The Lies that Bind Page 5

  I looked deeper into the Halcion container. Would Martha miss three or four? I wondered. Probably not. I took three and put them in my pocket. I’d never taken Halcion, and I wanted to see what a few plus some drinks would do, but my motives were not entirely investigatory or pure, I’ll admit. Every now and then I lift something just to prove to myself that I can.

  On my way back to the living room I passed an open door, stopped and looked in. A typewriter sat on an antique desk along with a collection of pictures in silver frames. The doorbell rang. “Whit,” I heard Martha say. “Unlike my daughter, he is always on time.” While she went to answer the door, I stepped into the room and took a look at the typewriter. It was a Selectric, not a manual, and couldn’t be the typewriter that had typed the note. Next I looked at the pictures. The majority were of a fair-haired boy, a boy any mother—or grandmother—would be proud to claim. He started out little, curly-haired and cute and grew up tall, blond and handsome. He had dark eyes, fine features and a perfect smile. He was as good-looking as his father, but he didn’t look like him. Michael was his mother’s boy—in appearance anyway. One of those children who look so much like one parent that the other seems almost incidental. There were pictures of him as a baby with a teddy bear, as a little boy with a soccer ball, as a middle-school boy in a soccer uniform, as a teenager running down the field. There he was in a graduation cap and gown, standing next to his mother. There were no pictures of him with his girlfriend, Justine Virga, his father, Emilio Velásquez, or even his stepfather, Whit Reid. Although there were pictures of a young Whit Reid by himself, pursuing his chosen sports, holding a hunting rifle, standing next to a horse, skiing. In the only other picture of Cindy, she stood smiling with Whit on the church steps on their wedding day, a day I never saw because by then I was long gone from Ithaca, New York. Something about the frames caught my eye, and I moved up close to examine them. They were different shapes and sizes, but all were sterling silver and every one was engraved with the initials MCC.

  6

  WHIT REID WAS standing in the living room when I got back. The Whit I knew in Ithaca looked like the photographs on Martha’s desk—tall, skinny, athletic, with blond bangs that fell across his forehead. The Whit who entered Martha’s apartment was still tall and still blond, but he was no longer skinny, and his hair didn’t flop anymore—it stuck to the top of his head, where it had been slicked into place to hide a bald spot. He was wearing khaki pants, a white shirt and Top-Siders with no socks, and he’d put on a lot of weight. He looked athletic, but heavy athletic, a tackle instead of a quarterback. He reminded me of my ex-husband, Charles, who might once have been skinny athletic too, but it was long before I knew him. Sometimes I think there are only two or three types of men in the world and it’s a woman’s fate to keep meeting them over and over again.

  Whit shook my hand. He had thick fingers and was wearing a gold ring on his little finger. “Nelly,” he said using my high school nickname. “Good to see you.”

  “Hello, Whit. My name is Neil.”

  “We’re so glad to have you on Martha’s team.” He moved on to Martha and kissed her cheek. His nose was flatter and broader than I remembered, as if it had gotten broken somewhere along the way, and he wheezed when he breathed. It was the kind of thing a less secure man might have gone to the trouble to fix.

  “Would you like a drink?” asked Martha.

  “Stay put,” he replied. “I can get it myself.” He made an end run around Martha’s spindly furniture and went to the kitchen, where he helped himself to a large Jim Beam, no ice. “Neil?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Whit brought the drink back to the living room, put it on the coffee table and sat down heavily on the sofa with his legs apart and his hands resting on his knees. In one way he looked as though he belonged on the sofa, and in another way he didn’t, like a large and sloppy dog who has climbed up on the forbidden furniture so often he’s made himself at home. His glass made a wet ring on the table.

  “Whit, use a coaster,” said Martha, handing him one.

  “Oh, sorry,” Whit replied, picking up his glass and putting it on the coaster. The routine had the smooth feel of a performance they repeated often.

  Whit looked at his watch. “Cyn’s late,” he said.

  “You know our Cynthia,” Martha replied.

