The Lies that Bind (18 page)

“Great, isn't it?”

“Fall's my favorite time of year.”

“Mine, too.”

“Be seein' ya.”

“Bye.”

That was the extent of the conversation, but short as it was and tiny as Martha Conover is, she made her disapproval felt. I could feel her tensing like a guard dog beside me. Her back got straighter, the elbow that held her purse gripped firmer, her lips pressed together tight.

The
minute we reached our table, she latched onto a waitress and ordered a martini. “Do you know who that was?” she asked in a loud and irritated voice.

“Paul Deschiney,” I said.

“That's one of the policemen who came to my door the night of the … the accident.” Deschiney had suspected her of a criminal act, but that wasn't what made her really mad. “And today he didn't even recognize me.” Her eyes snapped, her sprayed-in-place hairdo quivered.

I couldn't deny it. Paul Deschiney had given absolutely no sign that he'd ever laid eyes on Martha Conover before. In fact he'd given no indication that he saw her today. I might have been standing at his table alone, for all the attention he paid her.

“As soon as your hair goes gray you become invisible to men,” Martha said. “Once, I sat next to a man at a dinner party and talked to him for three hours. The next time I saw him, he didn't even remember me. Now the police are accusing me of murder, and they still don't recognize me.”

She had a point. It did seem that second-degree murder or vehicular homicide ought to at least get a person some attention. When Martha's martini came, she gulped it down. I'd ordered a ginger ale myself and sipped it like a lady. To present the counterargument and also because I was curious, I said, “I understand why you're mad. On the other hand, don't you ever feel it's kind of nice to be invisible, to be able to walk into a bar or a restaurant and not have every guy in the place staring at your tits?” A few days before, that had been my dream, but like a lot of dreams, it was better in the imagining than in the reality.

“I don't go into bars, and men didn't stare at
my
breasts. Ever.” She looked around the room. “Where is that waitress?”

The waitress happened to be standing within earshot, talking in Spanish to another table. “The goddamn Spanish are slower than molasses. Waitress,” Martha yelled, in a shrill voice that got her attention. That's the way hostility gets spread around. A policeman insults Martha, Martha insults the waitress, who goes home and yells at her kid, the kid kicks the dog, the dog bites the mailman. The waitress gave Martha a look that said she might just dispense with the kid and kick
her.
At least it would break the chain. Instead she rolled her eyes and said “
Híjole
” to the other table.

“What did she say?” snapped Martha.

“
Híjole
.”

“I can't hear you. Speak up.”

“
Híjole
.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's just an exclamation. It doesn't mean much.”

“Is it a swear word?”

“No.”

“
I'll have another martini, young lady,” Martha said to the waitress, who had arrived at our table. The waitress wrote down the order, stared at a speck on the ceiling and said nothing. I peered into Martha's angry blue eyes and for a brief minute was able to enter her world, a world where she was only five feet two, where she was getting older and weaker and more frequently ignored, where she was losing the power she'd struggled so hard to get. The world was full of pheromone secreters, and hers were all used up. She lived in a place where she was surrounded by a language she didn't understand and a culture she couldn't comprehend. On the other hand, why had she moved to a place where Anglos are in the minority? For the weather? One of nature's laws is that in any place with good weather, the locals speak a different language. Had she gone to the trouble to learn that language, it might not seem so threatening.

Martha ordered a chicken salad. I ordered the enchilada plate.

“Green chile or red?” the waitress asked.

“Green. And make it hot,” I replied, even though I knew Daisy's hot green chile wouldn't rate a footnote on the menu at Arriba Tacos.

“Well, have they decided what they are going to charge me with?” Martha asked.

“Not yet.”

“Then what did you want to talk to me about?”

“I've found out that Justine used the name Niki Falcón when she lived in Argentina and that the reason she left there was that she assassinated a general in Buenos Aires.”

Fortunately she didn't think to ask me how I found out. “Did you know that?”

