The Lies that Bind (25 page)

“You weren't as subtle as you thought.”

“She knows?”

“Yeah.”

“No shit? And she never let on?”

“I guess not.”

“She's tough.”

“
Maybe, but nobody comes in tough, and nobody goes out that way, either,” I said.

“Some do. I've seen some go out that were real tough.” He shook his head. “You have to give the old lady credit. She doesn't miss much.”

Not when all her circuits were connecting anyway. “She says she didn't want to make a martyr out of you by kicking you out of your apartment.”

“Maybe she just wanted to keep an eye on me.”

“Maybe.”

I hated standing over Emilio and looking down at him, so I sat on the grass, which happened to be damp from a watering system or dog piss. I felt around for a dry spot, but I couldn't find one in the shade. “You haven't seen any dogs go by here, have you?”

He laughed. “Not recently.”

“Good,” I said.

He stared at me with his whiskey-colored eyes. “What's on your mind, Nellie?”

“Martha thinks Michael and Justine were into drugs,” I said. I'd already tried this approach with Cindy, and it hadn't worked. I was hoping Emilio either knew more or would be more objective.

“She's wrong. I would have known if they were. I know a lot more about drugs than the old lady does.”

“About some kinds of drugs.”

“That's true, but those are the kinds of drugs Miguel and Justy would have been into—if they were into drugs.”

I tore off a couple of blades of grass and squeezed them between my fingers like the whistles I made as a kid. I was getting to the hard part. “When did Michael buy the Porsche?” I asked him.

“About a month before he died.”

“You're sure Martha didn't give it to him?” It was a diversionary tactic. I knew that Martha didn't give Michael the Porsche and Emilio knew that I knew, but I wanted to take his mind off the previous question, a question that, if I'd believed Emilio, I wouldn't have had to ask. He stared at me with his Jack Daniel's eyes, and once again I had the feeling the color was about to bleed out.

“I'm positive,” he said. “Can't you ever forget that you're a lawyer, Nellie?”

“Yeah, but not when I'm working. There's one more thing. I was wondering if you could give me Mina Alarid's address and phone number. I tried information, and she's not listed.”

“Why do you want to talk to her?”

“I was hoping she could confirm that Niki Falcón assassinated Jaime Córdova and that hit men were after her. The deputy DA doesn't want to believe me.”

“Nobody believes anybody in this case, do they?”

“
No,” I said.

A player in a blue jersey broke away from the pack and ran down the field. He had long muscular legs and kicked the ball with a perfect sideways kick. The goalie lunged at it, fell on his face, the ball went in. Emilio was running in place, sliding his leather gloves up and down the edges of the wheels. “All right,” he yelled. “Did you see that kick?”

“Yeah.”

“I bet your boyfriend can play soccer.”

“You're right.”

“Would you love him if he ended up like me?”

Would I? Would the Kid love me if I ended up a paraplegic? Did we love each other now?

“Cindy loves me. She'll always love me, and there hasn't been a damn thing we could do about it,” he said.

******

The next morning my Bic pen drew circles up and down the lines on my yellow legal pad while I thought about Michael Velásquez. If Emilio had told the truth, his son bought the Porsche a month before he died. If he paid five hundred dollars for it, he'd had a lucky break one day that turned out to be fatally unlucky a month later. If Emilio was wrong and Michael had paid what the Porsche was worth, where did he get the money? The obvious answer was drugs, the backbeat of the American economy. A lot of the money that got laundered and squandered in S&Ls came from drugs. It's convenient and tempting to blame drugs for everything that goes wrong, but it's a path I don't like to take; it's too easy.

