The Lies that Bind (20 page)

I rented a gray subcompact at Sky Harbor Airport and negotiated my way to New West Bank. Phoenix is a grid city like Albuquerque, crisscrossed by two interstates, only they call them freeways here, the L.A. influence. It's an easy town to drive in, as long as you have air-conditioning, and no one—not even Rent A Wreck—would dare rent out a car at the Phoenix airport that didn't have air-conditioning. Phoenix couldn't exist without air-conditioning, even in November. All the escaping freon has to be doing its part to extend the hole in the ozone layer. That's one reason I live in Albuquerque. You don't need an air-conditioned car to survive, but you'd probably go out before dark a lot more if you had one.

I went up a ramp and got on a freeway that gave me a good view of the city. Palm trees lined the streets. Cone-shaped protrusions stuck up here and there, the only places in sight that hadn't been developed. A large sign beside the road said the Clean Air Police advised people to car pool and in rush hour the left lane was reserved for them. Phoenix lives in the shadow of the Tonto National Forest, where the peaks are the height of the valleys in the Land of Enchantment. The altitude of Phoenix itself is a thousand feet—four thousand feet lower than the Duke City. The air was thick and humid enough to make my hair curl. From where I sat, Phoenix looked like a green and prosperous oasis. Albuquerque from any distance—near or far—looks like a dry and dusty pit stop. Going from New Mexico to Arizona reminds me of going from Spain to Portugal, from the bare and masculine to the soft and green. I asked myself the question that those of us who come from the Duke City ask here: Is Phoenix more prosperous than Albuquerque because it's prettier, because it's lower, because it's warmer or because it's closer to California? We're closer to Texas, but Texas money doesn't flow as freely as it used to. California money may not flow as freely inside the state either, but a lot of it seems to be flowing out. That's the American way. When your own nest becomes fouled, find another.

I
got off the freeway at Seventh Street and onto the surface streets that led downtown to New West. I saw a lot of anonymous gray rental cars that were exact replicas of mine. The traffic moved slowly, regularly and somnambulently. Driving here was too easy, and the persistent hum of the air-conditioning fan was the kind of white noise that could put you to sleep at the wheel. Everybody had automatic transmission, everybody was air-conditioned, everybody's windows were rolled up. When I stopped at a light I heard the whir of my fan instead of my neighbor's booming beat. I saw a lot of one-story houses, a lot of For Sale signs, and a lot of fountains on the surface streets. All over Phoenix, fountains were dripping, plopping, spurting and gushing water—water that had to be pumped in from somewhere else because it didn't flow naturally here.

New West had a fountain in the lobby, one large Indian pot that poured water into another over and over again. My fellow lawyer Jed White was waiting there, indicating that he had taken a faster route than I, indicating also that he was interviewing with New West. This time I did have something to say to him, and it was “Jed, what are you doing here?” although I'd already figured it out.

“Interviewing to be New West's representative in Albuquerque.” It didn't take him long to figure it out either. We were lawyers, after all, known for our quick wits. “You, too?”

“Yeah,” I said. I'd known they were going to be interviewing other people, but it seemed kind of tacky to be doing it at the same time. Were they trying to intimidate one or the other of us into working for less? Going through the motions of being an equal opportunity employer? I peeked around surreptitiously to see if there were any blacks or Hispanics in the lobby. None that appeared to be interviewing for a job. Jed looked the part of an Arizona banker's lawyer, I had to admit, casual but precise. His shirt was fresh, his suit pressed, his tie subdued, his hair short and combed, his expression eager. I could feel my own hair frizzing, my skirt wrinkling and my expression getting snarly. I considered going into the ladies' room to try to spruce myself up, but what the hell. What they saw was what they'd get. Actually, what they'd get—Brink—was worse.

If Eric Winston was embarrassed that Jed and I had arrived at the same time, he didn't let it show. He bustled across the lobby, jacket and tie flapping and a big grin on his face. If you can fake sincerity, they say, you can fake anything. “You two know each other?” he said. “Good.”

Jed looked at me. I looked back. He smiled. I didn't.

“Why don't you come first, Neil?” Eric said to me.

“Okay,” I said. When it comes to waiting around bank lobbies, I don't have a principle to stand on.

