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  North of the

  Border

  A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #1

  Judith Van Gieson

  With thanks to Irene Marcuse for her advice and encouragement

  For the missing and the dead

  ******

  NORTH OF THE BORDER

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1988 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 978-1-62064-454-6

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9478-3

  Cover photo © Susan Schmitz/Shutterstock.com

  North of the

  Border

  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

  Chapter 21

  Free Preview of RAPTOR: A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #2

  MORE MYSTERIES BY JUDITH VAN GIESON

  1

  “EVERY LIFE IS sacred, even the tiniest life. Jesus was a fetus too.”

  Easy to tell where that was heading. The clock radio had switched stations on me in the course of the night, and I’d ended up with KFLQ, Family Life Radio. It happens sometimes. I reached over, punched it off, and found the Kid sleeping on the next pillow. He wasn’t at his best this morning: pale as a statue, black curls plastered to his forehead, skinny and jittery as an aspen. He was only twenty-four years old, but already he had fine lines beside his mouth and worry lines on his forehead. He was working too hard, a mechanic in the shop by day, an accordion player at El Lobo Bar at night, and sending all the money “back there,” I supposed. I couldn’t remember when I had seen him last, but when he appeared at my doorway earlier that morning, a street dog who had fetched me an accordion, what could I say? I let him in.

  “You awake, bitch?” I whispered, tapping him gently on the shoulder.

  “Chiquita, please,” he replied, pulling the pillow over his head.

  I let him sleep; he needed it. Getting out of bed, I climbed over the accordion, went into the bathroom, and took a shower. It was a day, like most days, to dress as a lawyer. They say that nothing should detract from the competence of the presentation or the brilliance of the mind. If a client notices your clothes, they are the wrong ones. Not noticing what I wore but remembering you are what you eat, I had a slice of cold pizza and a cup of Red Zinger with honey.

  I blew a kiss at the Kid and let myself out. Home is a luxury apartment complex called La Vista; luxury means I have gold shag carpeting, a swimming pool, and a sauna that works sometimes. The vista is rolling rock, jagged cactus, and gray hulks of mountains—a mile of elephants, Georgia O’Keeffe called them. I noticed it was a clear day, the sky was still blue, the mountains were in place, and the Kid’s truck was parked in a No Parking zone. Truman, the night watchman, had probably gotten too drunk to notice, or he would have been pounding on my door, too.

  My car is a Rabbit—El Conejo, the Kid calls it—with “brecas” that squeal and a hole where the tape deck used to be. It took a walk one night when Truman was down in the laundry room rinsing his throat. The state is New Mexico, the town is Albuquerque, a flat place in the midst of mountains. The prestigious law firms are downtown in vertical buildings with blank faces and banks on the ground floor. I’m out on Lead in a one-story place that not too long ago was somebody’s house. We’ve got pebbles for a front yard and a thistle that blooms with poisonous purple vigor in the summer. Me and my partner, Brink: Neil Hamel and Brinkley Harrison, Attorneys at Law. I negotiated the streets of Albuquerque—Silver, Gold, Copper, Coal—and ended up on Lead, wondering if this once I might see Brink’s car or even Anna’s—Anna is our secretary—in the driveway ahead of me. Not this time.

  My office keys were in my purse. I keep them on a ring that has a long plastic handle with NELLIE embossed on it in gold letters. It was down there somewhere among the Kleenex, the packs of Marlboros, the glasses, the notes to myself, and a tube of Ortho-Gynol cream and a derby in a traveling case that I used to carry in case of emergency—a remnant of better days. Now when there’s an emergency, it’s the Kid, my place, the middle of the night. The key ring was big enough; I should have been able to find it. It was a gift from a former lover who got tired of seeing me fumble my way into buildings. It was a conceit of his that my name is Nellie just because he called me that, but it’s not; it’s Neil. I was named after my father’s brother, Colonel Neil Hamel, of the Tenth Mountain Division, who was killed by an Alpine avalanche near Cortina, Italy, on a cold December night in 1945. I kept telling the guy, “Neil—my name is Neil,” but he didn’t listen. I’ve got a key ring to prove it.

