The Lies that Bind (24 page)

“Maybe they don't want to go back to Argentina. Maybe they like it here. Maybe business is
better
in this country.”

“But why follow me to Arizona? Why not go after me here?”

“You don't go out in the desert and stay in motels alone here, do you?”

“No,” I said.

******

We took off our clothes later and got into bed. The parking lot's light filtered in through the curtains, giving the bedroom the ambience of a Motel 9. A car in the lot squawked as a remote unlocked it and then yelled “Break in” in an automaton's loud voice. There was another squeal, and the remote zapped the voice off. The sounds of high-tech progress at La Vista could make you long for the days before cars found their voice. It got quiet again in the bedroom; I could hear the Kid's steady and regular breathing. He curled up next to me, sniffed my hair and my skin.

“You have the smell of…”

“Road kill?”

“
La hedionda
.” Literally that means the foul-smelling one or the skunk, but it also means death, and in New Mexico folklore, death is an old woman. Enough light came in through the curtains so the Kid could see the finger marks on my neck. “People in South America have hard lives, Chiquita,” he said.

“I know.”

“The killers there are cruel and brutal.”

“They are not exactly nice guys here.”

“Believe me, Chiquita, they are worse there.”

“Felons are felons. You just think they are worse because you were a boy when you lived there and everything looks bigger when you're a child.”

“Why don't you bring your gun home with you?”

“You're the one who complained about guns in the house, Kid.”

“This is an exception.” He touched the marks on my neck. “
Cuidado con la hedionda
,” he said. Watch out for
la hedionda
.

******

I stopped by Martha Conover's in the morning to tell her what had happened since the last time I saw her, as much as I thought was advisable anyway. I didn't feel especially guilty about withholding certain facts at this point, because she hadn't always told me the whole truth. Martha measured out the truth the way she measured out her love—using the bottom line of the measuring cup. I looked around me as I drove up the Los Cerros road. She maintained her property a lot better than the absentee owners of La
Vista
did. The grounds were manicured, the sprinklers ticked, there were no pets, there was no litter, the children and the handicapped were confined to a limited area. In my hallway the paint cracked and peeled, the indoor/outdoor carpeting was stained, the night watchman got drunk. As I parked the Nissan in a space marked for visitors, I remembered what Jonathan Laswell had said about every real estate venture containing the seeds of its own destruction, and I thought about who would look after this place if Martha went to prison. She'd have to give someone power of attorney; she wouldn't be able to collect her rents, pay her bills and harangue her staff from a prison cell. There were people who could manage Los Cerros, but was there anybody who would do it as carefully as she had?

As I walked toward her town house I saw Martha standing in front of her door, clutching her keys in one hand and her purse in the other. In front of her was a locked door and behind her a view that went into the next county. The getting old resemble the very young: they change so quickly that the person you see today is not necessarily the one you saw a week ago. Martha stared at me as if she didn't know who I was. A window opened up in her eyes, and I was able—briefly—to peer into her interior world. It looked as though an intruder had disconnected the wires, broken in and ransacked her brain. The hand that held her keys trembled like a frightened bird. She was talking, but she didn't know whom she was talking to. “I can't remember whether I was coming in or going out,” she said in a dazed voice.

“Let's go in.” I reached to take the keys from her hand, but she wouldn't release them. She clutched them tight in her fingers and stared at me as if she was thinking: I know you, I know you and I don't approve of you. Then she snapped out of it, the wires reconnected, the juice came back on and she was her old self again.

“I can open my own door,” she said. The change from Martha's confused, vulnerable self to her bossy, in-control self was rapid and extreme. Every way-out form of behavior contains the seed of its own opposite, but swinging from one extreme to another is no way to create a balance. I couldn't blame her for overreacting, however; I wouldn't want to be old and infirm and depending on me for help.

She opened the door to let us in, and a pink Post-it fluttered to the floor. She put her purse down on the table and walked toward the kitchen. “Can I get you a drink?” she asked.

