The Lies that Bind Read online

“Justine was driving a Porsche?”

  “Yeah. It was Michael Velásquez’s car.”

  “Where did he get a Porsche?” I was thinking out loud, which is a mistake when Saia is listening.

  “Maybe his grandmother gave it to him.”

  “Maybe.” But it didn’t sound like the purse-clutching Martha I knew. “Was Justine speeding or under the influence?”

  “She was going close to seventy-five.” He shrugged, implying that was no big deal in New Mexico. “She took a Breathalyzer and came out clean. There were brake marks on that one.”

  “Martha didn’t consult me before she refused to take your Breathalyzer, you know,” I said.

  “She was advised of her rights,” said Saia, “and told she had the right to call a lawyer. She declined.”

  “Nice of the police not to put her in jail.”

  “Hey, she was an old lady in a nightgown, full of Halcion and booze. What could they do? Put her to bed in a holding pen full of hookers? It looked like a simple hit-and-run until the investigation turned up the fact that Conover was Velásquez’s grandmother and Virga was driving the car that killed Velásquez.” Saia lit himself another Camel, though one still smoldered in the ashtray. You know you’re smoking too much when you’ve got one burning in the ashtray and another one in your mouth. I squished the butt in the ashtray with my thumb and rubbed it out, but he didn’t notice.

  The Halcion was something Martha hadn’t told me about either, but I kept that lack of information to myself. Not only had Martha had the means, motive and opportunity to kill Justine Virga, she’d apparently had a couple of uninhibiting substances in her system as well.

  “Your client told the investigating officer about the Halcion,” Saia continued. “Since she refused to take the Breathalyzer, we have to assume she’d been drinking too.”

  It was my turn to shrug. Presumably the APD would interview (or already had interviewed) the bartender at the AWC meeting. As that bartender could be held liable for serving an intoxicated person, there was a good chance he or she wouldn’t admit to serving Martha Conover two martinis. There might, however, have been witnesses.

  “Do I get a copy of the note?” I asked.

  “What note?” Saia replied.

  “The one the police found in Justine’s pocket. They went into Martha’s house without a warrant, showed Martha the note and compared it to a sample they took from her typewriter.”

  “She gave her consent; they didn’t need a warrant.”

  “The police woke her up and walked in on her in the middle of the night. I’d say they were taking advantage of a respectable senior citizen.” Saia wouldn’t give me the note if it was evidence that would convict my client. If it would exculpate her, he’d have to produce it, but not yet. The note probably wouldn’t do either, but someone had typed it. I needed to find out who.

  Saia picked up the rubber band and stretched it between his fingers. He owed me a favor from a couple of years back, and the time had come to call it in. “You owe me one, Anthony,” I said. “Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember.” He reached into a folder on his desk and took out a piece of white paper. “Here. I made you a copy.”

  I unfolded the paper and read: “I knew this was going to happen, but I couldn’t prevent it.” It wasn’t quite as chilling as it had been when I first heard it, but it was close enough. Some letters were dark, some were light, indicating the original had been typed on a manual typewriter. The peculiarities of type were obvious, an e with a loop that didn’t quite close, a p that was missing part of its tail. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Spooky, isn’t it?”

  “Very. This note wasn’t typed on Martha’s typewriter, you know.”

  “So the report says.”

  “Martha said it was in a sealed envelope.”

  “It was.” Saia leaned back in his chair. “So you want to know how I call it?”

  “Dígame.”

  “It’s the anniversary of Velásquez’s death, and Conover’s distraught. She invites Virga over to talk and runs her down in the road. Willful, deliberate and premeditated murder in the first degree.”

  A smart criminal would never show premeditation; crimes committed in the heat of passion get lesser sentences. The García case had recently made it more difficult to get a first-degree conviction in New Mexico; now you had to prove deliberate intent. But Saia would have had trouble getting first degree for a case like this even before García. He knew it, and so did I. In some states juries will convict an intoxicated person of premeditation, but New Mexico is more tolerant of substance abuse than that. Here they believe a person under the influence isn’t rational enough to premeditate, and Martha appeared to have been under the influence. Saia had said so himself. The only way he’d get a first-degree conviction out of a DWI fatality would be to prove depraved mind murder. He’d have a hard time convincing a jury that a woman as proper as Martha was depraved. “You don’t have a chance,” I told him.