  I found the keys eventually and let myself inside. What was once a perfectly ordinary one-story frame and stucco home was now an equally ordinary office. The living room is our reception area, the two bedrooms are Brink’s office and mine. The kitchen, where we keep the Mr. Coffee and the Celestial Seasonings, is in the rear. It’s a cozy place, but it needed cleaning. There were dust balls under Anna’s desk, and the New Mexico Magazines on the coffee table were two years old. I made a note—Tell Anna: get the place clean—and put it in my purse. I didn’t plan to stay this morning, just to pick up some papers on my way to Santa Fe to talk to an assistant DA about a DWI. That’s what we specialize in: DWIs, divorces, bankruptcy. If it comes our way, we take it.

  I have a big wooden desk with carved panels that once belonged to my father’s other brother, Kerny, an attorney in Ithaca, New York. The desk overflowed with papers. It might be a mess to some, but it was a precise mess; I knew where everything was. I took the file off a pile on the southwest corner of the desk and put it in my briefcase. Then I watered the spider plant and picked some dead leaves off the grape ivy. The window behind the ivy was open a few inches, I noticed, and I wondered when I had forgotten to close it. I’m not good about windows and doors; whatever I’ve owned worth stealing is already gone. The graphite tennis rackets, the microwave—the Cuisinart, even—all belong to my ex-husband, Charles. I haven’t replaced him, or the appliances either. I make toast in the oven, and when it comes to tennis, I watch it in black and white on my nine-inch TV. Some guy in a white shirt and a Mormon haircut came by the office the other day, selling religion, I thought, but the product turned out to be word processors.

  “State of the art,” he said, “user friendly.”

  I laughed. Anna makes do with a twenty-year-old Olympia. She may be the user, but what she uses is never friendly.

  “If we got a word processor, what would she have to complain about?” I asked Brink.

  “Us,” he replied.

  The Rabbit gagged when I started it again. I made a mental note to call the Kid and take the car to the shop to see if it needed a tune-up. I can hit all the green lights on Coal if I maintain a steady pace—a creeping thirty—but some dip-shit screwed up the sequence, a low-riding blue Chevy. He squeezed in front of me on Ninth, slowed down at Eighth, cut me off at Sixth, and made my brakes squeal like a wounded pig. The Rabbit coughed, stalled, gagged before I got it started again. “Pendejo!” I yelled, and sat on the horn.

  He leaned out his window and grinned. “Hey, sweetheart, how’s it goin�
�?”

  That’s the way it is around here: you tell them they’re an asshole, they think it’s a pass.

  I turned down Second, across Lomas, got on the interstate, and headed north sixty miles to Santa Fe, the state capital. The highway, some people say, is the best if not the only place to think. It has to do with the motion, the space, the inspiration of the top forty. If that’s true, I-25 is a thinking person’s paradise. Once you get out of Albuquerque, there’s little traffic. The mountains recede into the purple beyond, and there’s nothing between you and them but space and an occasional tumbleweed. The sky is vast and blue and empty. In a place as empty as this, sometimes the only diversion is yourself; sometimes that’s not enough. It can be a relief to see a storm breaking over the Jemez in the west, the rain dropping like a gray sheet and lightning skittering behind the clouds. I wondered what thoughts had passed through the heads of all the drivers who had driven this road and what had been the outcome. The Waste Isolation Pilot Project, a planned depository for nuclear waste commonly known as WIPP? The A-bomb? Los Alamos, Santa Fe, it’s the same highway.