“No.”

Life sucks, and then you lose your body or your mind, I thought as I listened to her open the freezer door, take out the vodka and pour herself a large one with no ice. She might have just had a slight stroke. She might also have had one the night that Justine died. The part of her brain that stored the events of that night, that had or had not registered Justine in the headlights, could be a burned-out microchip inaccessible to her or anyone else. Someone should tell her she needed medical help, but the someone was her daughter, not me.

She sat down on her chintz sofa, crossed her legs at the ankles, straightened her back, swallowed
some
vodka.

“We can talk some other time if you're … sick,” I said.

“There's nothing wrong with me. Nothing,” she said. “What did you want?”

“I took a trip to Arizona to talk to some bankers, and I think someone followed me over there. Whoever it was attacked me in my motel room. I fought him off.”

“What did he look like?”

“Young … skinny.”

“Spanish?”

“Latin American. Look, I've asked you this before, but I have to do it again. Is there anyone you think could have set you up? Anyone with anything to gain by putting you in prison?”

“I've told you before that Mina Alarid hates me and would do anything to destroy me.”

“But she didn't hate Justine, did she? Why would she destroy her?”

“Emilio Velásquez had a disturbed relationship with that girl. He's probably the one who turned her on to drugs. Maybe she knew too much and he had to get rid of her. He hates me too, and by blaming it on me he could get rid of both of us at once.”

If you accepted the premise that Emilio was a scumbag, it had a certain kind of logic.

“I'm not a fool,” Martha continued. “I know he was living here and seeing Cynthia and Michael. I know he went on seeing Justine after Michael died, but I wouldn't make a martyr out of him by kicking him out.”

“If you know Emilio is living here, you should tell Cindy that.”

“I'll tell Cynthia what I want to tell Cynthia.”

This family was a raw onion. Peel off one tear-inducing layer of deception, and you found another. Real estate and divorce were looking better all the time. “I have to go,” I said.

Martha walked me to the door, carrying her half-finished vodka. Maybe she didn't use ice because she didn't want to hear it rattle in her trembling hand.

******

When I got back to the office I called Cindy. “I think Martha might have had a slight stroke,” I said.

“My mother?”

“I just came from her place. When I got there she was standing in front of her door extremely confused. She said she couldn't remember whether she was going in or out.”

“She gets absentminded sometimes. It happens to everybody.”

“This was more serious than that.”

“
Maybe she'd had a Halcion or a drink … or both.”

“Maybe, but it wouldn't hurt to have a doctor look at her.”

“She wouldn't go. I know my mother.”

“That could be what happened the night Justine died, you know. It's kind of hard for me to figure out what took place if Martha doesn't know herself.” But what happened happened whether there was anyone home to register it or not.

“My mother couldn't have had a stroke. She's too strong.” Cindy was hiding in the dark den of denial, and she didn't want to come out. She was living with her mother's substance abuse; she was used to that. The effects of the vodka and Halcion were self-induced and, presumably, reversible, but physical deterioration was something else. Once the aging body and mind start to go, there are good days and bad days, but there's no turning back. Watching an all-powerful mother change into a frail and dependent mother can't be easy. For one thing, it means you've got to do a lot of adjusting yourself.

“I'd have her checked if I were you.”

“I'll try. You never really think your mother's going to get old and sick. You always think she's going to live forever. I mean a mother like mine anyway, one of the tough ones.”

I knew my mother wouldn't live forever, that she might live only as long as I remembered her, but if she lived only as I remembered her she'd never get old. As for how tough she was, I didn't know.

“Well, thanks for calling, Neil. I'll see what I can do.”

“Okay,” I said. There were more questions that needed to be asked, but Cindy wasn't the one to answer them.

I called Emilio. “Hey, Neil,” he said. “How's it going?”

“Pretty good. There are some things I want to talk to you about.”

“Can you come over?”

“How about this afternoon?”

“Okay. I'm going to Arroyo del Oso to watch the soccer game. Could you meet me there at four?”