  “On the other hand, maybe Virga’s feeling guilty,” Saia continued. “Okay, Velásquez’s death wasn’t her fault, but she was driving the car, and from all accounts, she loved the guy. She’s afraid of Conover, but she needs to talk to her, tell her she’s sorry, ask for forgiveness, maybe, so she goes to Los Cerros. Conover sees her in the road, steps on the gas, does her, takes some pills, gets in bed and tries to pretend it didn’t happen. Murder in the second degree.”

  “Yeah,” I thought, “or Justine hates Martha. She’s depressed, full of guilt and suicidal. She goes to Los Cerros, sees Martha’s car, jumps in front of it, kills herself and ruins Martha’s life at the same time. Vehicular suicide.”

  “Or else Conover’s been getting into the Halcion,” Saia said, “and it’s making her crazy. She has a few drinks at the AWC meeting, joins the Point One O Club, gets even crazier, sees Justine in the road and runs her down in a drunken fog. Vehicular homicide.”

  The maximum sentence for vehicular homicide is three years, second degree will get you nine and first degree is life. If you’re looking to get off easy, running someone down when you’re drunk is one way to do it. Of course you’d have to be sure you’d complete drunk what you planned when sober. Most people refuse to take a Breathalyzer because they don’t want to be found drunk, but a person might refuse who didn’t want to appear sober. Under the influence? Sober? Martha was the only one who knew for sure. I looked at Saia. He smoothed his hair and looked at me. We were in the same business, we practiced in the same town, we’d gone to the same law school. If we were thinking the same thing, we both had our reasons not to admit it.

  “Any way you look at it, there’s no clear precedent for this case in New Mexico,” Saia said. “So much depends on the state of those two women’s minds. If you ask me, there is nothing harder than getting inside a woman’s mind, and one of them is dead anyway.”

  I wasn’t sure that getting inside my client’s head would solve anything. It could be a labyrinth, with a stone wall blocking every twist and turn. Who knew whether Martha herself remembered what had happened? How much she’d planned, how much she remembered, how much she’d blacked out? It wasn’t really my job to find out. My job was to present reasonable doubt and better now than later, because this was a case I did not want to take to trial. Given the evidence so far, it wouldn’t be hard for Saia to get an indictment; grand juries in Bernalillo County will indict a burrito. “Martha didn’t move the body or try to conceal her car, did she?”

  “Nope. The body didn’t appear to have been moved; the car was parked in its usual spot.”

  “It seems like a guilty woman would make some attempt to cover her tracks.”

  “A guilty woman who was sober and in her right mind would, but women who take too much Halcion aren’t always in their right minds, and women who take Halcion and booze together are never in their right minds,” he said. “We’re seeing more of these kinds of cases now. In combination, Halcion and liquor can cause poor judgment, decreased
attention span and bizarre behavior.”

  Amnesia too.

  “The older people get, the more sensitive they are to psychoactive drugs. An automobile in the hands of an elderly person on Halcion and booze can be the equivalent of a cocked and loaded gun.”

  “When did the police get to the scene?”

  “Eleven-fifteen.”

  An hour after Martha got home, an hour in which Justine’s body might have been lying in the rain or might not. “What did the medical examiner give as the time of death?”

  “Ten-fifteen, more or less.” He knew as well as I that the Office of the Medical Investigator can’t pinpoint death to the minute.

  I put out my cigarette, got ready to go. “Maybe it’s just bad karma that brought these two together,” I said.

  Saia laughed. “You and I start believing in karma, good or bad, we’ll be out of a job.” He looked at the clock on the wall. The minute hand had come to twelve noon exactly. “What are you doing for lunch?”

  “Taking you to Arriba Tacos for a stuffed sopapilla.”

