The Vanishing Point (15 page)

Chapter
Eleven

N
ICK
L
ORENZ
'
S OFFICE WAS ON
F
OURTH
S
TREET
, in a strip mall that time and development had passed by. As Albuquerque expanded, new development leapfrogged over the old. Strip malls on the edge of town replaced those closer to the center, and the new malls had a high rate of occupancy. In the older ones, parking spaces were always available, even in the middle of the day.

This mall had a mail drop, a dry cleaner, a store that sold used clothes, and a store that sold used books, but empty storefronts were spaced between them like gapped teeth. Here the storefronts were known pretentiously as “suites.” For her two o'clock appointment Claire found a parking space right in front of Nick's door, a sure sign that prosperity had gone elsewhere. If she hadn't known he was semiretired, she would have thought his business was failing. In the sixties and seventies, when he put in a lot of time for Ada Vail and presumably did do better, this sad little mall might have been on the cutting edge of the city's development. To stick with a place and a client through good times and bad could be considered a sign of character or the kind of pit-bull determination that Nick was known for.

He was keeping a low profile in his strip mall. There was no sign on the door, but he had told Claire he worked out of Suite 4. His window presented the blank face of plastic blinds closed tight. She knocked, and Nick came to the door. He was shorter than Claire, with a stocky build and a bald head circled by a ring of frizzy brown hair that reminded her of a clown's ruff. When he gripped her hand and smiled, she saw gold fillings in his teeth. He wore brown polyester pants and a short-sleeved white shirt open at the neck.

The office was done in dubious taste, with shag carpeting and fake wood paneling. Claire, who hadn't expected much in the way of decoration, was bothered more by the imitation Indian art on the walls, swirling ceremonial dancers in garish shades of orange and yellow. There was a shelf behind Nick's desk full of photographs of the private eye at various stages of his career. She wondered why Ada would hire someone with such a tacky office, but it was possible she had never been to Nick's office, that she didn't expect good taste in a private eye, or that Nick's fortunes had taken a downturn. Here was a man who had dedicated years to the search for Jonathan Vail and had come up empty. Claire had to wonder why. Was there nothing to find? Was he the wrong person to find it? Nick Lorenz might have been out of his element, an urban PI lost in the wilderness.

“Have a seat,” Nick said.

Claire sat down in the chair he offered. He remained standing behind his desk, with his hands on
the
back of the desk chair, as he questioned her about what she had seen in Slickrock Canyon. Her memory of that day was perfectly clear, and she relayed the events she had witnessed.

“It's possible that Curt Devereux was in the canyon with Tim Sansevera before you arrived,” Nick said.

“It's possible. The rangers are investigating. I would hope they would check his alibi and establish his whereabouts.”

“He has seniority; they might not. Ada doesn't have much faith in the federal government.”

“I'm aware of that,” Claire replied. “But right now they are the official investigators. Does anyone else have the right to intervene in an ongoing investigation?”

“Not really,” Nick said. He set the chair in motion with one hand and stopped it with the other.

Claire moved to the edge of her chair, intending to change her role from inquiree to inquirer. “Did Ada give you a copy of Jonathan's journal to read?” she asked.

“Yes, and it confirmed my opinion that Jonathan and Jennie were on drugs and got careless. She was a looker. I remember the first time I saw her, at a demonstration at
UNM.
A band was playing and she was dancing on the stage with her long blond hair swinging. There was a woman capable of wrapping Curt Devereux around her little finger.”

Nick was enjoying discussing Jennie Dell a lot more than Claire was. She changed the subject. “Did you ever go into the canyons when you were looking for Jonathan?”

“Sure. I went to Slickrock, where Jennie claimed she saw him last.”

“What about Sin Nombre?”

“Where is it exactly?” His hands halted the motion of the chair as he stared at Claire.

“A few miles into Slickrock toward the west.”

“I think so,” Nick said. “I never found any trace of Jonathan. Jennie did a good job of concealing the evidence and the body.”

“By herself?” Claire asked.

“Either by herself or with the help of Curt Devereux. I never saw any evidence that anyone else was there.”

