by Don Travis
“Did he get in?”
“Nope. The FBI won’t let anyone see Lando except his attorney. As of now that’s still me.”
“You haven’t been replaced?”
“No, and I thought I’d be back in Albuquerque by now. I don’t understand why the old boy didn’t bring a bevy of lawyers with him.”
“I don’t get it either, but I haven’t seen the man yet. Maybe I’ll find out something when I do. That’s next on my list. Am I still cleared to speak to Lando?”
“As long as you’re with me.”
“Stay close, Del. I want another try at him after I see Alfano and take a reading on him.”
“He’s all bluff and bluster and money.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s not all bluff,” I said.
“No, but he sure is bluster and money.”
THE COURTYARD by Marriott Farmington was a hotel built in the Pueblo Revival style with a wide portico, floors stacked one upon the other, and the entire structure covered in earth-brown stucco. When Anthony Alfano opened the door to his room, I saw a heavier, older, somewhat coarser version of his two sons. He carried his fifty-five years well. At five ten and two hundred pounds, he was a strong man in decent physical condition. A peek at his medical records would probably show him to be as fit as the proverbial fiddle despite the beginnings of a roll around his middle. The veins on his nose hinted he preferred Sabelito’s hard stuff to the grape he peddled. The gray in his wavy hair looked like streaks of gypsum in a seam of coal.
After I introduced myself, he invited me inside in the gravelly bass I remembered from our phone conversations.
He didn’t offer his hand but stepped back from the doorway so I could enter the suite. Aggie’s lanky form was sprawled in an easy chair. A snifter of white wine sat on the table beside him. Anthony’s drink was red. I waved away his offer of a glass.
“Good to finally meet you in person.” I tried playing the etiquette game, but he brushed aside the small talk.
“Good job finding my son, but why in the hell did you turn him over to the FBI?”
“For his own protection.”
“Bullshit. Aggie could have had him home in a couple of hours. There’s no place safer than that.”
“Maybe, but then he’d be a fugitive, and Aggie would have been aiding and abetting. That’s no life for your sons.”
“That decision wasn’t yours to make. You overstepped your contract.”
“So fire me,” I said with a smile. In his world, dismissal was the ultimate threat, and he might as well know it wouldn’t work on me.
“Consider it done,” he shot back. “Send me your final bill.”
“Wait a minute.” Aggie straightened in his chair. “For some reason Lando trusts BJ. We need to keep him around until we get a better handle on the situation.”
Alfano put his own twist on Aggie’s declaration. “I can have our own bodyguards here within four hours. We don’t—”
“I’m not talking about bodyguards. I’m talking about someone with a little moxie. Lando was as messed up as any down-and-out hobo I’ve ever seen, and BJ brought him out of it.”
Alfano winced at the mental image. Maybe the old bastard had a heart after all.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re not fired—yet. What’s next?”
“Gaines, the FBI agent in charge of this case, is going to try to isolate Lando, which means he’ll give you some grief about getting in to see him. Your temporary attorney successfully petitioned the court for a bail hearing. It’s set for four this afternoon. He also got me access to Lando by claiming I’m his investigator. I want to talk to Lando one more time before the bail hearing. After that, regardless of the outcome, Gaines will probably give you a few minutes with your son.”
“Hell, we’ll take him home with us. I’ll post whatever bail is necessary.”
“Might not be that easy. This is a murder case. Possibly a capital case since there are two bodies. I don’t expect them to grant bail.” I cut off his protest. “How did you get here so fast, Alfano?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? When I got Aggie’s message, I was in LA. A business associate flew me over. I’ll hitch a ride back with Aggie. Anything else you want to know?” His tone said he was holding on to his temper with difficulty.
“What do either of you know about the Pied Pipers?” I asked.
“Who the hell are they?” Alfano demanded. “Are we playing children’s games now?”
“Aggie?”
“Never heard of them. Why?”
“Just ran across the name recently. I’m on my way to meet Mr. Dahlman now, and we’re going to make certain Lando understands what’s going to happen in the hearing this afternoon. Any message you want me to convey?”
“Tell him we’re behind him a hundred percent. We know he didn’t kill anybody,” Alfano said.
“I’ll also tell him he’ll see you at the hearing. I assume you’ll both be there.”
“Certainly.”
When Aggie walked me to the door, I motioned him outside.
“What?”
“I’m going to ask you a very personal question, and I need an honest answer. I think your brother’s hiding something—at least his conscious mind is. There was something wrong between him and Dana, and I’ve got to learn what it was. It might be the key to this whole thing.”
“Why would he forget something so important?”
“Because it was so traumatic.”
Aggie thrust out his chin. “Okay, ask away.”
“Did you have intimate—by that, I mean sexual—relations with Dana Norville?”
“What?” The word exploded from Aggie. His face darkened dangerously, giving me a glimpse of his father lurking inside him. “Of course not. Never.”
“Hang on for a couple more, and they might be even rougher. Did you ever try to seduce Dana?”
He was in control of himself now; his mottled complexion faded. The dark eyes lost their feral glint. The answer was a flat no.