  After the Santo Domingo Pueblo I-25 was under construction. Day-Glo orange barrels warned me of what was ahead. Earthmovers roamed up and down beside the highway, bellowing and raising clouds of brown dust. I choked and rolled up the windows. A man in a hard yellow hat stepped into the road and waved traffic to a halt. He was a mechanical toy, and I was at the mercy of his ticking arm. Go. Stop. Go. He let me pass, and I leapt up the pink cliffs of La Bajada gaining a lead on the earthmovers when the Rabbit coughed once, choked, and died on me. It happened so quickly, I hardly had time to get off the road. Semis with chrome stacks and Keep On Truckin’ flaps whizzed past, shaking the Rabbit on its rubber foundations. I tried to restart the engine. There was a long silence, a whir, silence; the car was dead.

  I had an inkling of what was wrong: a clogged fuel filter caused by sloppy maintenance and cheap gas. Cheap gas: you pump it yourself; it saves you money, it costs you money. What was my client, Joe Feliz, going to do without me? He had been caught doing sixty in a zone where the limit was thirty, and he was probably guilty as hell. I could imagine him in his own defense: “I only had two beers, sir, honest,” Who would ever believe Joe Feliz?

  A Dos Equis semi passed a truck that was passing me. It was too much horsepower in too close proximity and no place for Neil Hamel. I got out of the car, climbed a grassless knoll, and considered my options: I could hitch; I could not; I could let the sun make a raisin out of me while I waited for someone to stop and offer a helping hand. In their pleasure at stripping the skin from an already naked landscape, the earthmovers grunted loudly. A red Mazda pickup truck with a white racing stripe came up the hill, hesitated, then came to a stop at the island in the middle of the road. The driver leaned out the window, cupped his hand to his mouth, and went through the motions of yelling. “Can’t hear you,” I yelled back. He gestured at the futility of speech, and I climbed down the knoll. The smell of diesel was thick on the road, a husky seductive smell that reminded me of Mexico, of the buses and the promise of a beach at the end of the road. Mexico—it took me both forward and back.

  “Hi,” the guy said as I reached the truck and leaned against the passenger window. “How you been?”

  “Peachy.”

  “What’s wrong with your car?”

  “Stalled. Can’t get it started again.”

  “Not getting any gas?”

  “Right.”

  “Might be vapor lock.”

  “Might, but I don’t think so. I think it’s the fuel filter.”

  “If you wait a while, it could clear itself, but I’ll take you to Santa Fe if you want to call somebody.”

  “You think it could clear itself?”

  “Could.”

  “I’ll give it a few minutes and see what happens.”

  “Okay, I’ll wait with you. Come on in and get out of the sun.” He opened the door and motioned me into the cab. I climbed up and sat down beside him. He offered me a cigarette, which I accepted, and some water from a mason jar on the floor. He had jagged teeth, which gave him a sinister dimension, but otherwise he wasn’t bad-looking. Skin, tan; hair, brown; body, slight but muscular; height, medium; age, late thirties, an age that had gone through a lot of changes to arrive at. I knew them well. The sleeves on his T-shirt were rolled up to his shoulders, and he had the hard arms of a man who works outside in the summer. He was edgy, fiddled with a knob on the steering wheel the entire time I talked to him; yet there was a softness in there somewhere. The kind of man who would break your heart and be sorry about it later. SATAN’S SINNERS was etched in purple on his right forearm.

  “So, where you goin’?” he asked me.

  “Santa Fe.”

  “No shit. Santa Fe. You know what foreplay is in Santa Fe?”

  I leaned over and punched his shoulder. “You awake, bitch?”

  He laughed, an interesting laugh with a touch of malice beneath the fun. Ex-con, I thought. State pen.

  “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad for a girl.”

  “I’m not a girl; I’m a lawyer. I’m going to Santa Fe to see the DA.”

  People like to tell doctors about their health, lawyers about their offenses. His was a familiar tale, beginning, he said, in Vietnam. A tour of duty brought out the demons: a heroin addiction; two wives in different states; arrests for this and that. Quality of legal representation poor, all lawyers shits with possible exception of self. Then down and out, broke and busted in Mexico, he found... the Lord.

