Slow Kill (19 page)

No more than five or six years older than Kerney, Pontsler kept himself in good shape. He weighed in at about a hundred and sixty pounds on a five-ten frame. He had a full head of hair and a crooked nose with a thin pink surgical scar that ran down to his nostrils. It had been badly broken years ago when Vic had responded to a fight in progress that turned into a bar brawl between cops and drunks.

Pontsler sat behind his cluttered desk and twirled a rubber band around his fingers. “I spent time after you called thinking about who you should talk to,” he said. “Michael Winger would be your best bet. Back in the old hippie days he called himself Montana. He grew up in Manhattan and dropped out of college to come west and be part of the love generation. Moved here from San Francisco in the early seventies. He knew just about everybody who lived in the local communes.”

“What else can you tell me about him?” Kerney asked.

“He’s part of the establishment now, a successful businessman. Chamber of Commerce member, museum foundation patron, and all that. Owns the Blue Mountain Restaurant on the Paseo and the Blue Moon Gallery just off the plaza.”

“He likes the color blue, I take it,” Kerney said.

“You’ve got that right. He lives in a primo old hacienda on a ten-acre parcel off Kit Carson Road. He likes to play the cowboy role. Wears his hair pulled back in a ponytail and dresses in jeans and boots. He’s divorced and has a Scandinavian girlfriend who teaches writing workshops and makes documentary films about oppressed women.”

“Is he into anything shady?” Kerney asked.

“As far as I know, Winger is a solid, upstanding citizen.”

“No trouble during his early days in town?”

“I know he smoked pot, but he never was busted.”

“How did he get started in business?” Kerney asked.

Pontsler rubbed his thumb and fingers together. “He likes to say he started out buying southwestern art for himself before the market for it took off. But it was really family money that bankrolled him. His father was a big-time New York City architect.”

Before leaving, Kerney got a rundown on a few more people Pontsler thought might be helpful. He locked his sidearm in the glove box of his unit, stuck his shield in his back pocket, and walked to Winger ’s restaurant.

Although it was touted as a mecca of Native American culture and had a long history as a famous art colony, Taos had never appealed much to Kerney. Parts of it were charming and the surrounding landscape was majestic. But the city was also a magnet for modern-day rogues and ruffians, frauds and fugitives, many of whom could be belligerent and nasty. Pontsler’s sterling character reference aside, Kerney wondered if Winger fit into any of those categories.

The Blue Mountain Restaurant occupied an old adobe house with a lovely tree-shaded outdoor dining patio and two small separate dining rooms with low ceilings, light blue walls with framed photographs of early Taos scenes, and Mexican tile tables. The hostess, a tall, rather aloof woman with a clipped English accent, told Kerney that Winger was never at the restaurant until late in the afternoon and could most probably be found at his gallery. He half-expected her to say “ta-ta” or “cheerio” when he thanked her and left.

He walked down the Paseo toward the plaza. Slow-moving road traffic with its incessant noise lurched in both directions as groups of shoppers wandered in and out of the retail stores lining the street. Many establishments had sale signs in the windows; others displayed rugs, apparel, and hand-crafted furniture in the front yards of old houses that had been converted to shops. Here and there a bored store clerk stood in a doorway watching the foot traffic pass by.

The hot, dry day had brought the tourists out in shorts, pullover short-sleeved shirts, and athletic walking shoes. Some were building up to painful sunburns, while others shaded their faces with newly purchased cheap straw cowboy hats or billed caps that proclaimed their visit to Taos.

The Blue Moon Gallery was an austere, modern space a few steps from the plaza. Overhead track lights and exposed heating and cooling ductwork hung from the ceiling, and the walls were filled with the works of the Taos Society of Artists, established in the early part of the twentieth century by a group of bohemian artists drawn to the area’s culture and landscape.

Kerney trailed behind two couples cruising the gallery and immediately recognized the distinctive styles of Joseph Henry Sharp, Eanger Irving Couse, and Ernest Blumenschein, three of the founding members of the society. Only the placards next to the smaller paintings displayed a price. There was nothing on sale below twenty thousand dollars until you got to the lesser-known artists who’d joined the society later on, and even those works were pricy.