“No, but that proves I was right.”

“About what?”

“That girl was a killer. Cynthia never wanted to believe me, but I knew from the day Michael met her that Justine was no good.”

“The man she assassinated was a well-known pig and torturer.”

“And she was a troublemaker. Michael was a bright boy with a great future ahead of him, and then she came along and ruined everything.”

“It's possible Argentine hit men were after her.”

“Or drug dealers.”

The food arrived, and I bit into my enchilada. Daisy's hot was Arriba's lukewarm.

“I've never understood how people can eat that hot food,” said Martha, picking up a fork and spearing her chicken salad.

“I like it,” said I. And then we got to the issue that even more than the question of Martha's guilt or innocence was keeping me with one foot outside the door of this case.

“And I don't understand what you are doing with that man.” She gave a little shiver of
disapproval.

“If it's not broke, don't analyze it.”

“His hands are dirty.”

“He's a mechanic.”

“You're a professional woman. Why don't you stick to your own kind? What's wrong with a professional man like Whit?”

“Lots,” I said.

We didn't have much else to say. She picked at her lunch, I gulped down mine. When we were finished I paid the bill and drove her up the road to her town house at Los Cerros.

******

The professional man himself showed up at my office the next morning before I did. When I got there, at a quarter of ten, the phone was ringing and Anna's computer keys were clacking. He didn't hear me open the door and come in, which gave me a chance to take a good look at him. He wore plaid pants, a navy-blue polo shirt with a mallet-swinging horseman galloping across his heart, and Top-Siders with no socks. He looked like the kind of man our former Vice-President praised for his family values. The way I saw it, that meant being tight in marriage, acquisitive in the marketplace and good at expensive sports. I was married to a man like that once (briefly, though it seemed like forever), and I know the breed. Whit was sitting, I was standing, and I could see clearly the bald spot beneath the strands of stretched and slicked-in-place hair. I could hear the breath that wheezed through his nose, see the ring he turned round and around on his little finger.

“Whit Reid,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He stood up and dropped the magazine he'd been reading onto the coffee table. The pages fluttered as they fell into place. “Can we talk?” he said.

“All right. Any messages?” I asked Anna.

“No,” she replied.

I led Whit into my office and shut the door. My desk, as always, was filled to overflowing, and the potted plants were crying for water. I sent them a telepathic message.
Later,
it said. I flipped through the papers on my desk, searching for someplace to put the ashes from the cigarette I was about to light. I located an ashtray, dumped the contents into the trash, lit my butt. I don't have a big office; I don't make big money. My office had been a bedroom when Hamel and Harrison was a frame and stucco house—a small bedroom, not large enough for a king-sized bed, or a king-sized ego. I doubt if Whit felt uncomfortable very often; he was too full of his own importance and too oblivious to everyone else. It wouldn't occur to a guy who could monopolize a conversation the way he did that there were people out
there
who didn't like or admire or at least envy him. But he did seem ill at ease in my office. In fact he acted as though he felt the walls were closing in. He stood in front of the desk, shifting his weight from one Top-Sider to the other, twisting the ring around on his finger, casting a long shadow across my desk. Maybe he was used to bigger offices. It has been well documented that tall men are more successful in our society and they like to build themselves rooms to match their size, their success, their egos.

“Have a seat,” I said. He sat, and so did I. I lit my Marlboro. “What brings you to my office?”

“I do volunteer work with minority businesses and I had to come downtown, so I decided to stop by. I'm concerned about Martha,” He had reason to be; she stood a fair chance of being indicted for second-degree murder or vehicular homicide, and she would not be a model prisoner if she got sent away. “I saw her after her lunch with you yesterday. She was very upset, but she wouldn't tell me why.”

“Maybe the chicken salad didn't agree with her,” I said.

“Did you tell her she was going to be indicted?” He leaned forward in his chair. Every action produces a reaction, and I leaned back in mine.