  “If that’s a bribe, I accept.” He put out his Camel and chucked the contents of the overflowing ashtray into the wastebasket. He stood up, leaned back, bent his knees to see into the too-low mirror and smoothed his hair in place.

  The way I judge a man is not by how much money he makes, how many cases he wins or loses, whether he’s good to his mother or his dog or even how much hair he has. My criterion is whether a guy is willing to eat with me at Arriba Tacos. They have the best stuffed sopapillas in town, but a lot of men don’t appreciate that—I’d been married to one once. That kind of guy sees a drive-in shack with flames licking the red letters on the sign and thinks the food isn’t good enough for him.

  Saia and I sat outside, eating our sopapillas and watching the traffic go by. At high noon there was about enough shade to shelter a bug. We ate our hot food in the hot sun, the way it’s meant to be eaten. An immaculate turquoise and white fifties Chevy with sparkling chrome stopped for a light.

  “What do you call a Chevy on a stick?” Saia asked me.

  That was easy. “Art,” I said. Elevated Chevys had become an item on the New Mexico art scene. The City of Albuquerque paid an Arizona sculptor $75,000 for a sculpture of a purple tile Chevy on a green tile arch. Santa Fe got one that was balanced on a pole. Someone took a chain saw and cut that one down. You couldn’t do that to our Chevy, but a lot of people would have sent it back to Arizona if they’d been able. We finished eating and lit a cigarette for the road.

  “Best damned sopapillas in Albuquerque,” Saia said.

  “In America,” said I.

  4

  WHEN I GOT to Hamel and Harrison, my secretary, Anna, was sitting at her desk drinking coffee, eating yogurt—the diet that kept her a size six—and talking on the phone. The receiver settled like a bird into her big hair nest. From her laugh I knew she was talking to her boyfriend, Stevie, the stereo king, proving that it is possible to do three things at once (eat, drink and talk on the phone), especially when none of them are work.

  “Hold on a sec,” she said to the phone, swiveling in her chair and laying the receiver down. Watching the earpiece hit the desk, I listened for the bass that accompanies Stevie wherever he goes and keeps him plugged into the source, like those heartbeat machines that mothers play for their newborn babies.

  Anna handed me my mail and messages. Stevie’s faint but unmistakable beat came through the telephone line.

  “Where’s Brink?” I asked, even though I probably already knew.

  “Out to lunch.”

  Having done her duty by handing me my mail and messages, Anna picked up the phone and resumed her conversation. I went into my office, closed the door and opened the mail, most of which could wait until next week or next year. Baxter, Johnson, one of my least-favorite law firms, was having a cocktail party to celebrate their move to new offices in the black slab building. It would be catered, of course, with the best nouveau Mex cuisine, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be eating it with Baxter or Johnson. I put the invitation in my purse, flipped through the rest of the mail and came across a brochure for a skunk gun, a vial containing skunk juice that was small enough to fit on a key ring. “Skunk juice,” the brochure said, “has been tested and proven to be the odor that repels men faster than any other.” When a woman is threatened, she breaks open the vial and the skunk smell drives the assailant away. Of course the woman doesn’t smell too great herself, but that’s better than being attacked, and the skunk gun comes with a spray bottle of neutralizer to remove the smell. “The odorant comes from the glands of free-range, one-hundred-percent natural Northern New Mexico skunks,” I read, “skunks that have been killed by ranchers because they are considered pests.” I put that aside to show Anna and moved on to phone messages.

  They were the usual real estate and divorce. Karen LeMond’s husband had split with an eighteen-year-old and left a message on Karen’s answering machine that he wanted out. What an eighteen-year-old woman would see in forty-five-year-old potbellied Tom LeMond was a mystery to me, but a man who doesn’t have the guts to tell his wife he wants a divorce firsthand deserves whatever he gets. I called Karen. She wasn’t home. I left my own message on her machine. “Call me back,” it said.