In the center space, randomly placed pale blue stands of various heights and widths held sculptures by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.

Kerney admired everything before moving on to a small display of Maynard Dixon pencil drawings that were hung on a corridor that led to a suite of offices. A comely woman with curly hair and a bright smile approached him holding a gallery brochure and asked if he needed any assistance.

Kerney shook his head, showed the woman his shield, asked for Winger, and when she showed concern, quickly reassured her there was no reason for alarm.

She led him down the corridor and knocked on an open office door. Michael Winger sat at a large cherrywood desk in front of a flat screen LCD computer monitor. Behind him was a floor-to-ceiling shelving unit crammed with art reference books.

Winger looked up from the monitor and studied Kerney with interest as the woman explained the reason for the interruption. Then he stood, shook Kerney’s hand, and gestured at an empty chair.

“You’re the Santa Fe police chief,” Winger said with a smile as Kerney eased into the chair.

“How do you know that?” Kerney asked as the woman left the office. Winger’s gray, neatly tied-back hair draped several inches below the back of his neck. He had on an expensive blue designer work shirt that matched the color of his eyes, which held a look of amusement. On his left wrist he wore a vintage watch with a leather strap. His face was narrow, long, and deeply tanned.

“I have some business interests in Santa Fe,” Winger replied, “so I spend a lot of time there. What can I do for you, Chief?”

“I’d be interested in what you could tell me about Debbie Calderwood.”

Winger laughed. “Boy, I haven’t heard that name in years. Debbie Calderwood. I may be the only person around who knew her real name. At the commune, she called herself Caitlin, after Dylan Thomas’s wife. She was always quoting his poems to anyone who would listen. She liked to say he was the only true poet of the twentieth century.”

“Certainly one of the best,” Kerney said. “What was she like?”

“Waiflike in a very sexy way. She was tiny, but perfectly proportioned, with these huge innocent eyes. Every guy who saw her wanted to sleep with her, but she’d have none of it. She was really smart and had a steel-trap mind. You could talk to her about something and weeks later she’d remember the conversation almost verbatim.”

“How did you meet her?”

“She just wandered into the commune with a sleeping bag and a backpack one day and stayed. Said she need to crash with us until her old man returned from Guatemala. Things were going downhill at the time. People were bailing to go back to the city, couples were breaking up, cash was tight, and the cops and the locals were hassling us. She had money, which helped a lot.”

“How much money?”

“I don’t know, but she was pretty free with it. She’d pay for the supplies we needed and put gas in the bus without anyone asking.”

“How did you learn her real name?” Kerney asked.

Winger smiled. “We were all a bit paranoid about newcomers who showed up back then, worried about the lowlifes who wandered in, or outsiders nobody knew who might be narcs. This one guy showed up, stayed for a week, and then stole the International Scout we used to till the garden with an old plow. So I searched through her stuff one day after she came back from town, and found some general delivery letters addressed to her.”

“Did you read the contents?”

“Yeah, they were innocent, chatty notes from some girlfriends in Albuquerque and Oregon.”

“Did you confront her about her name?”

Winger laughed and shook his head. “No. We were all into giving ourselves or each other new names. Jimmy called himself Beaner; Sammy, a surfer guy from Hawaii, was Bear; Judy had an acid ceremony to change her name to Peachy Windsong. We had girls who called themselves Star, Feather, Aurora, Chamisa; guys who went by Owl and Rabbit. Owl held a drum circle to celebrate his new name.”

“And you were Montana,” Kerney said.

Winger looked sheepish. “You heard about that. I guess I grew up watching too many cowboy movies. In retrospect, it’s funny now. But we were all just kids who’d dropped out of the establishment to create a brand-new society, live peacefully, and change the world. Free love, flower power, new identities, and lots of dynamite drugs. We wanted truth, enlightenment, sex, and freedom to get high without any bullshit.”

