Accustomed to the Dark (16 page)

“
He would've had no reason to. Without the Sylvia Miller connection, Mr. Thorogood was just a simple visitor
.”

“
The cop still should've checked him out
.”

“
Joshua.” She smiled again. “What's the real reason you're driving to Texas? Why won't you come back to Santa Fe?
”

I tried to find an answer that made sense, and one that put me in something like a good light. But that particular answer didn't exist. I was refusing to return to Santa Fe because I knew I would be helpless there. I would be unable to do anything but sit by her bedside and wait for her to recover. Or to die.

Hurtling through the grim flat prairie, with Thorogood and Carlton as goals, I could at least persuade myself that I was doing something. Even if I suspected that the goals, when I reached them, would prove to be phantoms.

And, like a phantom, the image of Rita slowly faded away, smiling as it did, smiling at the answer I had failed to provide, had been unable to provide, until all that was left was the empty prairie on either side of me, and the tent of dull blue sky, and the stuttering white line of the highway, racing toward the car like a volley of arrows.

I took a deep breath, blew it out.

Rita hadn't been a phantom that time, eight years ago, when she stood in the center of my shabby room at the De Vargas.

“Joshua,” she said. She smiled at me. “I found your message on the answering machine.”

Still standing by the partly opened door, leaning against the wall with my arms crossed, I only nodded.

She pointed to the rickety wooden chair in front of the rickety wooden desk. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

I smiled, I think. “Have you had a tetanus shot?”

I know that she smiled. She had the kind of smile that I could feel in my chest, even eight years later. “Not recently,” she said, “but I'm willing to take a chance.”

“Then be my guest,” I said.

She lifted the chair, turned it around to face the room, and sat down, her knees together, her hands holding her purse on her lap. She looked up at me and she raised her eyebrows, amused. “Are you going to keep standing there?”

The only other place to sit was the bed. It was foolish of me not to sit there, but I've often been a fool. “I've been sitting all day,” I told her. “I'm fine.”

She nodded, then pursed her lips, looked down for a moment at the threadbare carpet. I don't think she saw it. She was a woman who was used to speaking her mind, it seemed to me, and who was frustrated now because, for whatever reason, this was proving difficult. She looked up at me, smiled faintly. At herself, maybe. At the difficulty, maybe. “My husband,” she said at last, looking up, “is usually a very cautious man.”

I nodded.

“Not in the physical sense,” she said. “Physically, he's as brave as any man I've ever known. I've accused him, more than once, of being foolhardy.”

I nodded again. This was her scene, it seemed to me, and there wasn't any way I could help her with it.

But maybe, at bottom, I didn't really want to help her. Maybe I resented her for showing up here, and for reminding me of all the reasons I hadn't wanted to see her again. Maybe I was punishing her.

I've often been a fool.

“Let's call it,” she said, “a kind of emotional caution. He seldom takes people at face value.”

“That's generally a good way to go,” I said, “for a private detective.”

“Generally, yes. But sometimes William lets the caution seep over into his personal life. He sometimes finds it difficult to trust anyone at all. Not simply clients. Anyone he meets, in whatever circumstances.”

I nodded some more. “An occupational hazard.”

Smiling again, wryly now, she shook her head at my deliberate obtuseness. “You're not making this any easier.”

“What are you trying to say, Mrs. Mondragón?”

She looked at me directly. “What made you decide not to work with us?”

I shook my head. “It wasn't that. I just decided that I'd be happier in Oregon.”

“Why?”

“The redwood trees.”

She winced briefly, annoyed. “Oh, for goodness sake, Joshua. Stop being so difficult.”

“What would you like me to tell you?”

“Something that made sense.”

“I changed my mind. That's all. So far as I know, it's still legal in this country.”

She looked down at her purse for a moment, then looked up at me. “William trusted you. Immediately. That's the point I'm trying to make. He may not have shown it, he's sometimes not … quite as good at that as he could be, but he trusted you. And he enjoyed you. We've been looking for someone for months now. We've talked to retired policemen. We've talked to dead-end Pls. We've talked to bouncers from the Bullring. And William hasn't liked any of them. With good cause, usually.”

