The Other Side of Death Page 11

  Marci Coyle happened to be at the wheel with every hair sprayed in place like she’d just left the hairdresser. She was wearing a signature red warmup suit, although I doubted if she’d been running; the sweats were too neat, the makeup too perfect, and the scarf around her neck seemed a little dressy for the occasion. The well-groomed effect was spoiled, however, by an ugly expression. As she looked at the Hispanic men, then at me, anger distorted her eyes and her mouth swung out of control. “Keep your fucking dog out of the road,” she yelled.

  “It’s not my dog,” I answered reasonably.

  “If you’re not willing to take care of your goddamn fucking dog, then you ought to put it to sleep.”

  “It’s not my dog,” I repeated, a little less reasonably, looking to the men for help, but they just watched this exchange as if to say, ‘What could you expect from a Texan?’ I had to wonder why Marci was taking it out on me. Since we hadn’t been introduced at the opening, I had no reason to think she knew who I was. It could be because she was pissed and I was there, but then why not scream at the Hispanic men? They were there, too; the dog had come from them. Maybe she thought they were gentlemen and she didn’t want to embarrass herself in front of them, or maybe she thought they were not and was afraid of their reaction. As a female I made a better target. Women always do, even to other women, because we are conditioned not to fight back.

  While she glared at me and vented her jets I got a good look at the inside of the camouflage jeep. The seats were glove-soft leather, and there was a bag from the Collected Works bookstore on the floor and another from Origins.

  “Goddamn fucking dogs,” she said, in case I hadn’t heard her the first or second time. She rammed the car into gear, ground a pound out of the transmission and took off. I held the dog until she was safely on her way and then I let him go. He wagged his tail and loped across the road to the men, who patted his head and went on talking.

  I continued up Canyon Road and when I saw the jeep parked in a driveway I turned in. Fortunately Marci had left the gate open. She lived in what is known here as a compound, meaning she had more than one building behind her wall, a primary residence and at least one other that was a guesthouse, an artist’s studio or just a place to store all the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the main house. It had what they call LOSFC, Lots of Old Santa Fe Charm. Daffodils and crocuses were in bloom, a forsythia blazed. The main house was low and sprawling, with soft adobe corners and a line of cow skulls embedded in its front wall. I went up to a hand-carved wooden door, lifted the head of a brassy lion and knocked.

  Marci was not pleased—in fact she was downright unpleasant when she found me at her door. “What do you want?” she snapped.

  “I’m Neil Hamel,” I replied, “an old friend of Rick’s and Lonnie Darmer’s, too, a lawyer in Albuquerque. I want to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Rick.” It wasn’t entirely true, but it got me through the door. I could see her mentally running through a list of the women Rick had told her about and not finding my name on it. She was insecure enough about him, though, to let me in.

  I followed her black Reeboks down a hallway where Sombrajes, shutters made of twigs, cast slender V-shaped shadows on the floor. She led me into a living room that was bigger than Lonnie’s half a house and my apartment combined. A baby grand piano was lost in the corner. Oriental rugs were scattered across the quarry-tiled floor. The beams in the ceiling were old and round. There were some large Indian pots that were worth more than my car. A pile of antlers formed an intricate chandelier and a couple more made the backbone of a chair I had no intention of sitting in. A skull with long horns hung over the kiva fireplace. Marci, it seemed, was into bones.

  “How do you know Rick?” she asked. She was having trouble deciding which face to put on, hostile or cool. Scared might have been an option, too, but that wasn’t a face she was likely to wear in public.

  “We met about fifteen years ago when we lived in San Miguel de Allende,” I replied. Marci sat down in one large plush armchair and I in another.

  “Mexico,” she shrugged as if anything that happened in that place didn’t count.

  “Lonnie was a friend of mine, too. She and I kept in touch after we moved to New Mexico, but I haven’t seen much of Rick.”

  “Rick has put those days behind him.”

  “I saw him at the wake.”

  “I told him not to go, but he seemed to feel it was necessary.” She began examining the lacquered finish of a long, red fingernail.

