The Other Side of Death Read online

  “Crazy about him,” I said.

  “He reminds me of my boy,” Pete Vigil replied in his musical English. “I was hoping he would be a lawyer.”

  “I’d marry Victor tomorrow, if only he’d ask me.”

  “I was going to ask you to marry me.”

  “Well, if Victor doesn’t come through, I’ll think about it. How’s King?”

  “He’s good. How is your investigation going into your friend’s death?”

  “Not great. The police aren’t giving me any help.”

  “I’ve been asking around here to see what I can find out.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “One of my boy’s friends who was in Vietnam with him doesn’t think it was an accident either.”

  “Good. When can I talk to him?”

  “He will be at the Albuquerque flea market Sunday. Can you come?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there, too. I have some elk antlers to sell. Look for me and I will take you to him.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  I took a look through the rest of the pink slips and didn’t find anything as pressing or interesting as the next call I had to make—to Dennis Quinlan, my old law-school classmate and the recently elected Santa Fe County DA. Dennis had followed the straight and narrow path: a wife, two children, a house and a position that required him to be responsible to the community. He was the kind of guy who took his responsibilities seriously, who seemed terminally bland in law school but improved with age. He had taken on a thankless job, although he was doing his best to clean up the mess of unsolved and unprosecuted crimes his predecessor had left. He sounded harried when I got him on the phone.

  “Neil, how are you?”

  “Not too bad. And you?”

  “Overworked. You getting any interesting cases down there?”

  “Actually, I’ve got one in your district.”

  “Oh, what’s that?”

  “I’m representing the Darmers, whose daughter died at the ruins last weekend.”

  “Oh, yeah, the drug overdose, right?”

  “The parents don’t think so, they think she was murdered.”

  “Is there any evidence to support that theory?”

  “Some. I passed it on to Detective Railback.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. He’s convinced there was no crime.”

  Dennis sighed. “Well, as you know, it’s not really my role to solve crimes, although everybody expects me to. The police are supposed to investigate and bring in someone for me to prosecute.”

  “I know, Dennis, but the police aren’t doing crap and the parents are miserable and angry—with good cause, I think.”

  “I’d rather not interfere with police investigations, Neil,” he said. I knew why: he was relatively new on the job, there had been a lot of conflict between the previous DA and the police, he was trying to develop a better relationship. Implying the police weren’t doing their duty was not a good way to get started.

  Only the truth was they weren’t. “The problem is they’re not investigating,” I said.

  Dennis thought it over and I could just about hear the thoughts talking. One of the major problems his predecessor had was an alarming number of unsolved crimes against women: some had been murdered, some had been raped, some had disappeared. Santa Fe has a permanent population of fifty-five thousand, but there are over a million transients and tourists who pass through every year—which was one of the problems, but not the only one. The last thing Dennis needed was a victim’s parents complaining loudly and bitterly to the media about the unsolved murder or disappearance of their daughter. He knew it, and so did I.

  “You really believe she was murdered?”

  “Yes,” I said, and gave him my reasons.

  “It’s not much, Neil.”

  “It’s not so bad considering there hasn’t even been an investigation.”

  “All right, I’ll give Railback a call, see if I can light a fire under him.”

  “Thanks a lot, Dennis.”

  “You’re welcome,” he sighed.

  That accomplished, I made myself a cup of Red Zinger and took a look at the papers. I didn’t find any reference to Lonnie in the New Mexican. Among the “Police Notes” I did find this: “A man told police Thursday he jumped from his moving pickup near the corner of Don Gaspar and Paseo de Peralta because he hallucinated that a tree was inside his truck and was trying to grab him.”