I smiled. “Are you trying to find him someone to play with?”

She looked at me for a moment and then she smiled. I could feel it in my chest again. “Yes,” she said. “In a sense I am. I'm trying to find someone he can like, and someone with whom he can enjoy working. There's too much business for him to handle on his own. And I can help with only a certain amount of it. He needs someone he can rely upon. And he felt that you were that person.”

“Mrs. Mondragón—”

She pursed her lips. “His sending you out on that collection—perhaps that upset you. The manner in which he did it. Perhaps it struck you as … arrogant. William is not an arrogant man, but I can understand how some people might perceive him as such.”

I was so busy admiring her language skills, and the black depths of her large eyes, that she caught me off guard when she suddenly stood up. “I'm not going to beg you, Joshua. But I am going to remind you that you told him you'd be there tomorrow. I know that William would be extremely surprised, and extremely disappointed, to learn that you'd gone back on your word.”

“That's not entirely fair, Mrs.—”

She came toward me. “I've erased the tape on the answering machine,” she said. She stood only a foot or two away and again I could smell the citrus and floral scent of her perfume. “I hope I'll see you in the office tomorrow. I'll be expecting you. So will William. In a few weeks, or even in a few days, if we all find that we can't work together, then I'll understand if you decide to leave. But I think you should give William a chance. After all, he gave one to you.”

She smiled once more, briefly and without humor. “Thank you for hearing me out,” she said. And then she left, sliding through the opened door, phantomlike.

Later, I went to the Bullring and sat there among a jostling throng of red-faced New Mexican politicians, amid the sound of heavy masculine laughter and the sour smell of stale beer. As I nursed my drink, it occurred to me how strange it was that she had come to me. All right, fine, they needed another hand at the ranch. But were they so desperate for help that she had to plead with the first drifter who passed through town?

It occurred to me, too, that by not telling William about my message on the answering machine, she was keeping secrets from her husband. And that if I stayed, if I went to work with them, this would be a secret that we shared, she and I.

And, according to her, William had a failing or two. He was foolhardy. He was distrustful. He was sometimes perceived as arrogant.

Maybe the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Mondragón was not an altogether happy one. And maybe, if I hung around for a while …

I felt, within me, a sudden queasy flutter of self-disgust. It's always unpleasant to discover that you're still capable of thinking like some theoretically lower form of life. A weasel, for example.

Forget it, I told myself. Even if the marriage wasn't perfect, what difference would that make to you?

I drank there for a while, and after a few hours I convinced myself to give the job a try. As she had pointed out, I had said I would. As she had pointed out, I could always leave in a few days, a few weeks.

I convinced myself that I would take the job despite her, and not because of her. I convinced myself I'd be able to handle being in the same office, day after day, with Rita Mondragón.

She was, after all, just another woman.

I've often been a fool.

I had left Denver around four in the afternoon. I was across the border into Kansas by seven o'clock. Around eight o'clock, as I approached Colby, the headlights flashed along road signs that promised me the World's Largest Chipmunk. I managed to drive on without stopping.

I left the Interstate about twenty miles farther on, and picked up Highway 83, going south. It was headed for pretty much the same place that I was, and according to the map it was a good road. But I was tired, so I gassed up the car in Oakley, grabbed a hamburger, and found myself another motel.

I'd tried two or three times to telephone the hospital while I was on the Interstate, but I'd been out of range. I tried again now, lying on my “luxurious king-sized bed,” and I got through. Rita's condition was unchanged.

I didn't want to call anyone else. I poured myself a heavy drink, climbed into bed, and turned off the lights.

I lay there listening to the sad groan and rumble of distant trucks barreling toward their unknown destinations.

I lay there remembering Rita.

I tried to sleep, but that white dividing line of the highway had seared itself into my retinas. Whenever I closed my eyes, it began to flicker past them, endless, inexorable.