“Here comes the biggie. Did you ever have or attempt to have sexual relations with your brother?”
“You are a sick son of a bitching faggot,” Aggie said in a low, even voice. “No.”
“I accept your word on it, but I had to ask. I never believed you had. I’m going through a process of elimination here.”
“I guess I understand.” He paused as he reached for the doorknob. “Papa’s got a couple of attorneys from the Brasser firm on the way. You might want to let Dahlman know.”
JAIL APPARENTLY agreed with Lando, at least compared to life on the streets. He was a different man. It wasn’t only the fact he was clean; he was more alert than he had been in our first interview at the detention center. He rose to shake our hands, addressing both Del and me by name. For the first time, I caught myself thinking of him as an Alfano instead of “Lando.”
We were in a different room this time, one provided for attorney-client consultations, and he glanced around the small chamber with interest. A guard stood outside the steel door with a small window for observation. The place had an antiseptic smell about it. The table was metal and bolted to the floor, as were the chairs. Lando’s orange jumpsuit made me think of the Porsche lying at the bottom of the Rio Grande Gorge outside of Taos.
“What’s going to happen to me?” It was a straightforward question without a hint of pity.
“There’s a bail hearing set for four this afternoon,” Del explained. “But don’t get your hopes up. You are charged with two murders, and the judge is not likely to approve a bond, no matter how much your family can put up.”
“Two? Who am I supposed to have killed besides—” His voice caught. He cleared his throat. “Besides Dana?”
“Santillanes, the PI who tried to abduct you at Bisti,” I said. “Did you do that?” The question earned a frown from Del.
“No, I didn’t kill either one of them. I’ve never killed anybody.”
“You look stronger, Lando. Do
you feel stronger?”
“I’m okay.” His piercing chocolate-brown eyes shifted away from me.
“Look at me, Lando,” I ordered. Startled, he glanced up and met my gaze. “You’re hiding something, and if you want me to find out who killed Dana, I need to know what it is.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“You may not know it, but you are. When we talked last time, I asked about secrets between you and Dana and you fell apart. You need to face up to whatever it is.”
“Secrets? I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean the relationship between the two of you was under stress, and I don’t think it was because of Jazz Penrod. Something happened before Jazz came along, didn’t it?”
“That’s not….” His voice trailed off. “Well, things weren’t as easy between us, but it was just the trip. You know, being together 24-7.”
“Don’t try to snow me, Lando. What was going on?”
We danced for thirty minutes. I went at him every way I knew how without getting down and dirty. Finally that was the only way left.
“Lando, who else was fucking Dana?”
His head snapped back as if I’d clipped him on the chin. His eyes went wide. A groan rolled out of him. His torso rocked back and forth. The way he glared at me, I thought he was going to come across the table. Then he dropped his head onto his arms folded on the table.
Del gave me a look. “What the hell are you doing, Vince?”
“Trying to get to the truth.”
“What do you know that you haven’t told me?”
“It’s just a suspicion, nothing I know for certain. But I think what he’s hiding—from himself more than from us, most likely—is the key to everything.”
“You believe the murders were sexually motivated?”
“Not lust, if that’s what you mean. But one of them had a sexual context. The other was to cover up the first.”
“That third car down at Bisti?”
“Right. Santillanes was hired by someone to tail Lando and Dana. When he caught up with them, he phoned his client and kept tabs on them until his boss arrived. Then he tried to snatch Lando while his client went after Dana. And Dana ended up dead. Dead with semen inside him.”
“If there was semen, then there’s DNA. Surely, Gaines has taken Lando’s DNA by now. It either matched, or it didn’t.”
“He hasn’t had time to get the tests back on Lando’s DNA. And when they do, it’s not going to match. Unless Lando and Dana made love that morning.”
“We didn’t.”
The low, muffled voice startled us. I had assumed Lando was so out of it he wouldn’t notice us talking over him. But if he’d gone away, he was back. He lifted his head and stared me straight in the eye.
“We didn’t,” he repeated. “We hadn’t made love since he got together with Jazz. We argued about it. And… and that’s when he told me what was really wrong—what was tearing him apart. The thing that was tearing us apart.”
“What was that?” Del asked.
Lando shook his head slowly. “It’s too….” He shuddered.
“Was it Aggie?” I asked bluntly.
His lips tightened; his chest expanded. The rising outrage in his eyes turned cloudy. Lando dropped his gaze to the table and sagged visibly.
“No, not Aggie. Papa. Papa raped him!”
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Chapter 34
LANDO DROPPED his head to his arms again, but a moment later, Del and I witnessed another of those amazing transformations from boy to man. Lando sat up with fire in his eyes. His voice took on timbre and strength.
“I’d been planning a vacation for a long time but put it on the back burner when this De Falco thing came up. I didn’t want to leave Mama under that kind of stress.” He took a deep breath. “Then out of the blue, Dana said he needed to get away. Claimed he couldn’t take the pressure. You know, Papa’s dislike—no, his hate. I started to argue with him until it hit me. If Mama would trust me with a power of attorney for the acquisition, I could just disappear and let nature take its course. The De Falco people wouldn’t sit around and wait forever. We’d heard there was another interested party, which was why Papa was stepping up the pressure. So Dana and I packed up and took off.”
