The Other Side of Death Read online

  The Other Side of Death

  A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #3

  Judith Van Gieson

  For my New Mexican friends

  Although many of the places depicted in this novel clearly exist, none of its characters represents or is based on any person, living or dead, and all the incidents described are imaginary.

  ******

  THE OTHER SIDE OF DEATH

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1991 Judith Van Gieson.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by other means, without permission.

  First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-458-4

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9484-4

  Cover photo © Kipp Schoen/iStock.com

  The Other Side of Death

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Free Preview of THE WOLF PATH: A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #4

  MORE MYSTERIES BY JUDITH VAN GIESON

  1

  SPRING MOVES NORTH about as fast as a person on foot would—fifteen to twenty miles a day. It crosses the border at El Paso and enters New Mexico at Fort Bliss. Like a wetback following the twists of the Rio Grande, it wanders though Las Cruces and Radium Springs, brings chile back to Hatch. A few more days and it has entered Truth or Consequences and Elephant Butte. The whooping cranes return to Bosque del Apache, relief comes to Socorro. Los Lunas, Peralta and Bosque Farms take a weekend maybe. By mid-March the season gets to those of us who live in the Duke City, Albuquerque. On 12th Street fruit trees blossom in ice cream colors. The pansies return with purple vigor to the concrete bins at Civic Plaza. The Lobos are eliminated from NCAA competition. The hookers on East Central hike up their skirts. The cholos in Roosevelt Park rip the sleeves off their black T-shirts, exposing the purple bruises of tattoos. The boys at UNM take their T-shirts off, exposing peach fuzz. Women at the Pyramid Holiday Inn pick up their pillows, pay three hundred dollars and go within for a Shirley MacLaine seminar. Guys in Crossroads Park take their camouflage jackets off and lay their bedrolls down for free, burned-out Vietnam vets in spirit or in fact. Tumbleweeds dance across Nine Mile Hill and get caught in a sign that says DANGEROUS CROSSWINDS. Between the snake garden and the mobile home community the Motel Nine offers a room for $12.95 with a video of Wild Thang.

  At my place in La Vista Luxury Apartment Complex, the yellow shag carpet needed mowing; the Kid’s hair was getting a trim. His hair is thick, black and wound tight and the way to cut it is to pull out a curl and lop off an inch. The hair bounces back, the Kid’s head looks a little narrower, the floor gets littered with curls.

  He sat, skinny and bare chested, in front of my bedroom mirror, and I took a hand mirror and moved it around behind him so he could see the effect of the trim. “Looks good, Chiquita,” he said. I vacuumed up the curls and helped him out of his jeans, then we got into bed.

  The afternoon is the very best time: the window open to the sound of kids playing in the arroyo, motorcycles revving in the parking lot, boom box music but not too close, the polyester drapes not quite closed and sunlight playing across the wall and the Kid’s skin. Warm enough to be nice and sweaty, but not so hot as to stick together. And in the breeze the reckless, restless wanderer—spring.

  “Oh, my God,” I said in a way I hadn’t all winter.

  “Chiquita mia,” said the Kid.

  The Trojans that had defined our relationship and been our protection for the last six months had remained in the bedside table. I promised them that would never ever happen again.

  ******

  That was Saturday afternoon. In the evening the Kid played the accordion at El Lobo Bar in the barrio. He works as a mechanic during the day, an accordion player at night—the money goes back home to Mexico. I was on my way to my friends Tim and Jamie Malone’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day party in Dolendo. They were still calling it their annual party, but they hadn’t held it in years and I hadn’t seen them in those years either. They were friends from the Old Mexico days in San Miguel de Allende, where I’d spent the year between college and law school deciding what to do next. In some places the sixties spirit lasted well into the seventies; that was one. It was a small town full of gringos given to excess. Blake said that road leads to the palace of wisdom, but sometimes it leads only to further excess. The San Miguel crowd hung out in the plaza together, drank together, took drugs together, slept together. When the need to make a living intervened, a number of us ended up in New Mexico, the closest thing to Old Mexico, but as the years went by and we went our separate ways, I’d lost touch. I had settled in Albuquerque and was making a living (more or less) as a lawyer. The others lived around the City Different—Santa Fe—poets, artists, waitresses, Roto-Rooter men. It’s a magnet for seekers of all kinds and some people will do whatever it takes to live there. The occasion for renewing the tradition was the end of it—the Malones were moving to Ohio.