“Actually, Whit, I'm not at liberty to discuss this case with you. Martha is my client, and there is the matter of client confidentiality. If you have any questions, why don't you ask her? She'll tell you whatever she wants you to know.”
Exactly
what she wanted him to know.

“I don't think she understands the seriousness of the charges she's facing. She can be irrational at times.”

“Martha's a woman,” I said. “We're known for that.” The snideness in my voice went right by him. Whit wasn't great at picking up on subtleties. He had noticed my smoke blowing by, however, and moved his chair sideways out of its path. He leaned back and crossed his arms. “I mean big-league irrational. She changed a lot after Michael died. Before that she was quite sharp. But I don't think she's old enough to be suffering from that disease where you can't remember anything.”

“You mean CRS?”

“What's that?”

“Can't remember shit.” He didn't laugh. Whit's sense of humor was about as lively as a stone's.

“You know what I mean.”

I did, but he was the one who'd gone to all the expensive schools; why should I have to tell him?

“Alzheimer's,” he remembered. “Besides, the changes in her came on too quickly to be Alzheimer's. Her doctor says there's nothing wrong with her that a good night's sleep won't fix and just prescribes more Halcion. You've probably only seen her when she has it together. Martha can put on a good front when she has to. But Cyn and I see her when her guard is down. Sometimes she doesn't know what she's doing or even where she is. It's got to be the Halcion and the drinking, a bad combination. She used to be just a social drinker, but after Michael died she started drinking alone.”

Drinking
alone used to be a warning sign of alcoholism, but that had to be before everybody lived alone. Nowadays if you didn't drink alone you might never get to drink at all. At least people who drink in the privacy of their own homes don't drive while they're doing it.

Whit continued. “I was riding in her car with her one day, and she stopped at a green light. ‘Why did you stop here?' I asked her. ‘Because the light changed,' she said, and she got all confused and bent out of shape. But then all the other cars honked and went through the light, and she realized she'd done something dumb.”

“I don't know why you're telling me all this,” I said.

Both he and Cindy seemed more than eager to talk about Martha's character flaws.

“Because you're her lawyer and I'm not sure that Martha is competent to be making the right decisions about her life or is giving you the right information.”

“And you are?”

“I'm more competent than she is.” He shrugged.

“She seems capable enough to me.” Martha was as edgy as a lapdog, the kind of dog you'd like to drop-kick across the room, but she knew where her self-interest lay.

“You can do a better job if you have all the facts,” said Whit.

“Who ever has all the facts?”

“I think the Halcion defense will be her best chance, but you may have trouble getting her to agree to that.”

“Really?” I picked up a rubber band, shot it at a coffee mug on my desk, missed.

“Well, I just want you to know that Cyn and I are here if you have any problems dealing with Martha. We'll be glad to talk to her if you like.”

“It won't be necessary.”

“If you need help, Nellie—”

“My name is Neil.”

“—don't hesitate to call on us.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“I wouldn't want you to think I don't have confidence in you. I do, and that's exactly why I recommended you to Martha.”

“You
recommended me? I thought it was Cindy.”

“No, it was me.”

Why me, whose office was the size of his clothes closet, I wondered, instead of some large and prestigious firm? Like lightning flashing on one dark Sandia peak and then another, my mind bolted and landed on a seemingly distant subject. “When is El Dorado going to be auctioned?” I asked him.

Whit
Reid stared at me through his glasses, stretched his hands out in front of him until his knuckles cracked. “Where did you hear about that?”

“Cindy told me. I saw the picture when I was at your house. She said she thinks foreign investors are interested.”

“Next week, I think,” he said, giving the foreign-investor theory all the attention it deserved—none. He looked at his watch. “I have to be going. Now please don't forget you can call on us anytime if you need our help.” Whit's surface politeness was as smooth as still water in whose depths sharks go efficiently about their business.