At Ease with the Dead (15 page)

Why not? What was the point? You asked some questions, scribbled some answers down in your notebook, and then suddenly a remarkable old woman was dead.

What was it she'd said?

I could hear her strong precise voice saying it now: “The acquisition of knowledge is invariably a destructive process. The question is, finally, what value do we assign to the knowledge acquired, and what value to the thing destroyed …”

Nothing. That was exactly the value I assigned to the knowledge acquired.

It was also the knowledge itself.

Later, I told myself. Deal with all of it later.

The microfilmed back issues of the local paper were downstairs. I filled out a request form and a young woman ambled off with it. She returned a few moments later carrying a small rectangular box. She handed it to me and I brought it over to one of the machines lined up against the wall. I took the spool out of the box, hooked it up to the reader, and started cranking the knob.

Some things were different in September of 1925. Harding was president. Barney Google was still alive. You could buy a used 1924 Ford for $429. A Chrysler Imperial, brand new, would set you back $1,995. At the Wright Kitchen Cafe, you could pick up a Sunday chicken dinner for twenty-five cents. In Jamestown, North Dakota, a woman could be fined, and one was, for smoking cigarettes in public.

Some things were the same. A flood struck the Rio Grande valley on the third of the month, killing off livestock, destroying homes, ruining the cotton crop.

The flood held the headlines until the ninth, when the murder of Professor Dennis Lessing took over.

I read through the account. Most of what was there I'd already heard from Alice Wright. The only new thing I learned, and for some reason it came as no surprise at all, was that the name of the detective who investigated the case had been Mendez.

PART II

14

L
a Jornada del Muerto.
The Journey of the Dead. That's what the conquistadors called the long trek between El Paso and Albuquerque.

There hadn't been anything here then, and there wasn't much here now—a few small towns, Mesilla, Hatch, Socorro, and between them only sagebrush and flat baked trackless wasteland stretching to the rim of the world. After the sun disappeared, the wasteland stretched to the rim of the universe, out there where tiny isolated stars burned in the cold empty silence.

The car was hurtling down the tunnel of light drilled through the darkness by my headlights, but I had stopped moving myself. And, like the tail of a suddenly immobilized comet, my past had, all at once, caught up with its source.

I had liked the woman. I had admired her intelligence and humanity, her serenity, the swiftness and easiness of her laughter. All of it gone now.

If I'd never met her, never gone to El Paso, her death would've meant nothing, would've been just another one of those inevitable exits from the stage by an unknown extra. People were dying all the time, all around me lives were winking out; no matter how you felt about it, death was part of the scenery.

But I had met her, and liked her, and admired her.

On the other hand, if I hadn't gone to El Paso, she might still be alive.

Guilt is sometimes a secret sort of self-esteem. If I weren't such a bad little boy, Mommy and Daddy wouldn't be so unhappy, and gosh I sure do feel rotten about it. But at least I know, from the depths of my impotence—and finally all of us are impotent—that I have the power to cause pain.

I tried to be objective. I hadn't wished for Alice Wright's death. I hadn't had any way of knowing, before I went to El Paso, that my presence there might lead to it.

Somehow this was not a compelling argument.

Perhaps her death had nothing to do with my presence. Perhaps a burglar had caused it after all. She hears a noise in the living room, gets up to investigate, and walks unwitting from this world into the next.

That was still less compelling.

Death can come by chance, at the intersection of our lives, with a hurricane's random path, a madman's random logic. I couldn't believe it had come that way to Alice Wright.

I knew that her death was connected in some way to her father's. And knew that by dragging that fifty-year-old murder up into the present, I had somehow triggered another.

But how? Who gained something by her death? Who lost something by her life?

Alice Wright had thought her mother killed her father. Her own death seemed to disprove that.

But maybe her mother was still the key. Maybe one of her lovers—about which Alice had known nothing—had tired of a bit part and tried to take over the lead.