  Next I read the “Journal North” section of the Albuquerque Journal. Lonnie had disappeared from this paper, too, an inactive case. Gene Youngblood, a scholar in residence at the College of Santa Fe, had written a column on eroticism in film, which I figured would make a lot more interesting reading than the divorce files on my desk. Although eroticism is often the cause of divorce, what comes afterwards isn’t very interesting, at least not to me, even though that’s one way I earn my living. What you get is a lot of haggling over possessions and pets and health insurance, some of it valid and necessary, some of it a way of getting back for hurt that was done, and those kinds of hurts can never be compensated for. Now that I’ve become an expert on divorce my opinion is that lack of sex can hold marriages together and sex can break them up. There’s a sort of contract some people make when they feel sexually inadequate or uninspired or whatever. The unwritten contract (and nobody ever puts a contract like that in writing) says, “We’ll stay together and nobody else will have to know how inadequate we are.” But sooner or later an erotically charged human comes along (there are plenty of them out there) and the contract gets torn apart. And since it was never put in writing and the terms were never clearly stated, it’s impossible to enforce.

  Gene Youngblood had this to say: “I (am not) denying the beauty and power of sex for its own sake, independent of love, as a kind of transcendent discipline, a path to self-knowledge. The genuine erotomane, like the artist or the revolutionary, is a shaman on the frontiers of consciousness.” It was a frontier some of us had been on way back then, the border in the desert across which the invisible globes and colors of choice were found. The edge is an intense place to be and, unless you find the perfect companion, dangerously exposed. You can spend a couple of years there, maybe, but not a lifetime. Most people settle for comfortable sex, or embarrassing sex, or Saturday night sex, or no sex at all. Or you could be like Lonnie, and continue to cross the border leaving your lover behind; I doubted that Rick ever felt the same intensity about the experience that she did, or that he was even capable of it. He was a guy with a lot of technical skills who liked to watch himself at work, one who gave pleasure but didn’t feel it, inflicted pain and didn’t feel that either. He’d send you across the border—if you let him—and watch from the safe side while you danced alone, exposed in the wind.

  I had other things to think about than sex and Rick First, other cases to work on than Lonnie Darmer’s—divorces, in fact—but I didn’t feel like doing it, so I got out my Santa Fe phone book and looked up Historic Preservation Board chairman Jorge Mondragon’s phone number at Land of Enchantment Real Estate. I asked his secretary if I could see him that afternoon and she said “When?” without any What for? or Who referred you? It’s the curse of being a real estate broker, you always have to be available. It’s not the only one either—in some circles real estate brokers are despised even more than lawyers—so I had some sympathy for Jorge Mondragon before I met him.

  But I may also have been influenced by the Iberian guitar music I heard on the rent-a-Ford radio as I drove the lonesome highway north. Rippling flamenco riffs put me in a Spanish mood; I began thinking about the conquistadors, how they sailed off the edge of the world and ended up in places that looked just like home. They built their most beautiful cities in the high plains, the altiplano, of Mexico, which reminded them of the plains they had left behind in Spain. And they built La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Assisi, a.k.a. Santa Fe, in an area t
hat reminded them of the plains they had left in Mexico.

  Jorge Mondragon’s office was buried in an ancient complex on Paseo de Peralta. He and the office both had a weary Spanish style, a kind of battered elegance that fit my mood. The suit he wore wasn’t expensive, but it was serious. He had silver hair, a thin face, long, white virtuoso’s fingers and the rarefied air of an El Greco saint. It was kind of an unusual persona for a real estate broker, but maybe he didn’t sell much real estate. No doubt Jorge spoke fluent, maybe even Castilian, Spanish, which would be an asset in his work. I had no trouble getting in to see him; the office was not a hotbed of activity—his secretary filed her nails and the phones barely rang while I was there. On the walls of the reception room there were pictures of him posing with various clients, some Hispanic, some not, a few well known, most not. His secretary told me to go right on into his office so I did. It had a cool, damp, mushroomy feeling and the look of a room in the depths of a colonial home where the sun doesn’t dare shine. You have to be buried deep in New Mexico to find that. The light was artificial, the walls white, the furniture massive and dark. There was wrought-iron grillwork on the lone window and in the corner a bookcase full of photographs. It looked more like a shrine than a home for books. I got the feeling that before Jorge Mondragon left at night he pulled white candles and flowers out of his desk drawer, lit the candles, floated the flowers in water and placed them before the photographs. They were all of a woman, about forty I’d say, making her fifteen to twenty years younger than him. She had semi-bouffant, sprayed-in-place hair, an aristocrat’s nose, a model’s cheekbones, a gentle smile. In some of the pictures she stood next to two teenage boys who looked a lot like her. In many of the portraits she was alone, always smiling, with her mouth anyway; sometimes her eyes had a dazed, haunted look.