I left work in the middle of the morning and walked over to the library. Before I did, I loaded my pockets with change. Nobody walks in Albuquerque, but it was only a few blocks, and for the duration I pretended I lived in a city where people did walk. I kind of like the renovation of downtown and the new tall buildings. Now it looks like anywhere, U.S.A., when it used to look like nowhere. The skyscrapers make deep shadows, pockets of cool in the middle of the day. I walked past the parking lot where three pastel smokestacks vent air against a brick wall. It had the look of another decade, and so did the guys in camouflage gear sitting in front of the library with their hands out. I didn't begrudge them the change, but I hate the process of fumbling through my purse, looking for it. I reached deep in my pockets and put quarters in some grubby palms, but not all of them; I hadn't brought enough.

I entered the library, climbed the stairs to the second floor and went to the microfilm file for the
Journal
which was organized in drawers of six years and rolls of three months. I opened the most recent drawer and found the roll for July, August, September, three years back. To give myself leeway, I started in mid-September and cranked my way through the Sunday classifieds: lost and found, auctions, money
wanted,
garage sales and flea markets, until I came to automobiles. I didn't find any Porsches for sale on September 14 or 21, but on September 28 I did. There it was, exactly as Emilio had said, used Porsche for sale $500, 55,000 miles, with a phone number in an exchange I knew to be on the fringes of Porsche country. “All right,” I said, loud enough to wake the man at a nearby table from his morning nap. I copied down the phone number, put the microfilm back, ran a couple of dollars through the copier change machine, and dropped the quarters in the palms of the guys I'd missed on my way in.

******

“Where have you been?” Anna asked when I got back to the office. I was the boss. I was the one who was supposed to ask suspicious questions.

“The library,” I said. If she wondered what I had been reading, she didn't ask.

The number I had copied was three years old. It could have been reassigned many times in three years, but I dialed it anyway. “Hello,” growled the voice of an angry woman.

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Neil Hamel. I'm a lawyer and—”

“You're not representing my ex-husband are you? 'Cause if you are, I'm gonna hang up right now.”

“No. I don't even know who your ex-husband is. I'm investigating a Porsche that was supposedly sold by someone at this number three years ago.”

“Some Porsche has been in an accident, and you think you're gonna sue me for it? I got news for you: somebody already died in that car when it got totaled.”

“Thanks. That's what I wanted to know. Just one more thing: did you really sell it for five hundred dollars?” If she had, I'd have to eat my cynicism.

“I didn't. My ex-husband did. That son of a bitch sold off everything he could get his hands on. This is a community property state. I got half of what was left, and you know what that amounted to? Three thousand dollars. That's what I got, plus a house that was mortgaged up the ying-yang.”

“Why didn't you put the car title in both your names?”

“Because he bought it with our joint savings while I was in Oklahoma visiting my mother and he registered it in his name. Any more questions?”

“No. But I have a suggestion. If you ever get divorced again, get yourself a good lawyer.”

“I'm never gonna get divorced again, and you know why? I'm never gonna get married again. I don't even talk to the sons of bitches anymore if I can help it.”

23

I
LEFT WORK
early that afternoon and went to see Mina Alarid. She lived off Tramway in a subdivision that was tucked into the crotch of the Sandias where the view on one side is boulders and cacti and on the other the endless sky, where you don't dare let your pets out because they're coyote fodder, where the diversion channels turn to class-ten rapids in the rainy season. A powder-blue Ford was parked in the driveway. Her house was vanilla stucco in substance and California modern in style; it had a lot of glass and five or six different roof angles, combining the roundness of a dome with the sharpness of an A-frame.

Her bell had a musical chime loud enough to set dishes rattling in the depths of the house. Mina Alarid came to a window beside the front door with her glasses dangling from a ribbon around her neck. She picked up the glasses, balanced them on her nose and looked over my shoulder into the driveway, where my car was parked. She seemed to relax when she saw I was driving a yellow Nissan, enough to open her inner door anyway. She dropped the glasses to inspect me, one of those people, apparently, who can see up close but need glasses to get the long view. Obviously I wasn't selling Girl Scout cookies. So what are you doing here? her wary eyes said. The outer door, a combination storm/screen, remained closed. Most people don't bother with storm doors in New Mexico. Since this was fall, you'd expect to find glass in the door, not screens, but I would have been willing to bet my Nissan that the glass stayed in this door year round and that it was locked too. The puffy clouds drifting across the horizon behind me reflected in the glass and obscured Mina Alarid's face.

