” Claire said.

  “See you at Emilio’s.”

  ******

  Claire had two glasses of wine at dinner and laughed at all of John’s jokes. After dinner he walked her to her car, hesitated, poked the pavement with the toe of his shoe, then said, “Listen, I can follow you home if you want.”

  “I only had two glasses of wine,” Claire said. “I’m sober.”

  “That’s not what I’m worrying about. I don’t want someone to try to run you off Tramway.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Claire said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Someone may have cared about my going by Isabel Santos’s house, but I don’t think anyone cares what I do on Tramway.”

  She got home safe, parked the rental car in the garage, and let herself into the house. Ignoring Nemesis’s pleas for attention, she went right to bed and fell into a deep sleep.

  ******

  After a decent night’s sleep, Celia’s bracelets made a pleasant tinkling sound. Or was she wearing fewer of them? Claire wondered when her friend appeared in her office.

  “I haven’t found Peter Beck’s article yet,” she said.

  “I’m not surprised. I doubt it had a very wide distribution.”

  “But I talked to my friend at Berkeley. She told me that Richard Joslin’s wife, Renee, cares for him at home in Oakland. The brilliant, independent scholar has become a helpless, absent-minded professor. Can you imagine what it must be like to care for a husband with Alzheimer’s? When the mind goes, so goes the heart. Love is based on memory and shared moments. How can it continue without memory? Richard still has moments of lucidity, my friend said. I got his number if you want to call.”

  “What good would it do to call a man with Alzheimer’s?”

  “I’m sure Renee answers the phone. She worked in the department, too, and may re
member the Peter Beck incident. My friend told me that Joslin was Beck’s mentor so I’m sure it hurt to be rebuked by him.”

  She handed Claire a piece of paper with the number on it. “Go for it,” she said.

  Claire couldn’t convince herself to make the call while she was at work, but when she got home she wrote down all the reasons she should, skipped all the reasons she shouldn’t, prepared what she would say to Renee Joslin and dialed the number. She heard the phone being removed from the hook but no one spoke.

  “Hello?” she said into the void.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice echoed.

  “I have a question for Richard Joslin. Is he there?”

  “Is Richard Joslin here? Yes.” The man answered his own question. “He’s here. Would you like to speak to him?”

  He seemed borderline lucid. Not knowing how long the moment would last, she spoke fast, trying to keep her question simple but not so simple as to imply he was dumb. “My name is Claire Reynier. I’m a librarian at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico. I’m doing some research on the Jewish mystic Joaquín Rodriguez and I’m looking for an article Peter Beck wrote about the identity of a man at his Inquisition. The article was supplemental reading for one of your courses.” First she’d see if he remembered the article, then she’d ask why he disagreed with it.

  “Peter Beck,” was all he said.

  She had no idea what to say next. Not wanting to challenge him she resorted to “he’s a brilliant scholar.”

  “Peter Beck,” he said again with a deep sadness in his voice. For the Peter Beck he remembered or the Peter Beck he did not? He paused and Claire had an image of him trying to pull facts out of an empty hat. “The father and the son,” he said. If the father was the first fact, Claire thought as she waited for Richard Joslin to continue, the son would be the second. Joslin seemed to catch his breath and then his voice turned stubborn and angry. “Not so brilliant. He said the Jew became the son. But there’s no proof. Sloppy scholarship. Pure speculation.”

  “Richard,” Claire heard a woman say in the tired voice of a scold. “What are you doing? Whom are you talking to?”

  “I don’t know,” Richard replied.

  It was tempting for Claire to pretend she was an automated call and hang up, but that seemed dishonorable.

  “Hello?” the woman’s voice said into the phone.

  “Is this Mrs. Joslin?”

  “Yes?” the woman said, changing her tone to the annoyed voice reserved for credit card solicitors.

  Claire suspected that if she said she was calling on behalf of Visa or MasterCard Renee Joslin would hang up and that would be the end of it, but she took a chance and identified herself. “My name is Claire Reynier. I’m a librarian at the University of New Mexico.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m doing research into the Mexican Inquisition and I’m looking for an article written by Peter Beck,” she said although she feared her query might make its way back to Peter Beck.

  “Did you ask my husband about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve upset him. Please don’t call here ever again.”

  Claire’s ear rang as Renee banged down the phone. Alzheimer’s wasn’t a physically contagious illness, but the mental frustration it caused spread like ink seeping into a blotter. She went outside, listened to the cicadas strumming in the trees and watched night fall behind the West Mesa. The lights in the Rio Grande Valley twinkled on. The sky near the horizon was the blue-green twilight color that follows a sunset. A bright light appeared in the west that might have been an approaching plane but hovered in place long enough for Claire to determine it was the planet Venus. She had read that Venus was always visible in the sky and people could train themselves to see it even in the daytime.

  As she watched the other planets and stars come out, pieces of the Rodriguez/Santos puzzle began to fall into place. “The father and the son,” could be Richard Joslin and Peter Beck. She didn’t know whether Joslin had his own son, but the mentor might have thought of the student as a son. “The Jew became the son.” She sent that phrase into the night and waited to see what came back.