  “You’re looking for something to buy in Santa Fe?” Jorge Mondragon asked watching me quizzically as I sat down across the desk from him. “East Side or West?” I probably didn’t look like I had the money for either.

  “Actually, I’m not a buyer.”

  “Then what can I do for you?” he asked, spreading his long fingers and tapping the tips together, anticipating probably that I was going to try to sell him something, advertising or pencils with his name on them.

  “I want to talk to you about the Historic Preservation Board.”

  “Why?” This complicated the matter for him, as I certainly didn’t look like I owned a building downtown. He probably already knew all those owners anyway; had approved a few of their plans, turned down a lot more. He picked a pencil up from his desk and began turning it over in his long fingers, LAND OF ENCHANTMENT REAL ESTATE, the white pencil said in black letters, JORGE MONDRAGON, BROKER.

  “I’m a friend of Lonnie Darmer’s, the woman who…”

  “I know who Lonnie Darmer was.”

  “Her family has hired me to investigate her death.”

  “A private eye?” He smiled a ghost of a smile.

  “A lawyer.”

  “Oh.” The smile faded away. Apparently he didn’t feel any reciprocal sympathy for my profession. His long fingers laid the pencil down on the desk and were momentarily still. “This has nothing to do with me.”

  “Well, you approved the First Building, Lonnie campaigned against it, she died.” That was as much aggression as I was capable of in this sepulcher of an office.

  “You’re suggesting she committed suicide because I approved a building?” Jorge Mondragon raised some elegant eyebrows. “In my experience people don’t kill themselves over buildings. Love, yes, not buildings.”

  “I’m not suggesting that she killed herself at all.”

  “What then?”

  What indeed? A shaft of afternoon sun snuck through the grillwork, entered the office and backlit his silvery hair. It made him look too ethereal for a murderer or a real estate broker. “I’m not suggesting anything,” I said. “I don’t know for sure how or why she died. The family wants to know why the building was approved when there has been so much opposition to the project. I’ve seen the model myself and I have to say it’s very large for Santa Fe; ugly besides.”

  “If it’s the size you’re worried about, you’ve come to the wrong place. Size is regulated by the zoning commission and that building conforms. The ordinance specifies that you can build to a height of sixty-five feet, the height the ladders of the fire trucks would reach at the time the ordinance was put into effect. It is also the height of La Fonda. Are you familiar with that building?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think it’s ugly?”

  “No.”

  “Looks like it has been there forever, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “People will say the same thing about the First Building someday. They will also say that it adds to the tax base and provides badly needed jobs and office space. If you ask me the protestors are trying to stop progress. Besides, the zoning commission doesn’t have the right to reject projects that comply with the ordinance. That would be an abuse of their power and illegal as well. Of course you’re a lawyer; you already know that, don’t you?” The light crossed the wrought-iron bars of the window and moved on. The ethereal silver halo was no longer blinding me to the lines of defeat and yearning in his face and he began to look less like a saint, more like a real estate broker. Someone who can convince you that the shabby looks good, the affordable is palatable, a fixer-upper makes a great starter home and three points are not too much to pay for a fixed-rate mortgage.

  “The HPB does have the power and the responsibility to turn down a project for aesthetic reasons, and that building is going to be ugly,” I responded.