But it seemed to Claire that if you accepted the premise that Jennie was capable of concealing a body so well that it couldn't be found for thirty years, you would also have to accept the idea that she was capable of concealing the presence of someone else in the canyon.

“Did you ever talk to Sam Ogelthorpe?” she asked Nick.

“Sure.”

“Do you believe he saw anyone?”

“Maybe, or maybe he was just seeking attention. Hard to tell with Sam. He produced a cow
carcass,
but he could have killed the cow himself. If he was telling the truth, then I'd be wrong about Jonathan dying in Slickrock Canyon. He could have died on Cedar Mesa, which would make the body just about impossible to find.”

“Do you think Ogelthorpe could have killed him? It would have been a lot easier for him to hide the body than it would have been for Jennie Dell.”

“That's something we may never know unless Sam confesses. I'll tell you one thing,” Nick said. “I am convinced that Jonathan Vail is dead. Ada had unlimited funds, and I spent years looking for him. I searched Utah. I searched the Southwest. I went to Mexico. I went to Canada. Everywhere there was a sighting—and in the early years there were plenty of 'em—I went. Nothing ever checked out.”

But was it in his interest that nothing ever checked out? Claire wondered. Searching the West—north and south—for Jonathan Vail could be a lot more lucrative than doing background checks and conducting surveillance of unfaithful spouses, which is what his business was likely to consist of in Albuquerque.

“Did you ever feel you were getting close?” she asked.

“The only time I felt that was in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Beautiful place. Have you been there?”

“I have,” Claire said. She knew it to be a charming town of cobblestone streets, pastel houses, and hand-carved doorways. The market had the most beautifully arranged produce she'd ever seen. Even the street vendors were artists in San Miguel de Allende. It had a cosmopolitan population. In some ways it resembled Santa Fe, but to Claire it was more interesting. The weather was good and living was cheap. It wouldn't be a bad place to spend a winter—or a life.

“I spent more time down there than I did anywhere else,” Nick said. “Several people contacted Ada in the seventies claiming they had seen Jonathan in San Miguel. That was when the book took off and his reputation spread. At that time vets could go to the Instituto de Allende on the GI Bill, and it became a haven for a certain type of vet. The American Legion post was a bunch of guys stoned on drugs. A kind of cult developed around Jonathan. At one time soldiers hated him for his antiwar views, but later they began to see that he'd been right. When it came to draft dodgers, Mexico had a policy of taking the bribe and looking the other way. It was a place Jonathan might have ended up.

“The vets had a writers' group, and a couple of them told me that Jonathan came to their meetings, but they were so zonked out it was hard to know what they saw. My personal opinion was that it was someone posing as Jonathan. They told me the guy—whoever he was—got in a bar fight at La Cucaracha. Some reports said he killed somebody, others said he got killed himself. In the seventies bodies weren't embalmed in Mexico. They had to be in the ground or out of the country in twenty-four hours. Whoever got killed in that fight was buried the same day in a pauper's grave with no identification.
I
checked it out. If you can't afford to go on paying for a grave, the bones get dug up and dumped on the ground and the hole filled with someone else. It made it difficult to track down just who got killed. I didn't hear of any more Jonathan Vail sightings in San Miguel de Allende after that, but they slowed down everywhere in the late seventies. When amnesty was granted, I stopped searching. If Jonathan was alive at that point, he would have come back.”

“Did you ever come across a vet named Lou Bastiann in your investigation?”

“The Lou who is mentioned in the journal?”

“Yes.”

Nick spun his chair. “I don't remember him, but it's been a long time. I'd have to check my notes to be sure.”

“Would you do that?”

“Sure,” he said. “I had an index of everybody I talked to. Let me see if I can find it.”

While he went to the back room to look, Claire examined the photos on his shelf. There was one of a young Nick with a crew cut wearing a police uniform. There were several of him at various stages of his life with different women. It depressed Claire that Nick, who remained short-legged and barrel-chested, kept showing up with younger women. One photograph that interested her was of a man in bell bottoms with an unruly brown Afro as wide as the bottom of his pants. Would the hippie getup be considered shallow cover, she wondered, or deep? When Nick returned, she was holding that photo in her hand.