  “Ohio?” I asked when Tim called to tell me.

  “I know, I know. I’ll tell you all about it if you come to the party.”

  “You’ll have to do some fast talking to explain Ohio to a New Mexican.”

  “It’s what I do best,” he replied.

  Before sending the Kid off to work, I fixed him a snack of chips and salsa, gave him a beer and a kiss.

  “What time you be home, Chiquita?” he asked on his way out the door.

  “Well…” The last Saint Patrick’s Day party I went to was still alive when I left at three A.M., but the times had changed and Tim had probably changed with them if he was moving to Ohio. “Not too late,” I said.

  The Kid yawned and stretched. “Maybe I go home tonight after I play the accordion.”

  “See you tomorrow?” It would, after all, be the second day of spring.

  “Claro,” he said. “Mañana.”

  ******

  Dolendo, like most towns in northern New Mexico, has a beautiful old church at its center made out of mud and water, sweat and straw. Adobes of God, they call them. Dolendo also has more than its share of artists, poets, seekers and seers. Twenty miles of wide open spaces from Santa Fe, it’s a spiritual suburb. From Albuquerque it’s sixty-five to eighty miles north depending on which way you go, but any way you go is spectacular. In fact, once you get away from the buildings erected by the conquistadors of the last four centuries the whole state of New Mexico is spectacular.

  Spring was four or five days away from Dolendo—more maybe, factoring in an increase in altitude. The cottonwoods, long-limbed dancers on the wind, hadn’t leafed yet; their black shadows stretched across riverbeds and lawns. The Malones’ house sat on a rise at the edge of town with a cemetery behind it and an ocean of piñon in front. As far as you could see to the south there was nothing but green piñon bushes and blue sky and beyond that—more. I took a picture of the house from the cemetery once; both the middle distance and the far came out like deep-water, long-distance blue. Tim sat in his window day after day and wrote poetry but he should have built a wall around him, because in front of a view like that it was hard to believe anything you did or ever could do mattered.

  Tim and Jamie got married when they were teenage
rs, and had now owned this house—their first and only—for close to twenty years. It’s what is called a puddled adobe, poured mud—the way they used to build houses in New Mexico. The walls are three feet thick and keep the heat in in winter, out in summer. In a puddled adobe house there are no right angles or straight lines. All soft curves and rounded corners, it seems to be rising out of the ground at the same time that it sinks back in.

  I made a right at the church, a left, another right and turned up their bone-rattling dirt driveway, which was corrugated with dried mud. Ten to fifteen cars were parked among the ruts and Tim happened to be outside when I arrived looking for Foxy Lady, his dog. He spotted my orange Rabbit and ambled over.

  “Still driving the shitmobile,” he said.

  “Pleasure to see you, too, Tim.”

  “Your car’s a junker, darlin’, but you know I love you and I always will.” He opened his arms wide and I walked in. “Pretty as ever,” he whispered in my ear.

  “Not that pretty,” I replied. We separated and I took a good look at him. “You’re not looking so bad yourself.” His curly brown hair was turning gray, but his belly had stopped hanging over his belt buckle and his cheeks were less ruddy than they’d once been. His eyes still had the startled expression of a baby taking its first good look at the world, but they were clear. On the wagon again. He was an outrageous drunk, not much different sober, an Irishman, and that was compounded by having grown up in Mexico where his father worked. I told him once that I thought the Irish were Britain’s Mexicans. “You’ve got a point, darlin’,” he said. “Only the Brits swallowed up our culture, language and all, and that will never happen to the Mexicans. They’re the ones who will be doin’ the swallowin’.”

