The Lies that Bind (10 page)

There was an opening in the concrete wall of the diversion channel, where a pipe drained in. “Darlene Bador's hole” some adolescent had painted in large orange letters. I hoped Darlene would forget about it and grow up to find some kind of personal power, but I hadn't come here to worry about Darlene Bador. It was Justine Virga and Martha Conover that I was thinking about. There were places on either side of the channel where cars had driven onto the lot and parked. The kinds of places where, in the old days, you used to find condoms in the morning and maybe you still did. The dirt was crisscrossed with tire tracks, too many and too mingled to distinguish any one. On the school side, where I was standing, I saw a large dark spot where someone had changed his oil. I inched my way down the steep side wall of the channel and up the other side, where I found a patch of broken glass. Some shards were clear, and some were tinted sunglass brown. Headlights? I wondered. A windshield? I picked up a couple of pieces and put them in my pocket.

Someone could have hot-wired Martha's car, I thought, and driven it here while she was at the AWC meeting or after she went to bed. Someone with keys could have done it faster and been less conspicuous. Justine could have been run over on this lot and the body moved to Los Cerros. Who would be around on a rainy, dark night to notice? A criminal who really wanted privacy could have moved the barricades farther down the road and prevented access altogether. It was also possible that Justine was killed somewhere else, hit by another car, that Martha's car was dented and evidence planted on it here. I saw oil on the ground, but I didn't see anything that looked like blood. Blood washes away; oil lingers forever. It had rained hard on Halloween, and the diversion channel would have been as full and churning
as
the Rio Grande in snowmelt. Any evidence that fell or got thrown in would have washed to Belen by now.

I felt exposed suddenly and vulnerable as a rabbit when the shadow of a hawk passes overhead, as if something dark and hungry were watching me. A big gray American car with tinted glass drove down San Sebastián on the other side of the ditch. Whoever was in it could see me clearly, but all I saw was dark glass. The car stopped when it got to the barricades, stared at me with a blank black windshield, then backed down the road, making it impossible for me to get the license number.

******

When I got back to the office I called Saia and told him what I'd observed. “The Atalaya lot,” he said. “People park there all the time. They walk their dogs, change their oil. At night kids get drunk or get laid. They fight, headlights are broken. What's unusual about that? We'll have less trouble when it's turned into a mall, gets paved over and lit.”

“Maybe it will never get turned into a mall.”

“Right. I know a bridge in Massachusetts you might like to buy too.”

“It's not far from the Women's Club and Los Cerros,” I said. “Someone could have hot-wired Martha's car, driven it over there while she was at the AWC meeting or after she got home, hit Justine and driven the car back. There was time. The APD has Martha's car. You could check out the glass on the lot and see if it matches.”

“Come on, Neil, your client hit her. Admit it. She ran Justine Virga down in a Halcion mad-on. And now she's got a Halcion forget-on and doesn't want to remember she did it. Who would hot-wire a car in the Women's Club parking lot anyway? It's too busy.”

“Los Cerros isn't that busy. You're the ones who said no one passed through there in the forty-five minutes between the time Martha got home and the time the body was found.”

“Martha Conover's car can't be hot-wired.”

“Why not?”

“It has a kill switch.”

“What's that?”

“An antitheft device that disconnects the battery. You push it in when you park the car, unlock it when you're ready to go.”

“Suppose someone had a key?”

“Like who?”

“She left her car at Mighty the week before Halloween,” I said. “The key was sitting around on a keyboard all morning just waiting to be copied.”

“
All right,” Saia said. “I'll send someone out to Atalaya to take a look.”

While I was talking to Saia, my partner, Brink, wandered into my office, acting like a bored teenager waiting for someone to tell him what to do and how to do it. “Stop drumming your fingers on my desk and get a life” was the assignment I wanted to give him. He humped his eyebrows as I hung up, which meant a question was on the way.

“Are you going to represent Martha Conover?” he asked.

“Looks like it,” I said.

“Did she do it?”

“She says she didn't.”

His frown created a diversion channel that led from his receding hairline to the bridge of his nose. His eyebrows met across the furrow and squished together in a fuzzy caterpillar kiss. “You think we ought to roll the dice with a wobbler?” he asked.