He laughed. “I was doing some surveillance in the sixties and went undercover as a hippie. Hard to believe I ever had that much hair, isn't it?”

“Were you ever a cop?” she asked.

“Yup. Five years with the
APD.
That's me in the uniform.”

“The demonstration where you saw Jennie Dell—do you remember what band was playing?”

“It was a local band. I knew the drummer. They broke up soon after that demonstration. What was their name? The Margaritas—something like that.”

“I was there,” Claire said. “I was visiting a friend of mine at UNM. Who was it exactly that you were surveilling?”

“I was following Jennie around to see if she would lead me to Jonathan.”

“That demonstration took place in the summer of '66 before Jonathan disappeared. He participated in it. He sat on the podium with Jennie, and he spoke.”

“Is that right?”

“It's right. I remember it well.”

Nick was behind his desk again, spinning the back of his chair. Claire had him red-handed, and
she
hoped he would see that denial would be useless. He might even think it would be pointless, since the event in question had taken place over thirty years ago and would be remembered only by students who'd been in attendance. But to Claire, the archivist, what happened then would never be pointless.

Nick threw up his hands, laughed, and said, “You got me. Ada won't like me telling you this, but I don't want to lie to you either. Truth is, I began tailing Jonathan from the time he got his draft notice. Ada was afraid he would split. My job was to prevent that from happening, or if I couldn't prevent it, to find Ada's blue-eyed boy and bring him home. He never knew I was watching him. I was real careful.”

Claire wondered whether the hippie clothes had provided any cover. There were people in the sixties who believed that once a cop, always a cop, and claimed they could spot one miles away. “If he didn't know he was being watched, then why hide out in a place as remote as Slickrock Canyon?” she asked.

“He liked remote places.”

“Did you follow him there?” If he admitted it, the next question would be were you the hippie Sam Ogelthorpe saw?

Nick caught the spinning chair, held it in place, looked Claire right in the eye, and said, “Nope. Jonathan eluded me. I didn't go to Slickrock until after he disappeared.”

But Claire was talking to a man who'd spent years concealing himself and his purpose. She shouldn't be surprised if he had learned to face people when he lied to them or to look away when he didn't. She was ready to go, but there was still the issue of the index. She reminded him of it.

“I couldn't find it,” Nick said. “I must have put it in storage. I'll track it down and let you know. All right?”

“All right,” Claire said.

He thanked her for her help. She thanked him for his. She got in her truck and drove back to the library, feeling that lies were buzzing at her like mosquitoes. Claire knew that history is revisionist. Other than dates and documents, there were few absolutes. The past was often a matter of perception. Even without deliberate distortion, people were capable of perceiving the same event differently. Still, when she put together all she once knew about Jonathan Vail and all she had learned, it was clear that someone was lying. The only inescapable conclusions were that he had died in the canyons, he had died somewhere else, or he hadn't. In a way it shouldn't matter to an archivist. What mattered was that the legend survived. Legend rarely yielded to fact, and the mystery ensured this legend's survival. But the deeper Claire got into the mystery, the more important it became to discover the facts.

Chapter
Twelve

“I'
VE BEEN MEANING TO THANK YOU FOR YOUR NOTE
. “It's been real hard to talk about Tim,” Vivian Sansevera said when she called Claire back.

“I understand,” Claire said.

“I'd like to meet you and visit the center. Tim spoke well of you and your work. I'm beginning to feel like getting out again. Maybe later in the week?”

“That would be fine,” Claire replied. They arranged to meet at two on Friday. After she hung up, Claire tried to create an image of Vivian Sansevera. Her voice seemed dulled by grief, which Claire had expected. She'd been listening for an accent or phrase that would indicate whether Vivian was Anglo or Hispanic or Indian or where she was from. Her guess, from Vivian's lack of an accent, was California. In Claire's experience people who spoke unaccented English tended to be Californians. As to whether Vivian was Anglo or not, she couldn't say.