The Shadow of Venus (2 page)

“I may have talked to her once about a year ago by the duck pond,” Claire said, remembering a white face coming out of the growing darkness. “It was evening and the Venus-Jupiter conjunction was visible in the sky. The woman pointed it out to me and said, ‘Venus is brighter than most people realize, so bright it casts a shadow. It's visible in the daytime, too, to those who have eyes to see. I know. I've
seen
it.' Then she walked away. It was getting dark. I didn't get a good look at her.” Claire stared at the photo. “It could be this woman.”

“Do you have any idea who she was?”

“No, but I talked to her again last week at the Jorge Balboa reading in the Willard Reading Room. She acted as if she recognized me.”

“Who is Jorge Balboa?” Owen returned a wandering strand of hair to her tight hairdo.

“A Chilean poet,” Claire said. “I arranged a reading for him. It was free and open to anyone who wanted to attend. Ansia came to the doorway and shouted out her own poetry until the campus police took her away.”

Detective Owen smiled. “Ansia has become a poet? What did she have to say?”

“Something about her
chiva,
her BB, her
jeringa,
her candy man.”

“She's an addict. Those words mean heroin, syringe, connection.”

“She also said, ‘You got me all tore up from the floor up.' ”

“That means she's using. Did you know that the word
ansia
means heroin on the street?”

“I thought it was Spanish for anxiety,” Claire said.

“It also means longing and desire. Addicts love heroin more than sex, food, shelter—more than life itself. When all their other veins are gone, they'll find a car mirror on the street and shoot up in their eyeballs. Heroin killed Jane Doe. What did she say when you talked to her last week? Anything that could help us identify her?”

“She was sitting alone near the back of the room. She had a plastic bag on the chair beside her. She picked it up and moved over to make room for me. Her looks and her dress were subdued. She would have been quite pretty if she'd made some effort. She wasn't someone I would have particularly noticed, until she told me I looked beautiful.” Claire felt embarrassed to admit this.

Officer Owen smiled as if she remembered what it felt like to be called beautiful. She smoothed her hair. “How sweet,” she said. “It sounds like she recognized you, then.”

“It's possible.”

“Did she have a plastic bag when you saw her at the duck pond?”

Claire revisited her memory. “She might have.”

“That's one sign of a homeless person. We're checking the shelters to see if anyone can identify her. We think she went into the storage room to shoot up and sleep.”

“How did she get in? You need to punch in a code to use the elevator. You have to be a graduate student doing research at the center or a staff member to get the code.”

“We're looking into that and showing the photograph around to see if anyone can ID her.”

“Has the autopsy been completed yet?”

“Yes.
Jane Doe died of an overdose of China White heroin. It's a West Coast drug, better quality than we usually see on the street in Albuquerque. Whenever something very pure or very strong shows up we see more deaths.”

“I wouldn't have thought the woman I talked to was an addict. She was so quiet and neat.”

“Jane Doe had needle tracks in her arms and she had twenties, the price of a BB.”

“That's the currency you get from an ATM machine,” Claire pointed out.

“It's unlikely the money came from an ATM machine. Jane Doe wasn't carrying a card.”

“I'm curious. Do the police consider an overdose a murder or a suicide?” Claire asked.

“Any unattended death is treated as a homicide. The only prints we found were the victim's. If it was a suicide, she left no note to prove it.”

“Would that make the person who sold or gave her the China White a murderer?”

“It might, but it would be difficult to prove. There are other means of putting dealers in jail.” Detective Owen consulted her notes. “I understand that you work with rare books.”

“I do,” Claire replied, wondering what on earth that had to do with the death of Jane Doe.

“We found this in the room with the body,” Detective Owen handed over a book-sized illustration encased in a protective plastic cover.

Claire felt her lunch lurching inside her stomach. “Oh, no.”

“You recognize this?”

