Accustomed to the Dark (14 page)

“Or what happens?”

Raising his hand off the table, he sat back. “Hey, who knows? It's a complicated world, right? Almost anything could happen. What I'm saying, things could get difficult for you. In general, you know?”

“Right.”

“Right,” he said. “And I wouldn't want to think that you and me, we screwed up this fantastic rapport we got established here. You follow me?”

“Like a caboose.”

“Good. And like I say, I'm sorry about your partner. I mean that sincerely. I hope it all works out.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. He stood, I stood, we shook hands. He nodded toward the bill. “Don't forget,” he said. “You're paying.”

I needed a place to operate from, so I drove up to Colfax and followed that east, until I found a generic motel a few miles past Monaco Parkway. After I hauled the computer into my room, I used the cellular phone to call the hospital. No change.

I called Leroy. He told me that the photos were ready, and I hung up. I connected the phone to the computer, turned on the machine, and brought up the fax software. In just over two minutes, the phone rang and the computer answered it. The machine hissed and beeped, whirred softly for a maybe a minute, hissed and beeped some more, went through the cycle again, then clicked off.

A few minutes later, after I'd told the computer what to do, and it had sent the information to the portable printer, I had fairly good paper copies of photographs of Ernest Martinez, Luiz Lucero, and Sylvia Miller, all facial views. As Leroy had told me, the photo of Sylvia was less clear than the other two. He had gotten a copy of her photo from Motor Vehicles and enlarged it. Although he had used his own computer to enhance the enlargement, the picture was still blurred and grainy.

I called Leroy, told him everything had come through all right. Then I lay down on the bed, called the New Mexico State Police, and asked for Robert Hernandez. He came on the line gruffly. “Yeah?”

“This is Joshua Croft.”

“You don't listen good. I don't have anything else to say to you.”

“Right. But you already said something. When we were talking before.”

“What?”

“You said that after the breakout, you were getting phone calls from all over.”

“Yeah, so?”

“One of them came from Denver, you said.”

“So?”

“So I'm in Denver. Do you have a record of who made the call?”

“It was junk. The Denver PD already checked it out.”

“Then they won't mind if I check it out again.” This was something less than the truth, but Hernandez didn't have to know that. “If it's junk, what difference does it make? But if it isn't, it might help me locate Martinez and Lucero.”

“And that whacko Miller woman. How'd you get onto her?”

“An informant.”

“Pretty good work,” he said. “Too bad you blew it by calling the house in Denver.”

“I made a mistake. It won't happen again. Do I get the phone number?”

“You know, Croft, you really are a major pain in the ass.”

“I've heard that before.”

“I'll bet. Look, I'm busy right now. How do I get back to you?”

I gave him the cellular phone number. He hung up.

I flipped the phone shut and tossed it to the mattress.

The two beers at lunch had made me slow and fuzzy. I lay there, staring up at the dingy false ceiling, listening to the sound of the traffic whizzing through the thin walls. After a while, I thought back to the time I'd been lying in my room in the De Vargas Hotel in Santa Fe.

The De Vargas used to be on Water and Don Gaspar. It doesn't exist any longer. It's been gutted and refurbished and transformed into the Hotel St. Francis, a sleek and stylish place where you can order your breakfast in French. Back then, when it was the De Vargas, it had been the only cheap hotel in downtown Santa Fe. My small room had cost something like thirty dollars, but even at that price I had been overcharged. The grimy window looked over a service courtyard littered with garbage. The air was tainted with the smell of old cigar smoke and Pine Sol. The bedcover was as thin and frayed as the prospects of the hotel's guests.

It hadn't really mattered to me. By tomorrow I would be gone. I had already called Mondragón to tell him. Neither he nor his wife had been there, and I had been cowardly enough to feel relieved. I had left a message on his machine. It was early evening now and the nightstand lamp was on, casting a jaundiced yellow light through the thin shade, imitation parchment decorated with clumsy paintings of cowboys busting broncs. I was lying there in my clothes, trying to decide what to do with myself. I could go to the Bullring or the Pink Adobe, over on the Old Santa Fe Trail, and have a drink. Or maybe stop by the Palace. Back then there weren't as many places to get drunk as there are now.

I had decided on the Palace when someone knocked at the door. I was puzzled. I hadn't been expecting anyone.

I got up, crossed the tiny floor, and opened the door.

She stood there in the hallway, wearing the same pale blue blouse and the same black skirt she had worn earlier today. She held a flat black leather purse under her right arm.

“Mrs. Mondragón,” I said.

She smiled. “May I come in?”

There was no polite way to refuse her. “Of course,” I said, and I stepped aside to let her pass. As she did, I could smell the fragrance she wore, something faintly astringent and faintly sweet that reminded me of citrus flowers.

I was abruptly conscious of how cramped and shabby the room was. The thin bedspread, the worn brown rug, the peeling wallpaper—everything seemed to have become, in an instant, even more sleazy and pathetic than it had been before. I turned to her, leaving the door slightly ajar. I didn't know who I was protecting by doing that, or what I was protecting them from.

She stood in the center of the room. Over the years, maybe a hundred times, I've thought about this scene. Rita Mondragón standing in the center of that small seedy room.