“A wobbler? What the hell is a wobbler?”

“An unwinnable case.”

“It's not
that
unwinnable,” I said.

“You gotta hear your horoscope for today,” Anna called from her desk, where she was busy opening a package and reading the newspaper at the same time.

“Why?” I replied.

“It says, ‘In your life you are both the marble and the sculptor, and your greatest pleasure is doing what other people say you cannot.'”

“Um,” I said.

“Hey, look at this,” Anna said, pulling two small black tubes from their padded envelope. “Our skunk guns are here.”

“Let me see.” I went out to her desk to take a look. I held mine in the palm of my hand. It was, just as the ads said, small enough to carry on a key ring. Anna pulled a larger, white spray bottle from the box. “What's that?” I asked.

“Neutralizer. You spray it around to get rid of the skunk smell.”

Brink didn't buy it. “You can never get rid of the smell of a skunk,” he said.

“These are all natural, free-range, native New Mexico skunks,” I said.

“It beats getting beaten up or murdered,” said Anna.

******

The Kid came for dinner, and we had our personal big three—tacos, tequila and Tecate—at my coffee table. He had already stopped in the parking lot and left a couple of extra tacos with no hot sauce
for
his buddy, La Bailarina. “How's
la viejita
?” he asked over dinner, meaning the little old lady Martha Conover.

“Difficult.”

He squeezed some lime juice on the top of his Tecate can, took a sip. “She's an old lady, Chiquita.”

“She's not that old, and even if she was, that wouldn't give her an excuse to be a narrow-minded bigot.” You could say that what we become when we are old is the sum of all the things we do when we are young. Martha Conover had been bigoted when she was younger too. “You feel like going out for dessert, Kid?” I asked when dinner was finished and I'd cleaned up by throwing the paper wrappers away.

“Dessert? Why you want to go out for dessert?”

“I feel like it.”

“If you want dessert I'll make you dulce de leche.”

Dulce de leche was an Argentine favorite made by sticking a can of evaporated milk in a pan of water and boiling it until it caramelized. It's about as unappetizing as the maté they sip from straws for tea, but in a different way. One is too sweet, one is too bitter. “There's a French place on Academy,” I said. “Let's go there.”

“Why?”

“I feel like having a French pastry.”

The Kid didn't feel like having a French pastry, but he was so startled by my request that he agreed to come. Chez Henri, the French place on Academy, was in a faceless strip mall identical to a hundred thousand strip malls across the West, with a dry cleaner, a semi-ethnic restaurant, a stationery store, a Furrs Cafeteria and an exercise studio that had gone belly-up. The mall made up in parking space for what it lacked in distinction. The interior of Chez Henri aimed for Provençal charm, with rough plaster walls, dark beams in the ceiling, red and white checkered tablecloths and candles in wine bottles. It missed, but it wasn't entirely off the mark. The Kid ordered a Napoleon and an espresso that was dark and thick enough to dissolve a quarter in. I ordered fresh raspberries with cream in spite of my stated desire for a pastry. I had no idea where the raspberries came from at this time of year, but they were plump and delicious. I had a dog, a malamute, when I was a kid, who used to walk up to raspberry bushes and—very carefully—bite the berries off. He thought they were worth the trouble. Me, too.

Chez Henri was small enough to have only one waiter, who moved at the pace of a somnolent snail. His movements had the deliberate slowness of someone who didn't much like his job, or the people he was waiting on. As Whit had said, the service here wasn't great.

“Some people I know recommended this place,” I said when the waiter finally showed up with the desserts. “She's in her late thirties, he's fiftyish. They both have kind of blondish hair. He's big, looks
lik
e a football player, in fact, but his hair is getting thin on top. They were here on Halloween.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Them. They were with another guy, who talked on his cellular phone all night. I don't know who
he
was trying to impress.” That would be Ed George, the banker. “They stayed until eleven-thirty. I couldn't go home until they left, and I thought they'd never stop talking.”

“Once Whit Reid gets talking, it is hard to stop him,” I agreed.

“They didn't leave any kind of tip either.” He served the Kid his Napoleon, slouched over to the next table.

“How you like your dessert?” asked the Kid.

“Delicious,” said I.