“It's from the book
Ancient Sites
by the explorer Thomas Duval with illustrations by the expedition artist Quentin Valor. They were the first Europeans to visit many of the sacred sites in the Southwest. Valor sketched Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, and Mesa Verde among other places. This particular illustration is of Spiral Rocks in southern Colorado.” Claire loved Valor's work and thought it was a tragedy there was so little of it. “Quentin Valor had a short, adventurous life and was shot to death in a barroom brawl when he was thirty-three.”

The artist's illustrations were full of exquisite detail, but they also captured the mystery and magnificence of the sacred sites. There were two pinnacles at Spiral Rocks spun into shape by eons of wind and water. A chasm several feet wide had developed between them. That was how they would stand and how they would remain until eventually they disintegrated and turned to dust. Twins. Always together. Always apart.

“Does the library have this book?” Detective Owen asked.

“We did,” Claire said. “It was down the hall in the Anderson Reading Room. We had a pristine first edition.”

“Is it valuable?”

“Intact it's worth several thousand dollars. With pages removed, it's worth less. I'd say the
illustration
alone is worth two hundred dollars.”

“Could this Jane Doe have been stealing illustrations from the library and selling them for drugs?”

It was something Claire hated to even consider, but it was a definite possibility. “See how straight this edge is?” She pointed. “The illustration was very carefully razor-bladed out of the book. It could be the work of a professional. It doesn't look like the work of an addict.”

“Can you show me the book?” Detective Owen asked.

“I hope so,” Claire replied.

She took Owen to the Anderson Reading Room, where even a detective had to show ID before being admitted. She went to a balcony shelf and was pleased to find
Ancient Sites
exactly where it was supposed to be. Claire lifted the book from the shelf, checked the index for Spiral Rocks, and turned to the page. Her stomach lurched again when she discovered a smooth edge where the illustration had once been. Detective Owen placed her illustration beside it and one razor-bladed edge connected with another in a perfect fit. Claire turned to the other illustrated pages in the book and was relieved to see them all in place.

“Maybe she began with Spiral Rocks intending to work her way through the book,” Owen said.

“If I were gutting this book for drug money, Spiral Rocks wouldn't be my first choice,” Claire replied. She showed Detective Owen the Chaco Canyon illustrations, which were even more magnificent than the one of Spiral Rocks. Chaco Canyon was a vast and important ruin created for purposes that still weren't understood. Spiral Rocks was small and intimate in comparison, created by the forces of nature and not by man.

“Those rocks look like . . . you know what,” Detective Owen said.

Claire knew. The Southwest was full of rocks that resembled erect penises. “I don't think that's why Jane Doe cut this illustration out,” she said. “Maybe Spiral Rocks represented something to her. If she traded it for China White, you wouldn't have found both the illustration and the drugs in the storage room, would you?”

“Unless she traded something else for the China White and planned to trade Spiral Rocks the next time she needed to shoot up.”

Claire's eyes circled the reading room. From floor to balcony, from balcony to ceiling, there were rows and rows of valuable books. The story of the Southwest could be found in this room. How would anyone ever establish what had been cut out of the books here? You'd have to open every book, check every page. There were thousands of books in the Anderson Reading Room and many contained artwork. “Do you think there is a drug dealer who would trade drugs for art?”

“Not at the street level, but maybe higher up. Those guys have to put their money somewhere.
Why
not collect art? China White is a better class of heroin that we usually see in Albuquerque. Maybe we're looking at a better class of dealer. On the other hand, Jane may have been selling artwork to another interested party and using the cash to buy drugs. She could also have been turning tricks for drug money.”

“If Jane Doe was systematically looting books in the Anderson Reading Room, she had to be doing it when there was no one around, which again raises the question of how she got in. She'd need an ID in the daytime and a security code after hours.”

“What about the cleaning people? Could they have let her in?”

“No one but staff cleans in the Anderson Reading Room. The security people don't have a code either. If they find that someone has left a door open, they are supposed to notify Celia Alegria.”