  She saw a sprinkling of what-ifs that mirrored the lights on the ground and the stars in the sky. What if the Catholic family that adopted the orphan Daniel Rodriguez happened to be the family of Manuel Santos, the Inquisitor? It had to have been a family with good standing in the church. What if Daniel became Manuel’s adopted son and took his name? What if he was the young man who approached Joaquín Rodriguez on his way to the quemadero then persuaded Manuel Santos to give his brother a less painful death? What if Daniel Rodriguez was the ancestor of the current Santos family and he was the one buried with Joaquín’s last words under the house on Calle Luna?

  What if this was the information contained in Peter Beck’s article and he lied when he said he believed Joaquín Rodriguez’s conversion was sincere? After his book came out, he might have come across long-hidden records in the archives in Mexico City stating that Daniel Rodriguez was given to Manuel Santos to raise. But there might have been no written evidence that Daniel Rodriguez took Manuel Santos’s name and found his way to New Mexico until Joaquín’s last words showed up inside a cross with specks of green paint.

  For Peter Beck it would be the solution to an intellectual puzzle, proof of his hypothesis. He’d be unlikely to feel any emotional connection to the people involved. But for Claire, thinking that Daniel Rodriguez had made his way to New Mexico and brought his brother’s last words with him, that the beliefs of Joaquín were honored by Tey Santos 400 years later, was a discovery as magical as the night sky. She wanted to gift wrap the discovery, put a bow on it and deliver it to Tey, but first she needed to be sure and that meant finding Peter’s article.

  She looked up again before she went inside. The sky was black velvet and thousands of stars were visible. They all seemed to be in place, but stars and planets had no fixed place in the sky. Their location changed with the days and the seasons. Tomorrow Venus wouldn’t be exactly where it was today and next month it would be somewhere else.

  She went inside and called May Brennan again. After she heard May’s recorded voice mail message she said “May, this is Claire. I need to talk to you. Please call me back.” It was getting close to ten o’clock. She believed May was home and screening her calls. She couldn’t make May answer her phone so she gave up and went to bed.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  IT WOULD TAKE TIME TO TRACK DOWN PETER’S ARTICLE. The response from interlibrary loan had not been encouraging; several copies of the journal were reported missing. Waiting was frustrating but Claire trusted the people who were searching on her behalf—August, Harold, John, and Celia. She didn’t want to be a nudge and bother them every day so she kept quiet and waited. On Thursday Mauricio Casados, the mechanic in Bernalillo, called to say her truck was ready.

  “Yay!” she said.

  She returned her rental car after work and got a ride to Bernalillo with a coworker who lived in Placitas.

  The mechanic’s hands were covered with grease. His smile was missing a tooth. But to Claire he was beautiful.

  “Good as new,” he said, handing over the keys.

  The truck looked almost new, better than it had before the wreck. Mauricio had taken out all the small old dings along with all the large new ones, but vehicles that were in major accidents often didn’t achieve the alignment they had before. Her expression had to show doubt because Mauricio asked if she would like to take the truck for a ride to make sure it was all right.

  She agreed and took it for a drive around Bernalillo before she paid him.

  “Rides good, no?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  On her drive she saw that Silva’s Saloon on Camino del Pueblo was having one of its occasional poetry readings. After she paid Mauricio she stopped in. Silva’s walls were a collage of photographs and magazine clippings featuring decades of women, d
ogs, and motorcycles. The poet reading in the back room was a Lakota Sioux from South Dakota. Claire sat on a stool at the bar, ordered a glass of white wine and listened to him read. He had an easy style and a subtle sense of humor. He was followed by another poet in a pair of dirty overalls who looked like a Jemez hippie. Next came an Albuquerque poet who wore an elegant pair of hand tooled cowboy boots but whose poetry lacked finesse. She paid for her drink, asked for directions to May Brennan’s house and left.

  It was nearly eight o’clock. May was sure to be home from work by now. Although she had known May for years, Claire had never been to her house. Considering her interest in history she expected to find a restored adobe, but May lived in a frame stucco ranch, bland enough for suburbia, but lacking a suburban lawn. Her yard had a few sad weeds and some thorny Russian thistle that would turn into tumbleweed and move on at the end of summer. The car parked in the driveway was a Subaru Outback. Beneath layers of dust it was black, but too small to be the vehicle that ran Claire off the road unless her imagination had blown that event way out of proportion.

  She parked in front of the house, straightened her back, walked up the path to the front door and pushed the bell. She saw TV light flickering behind a lace curtain.

  “Coming,” May called. She yanked the door open and said, “Oh…”

  Expectation segued into disappointment in her distracted eyes. Claire wondered just who May had been expecting.

  “What are you doing in Bernalillo?” she asked.

  “I was having some work done on my truck. I came to pick it up.”

  “You came all the way to Bernalillo to have work done on your truck?”

  “It was in a wreck here. If you’d answered my calls, I would have told you about it.”

  “I’ve been busy,” May said.

  She didn’t look like she’d been busy. She looked like she barely had the energy to get off the sofa. May’s divorce had aged her. Her spine had compressed from lack of calcium or lack of energy. It brought her hips and breasts too close together and gave her the rounded shape of a muffin.