  He took my arm. “No more drinking, no more smoking. I’m livin’ the sober life now. Come with me, take a walk on the tame side.”

  “Where?”

  “The cemetery. Jamie wants the dog in and she’s up there digging up bones—not the dead’s, ones she buried. Foxy?” he yelled. The dog didn’t answer.

  I have a weakness for old cemeteries, and Dolendo’s is one of the best. It’s filled with wooden crosses and crooked tombstones telling stories of the prematurely stricken and the miraculous survivors. Take the Ortiz family. In the 1800s Margarita lived to be 25, Pablito 7 and Josecito 5, but Jose made it to 1929 and 101. The bad news is that sooner or later you’re going to end up just like them, but it helps to know so many have gone first. A couple of Foxy Lady’s buddies who had been headed toward the cemetery hadn’t made it. We found their bodies, decaying lumps on the ground, noses pointed toward the gate. “Even the dogs are dying to get in,” said Tim.

  “Did you bring me up here just to say that?” I asked.

  “You know me too well, darlin’,” he replied.

  “Not that well,” I said, because when it comes to somebody else’s husband I’ve learned there’s always a far side to them you’ll never know.

  There was a flurry of dirt behind a tombstone. “Foxy,” Tim yelled. “Get your ass on over here.” She peered out at us, a red mutt with a long tail whose nose was covered with dirt. “Damn bitch,” muttered Tim. “Come over here or I’ll sic the hawk on you.” Foxy gave her tail a shake and went on digging.

  “The hawk? Aren’t you promising more than you can deliver?”

  “Not necessarily. The neighbors lost their cat to a hawk. When they moved here from California, the cat, an expensive Persian, refused to go outside and it had always liked being out before. After a couple of years in the place, they finally coaxed it through the door. It climbed the wall, and a hawk swooped down, picked it up in its talons and carried it away. When it runs out of cats, Foxy, you’ll be next.” He went behind the tombstone and pulled Foxy out, and we began walking back to the house.

  “Is that why you’re leaving Dolendo, afraid of the hawk?”

  “No, we’re leaving because my messenger-service business went under and Jamie was offered a job in Columbus teaching pottery.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “I haven’t made my mind up yet, but I’ll tell you one thing.” He waved his arm around the cemetery then swung it toward the long view. It was a place that raised the big questions. “I’m tired of living in the middle of a fucking religious experience. We’ve got the house rented for a year. Maybe we’ll come back, maybe we won’t. Wait ’til you see what Jamie’s done to the place.”

  “Put in some more windows?” I’d been at the Malones’ one New Year’s Day bored stupid by the groans and grunts of television football when Jamie decided she wanted a new window in the bathroom. She picked up a sledgehammer and smashed a hole in the wall. You can do that with adobe.

  Tim laughed. “A whole lot more than that.” He pushed Foxy Lady toward his front door and just before we got there he said, “Lonnie’s here; she wants to see you.”

  Jamie was waiting for us behind the heavy wooden door. “Stay in the house, Foxy,” she said. The dog grinned, wagged her tail and disappeared inside.

  You wonder sometimes what keeps two people together. A week of it could be compared to a short flight on a commuter line; twenty years would be a voyage to Neptune to me. When I see Jamie, though, it makes some sense. She’s a tall woman, Tim’s size. They used to wear each other’s clothes, maybe they still did. She has large brown eyes and wears her hair hanging down her back, the kind of hair that falls into place and ends in a straight line. She’s a woman who pays attention to the small things and in the middle of a party worries about her dog, a woman who keeps her head when everybody else is losing theirs, a woman who would hold her marriage together no matter what the cost, but maybe for her the cost wasn’t that great. It seemed to be her nature to be a partner and a rock.

  “Good to see you, Neil.” She gave me a hug.

  “You, too, Jamie.”

  “What do you think of the house?”

