The Lies that Bind (16 page)

“Yeah,” I said.

“
Mucho gusto
,” said the Kid to Santo, and “
Ándale
” to me.

“Come back again,” replied Santo.

The Kid and I walked down the arroyo, past the pink-faced boulders, through the sandy place where water flows in summer. One of Santo's dogs followed us, and when Santo called him he sat down, threw his head back and began a long, lonesome howl.

The Kid shook his head. “People in this country are crazy,” he said.

13

I'
D FOUND
E
MILIO
'
S
typewriter. The next step was to find Emilio and tell him. He was on Los Cerros tennis court, where he had challenged the ball machine to a game and the machine had met the challenge. When I got there on Monday afternoon, the match was on. Emilio's concentration was intense, and I leaned against the fence and watched for several minutes before he noticed me. The balls hit the ground and bounced one after another in the exact same spot. Emilio didn't have to move around much, but even so he'd probably had to set the machine to its slowest setting. The machine hiccupped, exhaled a ball. The strings thunked when the sweet spot of Emilio's racket connected. He brought his racket back, narrowed his eyes and swung hard. His intensity made me wonder if he wasn't seeing someone's face on the ball. Martha's, maybe, or Whit's. He noticed me out of the corner of his eye, dropped the racket in midstroke, rolled around to the other side of the court and turned the ball machine off.

“See that?” he asked. “I'm taking the dis out of disability.”

“Go ahead and finish the set,” I answered. “Don't mind me.”

“It's okay. I've had enough.” He wheeled up close so I was looking down at him again. If the purpose of exercise is to break a sweat, he'd achieved it. His shirt clung to his body, his dark hair formed Greek-god tendrils on his forehead. “Tennis is okay, but I'd rather be talking to you.”

“You haven't heard what I have to say yet.”

“That's right.” His smile was a quick, hard flash. “Here or my place?”

“Your place.”

“See you there.” He went to his car; I went to mine. It took him longer, and I arrived at his apartment first. I waited for him at the door, wondering how I was going to explain that I had tracked down his typewriter, hoping that Dorothy wouldn't come to
her
door. All was quiet behind the facade of 53C, no sound of metal scraping or death walking. Maybe Dorothy had fallen asleep, or she hadn't gotten up yet, but that seemed unlikely, since there appears to be an inverse relationship between the amount of sleep you get and your age. By the time you reach ninety you're lucky to sleep at all. Thinking about Dorothy kept me from thinking about Emilio, and when he showed up and let me into his apartment I hadn't a clue how I was going to say what I'd come here to say.

“Want a beer?” he asked, heading for the kitchen. “I have some Tecate.”

“Got anything else?”

“Lemonade?”

“
I'll have one of those.”

There was a John Callahan cartoon lying on the coffee table, and I picked it up. It was a picture of a dog lying on his back with a pane of glass sticking out of his chest. “How much is that window in the doggy?” the caption read. Emilio heard me laugh.

“I've got a joke for you, Nellie,” he said. “There was a guy with no arms and legs who had to give up his effort to swim the English Channel. You know why?”

“
Dígame
.”

“His ears got tired.” I heard him open the refrigerator door. “Not drinking these days?”

“Not when I'm working.” I sat down on his sofa, picked up the picture of Justine with the gypsy eyes and put it down.

He came back with the drinks and handed me mine. “Seeing me is work?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” I took a big sip of lemonade. “I found your typewriter, Emilio.”

He looked at me over the top of his Tecate can. “My typewriter?”

“A man named Santo took it from Last Chance. He wears a dress and lives in a hovel in Coldwater Arroyo. He thought I'd come there to interview him for
60 Minutes
.”

“Glad to know someone is using it,” he said.

“He is. In fact there was a poem in the typewriter that he says he coaxed out.”

Emilio shook his head. His curls remained stuck to his sweaty forehead. “You're a good investigator, Nellie. How did you even know I had a typewriter or where to look for it?” Not being such a bad investigator himself, he quickly came up with the answer. “Dorothy?”