Eric led me to his office and sat down. He was a little short, a little plump, a little slow, a whole lot affable, the kind of guy there probably
was
a board behind. Within those limits he was pretty much what he pretended to be—nice. He was the kind of good old local boy banks like to hire and promote—up
to
a certain point. When they get to the executive level, they bring in someone with more polish. We went through the motions, but we both realized relatively quickly that I was not the lawyer for New West. Sitting in his office for a half hour confirmed what I already knew—I'd hate bank work, and I couldn't count on Brink to do it right. Eric said he'd talk it over with the board and call me.

“Okay,” I said. I almost told him not to bother, but why give up whatever guilt leverage I had? “So what do you think about Sharon Amaral?” I asked.

He tapped his pen on his desk while five gray-haired men sat around a table behind him and conferred. “It's your call,” they whispered to Eric, and then they vanished. He cleared his throat. “We could probably sign off on the mortgage if she'll turn the house over to us. We don't want to go through foreclosure if we don't have to,” he said.

“Can she stay in the house until she gets her life in order?”

“How long?”

“Six months.”

“All right, but we'll need to draw up a lease and charge her rent.”

“How much?”

“Make me an offer.”

“Seventy-five dollars a month.”

“A hundred?”

“All right,” I said. It was a small victory, but that's what practicing law is usually about: large losses, little wins.

I passed Jed White in the lobby on my way out. “All yours,” I said.

“Huh?” replied Jed.

17

T
HE NEW WEST
interview hadn't gotten me a client, but it had brought me to Phoenix and only thirty miles from Whit Reid's golden place, El Dorado. After I left New West I got on the freeway and headed south. Following the directions in the RTC brochure, I left the freeway at Bernal Road. In my rearview mirror I saw the white car that had been behind me pull off, stop at the intersection and turn in the opposite direction, but I couldn't see who was driving it.
ENTERING BLOWING DUST AREA
, the sign on one side of the road said.
FOR SALE
, said the sign on the other. “Living in the Shadow of a Doubt” played on the country music station. A car passed me going eighty-five. The kid behind the wheel was wearing a scarf around his head, tied pirate style.
DON
'
T DRINK AND DRIVE
, his bumper sticker said,
YOU MIGHT HIT A BUMP AND SPILL IT
.

Bernal Road passed through the Sonoran Desert. Saguaro cacti stood up like thirty-foot-tall sentinels with their arms raised, providing holes for birds' nests and casting long shadows. Forget the palm trees that were imported from somewhere else—the saguaros are what make Arizona unique. They don't grow anywhere in the world but here and northern Mexico and a few places in California. Saguaros have a waiting, watching quality, which gives me the impression that they are trying to communicate. There are people who talk to plants. There were times when I lived in Mexico that I came close to doing it myself. If I ever broke through the species barrier and communicated with a plant, it would be a saguaro, but what would it have to say anyway? You're only passing through, but I will endure? Or: You're destroying yourselves, and you're taking me along with you?

Go west on Bernal Road for five miles and turn north, the RTC brochure said, onto an unimproved road. That meant dirt, and I could see it in the distance, red dust whipped to pink vapor by the wind. At the corner was a large RTC For Sale sign, just in case anyone hadn't been following the directions and keeping track of the odometer reading. A couple of guys had set up shop on the corner in a pickup truck with the tailgate flipped open. Two big saguaros wrapped in blankets stuck out of the back of the truck. I guessed what the cacti were doing in the truck, but why the blankets? I wondered. To keep them warm in the eighty-degree heat? To protect them? To cover them up if the cops came along? The guys were in a spot where they could see what was coming from a long way. It's illegal to dig up and sell saguaros without a permit unless they are on your own land, but they can bring prices in excess of ten thousand dollars, so you know somebody's going to be doing it. If these cacti could communicate, they'd be crying “Help!” They had minuscule roots, which made me wonder if they weren't already dead, if the
guys
hadn't cut off the root systems and murdered them when they dug them up. An elderly couple had stopped and were negotiating with the guys. People will sell anything—their plants, their pets, their mothers-in-law—and the reason is, there is always someone out there ready to buy. “Don't do it!” I sent the negotiating couple a telepathic message, but they weren't listening.