I drank some more. Quite a bit more. I remembered Rita as she toppled to the patio. I remembered her lying in the hospital bed, the vulnerable human center of an alien network of wires and tubes.

Memories tumbled over one another in no particular order. I saw her standing in the doorway of a barn in northern New Mexico, holding the gun that saved my life. I saw her walking toward me in the moonlight, her bare skin glowing pale. I saw her sitting in the wheelchair, patiently explaining to me why I was wrong. I saw her peering out the porthole of the boat in Catalina, laughing at the fish. I saw her crying—the first time I'd ever seen her cry—as she told me she had begun to believe she would never leave the chair, never walk again …

I must have drifted off. Suddenly the phone rang and my entire body twitched. Blindly, I fumbled around on the bed until I found the receiver. It rang again. I flipped it open and I glanced at my watch. Ten-thirty. The hospital?

“Hello?” I said.

“Croft?” I didn't recognize the voice.

“Yeah?”

“Hey,
Josh-you-ah
. How's your girlfriend, bro?”

I recognized it then. Ernie Martinez. The man who had shot her.

18

I
COULD FEEL
my fingers curl around the tiny telephone as though it were his throat. If I weren't careful, Leroy's expensive toy would become a handful of splintered plastic and shattered circuits. “She's fine, Ernie,” I said.

He laughed, low and gravelly. “That's not what I hear, bro. I hear she's in one of those comas. I hear she's a fuckin' vegetable. A fuckin' tomato, bro. Hey, bro, can you fuck a fuckin' tomato?” He laughed again. “Can you do that,
Josh-you-ah?
”

I kept my voice even. “I don't know where you're getting your information, Ernie. She's fine.”

Another laugh. “Hey,
Josh-you-ah
, you got one of those phones tell you who's calling? Caller ID? That won't work, bro. I blocked it.”

“Maybe the call's being traced.”

“Cops aren't gonna set up a trace—why should they figure me to call you? Besides, you were running a trace, that's the last thing you'd want me to think about. Doesn't matter anyhow, bro. A few minutes and I'm outta here. I'm history. Just thought I'd call and shoot the shit with my old amigo.”

“How's Sylvia Miller?”

“Sylvia? She's okay. Great little chick, bro.
Hot
, you know what I mean? A lot hotter than your tomato girlfriend, that's for damn sure. Hey, was that you? Called the house up in Denver?”

“That was me.”

Another laugh. “You gave us a real scare,
Josh-you-ah
. Panic city. How'd you find out about Lyle?”

“So where are you now, Ernie? Let's get together, maybe do lunch.”

Still another laugh. “Hey, bro, you should go home, get some rest. You been hangin' around the office too long. You sound a little loco these days, you know?”

“Was it you, Ernie, who called before and hung up?”

“Just wanted to see how my old amigo was doing. My old
amigo Josh-you-ah
. Hey, bro, you go home now. Or go over to the hospital, check out the tomato.”

“Why don't we get together, Ernie. You and I.”

He laughed once more. “I'm gone, bro. I'm outta here.” And he hung up.

I took a breath. Then I poured myself a straight shot of Jack Daniel's and I took that. Quickly. My hands were shaking.

The phone call hadn't told me much. He had said “up in Denver.” Most people use “up” to mean north. But some don't. Maybe he was south of Denver, maybe he was in Carlton, Texas. And maybe he wasn't.

He didn't know that I was in Kansas. He had dialed the office number and the call had been forwarded to the cellular phone. Maybe it gave me an advantage, his not knowing that I was headed for Texas. And maybe it didn't matter at all.

I first met Ernie Martinez seven years ago, at Vanessie's in Santa Fe.

Vanessie's is a big, open saloon that a local newspaper had once described as looking like a Viking mead hall. The high ceilings are supported by square, oversized wooden beams. At either end of the huge room are oversized stone fireplaces, and above each of these hangs the oversized stainless steel skull of a stylized longhorn steer. A Steinway grand piano sits against the south wall, beneath an oversized mirror and between a pair of oversized wall hangings. The big rectangular bar sits in an alcove at the north wall.