  It used to be one large room and when the two of them needed psychic space, they imagined more. “I’m going into the den now,” Tim would say when he wanted to write. “Okay,” Jamie’d reply and go on ignoring him. From what I could see over and around the guests, they’d added some rooms, more windows, beams (called vigas around here) in the ceiling, a kiva fireplace, smooth pastel walls, Mexican tiles in the kitchen, a polished wood floor. Dolendo dirt-floor poverty had turned into Santa Fe style. Jamie was in her stocking feet, probably to protect the new floors. She eyed my running shoes suspiciously but she didn’t make me take them off. “It’s a change, all right,” I said. “Did you do all this yourself?”

  “Not exactly, I contracted it out, but that was a job, too.” Expensive, besides. I wondered, briefly, how the Malones, one potter and one failed messenger-service operator and poet, had paid for it. They’d been broke as long as I’d known them.

  “Now that you’ve made it so beautiful, aren’t you sad to leave?”

  “No,” said Jamie.

  Tim had wandered off among his Hispanic neighbors. Some of them were playing down-home music—a fiddle, a guitar, an accordion—that blended well with the sound of Hispanics speaking English. Native Spanish speakers have a way of singing the English language and rounding off its corners, but Anglos put angles in Spanish where they’ve never been.

  Jamie and I squeezed into the kitchen, my mind on some ice for the Cuervo Gold I’d brought. A table was covered on one side with bowls of posole, chile, chips, beans, a pot of chile con queso, on the other with bean sprout salad, tabouli, sesame noodles, whole-grain bread. A New Age woman was leaning against the dishwasher talking, a tall woman with a silver voice wearing a silver dress. She had a thick black mane parted down the middle with silver streaks that framed her face. Her eyes were turquoise blue. Her dress was made of some kind of thin, pale fabric, with a zigzag ankle-length hem, embroidered everywhere with lightning bolts of silver sequins, a dress you’d notice in a crowd. It was what they call wearable art in Santa Fe and only Hollywood actresses, rich Texans and expensive psychic
s could afford it, Santa Fe being one place in America where psychics make more money than lawyers. A psychic or an actress, I figured when the woman spoke, because a Texan’s voice has more oil in it than silver.

  “The center of Uranus is ice cold,” I heard her say.

  “That’s Ci,” said Jamie, “the psychic. You have to have at least one at a party around here.”

  The only way to get to the refrigerator was to press between C (or was it Sea?) and her audience. “Excuse us.” Jamie interrupted the monologue and introduced me since I was six inches away from the woman’s nose. “Ci, this is Neil Hamel.”

  “Neil?” she asked.

  “N-e-i-l,” I spelled it out.

  “The man’s name. I like it. Short, simple, expressive of the Martian nature, the masculine, take-charge side. Most women have chosen names more aligned with Venus, but a name like Neil … now that makes a statement. What do you do?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Of course.” She smiled.

  “And I didn’t choose my name; I inherited it from my uncle, Neil Hamel, who was with the Tenth Mountain Division in World War II,” I said.

  “Named after the warrior uncle. Mars is the god of war, you know. I see something Martian about you, a very strong element or a weak one masquerading as strong. Mars does that sometimes. In the larger scheme we all choose our own names just as we all choose our parents and the moment when we incarnate.”

  I was about to choose a nice, cold tequila if I could find some ice. “Excuse me, Sea…” I began inching past.

  “Ci is short for Cielo. It means…”

  “I know what cielo means.”

  “Sky. In Spanish.”

  “Bedspread, too,” I said. Jamie had gotten waylaid by a guest, and I was on my own when it came to finding the ice. There wasn’t any. No ice bucket, and the trays in the freezer had been emptied before I got there. A large pot was brewing coffee. Some bottles of lemon-lime seltzer, raspberry ginger ale and white zinfandel in a clear bottle littered the Mexican-tiled counter—soda or disguised as same. I remembered when it used to be white chablis in a green bottle or clear liquor in a clear bottle. The only colored drinks were the ones the Mexicans drank out of plastic bags. I poured some Cuervo Gold into a paper cup. A guy with blond Rastafarian ringlets and an embroidered Guatemalan shirt was helping himself to a coffee.