“Yeah.”

“
Hijole
. It's worse than living at home with your mother. She's got nothing to do all day but watch me go in and out.”

“When I came here the other day she told me you'd gone to Last Chance with the typewriter. I have to ask why you got rid of it, Emilio. That typewriter typed Justine's note.” The next question was, Did
you
type it? But I didn't ask.

“I was afraid of that,” he said.

“If you give me a sample of something you've typed, I can prove it.”

“You don't need to prove it; I believe you.”

“Who typed it, Emilio? I have to know.”

He put his Tecate down on the table, leaving a wet ring, but it didn't matter because the veneer that masqueraded as wood was grade A plastic. “Justy, I think,” he said. “She was here all alone that morning.”

“Was her English that good? Wouldn't someone who didn't have very good English have said
‘
stop' rather than ‘prevent'?”

“Her English was fine. Better than mine.”

“Why would she write herself a note like that?”

“As sort of an apology to me.”

“I don't get it.”

“It's a long story, Nellie.”

What did I have waiting for me at the office anyway? Real estate and divorce, Anna and Brink. “
Dígame
,” I said.

“Justy and I got real close after Miguel died. She was like a daughter to me. She came here every year on the anniversary of the accident, and we spent it together. Justy was a marked woman. She might of taken steps to protect herself, and for a while she did. But after Miguel died she didn't care whether she lived or not. I think the note was telling me she knew she was going to die and that she didn't care enough to prevent it.” He took a long sip of his beer.

“Who wanted to kill her?”

“A lot of people. When she was sixteen years old she fell in with a group of Argentine revolutionaries or terroristas, whatever you want to call them. It was the time of the dirty war, and Argentina was a mess then, run by a bunch of assassins. Justy's real name was Verónica Falcón, but she was known as Niki.”

“She was named after her grandmother?”

“Yeah. She came from an upper-class family. Jaime Córdova, her best friend's father, was a general in Buenos Aires and a notorious pig and torturer. She went to visit her friend and took a book with her. She excused herself to go to the bathroom and planted the book under the old man's bed. It was a bomb, and it blew him up.”

“Oh, God.”

“Her boyfriend, who made the bomb, got caught. They probably hooked him up to the torture machine and fried his balls, but Justy escaped and she came here and lived with her mother's sister, Mina Alarid. Alarid is not the family name. He was someone Mina was married to years ago. Mina's been in this country for thirty years. She teaches Latin American literature at UNM. I guess Justy hoped the assassins wouldn't trace her here or would forget about her, or maybe she knew they would find her someday and she stopped caring.”

“If it was Argentine hit men, why not just run her over themselves? Why set up Martha Conover?”

“They have a sense of humor? I don't know, Nellie. The other possibility, which I hate to even consider, is that Justy stepped in front of the car herself. Justy knew that the old lady was going to the
meeting
that night and would probably be coming home loaded and driving like the Terminator. The note doesn't make much sense, does it, if you think Martha Conover murdered Justy in cold blood?”

“No.”

“And it wasn't given to her by the psychic if it was typed on my typewriter.”

“Did you really believe it was?”

“Let's say I
hoped
it was.”

“Tell me what happened the day Justine died.”

“She got here about eleven-thirty. I went out to get some tacos for lunch. I'm not much of a cook. When I got back, Mina Alarid and Cindy were here. Mina picked Cindy up because Cindy doesn't like to leave her car parked outside when Martha is around. We had lunch and talked and cried about Miguel. Around four, I took Cindy home. Whit was downtown, doing his charity work. Justy and Mina stayed here for a while, and then Justy left to go to the cemetery. She liked to go alone. I never saw her again.” He picked up Justine's picture and stared at her. “You would have liked her, Nellie. She reminded me of you when you were sixteen. You might of been a terrorista too, if you'd grown up in Argentina. Remember how you hated the war?”