But if so, where had he gone since? Her mother hadn't remarried, hadn't been involved, according to Alice, with anyone after her father's death.

But according to Alice, she hadn't been involved with anyone before it, either. And according to Brian DeFore, she'd been involved with him. I tended to believe Brian DeFore.

I couldn't see him, however, as a murderer. Even if he could slip away somehow from the old folks' home, he didn't have the strength for it, or the memory. His killing would be self-inflicted; and that, it seemed to me, he had done already, many years ago.

Sergeant Mendez's father? He'd been the detective investigating Dennis Lessing's death. Was it possible that he'd been having an affair with the dead man's wife? That he'd killed Lessing to get her?

I was spinning off into paranoia.

Or was I? Hadn't Mendez shipped me out of town? Afraid, perhaps, of what I might learn?

All right. Forget Alice Wright's mother for the time being. Anything I might've discovered about her would probably be buried with Alice. And even if someone else knew something, I was persona non grata in El Paso for the moment.

Focus on the part of the problem you can do something about. The other factor in the equation. The father. The father's affair with the woman on the Reservation.

And try to find out how any of this had anything to do with the disappearance of a hundred-year-old corpse.

Do the job you were hired to do. And maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to do something about the murder of Alice Wright.

When I reached Santa Fe at ten o'clock that Friday night, I was exhausted. Favoring both palms, which should have been impossible, and often was, I manhandled the suitcase into my house and dumped it beside the door. I shuffled into the kitchen, made myself a drink, carried it back out to the living room, and flopped down onto the sofa. I was kicking off my boots when I decided to call Rita and let her know I was back.

Her phone rang long enough for me to start worrying. She never went to bed without turning on the answering machine. And she wouldn't have left her house—Rita didn't leave her house.

I sat there picturing all the things that could happen to a woman whose legs were paralyzed. Finally, just as I was about to hang up and run out to the Subaru, the ringing stopped and I heard her voice.

“Hello.” She sounded as flat and lifeless as Lisa Wright had sounded earlier today.

“Rita?”

“Hello, Joshua.” Still without emotion.

“I'm back. I thought you should be the first to get the good news.”

She sniffled as though she had a cold. “I'm glad. Could you call me in the morning, Joshua?”

No one wanted to talk to me today.

“What's wrong, Rita?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” She sniffled again, cleared her throat. “I just don't feel very well.”

“Rita, what's the matter?”

“Nothing's the matter.” Another sniffle. “Really. I'm all right. I'm fine.” There was a quaver now in her voice.

“I'll be right over,” I said.

“Joshua, no.” Sudden, insistent. “
Please
, I'm
fine.
”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said.

She wouldn't answer the door either, not until I leaned on the bell for a solid two minutes. At last the door swung open. I stepped in and pushed it shut behind me.

Her back was to me as she rolled the chair down the hallway and turned left into the living room. I followed her.

Only one light was on, a small brass lamp on the table by the sofa. Without looking at me, she wheeled the chair around to face the sofa at that end, my usual seat. She wore a black silk robe and her black hair looked like she'd just brushed it. The skin around her eyes was puffy and the corners of her mouth were tight.

I sat down on the sofa and the tightness went from her mouth to her eyes and she said, “Your face, Joshua. And your hands. What happened to you?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. An accident. I'm fine.”

Now both eyes and mouth were tight. “A fight.”

“I'm okay. Tell me what's wrong with you.”

“Joshua,” she said, “there's nothing wrong with me. I think I may've picked up a flu. All I need is some rest.” Her mouth tightened again. “And I asked you not to come over. You don't have any right to come barging in here when I want to be alone.”

“Rita,” I said. “This is me, remember? The tall guy? I've known you for four years. That flu story isn't going to cut it.”

She looked at me for a moment and then put her head back. She closed her eyes and said, “Please, Joshua.” Her voice was deliberate and strained, as though she were trying to keep it from cracking. “Please go away. If I've ever meant anything to you, you'll leave me alone right now.”