Winger shifted in the chair, with a sunny look on his face as he warmed to the memories. “Looking back, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing. We built chicken pens and then let the birds run wild, put up a big dome-sort of an aboveground kiva we used for family meetings-that almost blew down during the first big storm. Hell, the most substantial structure on the whole place was the outhouse. It had six seats and was made of scrap slat lumber.”

“Looks like you came through it all right,” Kerney said, thinking of his year in Nam, which occurred probably right about the time Winger and his friends had been trying to build their utopia.

Winger smiled. “Yeah, and most of it was fun. The one thing I learned was that you can’t live without rules. It’s a great idea but it doesn’t float.”

“Did Debbie do a lot of drugs?”

“She smoked some pot, but that’s about it.”

“How long did she stay?”

“Three, maybe four months, until her boyfriend showed up. They split two days after he arrived.”

“When was that?” Kerney asked.

Winger closed his eyes and thought hard, “Shit, I don’t know. Sometime in the summer. I was on a really bad head trip at the time. People were staying wasted, not pulling their share, or just bitching each other off right and left about the crops we couldn’t raise, the goats that got into the garden, the pig nobody knew how to slaughter, the tools that had gone missing. There were maybe a dozen of us left and nobody was getting along or doing any work.”

It was clear that Winger had told the story of his youthful, hippie escapades many times. Kerney decided Winger wasn’t a rogue or ruffian, fraud or fugitive. He was just a guy who wore his counter-culture experiences as a mark of his individuality.

“Tell me about the boyfriend,” he said.

Winger made a face. “Now, that was strange. He showed up one day driving a new truck with Mexican license plates. It was like he didn’t want to talk to anybody but Caitlin. They went off together in his truck. Two days later they came back, picked up her stuff, and left. That was the last time I saw her.”

“Describe him to me.”

“Average height, real fit looking, with a shaved head that he covered with a bandana. Oh yeah, and a fairly new mustache he was cultivating. Somebody asked him what had happened to his hair, and he said he’d picked up head lice and had to shave it off in Guatemala.”

“Did he have a name?”

“Caitlin called him Breeze.”

“Can you give me a little more detailed description of him?”

Winger chuckled. “I can go one better than that. Photography was my thing back in those days. I was documenting communal living and keeping a journal. My plan was to write a book about it someday. Never did get around to it. Anyway, I snuck around taking pictures of everyone and everything with a telephoto lens. Before Caitlin and Breeze left, I snapped a couple of frames from a distance for my rogues’ gallery. Got a nice tight head shot of both of them.”

“I need to see those photographs,” Kerney said.

“Hell, I’ll give you copies if you’ll tell me what this is all about.”

“If I’m right, Breeze may be a solider named George Spalding who faked his death in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Why he did it, I still don’t know.”

Winger’s eyes widened. “A deserter. Isn’t that something?” He scribbled on a piece of paper and passed it across the desk. “Meet me at my house in an hour. It shouldn’t take longer than that for me to dig through my archives and find the photographs.”

“One more question,” Kerney said, pocketing the address. “Do you have any idea where they went?”

Winger shook his head. “They could have gone anywhere. South to Silver City. There was a commune down there. Maybe up to Trinidad, Colorado. All I know is that they didn’t hang around Taos.”

Ninety minutes later, Kerney waited patiently in the library at Winger ’s house, a spacious room with massive ceiling beams, double adobe walls, and tall casement windows, painted on the outside in turquoise blue. Bookcases along three walls were filled with Native American artifacts, pre-Columbian pots, and rare first editions of early Southwestern archaeology studies. The room held two oversized antique Mexican tables that served as desks, each laden with books, old maps, file folders, photographs of high-end artwork, and related provenance documents.

He sat in front of the stone fireplace, impatiently waiting for Winger ’s return from what he called his archives room, located somewhere in the back of the rambling adobe. The sound of hurrying footsteps brought Kerney to his feet. Winger appeared, photographs in hand, which he passed to Kerney.

“Sorry to take so much time,” Winger said. “I had to make copies and dig out my journal to look up when I took the photos.”