“I still do.” And looking at the limp legs in his wheelchair, I hated it even more.

“The guy she killed was a pig and a brutal assassin, who deserved to die.”

He was also her best friend's father.

“She did the world a favor by getting rid of him.
El muerto al pozo y el vivo al retozo
.”

The dead to his hole and let the good times roll.

“It took a lot of courage to do what Niki Falcón did—and she was just a kid—but it ruined her life. Loving Miguel helped, but you never really recover from something like that. I know because I've killed too. Justy and I had that in common. Only her victim was an assassin and mine was a VC who wanted me to get the fuck out of his country. She paid with her life. I lost my legs, which in a way made it easier for me to deal with it.” He looked down at his lap. “The old lady's got nothing to worry about now. As the doc in rehab said, sex will always be a distant memory for me. It's hard to get into it when you can't feel a thing and you've got a catheter in your dick.”

“Sex isn't everything,” I said, echoing Martha Conover, but her voice had had more conviction than mine did.

“It's a luxury,” Emilio said, “for people who've got something left to lose.” He finished the Tecate, squeezed the can together and threw it at the trash container visible through the open kitchen door. The can hit the edge, bounced off, landed on the floor and gave a death rattle while it rolled to a stop.

“When Miguel died too, Justy felt like she was the kiss of death and there was no reason for her
to
go on living. But she was wrong, Nellie, there were reasons. There's me, there's Cindy.”

It's easy enough to see why people believe in reincarnation. Who likes to think you'll only get one shot when the hand you're dealt is stacked with cards like that? “Did Justine usually carry a gun?”

“Wouldn't you if you were her?”

“Probably.”

“I have a gun. Don't you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

“Why do you ask?”

“The night Justine died, the police found a revolver with two empty chambers in the glove compartment of her car.”

“Where did the bullets go?”

“I don't know. You'd think someone in Justine's situation would have reloaded the gun soon after she fired it, wouldn't you?”

“You'd think so. Something you should understand about Justy is that killing Jaime Córdova didn't make her inhuman, but anyone who does something like that is going to be living by different rules afterwards.” Emiliano had killed too. What rules was he living by? I wondered.

“I'm going to have to tell the DA's office about the Argentine connection,” I said. “Martha's my client. This is evidence that could keep her from being indicted.”

“I was afraid of that,” Emilio said.

“Why do you care?” I asked.

“She's a heartless woman. She's ruined a couple of lives, and I'd like to see her pay. If they put the old lady in jail, it's all right with me.”

“Don't you care about finding out the truth?”

“Not anymore,” he said.

******

But it was important to me—more than that: it was of the essence. Although a couple of years practicing law could easily make you care more about billable hours than the truth, it was the raft I tried to navigate through the shallow rapids of the legal river. Without it I'd be scraping the bottom with my butt. Practicing law could also make a person suspicious of everyone, even old friends. Emilio Velásquez hadn't acted as though he was lying, and I didn't want to think he'd lie to me. But the black velvet bog of suspicion is seductive, and I could feel myself getting pulled by the suction. Justine Virga could have been Niki Falcón, Niki Falcón could have murdered Jaime Córdova. On the other hand, Justine Virga could have lied to Emilio Velásquez and he could have lied to me. Justine and Miguel might have been
involved
with drugs. It would explain the Porsche and the revolver and the deaths of two young people, except that drug dealers are more likely to carry semiautomatics than revolvers. Maybe Cindy had been kidding herself about Michael's drug use. Maybe he'd been fooling her. Emilio Velásquez could also have been involved with drugs, and in fact by his own admission he had been. Drugs might have been the bond that held Justine, Michael and Emilio together. Emilio had as much reason as anyone to want Martha to appear guilty. Just because I liked him better than Martha Conover didn't make her wrong … or guilty.

The Kid came over for dinner that night, and I asked him if he had heard of Niki Falcón. He did, after all, have an Argentine connection.