  The next pink message slip was from Sharon Amaral and incorporated both real estate and divorce. Her husband hadn’t been making his child support payments, she hadn’t been making her mortgage payments, the bank was threatening foreclosure. In newspapers all across the country these days the real estate sections are filled with notices of foreclosure auctions. Foreclosures are at the highest rate since the Depression. There are bottom feeders out there who buy up these properties cheap and wait for better days. Fortunes get made that way out of other people’s misfortunes. There are also close to one million bankruptcy filings a year, and the national debt has reached four trillion dollars, a number too big to comprehend, the twenty-four-wheeler of numbers careening out of control down the highway.

  The nineties are paying for the excesses of the eighties. You see it daily in my business. A lot of the excesses began late one night in 1980 on the floor of the House of Representatives, when Congressman Fernand Saint Germain added a rider to a bill deregulating the savings and loan industry and upping the amount of federal deposit insurance from $40,000 to $100,000. Deregulation handed savings and loan owners and their cronies an engraved invitation to steal. The rider raised the amount they could steal by 150 percent. With nobody policing them, the S&Ls squandered their deposits on bad loans, junk bonds, junk developments and the campaign contributions that induced politicians of both parties to look the other way. Charles Keating of Lincoln S&L fame invested $3 million of depositors’ money in political contributions, and when asked if he thought he was buying influence, he replied, “I hope so.” An economy pumped up by S&L steroids created an artificially induced boom that led to a very real bust. The taxpayers are going to have to repay the squandered deposits to the tune of fifteen hundred dollars each, and the amount is rising daily.

  Given this climate, you could probably talk a bank out of foreclosure in most cities for a little while anyway. The real estate market has fallen so drastically that a lot of properties are now worth less than the mortgages that were placed on them a few years ago. Banks are often better off making a deal than foreclosing and trying to unload a property in a depressed market. The trouble for Sharon Amaral was that Albuquerque never went through the boom and it wasn’t going through the bust either. Real estate prices had remained low but stable. Our S&L crooks hadn’t had the nerve or the imagination of their neighbors in Arizona.

  “How’s it going?” I asked when Sharon answered the phone.

  “It sucks, if you really want to know,” she replied. Tommie and Joey, her twins, were screaming in the background, and Sharon sounded close to tears herself. I had a vision of dirty faces, sticky fingers, runny mascara, toys on the floor, stupid pets, an ex-husband who was in a ba
r somewhere having a brewski, and a run-down ranch house in a declining neighborhood, which was Sharon’s and the twins’ only hope of financial security.

  “How much are your mortgage payments?” I asked.

  “Two fifty.” Not much in the big picture, and nothing at all to the top one percent of our society who controlled most of the wealth, the rich who kept on getting richer. In a lot of places, you couldn’t even find a property with a $250-a-month mortgage. But a blip is a mountain when you’re broke.

  “Who holds the mortgage?” I asked.

  “New West.” It had been a local bank, locally owned, locally managed, until a few months before, when it collapsed and was taken over by a larger bank in Phoenix.

  “How long have you had the house?”

  “Seven years.”

  “Is there any chance you could just pay the interest?” I knew the answer before I asked. Even after seven years, 80 percent of the payment would still be interest.

  “No.”

  “You could try to get social services to track Bobby down and make him pay, but they’re overloaded and it’ll take a while.” If they ever found him at all. She could also hire a private investigator—if she had any money, but if she had any money why waste it looking for a deadbeat like Bobby Amaral? “Is there anybody—family, maybe—who can help with the payments?”

  “Are you kidding?” She laughed. “They’re worse off than I am.”

  The next question was, if she couldn’t pay her mortgage interest or a private investigator, how was she ever going to pay me? I didn’t ask. There was always the possibility that I could resolve this with a phone call. “I’ll call the bank and see what I can do.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  I got Joe Bench, the only person I knew at New West, on the phone. “Jeez, Neil, I don’t think I can help,” he said. I could picture the sincere concern on his earnest face while he was saying it and his fingers tapping a pencil against his desk, but the friendly-local-banker act doesn’t fool me. Every litigator knows that the last person you ever want to put on a jury is a banker; his job is to say no, and bankers’ hearts are hardened to it. “All the mortgages are being handled out of Phoenix now.”