  “So you have your own law practice, Neil?” Whit said to me, drumming his fingers against his thighs.

  “Me and my partner.”

  “Where’s your office?”

  “On Lead.”

  “Who’s your partner? “

  “Brinkley Harrison.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “How long have you been in Albuquerque?” I asked.

  “About a month.”

  It was a little soon to know all the lawyers, but I didn’t say that. “What brought you here?” I asked. Most Arizonans consider Albuquerque the place the wind blows through on the way to Texas.

  “The recession,” he said, taking a big sip of his drink. “Albuquerque hasn’t been hit nearly as bad as Arizona. Rental units have a ninety-eight-percent occupancy rate here.” He turned to Martha. “That reminds me. I’ve been thinking about Property Management, and I don’t think they’ve been doing that brilliant a job with Los Cerros. I’d like to try someone else.”

  “Would you?” asked Martha.

  The doorbell chimed. “Now that has to be Cyn,” Whit said, looking at his watch again. He put his drink down on the coaster, pulled himself up off the sofa, dodged the coffee table and a floor lamp, went to the door and let her in.

  You have to expect changes in someone you haven’t seen for a long time, but it’s startling anyway. The Cindy I saw smiling in the doorway had been hit hard by the past twenty years. She still looked younger than her husband, but not by much. Marriage has a way of evening out the age differences. In high school Cindy had had a blond and boring prettiness that might well have turned into her mother’s china-doll perfection but hadn’t. There were crinkle lines under her eyes. She was carrying some extra weight, which softened her chin and filled out her breasts, making her seem fragile and maternal at the same time. She didn’t wear any makeup. Her fine, pale hair had been tied back at some point, but now it was falling down around her face. She wore a lavender T-shirt, baggy jeans and worn running shoes.

  “It’s great to see you, Neil,” she said, but she was looking off over my shoulder even before she finished saying it. She gave me a hug, stepped back, smiled and said, “Hello, Whit. Mother,” but she didn’t exactly look at them either. Her blue eyes were evasive, and she had the guilty manner of a woman who has been sleeping with her best friend’s lover.

  “Your shoes are wet,” Whit said.

  Cindy looked down at her feet. “You’re right. Of course.” She took the shoes off and left them beside the door. “I think it’s time to turn the sprinklers off for the season, Mother.”

  “I’ll talk to Rafael about it,” her mother said.

  “I can do it for you,” said Whit.

  “I can manage,” replied Martha.

  “I’m so glad you’re going to be representing Mother, Neil,” Cindy said. “Can you imagine? Who would have thought that you, my old hippie friend, would become a lawyer? And that you’d end up representing Mother. Or that she’d ever be charged with murder. Life is too weird sometimes.”

  “Are you considering the Halcion defense?” asked Whit, the self-appointed legal expert. Every family has at least one.

  “I only took a half,” Martha replied.

  “No charges have been filed yet,” I said.

  “How’s dinner coming?” Cindy moved into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door and looked in. One thing you can count on is that getting together for dinner will either defuse family tensions or exacerbate them. “Can I get anybody a drink?” Cindy asked, taking a tray of ice from the freezer and putting it down on the counter.

  “All right,” I said, since w
e seemed to have moved from the business part to the social part of this meeting. I got up and joined Cindy in the kitchen. Martha followed us.

  “I don’t need anything,” Martha said. She sipped her vodka more slowly than anybody I’d ever seen.

  “What’ll you have, Neil?”

  “A tequila. Up.” With some salt and lime juice to squeeze on the back of my hand was the way I liked to drink it, but I didn’t ask.

  Cindy pulled the handle on the metal ice tray and cracked loose the ice. “I don’t think Mother has any tequila in the house. “

  “I don’t,” Mother agreed.

  “How ’bout a vodka? There’s plenty of that.”

  “All right,” I said. Cindy opened the freezer and pulled out a bottle of Stolichnaya, which was smoking with cold. She took a glass from a shelf and began to pour my drink.