“Yeah,” I said.

******

My next call was to Anthony Saia, to tell him about the Arizona trip. Either his back was to the wall or his bucket was full. He was in a bad mood and didn't want to listen to what I had to say. Present an opposing point of view to a man who's down and he's liable to attack, and the way a man attacks a woman (if he doesn't punch her out) is to tell her, in one way or another, that she's stupid. Maybe they do that to each other too. Who am I to say?

“
You're imagining things, Neil,” Saia said. “Why would some guys kill Justine Virga and then try to do you?”

“Justine Virga because she is Niki Falcón and she assassinated a general in Buenos Aires. Me because I'm doing the APD's job for them.”

“Hearsay. You heard Justine Virga was Niki Falcón. There's no evidence to support that theory.”

“There is evidence that someone attacked me, if you want to see it. Big red welts on my neck.”

“So some douchebag was trying to rob you or get into your pants, and you're making a big-deal conspiracy out of it.”

If that kind of talk made him feel like a superior man, what did it make me? A paranoid bimbo? “Fuck you, Saia,” I said.

“You, too,” he replied and hung up.

Anthony Saia was the friend I counted on to chase away the legal blues and raise the level of any old boring day, the professional associate who would laugh, flirt and do what was necessary to maintain the feeling that life doesn't suck before you die. We'd had the bond of You jolly me up, I'll do it for you. No more than that, but it was a bond, and he had violated it. A grouchy man can ruin your day faster than a flat tire in a rainstorm—if you let him. I picked up a rubber band, shot it at the coffee cup on my desk, lit a cigarette.

When the phone rang, I let Anna answer it. “It's Saia,” she yelled. “For you.”

I picked up my end. “Yeah.” I didn't think he would go so far as to actually apologize, and I was right. What he said was, “I've had a bad day.”

“No shit.”

“C'mon, Neil, cut me a little slack, will you? Dorman's been on my case.” It was about as much as you could expect and more than you usually got. “I do have some interesting news for you.”

“What's that?”

“The APD checked out the headlight glass at Atalaya and found it didn't come from Conover's car. As for the tinted glass, Martha's car doesn't have tinted glass. None of her windows were broken anyway.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Glad to do it,” he replied.

22

T
HE
A
RROYO DEL
O
SO
or Bear Creek soccer fields have a wide-angle view toward the west, big enough to show several storm systems at once. It could be raining in gray sheets in the South Valley, sunny in the North, and you'd see it all from up there. When you see that far, you have the feeling that if you took a giant step you'd end up in the sky, and you can easily forget you're in a city. Emilio had parked his van beneath the trees. He wasn't supposed to park there, but his license plate had wheels on it and his bumper wore a sticker that said Vietnam Vet, so he knew no one was going to bother him. He had rolled his wheelchair into the shade. It was a trimmed-down racing model, nothing but seat and wheels canted out for balance and speed. He wore black leather fingerless gloves, and his legs were strapped in with a black belt. It was a clear, crisp fall day, a relief after the heat of summer that presses you into the pavement. The match had started. Teenage boys ran down the field in their shorts, bouncing the ball off their thighs and their heads.

“Hey, Nellie,” Emilio said when he saw me.

“
Hola
.” I bent down and gave him a kiss.

“Miguel loved to play soccer. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.” Emiliano had been a good soccer player himself. I remembered games he'd organized on the playing fields of Ithaca, New York.

“He had hot feet. I saw him score four goals once right here. That's one reason I don't leave Los Cerros. I like to come here.” Emiliano was connected to another life that had screeched to a stop in midflight and kept him from going forward. “I'm glad I've gotten to the point where I
can
come here again,” he said. “The old lady hardly ever watched Miguel play, only she came the day he scored all the goals. She's too dignified to yell, but you should have seen her shake her little fists. It was something. I was parked in my van on the other side of the field, and I had to try real hard not to let on that I was Miguel's dad.”