“She's on my list,” Detective Owen said.

Chapter
Three

C
LAIRE HAD DINNER WITH HER FRIEND
J
OHN
H
ARLAN
after work and didn't get home until nine. Her house was dark and her cat, Nemesis, was waiting at the door. She fed him and went into the bathroom. When she turned on the light a flock of moths flew out of her towels and beat their wings against the light fixture. Every few years Albuquerque had a moth infestation. There was nothing to do about it but turn off the lights whenever possible and wait in the dark for them to go away. A moth settled on the windowsill, giving Claire a moment to examine it. The wings were the color of parchment and had a pattern that resembled endpapers. She knew if she touched the wings they would leave a smudge on her fingers. While the moths fluttered around the light, Claire stared at herself in the mirror. What had Jane Doe seen that made her use the word “beautiful”? Claire couldn't continue to think of the deceased as Jane Doe. She had to find another name for her. If she couldn't discover the woman's true identity, she would pick a name herself.

Claire liked the way her hair looked now—short and curly with hairdresser highlights. She had good bones and robin's-egg blue eyes. She wasn't bad looking but it had been a long time since anyone had called her beautiful. Knowing that a joyful expression could momentarily transform most people, Claire tried to bring back the enthusiasm and the radiance she had felt when she introduced Jorge Balboa, but she couldn't do it. Her features settled into a worried frown. The moths beating against the light were distracting and she was disturbed by the things she'd learned from Detective Owen.

She turned off the light and paced her house in the dark. The compliment had been so unexpected and so pleasing she had wanted to cherish it, to bring it out of memory from time to time and polish it. She hated to think it came from a drug addict who went around the library after hours cutting illustrations out of valuable books. But until Claire examined every illustrated book the library owned or knew more about the woman, it was a fear likely to come, flapping its wings, out of the night. She didn't see the woman she met as a street person or an addict, but then how to explain the China White and the plastic bag containing a toothbrush, a change of clothes, a comb, and baby wipes? How to explain how the woman gained access to the basement and the Anderson Reading Room?

Claire had a more recent edition of
Ancient Sites,
too recent to be valuable. She went to her bedroom and shut the door, hoping to lock the moths out before she turned on the light. She took the book from her bookshelf and turned to the illustration of Spiral Rocks. In the years since the Duval exploration a great deal had been learned about the sacred sites the expedition visited, some of which—like evidence
indicating
there was cannibalism at Chaco Canyon—Claire would rather not know. It had been established that some buildings at Chaco Canyon were orientated toward the sun and others toward the phases of the moon. The spiral carved into Fajada Butte recorded solstices, equinoxes, and other cycles with amazing accuracy.

But little was known about Spiral Rocks. Since it was a small site, located now on private property, it hadn't been studied the way Chaco Canyon had. Claire looked at Quentin Valor's illustration of the rocks pointing toward the sky and wondered whether there was any astronomical significance to the site. Was the rock formation worshipped by the Anasazi or used by them in some way as a calendar? Jane Doe had expressed an interest in Venus. It was possible she had an interest in astronomy, too. She might even have taken courses in the subject.

A solitary moth had made its way into the bedroom and fluttered toward the light with the ardor of an addict. Claire turned off the lamp, but the moth found the warmth and beat its wings against the bulb as if it had discovered a long lost mate. The moth infestation resembled having a house full of unwelcome intruders, restless thoughts, spirits of the dead, and the unnotified next of kin.

Claire didn't sleep well, was awake at dawn and at her office by eight. She took her copy of
Ancient Sites
to work with her. Before she even sat down at her desk, Celia showed up at the door wearing a crimson dress that flattered her vivid coloring and reflected her angry mood.

“I am deeply, totally, pissed off,” she said.

“About Jane Doe?”

“Yes. How in the hell did she get into the basement and into the Anderson Reading Room after hours?”