  “He’s known the Darmers for a long time. He told me how happy he was with the First Building and that you two were getting married.”

  “Rick said that?” she smiled, more pleased, probably, than she should have been. When she wasn’t screaming at strangers, Marci had a confident and successful manner, a polished facade. She was probably superconfident when dealing with bankers, brokers and builders, but loving a guy like Rick was letting termites into the cellar. Sooner or later he’d undermine your foundation. She offered something like an apology for her performance on Canyon Road. “Those damn Hispanics let their dogs run all over the place then slash your tires if you complain.”

  It explained why she yelled at me, but if she thought I was going to join her in condemning Hispanics, she was mistaken. “When I saw Rick he seemed worried about the campaign to stop the First Building and the buttons people have been wearing,” I said.

  “People can wear all the buttons they want to. The project has been approved; it’ll be built.”

  “It doesn’t bother you to be involved in such an unpopular project?”

  “Who is it unpopular to? We’re providing jobs that this town needs badly. The building is already 90 percent leased to some prestigious clients, the law firm of Lovell, Cruse, Vigil and Roberts, for one. Soon we’ll be turning tenants away. That’s unpopular? There are people in this town who would be happier communicating through the pony express than a fax machine, but someone is always trying to stop progress; I don’t let it stand in my way.”

  “That’s what Jorge Mondragon said.”

  “Jorge Mondragon? How do you know him?”

  “I just went to see him in his office.”

  “What for?” she asked, attempting to powder herself with bland indifference.

  “Lonnie’s parents don’t believe her death was a suicide or an accident and they hired me to investigate.”

  “So what does that have to do with Jorge Mondragon or me?”

  I took a deep breath and jumped in. “As you know, Lonnie was opposed to your building. She told me Mondragon had been paid off to approve it and that she had proof.”

  “That drunken bitch,” she snapped hard enough to shake the powder off. “What proof could she possibly have of anything? That poor man has had enough problems with his wife dying. You ought to consider the source before you go around accusing people. Lonnie Darmer was a substance abuser and jealous as hell that I am marrying Rick. People like that lose touch with reality. She’d have done anything to discredit me if she thought she could get away with it. You can take it from me, there was no payoff, no proof of anything. That building was approved because it is an excellent project and good for Santa Fe. Didn’t Jorge Mondragon tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “See?” All that proved to me was that they’d coordinated their stories.

  “What do you think happened to Lonnie?” I asked.

  “People who live on the edge fall off.” She shrugged. The cordless phone on the end table rang and she picked it up. Marci, who wasn’t the kind of person to be far from a phone, listened briefly, said, “I’ll have to call you back,” and hung up.

  “You were out of town that weekend, according to Rick,” I continued.

  “I had business in Dallas.”

  “When did you get back?”

  “Sunday night.” The phone rang again. “That’s probably my lawyer. I’m expecting an important call from him.”


  “Lovell, Cruse?” I asked.

  “Baxter, Johnson,” she replied. “Is there anything else?”

  “No, but I’d like to use the bathroom before I leave.”

  “Down the hallway, second door on the right.” She waved her manicured hand in that direction and glanced at her watch as she picked up the phone, probably checking how many minutes her lawyer was charging her for at three to four dollars per. “Garland,” she said, not wasting one expensive second, “I need those leases and I need them now.”

  I made my way down the hallway to the king-size bathroom. There were yellow roses on the vanity, the light was subdued enough to make a person look ten years younger, the Mexican tiles had yellow birds on them, the toilet seat was up.

  On my way out, I passed the living room where Marci, oblivious to me, drummed her nails on the coffee table and argued with her lawyer. I let myself out the front door and walked down the path that led to the driveway. The Mercedes jeep wasn’t visible from the house. I didn’t think the auto alarm would be on at home and Marci’s phone conversation had sounded like it would cost her a few hundred dollars more before it was done, so I took a chance and opened the jeep’s door. The packages were still on the floor. The book was The Shell Seekers, the sales slip was dated today. In the Origins package I found a wearable-art sweater decorated with feathers and tufts of fur that she had—incredibly—paid $700 for, also today. Nobody was screaming at me to stop my investigations yet, so I opened the glove compartment and took a look. There were Texas maps, New Mexico maps, a Mercedes-Benz manual, registration and proof of insurance, some ballpoint pens, a small notebook where Marci kept track of her business mileage, some country-and-western tapes—Reba McEntire and Willie Nelson—and at the very bottom of the pile a parking ticket for an offense that took place on San Francisco Street at 4 P.M. on March 17, the night before Lonnie died.