“Who are those people you were talking about?”

“Cindy and Whit Reid. Cindy is Martha Conover's daughter and my old high school friend. Whit is her husband. I was checking on where Whit said they were the night Justine Virga died.”

“Why you do that?”

“Just curious.”

I shifted to another lane. “I had my oil changed at Mighty today.”

“Why? I change your oil for you.”

“I know. Martha had her oil changed there the week before Halloween, and I wanted to see what the place was like—if anybody could have taken her keys and copied them. The guys there speak Argentine Spanish. You don't know them, do you?” One of the first things recent immigrants do is find other immigrants from the same place and pool their resources. It's the time-honored way to make it—legally or illegally—in America.

The Kid stirred a couple of teaspoons of sugar into his espresso. “No. I was only ten years old when we left Argentina. I don't know many people from there. Argentinos don't think I am a countryman anyway. Because I lived in Mexico, to them I am a Chicano.”

I've never been able to figure out what to call Spanish-speakers myself. A Chicano to me is someone with close ties to Mexico, maybe an illegal alien, maybe not. When one of them is accused of a crime, he or she becomes a Mexican national to the police and the newspapers. I know native New Mexicans whose families have been here for hundreds of years who call themselves Chicanos. It means la raza, the race, and has a certain kind of “this is who I am, roots and all” militancy. Besides, New Mexico was once part of old Mexico, and if you go back far enough, New Mexicans are Mexicans too. If you go back even further, they are descendants of the original Spanish settlers, and I also know native New Mexicans with roots who call themselves Spanish, and sometimes they're related to the ones who call themselves Chicanos. On the other hand, when Martha Conover says Spanish, it sounds like an insult. As for me, I'm an Anglo but never an Angla: nobody uses that word, although a female Chicano can be a
Chicana.
I'm a WASP too, but people in New Mexico also don't use that word.

“The Argentinos are
muy arrogantes
, the Mexicans say. Because they don't have Indian blood, they think they are more European and better than the other Latinos,” the Kid continued.

“They don't have Indian blood because they killed all the Indians off.”

The Kid shrugged. “They did that in this country too, Chiquita. The Argentinos think they are better educated and have more culture than the other Latin Americans, the Mexicans say. Who knows? Maybe they do.”

The waiter showed up with the check, a subtle hint that it was time to leave. I ignored it and ordered a cappuccino. The Kid asked for another espresso. A candle flickered in the middle of the table. We leaned over it and whispered like conspirators, even though there were only a few other people in Chez Henri and none of them were in hearing distance. It was the kind of place that made you want to whisper and linger. Some zippy accordion music in the background wasn't all that different from the kind of music the Kid played. We were only a few blocks from La Vista, but the setting was so far removed from any we'd ever been in together that it put a different spin on things. I asked the Kid a question that I'd asked him before but he'd never completely answered. “Why did your family leave Argentina?”

Maybe because he was out of his element, or an espresso buzz had put him in a talkative mood, he answered me this time. “It was the time of the dirty war, and it was crazy there. The left, the right; the comunistas, the fascistas; the guerrillas, the military; the Perónists, the anti-Perónists; the Montoneros, the anticomunistas—everybody was fighting everybody else. The military leaders owned their zones. They could put in prison and torture anybody they wanted, and nobody could stop them. They had a torture machine they called Susan. They poured water on people, tied them to the machine and shocked them or killed them with electricity, but they did it so there were no marks on the body. Twenty-five thousand people died or disappeared in the dirty war—Los Desaparecidos, they called them. The military took them from their homes, put them on the floor of a car and put a blanket over them so no one knew where they were going. Sometimes they buried Los Desaparecidos in big holes, sometimes they threw them in the river, sometimes they put cement on their feet and they dropped them in the ocean. You could see them on the bottom, moving like
that.
” His hand made a motion like grass swaying in water. “The military took Los Desaparecidos children and raised them themselves or sold them. They hated the parents enough to kill them, but they wanted their children. Crazy, no? They have a saying there, God is an Argentino, but when something bad happens, they say God was busy in another place. My father taught at the university. The military took away his job, and we went to Mexico before they took away him.” It was a long speech for the Kid, and he finished with a gulp of espresso.