  “Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?” He glanced toward the pictures of the woman, who would not be ugly by any standards. “The building complies with the aesthetic standards set by other downtown buildings, it has the puddled adobe look.”

  “It has the penitentiary look if you ask me. The proportions are terrible, the building is too massive, the windows too small, the courtyard too large.”

  “With all due respect, I don’t think you would like it if an architect tried to tell you how to practice law.” He picked the pencil up again and began tapping the eraser against the desk, softly like everything else he did.

  “That’s different. Nobody could ever figure out the workings of the law unless they spent years studying it, but anybody can look at a building.”

  “But everybody sees it differently, don’t they? I happen to like the small windows. I find them snug and appealing.”

  He probably found this damp room with its two-minute daily ration of sun snug and appealing, too. “There was quite a division of opinion among the board, wasn’t there?” I asked.

  “There was some disagreement.”

  “And you had the deciding vote?”

  “Yes.” He put the pencil down, spread his hands, tapped the fingers together and looked toward the corner as if anticipating the moment when he could be all alone with his shrine again. “Is that all?”

  “For the moment I guess it is. She’s lovely,” I pointed to the shrine. “Your wife?”

  “Yes. Maria Mercedes. Her nickname was Mecha, which means wick. She was the light of my life but now she’s gone. God rest her soul.”

  “What happened?”

  “Cancer.” So it was grief that had muted him. “She died a lingering, painful, you could say ugly death. Her hair, her beautiful thick hair came out in handfuls, she weighed eighty pounds, her skin was paper-thin and she was too weak to even lift her hand from the bed. Death is not beautiful. If you will excuse me now I have some business to take care of.”

  “Thank you for your time.”

  He waved a weary hand. “It’s nothing,” he said.

  10

  IT WAS A relief to get out of the gloom of Mondragon’s office and back onto the sunny Paseo, where tourists were smiling for each other’s cameras and the shadows were four o’clock
long. There was no reason to hurry back to the Duke City—I wasn’t going to see the Kid till tomorrow—so I walked a few blocks to the library and looked up Marci Coyle’s address in the phone book. She lived on Canyon Road, on the fashionable East Side. It’s my theory of urban civilization that the rich and established settle on the east sides of cities and the poor and artistic on the west, but I haven’t been all over the world yet to prove it. I decided to walk up to Marci Coyle’s and see if she was home; there’s never anyplace to park on Canyon Road anyway. I walked past the restaurants, shops and art galleries whose discreet nameplates indicated they weren’t interested in my business. Eventually the road becomes residential and two-way, although it’s barely wide enough for one. The houses are old here and adobe, the walls come right up to the street and the house numbers are Mexican tile embedded in the walls like they are in Lonnie’s neighborhood. It’s only a couple of miles in distance but light years away in status and wealth.

  Spring had come to Canyon Road. Forsythias were in bloom and junipers were sending out clouds of pollen. A woman in a white dress, white hat and white boots walked down the road pulling a white Scottie behind her. Santa Fe brings out the actress in women. Two old Hispanic men stood across the road talking. They’d probably grown up in this neighborhood before it became chic and their parents and grandparents could well have grown up here, too. A brown mutt belonging to one of the men hung around waiting for them to finish up. When it saw the white dog it lifted its leg and peed.

  If there’s a leash law in Santa Fe, it’s enforced about as often as the speed limit. The woman in white passed by pulling her dog, a black Saab came down Canyon, a camouflage-colored Mercedes-Benz jeep—the car of the moment here and worth about fifty thou—came up. Just before the vehicles squeezed by each other, the mutt saw me and dashed across the road to say hello, coming all too close to getting squashed by the wheel of the jeep. I grabbed him by his collar and yanked him into a narrow space between the road and a wall. “Careful, pooch,” I said. “Those Mercedes are killers.” The Saab squeezed through and kept on going, but the Mercedes-Benz, whose plates bore the emblem of the Lone Star State, stopped.