  “Don’t use that one,” Martha ordered. “You put those glasses in the dishwasher the last time you were here, and they came out spotty.”

  “I was trying to help, Mother.”

  “Use the ones on the second shelf.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Whit entered the kitchen and took up more than his share of the limited space.

  “Smells like roast beef,” offered Cindy.

  “Leg of lamb,” said Martha. “Baked potatoes and peas.”

  “Of course,” said Cindy.

  “Of course what?” asked Martha.

  “Peas. We always have peas with lamb, and actually, we always have them with roast beef too. Here, Neil.” Cindy handed me my vodka and not a second too soon.

  “What’s wrong with peas?” asked Martha. “I thought you liked peas.”

  “I do, Mother. Everybody likes peas. How can you not like peas? But we always have peas. With everything. You’re supposed to serve mint jelly with lamb.”

  “If you want mint jelly, there’s some in the cupboard.”

  Cindy looked through the shelves and found the jar. “Mint jelly should be cold.”

  “And just what is wrong with you tonight?” snapped Martha in her best disapproving-mother voice. In this family every sentence had at least one underlined word in it. “You’ve done nothing but criticize me ever since you walked in the door.”

  “Nothing is wrong with me, Mother. Nothing. Everything is peachy keen.”

  “It wasn’t easy raising a child on my own, you know, and I certainly didn’t get any help,” Martha said. Every paragraph in this family had at least one cliché in it too. “I always tried to do my best. I gave you a good home surrounded by beautiful things. I took Michael in when he was having trouble. It’s not my fault he met Justine.”

  “I know. I know you have beautiful things. I know you took Michael in, Mother. You don’t have to tell me. I know.” Cindy picked up the ice tray, intending to put it back in the freezer, but it fell out of her hands and smashed into the sink. The metal tray hit the stainless steel hard, and the ice clattered as it fell out. Cindy gripped the counter and stared at the ice. A silence followed that was more than welcome to me, but Whit filled it up.

  “Welcome to the Conover family,” he said.

  The hard-core members of this family, Cindy and Martha, the ones that were in it for life, looked at each other over the sink full of broken ice. “It wasn’t Justine’s fault, Mother. You’ll never understand that. Justine didn’t kill Michael. It was an accident. It’s terrible that Michael’s dead. It’s worse that Justine’s dead too. Sometimes, if you want to know, I don’t think I can stand it.”

  “It’s not my fault.”

  Cindy sighed. “Of course not. Sorry you have to listen to this, Neil.”

  I shrugged. Domestic disagreements were one way I earned my living. Everybody hates them, everybody has them. Most people would rather argue about peas and mint jelly than life and death.

  Martha took the leg of lamb out of the oven and placed it on a platter. “You carve,” she said to Whit.

  “Be glad to,” he replied.

  “Do you want another drink?”

  “A splash.” He handed her his glass, carried the platter to the table and started hacking off pieces of gray meat that appeared to have had every ounce of juice cooked out of it. As a butcher he lacked finesse. A child with a dull knife could have done it better, but the man’s right and obligation to carve the meat were a tradition that remained intact in some families.

  Dinner was served on white linen place mats. The china was white with a gold border. The flatware was engraved with the initials MCC. The candles in the silver candlesticks never got lit. The peas were soggy, the lamb overcooked. The mint jelly quivered in its crystal dish, but nobody broke through the surface tension to take a bite. The conversation concerned real estate and was dominated by Whit. I discerned a once-familiar pattern. The woman of the house was the boss when it came to domestic matters, but when the family sat down to dinner, everybody shut up and let the male dominate, especially when he talked about business—and Whit’s business was real estate. So was Martha’s and so was mine, but I’ve never considered it a fit subject for dinner conversation.

  “Interest rates are down to eight percent,” Whit said to nobody in particular, “the lowest point in twenty years. What are you paying on the mortgage here?” he asked Martha.

  “Nine and three-quarters,” she said.

  “It’s a little soon to think about refinancing. You ought to wait until there’s a full two-point spread.”

  “Really?”