  The sun was setting as I walked back down Canyon. Dogs barked, burglar alarms went off—the songs Santa Fe sings at dusk. High up in the jet stream a plane headed south, leaving a trail of Vs behind it.

  11

  THE KID AND I took Saturday afternoon off and spent it in bed. That night he played the accordion at El Lobo. He has a key, and I went to bed early kind of hoping he’d come back later and let himself in. It was, after all, the second week of spring. I was asleep and somewhere else, someplace green and fertile, a rain forest, maybe, when he crawled into bed and woke me with a kiss. He was dressed and his jacket had the rough texture of an adventure and an unfamiliar smell of beer and smoke. Suddenly I was kissing a stranger in my bed; it put a different spin on things. “Chiquita,” he whispered, and I knew it was my Kid. He got up and I watched him take off his clothes in the light from the parking lot that filtered through the drapes and found hollows in his skinny body I’d never noticed.

  “Kid, I want to try something,” I said when he was curled up beside me cool and naked. “Feel these places here on my neck where my heart beats.”

  “Yeah, I feel them. You have a strong heart.”

  “Those are the carotid arteries. They say if you press down on them during sex it makes it really intense. You do it right before you…”

  “You finish?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You do that too hard you kill somebody.”

  “I want you to try it later on when I’m…”

  “You want me to do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “C’mon, Kid. I know you won’t hurt me.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “What’s wrong with us the way it is?”

  “Nothing. It’s wonderful the way it is, you know that. I’m just curious, that’s all. It’s something people do; I want to see what it’s like.”

  “What people?”

  What was I supposed to say? Killers, rapists, horny teens? That I wanted to see what it felt like to be a murderer’s or rapist’s victim? That I wanted to see what that victim would do? “Just people.”

  “Not me. I won’t do it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “C’mon.”

  “No. I’m going to sleep.”

  That was the end of a promising beginning. The Kid rolled over and pulled the covers around his head. When he does that, there’s no talking to him before morning. I waited a few minutes until he went to sleep—it doesn’t take long—and then I got up, went into the bathroom and lay down in the cold tub. I leaned back, closed my eyes and pressed my hands against the arteries, feeling the steady thumping of my heart. Apparently this cuts off the supply of blood to the brain—sending it elsewhere I suppose. It intensifies erotic sensations, if it doesn’t kill you. It took quite a bit of pressure before I felt any lessening of the blood supply. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation to have fingers pushing at my veins; if anybody did it to me I’d fight, not yield, but then yielding doesn’t come naturally to me. I tried holding my breath next. They say you can only hold your breath till you pass out, then your body automatically takes over and starts breathing again. I held it long enough to see lights in the darkness, but I couldn’t stand the smothering sensation any more than the compressing sensation so I started breathing again. I wondered if the brain experienced oxygen deprivation and/or blood deprivation as light and color and ecstatic vision. It could be the source of mystical experiences, magical orgasms and maybe the being of light after death, as well. But what lay beyond the light and the ecstasy? Darkness and nothing? Those were questions that could only be answered by the very experimental or the very dead.

  I got up, went back to bed, curled up behind the Kid and snuggled into the feeling of a warm bed in a cold room. I thought about Lonnie surrendering to fear and light in a cold, dark cave. I wrapped my arms around the Kid, lay my cheek against the soft, silky spot on the back of his neck and dreamed about nothing.

  ******

  In the morning I whispered, “You awake, Kid?” We forgot about the night before and made careful love. It was Sunday and we couldn’t linger; the Kid had cars to work on, although not mine—the part hadn’t shown up yet. I invited him for dinner later.