  “I’ve been clean for six years,” he said. “I drink a bit but no drugs.”

  “Really? Six years. I’d say you’ve got it licked.”

  “I have,” he answered with lazy confidence.

  “Was it... the Lord?”

  “He helped, all right, but I don’t even need that anymore. I have friends who still go to church, but I don’t need it. I just don’t need it.”

  “What keeps you straight now?”

  “Well, a couple of things. I’m going into business, and I got a good woman. I got myself a real good woman. She’s a Mexican. Wanna see her picture?”

  “Sure.”

  He pulled the snapshot from his wallet. Fondled frequently, it was wrinkled and torn at the edges. She was a beauty: big dark eyes, a cloud of dark hair, young and dewy—no more than seventeen I figured. To her he was probably bigger than life. Life is bigger than life in Mexico and at the same time, not worth a damn.

  “She’s down there right now with her family. I’m gonna bring her back soon.”

  “She’s lovely,” I said, “and I bet she’s devoted to you.”

  “Devoted, that ain’t the word for it. She worships the ground I walk on.”

  And what ground did he walk on? Red mud, from the look of his boots. Thoughts of Joe Feliz were pestering me like obnoxious flies. “I think I ought to give my car another shot,” I said. “I have to get going.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what: if you get it started, pull it over here and give me your card. I’ve been wantin’ to talk to a lawyer. Guess it might as well be you.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “I’ll follow you up the hill just to be sure it’s running okay.”

  I let myself out of the truck.

  “Nice meeting you, Nellie, after all this time.”

  “You, too.” I started to walk away and then stopped. After what time? And how did he know my nickname was Nellie? “Did I tell you my name? And it’s not Nellie, anyway, it’s Neil.”

  “I’m psychic,” he said, smiling with snaggly charm and tapping his forehead.

  Psychic. For a moment I had that watery sensation, a quivery blend of premonition and apprehension: strangers on a highway, one of us needing help, brought together by the cold hand of destiny. What would it all mean? Nothing, I hoped. Maybe it was a lucky guess; maybe I was beginning to look like a Nellie. All I wanted from this encounter was to get to the top of La Bajada. From th
ere I figured I could coast easily into Santa Fe. The car started like a dream, as if the coughs and stalls had just been a put-on. I pulled over next to the truck and handed him my card. He smiled, turning it over in his hand.

  “You never know,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be seein’ you again sometime.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  The car ran perfectly up La Bajada. He followed me to the top, waved his hand, and took off down the hill. La Bajada means “the dip.” It’s steep going up but easy on the way down. From the top of the hill you can see Santa Fe spread out before you, and beyond it the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, snowcapped till the middle of July. Santa Fe is a light center, they say; that’s why so many artists live there. At certain times of day, the city is brushed with gold. It’s memorable, but the trouble with all that light is that it darkens the shadows. On the way down the hill, the Rabbit stalled three times. I was able to coast long enough to get off the road again, where I waited for the dirty gas to recede.

  Joe Feliz was no longer at the courthouse when I arrived. I figured he was at the nearest bar drinking away his disappointment, but I didn’t have the heart to look. I went to the DA’s office to reschedule the meeting. Demonstrators were parading in circles in the parking lot outside the building. Among the Mercedes-Benzes and four-by-fours, earth mothers and aging hippies with limp ponytails were holding up signs and chanting against WIPP.

  They still have hippies in Santa Fe. You see them in Albuquerque occasionally, waiting lotus-legged beside the interstate for the magical ride that will take them north. It’s a worthy cause, opposition to the WIPP project which would allow our government to store nuclear waste in a remote portion of the state, but this group didn’t look like the people to be fighting it. They looked like right-brained dreamers in a left-brained world, worn out from fighting lost causes.

  After I had rescheduled the meeting, promising that both Joe Feliz and I would be there, I went to High County Volkswagen and spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for someone named Skye to get off the phone and change my fuel filter.