  “I’d give it to next spring. The administration will want to keep the economy pumped, and the Federal Reserve’ll be cutting the prime rate. It ought to get down below eight percent by April.”

  “Did you know that Katie Pollock is living in Scottsdale, Neil?” Cindy asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  “She’s opening a day care center, and she wanted me to go into business with her, only we came here.” Her attempt to grab the conversational ball didn’t work; she got blocked by tight end Whit.

  “A day care center. Now there’s a great way to lose your shirt,” said Whit. He changed the subject to one that was more to his liking—big money. “Has anybody been watching the Keating trial?” he asked. “CNN has been televising it. Everyone’s out to get Charlie now, but they forget what a boon he was to Arizona. The economy was pumped when he had control of Lincoln.”

  Boondoggle would be more like it. A ton of office buildings, apartments and resorts were built that nobody needed or wanted. Federally insured deposits were used to pay for them and pad the pockets of Keating and his friends to the tune of a couple billion dollars. Now the empty buildings were rotting in the desert, and Charlie Cheating’s boon was going to cost every American taxpayer dearly.

  “What did he do that was so bad anyway?” asked Whit.

  “How about he invested people’s retirement income in junk bonds?” said I.

  “High-yield investments are high risk. You pay your money, you take your chances.”

  “Only he never told people what the risks were.”

  “Caveat emptor.” Let the buyer beware, which more often than not means let the buyer get fucked.

  “I saw a Cheating cartoon the other day,” I said. “He’s in jail, reaching his hand out through the bars, and a guard walks by, mumbling under his breath, ‘That goddamn Keating’s asking for the Grey Poupon again.’”

  Cindy laughed. Martha helped herself to a slice of cooked-to-death lamb. Whit said, “I don’t get it.”

  Either you have a sense of humor or you don’t. You can’t explain jokes to people like that. Whit didn’t give me a chance anyway. He went right on talking.

  “I was playing tennis today with Ed George from First Western Bank. Do you know him, Neil?”

  “No.”

  “It went three sets. He had me down four love in the third, but I rallied and took him. Ed’s not a bad tennis player, but he has a weak backhand. It’s his grip, I think. I’ve been working on mine with Jim, the pro at the country club. He teac
hes skiing at Sandia in the winter. Have you ever skied there, Nel … Neil?”

  “No,” I said again.

  “It’s not every city that has its own ski area. It’s funny that the economy in Albuquerque never took off. I was asking Ed about it when we had dinner with him on Halloween, and he doesn’t understand it either. What was the name of that place we went to, Cyn?”

  “Chez Henri.”

  “That’s right. Great desserts, but the crepes were soggy and the service was terrible. Now Taos is an interesting area. Remember when we skied there, Cyn? Great runs, super powder, but there is absolutely nothing to do at night. It’s dead as Tucson in the summer. Give me Europe or Aspen any day. I don’t understand why Ernie Blake didn’t do more to develop Taos. First Western would have backed him, I know.”

  Whit talked, Cindy and Martha ate, I yawned. Who needed Halcion when you could spend the evening with Whit, the kind of guy who warms up his vocal cords in the morning by looking in the mirror and singing “Me, me, me”? He reminded me of the joke about the man who talks about himself all evening and then says, “Enough about me. Tell me about yourself. What do you think of me?” One of nature’s laws is that the more successful men are, the more they talk and the less they listen. It’s never been my idea of bliss to sit around and listen to men talk about themselves.

  “It’s amazing how Santa Fe got through the eighties without experiencing any dip in property values at all. In fact the valuation of property in Santa Fe County increased six times. Did you know that?” Whit asked the table, but it did not answer. “The price of an average home there now is a hundred eighty thousand. It’s incredible. Most of the influx comes from second-home buyers, flex households with flex jobs. They’re the force that’s driving that economy. Here I think it’ll be high-tech. The salaries and cost of living are so much lower here than California. That’s got to make Albuquerque attractive to venture capital.” It also made us the equivalent of a third-world country. One of our fifty states was missing again.