“I'm Neil Hamel,” I said. “I'm a lawyer representing Martha Conover.”

Mina Alarid stiffened right up when she heard Martha's name, and she started to close the inner door. “I can't help you,” she said.

“Wait,” I replied. “I think whoever killed Justine has been trying to kill me.”

“Martha Conover killed Justine.”

“I went to Arizona a few days ago, and I was followed and attacked by a man who spoke Argentine Spanish.”

“What do you know about Argentine Spanish?” Her English was crisp and precise and had no noticeable accent.

“I have a friend from Argentina.”

My hand was still on the inner door; her face drifted in and out of the clouds. She sighed and
unlocked
the storm door. “All right. Come in.”

She was a slim, elegant, erect woman. Her black hair was pulled straight back in a tight bun, and a few gray wisps curled loose around her face. She wore a white silk blouse with a scalloped collar and a gray skirt. I followed her into her living room, which was as soft and cluttered as the view outside (if she ever opened the curtains) was spare and empty. The knee-jerk femininity of the house probably came from the same impulse that made pioneer women plant flowers and attempt to civilize the windy prairie. I was reminded of a house I saw once in Santa Fe, where the owner was watering limp petunias and trying to keep them alive when across the road wildflowers grew in abundance. My own personal style is about as stark inside as it is out, but then I hadn't been through what Mina had.

She wasn't a woman who opened her windows in rainstorms to let the ozone blow in. The air in the living room was sealed-tight stale. The long white curtains dripped like candle wax onto the off-white rug. The chairs were in the ornate style of some French despot, white upholstery with gold arms and legs. A large mirror with a gilt frame hung over the sofa, also white, with sleeves across the arms to keep them clean. The lamps on the end tables were painted with pictures of plump maidens sitting in a swing. A vase of pink silk flowers sat on the coffee table. If this room were a pet, it would be a clipped white poodle. It was a city room, but that of a closed-in European city, not the Duke's wild West. The softness and fussiness might have been an attempt to keep bitter reality at bay, but it made me feel I'd eaten too much and was wearing tight underwear. The only harsh notes in this room were me and a picture of Justine with her wild gypsy eyes. Justine was wearing a pink dress in this picture, and her long hair swung loose. She was smiling and looked younger and softer than in any of the other pictures, but the eyes were the same. I looked into those eyes and wondered what she had thought of her aunt, of this room, and how confined a woman reckless enough to have blown up Jaime Córdova must have felt in a house like this. All I knew of Justine came from the picture and from other people. It wasn't enough.

Mina sat down in a straight-backed chair. I sat on the sofa and picked up the picture. “Justine … did you call her Justine?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“She looks like a gypsy.”

“She was a very pretty girl.” Mina obviously preferred to have the picture in place on the table, so I put it back. “And Miguel was a handsome boy. They were a lovely couple. Romeo and Juliet, I called them. They're buried next to each other in Heavenly Gate Cemetery. Martha Conover can't keep them apart now.” I was beginning to understand the decor. Mina was a romantic. Romance causes frustration, frustration leads to violence, violence leads to litigation and litigation leads to people like Saia and me.

“I understand Justine came from Argentina and her real name was Niki Falcón.”

“So?”

“
And she killed Jaime Córdova, a general in Buenos Aires.”

“Who told you that?”

“Emilio Velásquez. I'm an old friend of his and Cindy's. My friend from Argentina confirmed it.” Mina Alarid said nothing. “You know the Argentines could have set Martha up.”

“How would they have done that?”

“They could have taken her car while she was at the AWC meeting or after she got home, killed Justine with it somewhere else and planted the body at Los Cerros. Argentines run the Mighty, where Martha had her car serviced, and had access to her key. Do you know them?”

“No. I avoid my countrymen whenever possible.”