I said, “Rita, you know what you mean to me. It's the same thing you've meant to me for a long time now. But I've always thought that whatever else we might be to each other, or might not be, we were friends.”

She lowered her head and put her hand to her face, thumb against one temple, middle finger against the other. I couldn't see her eyes now.

“And I've always thought,” I said, “that friends were supposed to—”

I stopped. Beneath her hand, tears were slowly rolling down her cheeks.

She sat motionless and silent.

“Ah, Rita,” I said. Her other hand rested on the arm of the wheelchair. I leaned forward and took it in mine. The rest of her remained still, but her thumb moved against my fingers.

Neither of us said anything for a while. I could hear the tears lightly tap, one by one, against her gown.

Finally she breathed in, deep and shuddery. She cleared her throat. “There's some Kleenex in the bathroom,” she said. “Could you bring me some?”

She never asked me to do anything for her; she wanted a moment alone.

I stood up, padded across the room and down the hallway to the bathroom, plucked three or four Kleenex from their box, and padded back. I handed them to her and sat down again on the sofa.

She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, put her hands in her lap. For a few moments she didn't look at me. Then she did, and she was smiling. It was a sad, fragile smile. And once again, as often happened when I was around her, something turned, wrenching, within my chest. She said, “I don't know what I'm going to do with you.”

I smiled. “I've got an idea or two, if you'd care to hear them.”

She shook her head, sniffled, blew her nose again.

“So what happened?” I asked her.

“Your friend, Mr. Begay. He happened.”

“He called here?”

She nodded, took another deep breath. “He's in town. I asked him to come over. I wanted to meet him.”

“So what happened?”

“He came over. We talked. He told me about the woman on the Reservation. The woman having the dreams.”

“Yeah?”

“Then he was asking me about the shooting. About my back. I told him what the doctors said. That I wouldn't be walking again. I told him that I would. He asked if he could examine my spine.”

I was trying, not very successfully, to imagine Daniel Begay as a letch.

She saw my frown. She smiled that fragile smile again. “No, Joshua, nothing like that. I just bent forward in the chair and he ran his hands down my back. No clothes were removed. It was all very clinical.”

“Right. And then what?”

“And then he sat down and he said, ‘I'm sorry to tell you this, Mrs. Mondragon, but you're fooling yourself.'”

15

I
stared at her for a moment. “Jesus, Rita. So what? He's not a doctor. What right does he have to tell you you're not going to walk? What does
he
know?” As soon as I found out where Begay was staying, I was going to get over there and—quickly, neatly, as efficiently as possible—I was going to put out his lights.

Rita was shaking her head, smiling the fragile smile. “No, Joshua, that's not what he meant.”

“So what did he mean?”

“That I'd stopped believing it was possible. And that until I believed it again, it wouldn't happen.”

“That's crap, Rita. You've been telling me for almost three years that you're going to walk again.”

Her fingers moved lightly around the balled-up Kleenex. She nodded. “I said the same thing. He just sat there smiling at me. A nice smile, fond and affectionate, like he was my uncle, and he knew better than I did what I thought.” She pressed her lips together. “I treated him like a bitch. I told him he didn't know what he was talking about.”

“He doesn't.”

She blew her nose again. “He ignored me. He told me that I had to put some time aside every day, and sit quietly and picture myself. Standing up. Walking. Running. He told me that everytime I stopped believing, I had to call up one of those pictures. Think about it. Breathe it in and out. Become it.”

“Swell,” I said. “Does he do crystal healing on the side? Channeling? Does he talk to dead pharaohs?”

She shook her head again. “Joshua, he's right. I
have
stopped believing. I've been telling you that I'll walk again. I've been telling everyone. Sometimes I even tell myself. But it's all been a sham, a front. At night, when I'm lying there alone in the bed, and I can see the silhouette of the chair against the light from the window, I know I'm going to climb back into it tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that. Forever. Until I die. And sometimes I think it might be a good idea to hurry along the process.”