  I went to the Albuquerque flea market to see Pete Vigil. There’s a flea market outside of Santa Fe, too, right next to the opera and known to some as Der Fledermarket. It’s on land the opera patrons probably wish they’d had the foresight to buy, a spectacular site with long views of the high mesas. In Santa Fe they sell junk in scenes of breathtaking beauty. Albuquerque’s flea market is on the state fairgrounds with a view of resting elephants and a parking lot that’s bigger than the Dallas Cowboys’. I parked in the first space I found, which was far, far away, and walked across the lot. A big dusty wind blew around telling me that spring was here, but I already knew that. I entered at the sign that says LIQUOR, GUNS, KNIVES AND OTHER WEAPONS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED ON THE GROUNDS, noting that I was armed with none of them.

  This is a big flea market that takes place every weekend. It is loosely arranged by subject: Indian jewelry, Anglo jewelry, Kachinas, tires, tools, food, herbs, pottery, kites, books, household stuff, furniture, rugs, jeans, T-shirts, velvet art, bones. I went to the velvet art booth first because I like to visit Elvis every now and then to stay in touch, the young Elvis I mean, not the drugged puffball he became. He was hanging between a snarling tiger and a bleeding Jesus, sneering in tacky splendor, his guitar in hand, the collar of his leather jacket turned up, glitter and glitz on black velvet. It would be a change from a pastel R. C. Gorman woman on the wall. This particular booth also represented Harley-Davidson “The Eagle Has Landed” art: bath towels and velvet paintings. A fierce-looking eagle killed a dragon or posed in front of the American flag. Bikers hung around here wearing black leather gloves with the fingers cut out and sleeveless T-shirts that bared their tattooed arms.

  The bikers were one kind of American, but there were a lot of other groups represented at the flea market, giving it an international flavor. The dust blowin
g around added to the Third World feeling. There were West Africans in native dress selling baskets and beads; Southeast Asians walking in groups with their children and speaking a quick, sharp language; lots of Hispanics, some Mexican, some not; many Native Americans. The X-ray light here made everyone look like what they were only more so, and Anglos got bleached white as bone. I saw a girl who had exaggerated her whiteness and made herself into a work of flea-market art—a look Anna would have envied. She had pale skin and long, frizzy blonde hair pulled high up on top of her head and hanging way down her back. She wore a black tube top and skintight spandex pedal pushers, black high heels, bright red nails and lipstick, the female equivalent of Elvis. It takes a certain brassiness to pull the look off. She had it, but so did he and look what happened to him. There were some aging hippies here, as there always are at New Mexico gatherings, dressed in long skirts, ripped jeans, Guatemalan huipils. The fine lines etched on their faces were like the thin lines on maps that lead to out-of-the-way pockets, mountain villages, time warps. I wouldn’t want to walk around with twenty years of alternate lifestyle written all over me, but then I wouldn’t want to walk around with ten years of lawyer written on me either. I’d like to walk around with nothing written—keeping my feet in all possible worlds—but it’s hard to pull it off. The flea market makes me glad to be an American; in a way this place is about as American as you can get. I mean border or coastal America anyway, where the Third World pushes at the door.

  Making my way to bones, I followed a path through miscellaneous junk and jewelry, and passed a booth of animal skins, furs, bird feathers and belly-up turtle shells. These empty, gawking shells could make you cry for the turtles who’d been forced to vacate them. Next I came to a booth selling chile ristras, long strips of dried red chile peppers, some of them arranged into hearts, a Valentine’s Day gift for a picante-loving lover. The following booth had red roses for sale, and not the live ones that turn brown and die in two days either. These were pickled roses in a jar, roses that would last forever like the rose the Kid gave me. Maybe he bought it here some weekend and saved it for a special occasion. I’m not the kind of woman to call up a jewelry store and find out how much a lover paid for a ring, or to pick up a rose and look for a price on the bottom of the jar either. A pickled rose on the mantel might be the equivalent of Elvis Presley on the wall but I wouldn’t take it down.