She smiled again. “Joshua—”

The telephone rang, hurling me from one cramped room to another.

I grabbed Leroy's phone, flipped it open. “Yeah?”

“Croft? Hernandez. You ready? I got that information.”

16

I
T WAS A
gated suburban development to the west of Denver. But probably the home owners here would take umbrage at the word
development
. Probably the home owners here would take umbrage at a lot of words. Like
poverty
, and
hunger
, and
desperation
. The houses were mostly huge mock-Tudor castles and they sat comfortably back among imported trees on bright green landscaped lawns that looked as though they should be crowded with pavilions and banners and jousting knights, and with motion picture cameras.

I found the house I wanted, drove the Jeep into the circular driveway, parked under a tall maple. I climbed up the flagstone walk, up the flagstone stairway, thumbed the buzzer. The door was pine, roughened and stained to look almost exactly like old oak, and it was banded with strips of anodized aluminum hammered to look almost exactly like wrought iron. There was a small casement window set into the wood, and through the artistically pebbled glass I could see someone moving toward me, like a fish gliding through murky water.

The door opened and the lady of the manor appeared. She was a blonde, and had been since at least Friday. Her face had the healthy glow that comes from a good diet, a good conscience, and an excellent bank account. She was probably in her mid-fifties but she was very fit and she wore a bright red blouse and a short black skirt that proved it. People probably told her fairly often that she had good legs. They were right. She had good arms, too, strong and wiry below the carefully back-folded cuffs of her blouse. It was my guess that there was a tennis racquet lurking around somewhere.

“Mrs. Albert?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, and with the back of her slender hand she brushed away a lock of hair that had slumped a couple of millimeters out of place. Her nails were long and flawless and, like her lips, they were painted the same color as her blouse. “Are you Mr. Croft?”

“Yes.”

“May I see some identification?”

“Certainly.” I slipped out my wallet, showed her the ID. “Did you call Robert Hernandez at the New Mexico State Police?”

“I did, yes. But you can never tell, can you? Someone could be wandering the streets, pretending to be you.”

No one was that stupid, I thought. But I smiled pleasantly.

“Please come in,” she said.

I tucked the wallet back into my pocket and I stepped into the foyer. She glanced swiftly down to make sure I hadn't tracked any socialism onto the parquet floor. “This way,” she said. “He's upstairs. He has his own suite of rooms.”

I thought that must be very jolly for him.

I followed her along the edge of a living room that wasn't quite as large as the L.A. Coliseum. Stone walls, square beams overhead, a huge fireplace, dark wooden floors brightened here and there by throw rugs that had probably been woven in quaint Third World countries. Off in the distance a short Hispanic woman was plumping up the cushions of a white sofa the size of a tugboat. Mrs. Albert told me, “The policeman who came here before said that it was a waste of time.”

“You can never tell,” I said. Words to live by.

We came to a broad balustraded stairway, more pine, more stain. Mrs. Albert turned to me. “You won't take terribly long, will you? The house is a mess and we've got some people coming over tonight. Consuelo and I are trying to get everything ready.” She brushed her perfect hair back again. This time I realized that the gesture was designed to demonstrate that her competence, usually invincible, was a tad harried at the moment.

I smiled pleasantly again. It's easy when you know how. “I doubt it,” I said. “I'll try to be out of here as quickly as possible.”

She nodded, not at all surprised that life would proceed as she expected it to proceed. “He's just up there,” she said, pointing up the stairs. “The door all the way at the end, on the left.”

At the end of the long hallway, I knocked on the door to my left.

It was opened by an elf. He had to be at least seventy years old, and possibly he was older, but he looked about sixty. He was a thin inch over five feet tall and he wore a double-breasted gray wool suit with the jacket buttoned shut, a white shirt, and a neatly knotted black tie. His face was shiny and red and his wavy hair was thick and white. So were his eyebrows. His eyes were blue. “Are you the PI?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Joshua Croft.”

“Terrific,” he said, and beamed at me. “Terrific.” He held out a small red hand and I took it. The small red hand wrapped around mine and crushed it. “Charlie Niederman,” he said. “Come on in.”

I stepped into a small parlor filled with antique furniture that seemed too bulky for the space it occupied. A rambling upholstered sofa printed with a floral pattern, a pair of bulky matching club chairs, an elaborately carved coffee table, matching end tables, tall matching bookcases along one wall. It reminded me for a moment of the furniture in Sylvia Miller's house in Las Vegas, but all of this had been lived-in, for a long time. And probably it had been lived-in somewhere else, before it had been crowded into this room.

“I dressed up for the occasion,” said the elf, cocking his head and running his thumbs along the broad lapels of his jacket. “Whatty ya think?”

“Very dapper,” I said.

“Yeah? You think dapper?” He turned to look at himself in a full-length mirror mounted on the wall. “Dapper, sure, why not?” He nodded to the mirror. “Dapper's good.” He raised his head slightly, giving himself another half an inch of height, turned to the side, and lightly ran his hand down the front of the suit coat as though he were stroking a cat. “Forty years I got this suit, and it fits me like I only bought it yesterday. Like a glove.” He turned to me. “You know why?”