“You didn’t let your father know where you were going?”
“Yeah, I did. I stood right in front of him and told him to go to hell. Told him I was going to get lost somewhere in New Mexico, and I wouldn’t take his calls. When I left his office, I wasn’t sure if he was having a fit or a stroke. And didn’t much care which one it was.”
“So Dana probably didn’t see your father again after the… uh, incident. And at that point you weren’t aware of what had happened?”
“Nope, and it’s a good thing I wasn’t. The bastard didn’t have to do that to Dana just to get back at me. He did it after preaching all these years about me manning up. If I had known, I’d have killed the son of a bitch. Still might.”
I would have dismissed that as bravado except this was an Alfano, and I was beginning to wonder if anything was beyond any of them.
Del spoke up. “Lando, you’ve got to understand that rape isn’t sex. It’s violence, domination. It’s a way to terrorize.”
Lando took another deep breath, and his defiance collapsed. “I know. But he didn’t have to do it that way. That… that made it my fault. It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for me.”
“Your father did it to drive Dana away,” Del continued. “And it worked. If you hadn’t agreed to get out of town, Dana probably would have gone by himself.”
“Yeah. I figured that out. Dana got happy as hell when I agreed to go with him. We decided to make it a vacation. No cares. No worries. Just fun. And it was for a while. We had a great time, but I could tell something was bothering him. And it got worse. It started interfering with things. I tried to get him to tell me what it was. But he wouldn’t. I guess I pushed too hard, because it got so he wouldn’t talk much at all. Everything really fell apart when we came here.”
Lando drew a deep breath like a man coming up from under water. “I thought it was because the trip was coming to an end, but I finally figured out it was the phone calls. The last week or so we were together, his phone started ringing all the time. After a while he’d just hang up without saying a word. I thought it was Bruno, you know, his ex, bugging him, but at first he claimed it was wrong numbers, and then it was a problem with his preregistration at school. A couple of times, I grabbed the phone when it rang, but whoever it was just hung up.”
“Did you see the number displayed on the phone’s screen?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It was restricted. There wasn’t a number. Anyway, he got nervous—like he was worried. He’d shy away when I wanted to make love. But then he’d apologize and everything would be fine. But he’d changed. It was almost like he was a different guy. Otherwise he wouldn’t have hooked up with Jazz. It was just us. You know, the two of us. The rest of the world didn’t matter—at least for a little while. God, I miss him.”
Lando shuffled his feet and thumped a fist on the metal table, making a sound like a muffled Chinese gong. “When I came back from the art gallery and saw Jazz leaving the motel that day, I was really bummed. Jazz is a natural-born flirt. I don’t think he even knows he’s doing it half the time, but it drove me crazy that Dana was eating it up. I accused him of two-timing me.” Lando paused and swallowed hard.
“He… he said Jazz was the least of our worries. It took me an hour to get it out of him, and we almost ended up in a fistfight. But he finally admitted Papa offered him a lot of money to go away and leave me alone. You know, break up with me. Move out of state. When Dana wouldn’t do it, Papa went down to LA while I was on the way home for the weekend. He talked Dana into meeting him at a motel to ‘settle things between them,’ Papa said. But what he really wanted was to up the ante to get Dana to leave me. Things got kind o
f bad. Papa started slapping him around. Dana said it turned into something else. Papa said…. Papa said….”
That faraway look came back into his eyes. The man was retreating; the kid was coming back. I reached across the table and clasped his shoulder, hoping my touch would ground him.
“That’s good. Keep on going. You need to tell us everything, Lando. Say it out loud. What did your father tell Dana?”
Lando’s gaze wavered before he looked me in the eye. “Papa said he’d show him how a real man fucked. Threw him down on the bed in the motel where they were meeting and… and raped him.”
“Lando, your father’s a strong man, but I saw Dana’s body. He was well-built. He could have put up a fight and kept it from happening.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said too. But that’s before I found out what Papa did.”
“What was that?”
“He had a stun gun. He put it to Dana’s back and stripped him while he was helpless. When Dana kept trying to fight, he zapped him again. Then he raped him. He raped the man I loved. And all this time he’d been telling me what a sissy, what a mama’s boy, what a pansy I was. He said what Dana and I did would make a real man sick to his stomach. And then he did that. Dana didn’t know how to handle it. He tried to deal with it himself, but he was falling apart. I think that’s why he got together with Jazz.”
He expelled a breath of air. “Aw, I don’t know, maybe I’m making excuses for him. But we’d always been faithful to each other… until then. Oh, God, I wish I’d handled things better. But I didn’t know it was about to end. That Dana was going to die.” He cradled his head in his arms again.
“Why do you think he died?” I asked.
Lando’s body froze. Muscles trembled as he grappled for an answer—or a plausible evasion. Then his head rose slowly. “I don’t know.”
“Your father’s in town. He and Aggie will be in the courtroom this afternoon.”
He scrambled to his feet. “No.”
I turned and waved to the guard watching through the window, signaling everything was under control.