Like the conquistadores before me, I turned north to search for El Dorado. The road was red dirt, the desert green cacti, the sky deep blue with white puffs of clouds floating across it. A large bird with a white belly and black falcon wings lifted up and flew away. A coyote ran down the road, and its white tail bobbed like a bunny's. This place was a desert paradise. If it had to have a building, it deserved at least a Frank Lloyd Wright.

What it had received was a bloated corpse rotting in the sun. I came upon it about a mile later, a sprawling unfinished hulk of a building beside a sign that labeled it El Dorado. The wooden frame stuck out like the rib cage of the corpse, where the mud-colored stucco didn't cover it up. In some places the concrete-slab foundation lay exposed, a landing pad for helicopters or extraterrestrials. A pile of plywood and pink fiberglass insulation lifted and bucked in the breeze. Wires dangled from exposed beams. The size of it was appalling; so was the ugliness, the stupidity, the greed and the waste. You don't often find water in the desert, but you do find real estate fraud. This was a Las Tramponus project, which never should have been built with depositors' money that never should have been lent. A bank had collapsed, taking El Dorado down with it, or was it the other way around? Did it matter to the taxpayers who were going to be paying for it?

El Dorado looked as though it would have a three-day-old carrion smell, and I was tempted to remain in the car, sealed in and air conditioned. “You didn't come this far just to sit in a car,” I told myself, so I changed into my running shoes, got out and walked toward the building. A mourning dove cooed, a sad and lonely desert sound. The pile of warped plywood shuddered and banged. I entered the El Dorado hotel, walked across the lobby and climbed the stairs to the second floor, wondering how long it would take this monstrosity of a building to decompose and this patch of desert to return to what it had been, remote, pristine, beautiful, wild. Forever, probably. It was for sale, I remembered, and would in fact be auctioned off in a few days. Some investor would buy it and borrow more money to finish it, maybe even from New West Bank. Water would be brought in from somewhere, and before you knew it, people would be playing golf at El Dorado and building their dream houses where saguaro had stood. Whit Reid's dream would come true, but he wouldn't be part of it.

Even in running shoes my footsteps sounded loud as I walked down a corridor on unfinished plywood floors. They echoed as I passed by room after room after empty room. No one had gotten around to putting down any sound-numbing carpet, or if they had, it had been stolen. This place, derelict as it was, would be a palace to Santo and all the other homeless, but they couldn't live here; it was too far from
water,
too far from food. The law of supply and demand didn't work in the Arizona desert unless you had money and a car. I turned a corner and passed a small room, intended to be a bathroom. The plumbing fixtures had left holes where they'd been ripped from the wall; they probably had not been gold, as they were in some S&L rip-off buildings, but would have been expensive enough. This was, after all, supposed to be a luxury resort. I continued down the hallway and entered one of the rooms. The wall behind me had been stuccoed over, and I crossed to the far side of the building, where I could look out through a space for a sliding door that led to a terrace. The arms of the watching saguaros were raised as if they'd been held up at gunpoint. I wondered how many Whit had dug up to build this place and what he'd done with them. I heard tires approaching on gravel, then a car door shut, reminding me that I was a woman alone in a lonely place and empty-handed too. I'd locked my purse and my weapon in the car. I had nothing with me to steal, but I had nothing to protect me either.

“It's a prospective buyer,” I said to myself. I crossed the building to a window-sized hole on the parking lot side and saw a white subcompact car dusted with red Arizona dirt, but whoever had been in it had already entered the building. I heard footsteps coming slowly up the stairway. “Hello,” I called, but the only answer was feet reaching the top of the stairs and turning down the hall. “Who's there?” I called again, revealing that I was a woman and probably even that I was alone, if the intruder didn't already know. The mourning dove stopped cooing. The footsteps continued. There was a hesitation in the step and a scuffing sound like one foot dragging behind the other. I looked around for some means of self-defense, found a two-by-four in the corner and whacked it hard against the wall to make my point. I made a dent in the Sheetrock; the board held solid. The footsteps kept on with their erratic beat. I thought about Justine Virga frozen in a pair of headlights, about Las Manos, about my own hands. I could live without hands if I had to, but I couldn't live without blood. This was not a good place to empty your arteries. Trying to dial a phone would be the least of your worries out here.