The Other Side of Death Read online

  “Over there,” she waved in a southerly direction. “Across the river. He’s got a big dog and a blue-and-white Chevy.”

  “Gracias,” I replied.

  “Por nada,” she said.

  I got back on the highway, passed the Cuyamunga Stone Company Rock Shop and turned right. The radio was tuned to KMIO, K-mio, Espanola, Santa Fe, playing songs of love gone bad full of “lo sientos” and “te quieros.” I came to a bridge across a fifty-foot-wide riverbed with three inches of water down the middle—it would take some wishful thinking to call it a river.

  Raquel hadn’t told me which way to turn once I’d crossed the bridge and I had two choices, not three; turning around and going back was not an option I’d consider. If you’re lost in a labyrinth, they say, keep turning left, so I did. After about a quarter of a mile I came to a trailer with a blue-and-white Chevy in the driveway and a black-and-white malamute tied to a tree. The trailer wasn’t much to look at, but it was shaded by a couple of tall and aged cottonwood trees and it had a spectacular view across the dry river to the mountains turning to sangria in the setting sun. The place was well taken care of: a fruit tree was about to come into bloom, wood was neatly stacked in a pile. The car and dog were well cared for, too. The dog had a large, majestic head. His face was white with a black mask. His ears picked up but he didn’t yap, wag his tail, stand up or make a fuss when he saw me. He was a very calm dog, a breed that was probably not inbred or popular enough to have picked up nervous habits. The car was a two-tone Chevy from the fifties with lots of chrome in immaculate condition. I stood by the door for a minute admiring it.

  Pete Vigil came out of the trailer tapping the ground with a stick he used as a cane. He was a small, bowlegged old man with white hair and a mustache to match. He had a kind of rolling cowboy walk pulling himself along with the cane. When he reached the Chevy he asked me in musical English, “You wanna swap?”

  “It’s a great-looking car,” I answered.

  “I’ve had it for thirty years.”

  “How many miles you got on it?”

  “Fifty-three thousand. I only use it to go to the store. You got air conditioning in that one?” He pointed to the legger.

  “Yup.”

  “A radio? Automatic transmission?”

  “That, too.”

  “It’s a deal.” He shook my hand and smiled. “They call me Pete Vigil.”

  “Neil Hamel.” I smiled back.

  “That’s my dog. His name is El Rey de los Machos, but I call him King for short. I wouldn’t swap him for anybody.”

  “I wouldn’t either. He’s a beauty.” King watched us calmly, acknowledging his worth. Pete Vigil seemed to be a man who took care of what was his.

  “What can I do you for?” he asked.

  “I’m a friend of Lonnie Darmer, the woman you found at the ruins.”

  “She was your friend?” He shook his head sadly. “I’m very sorry for you. You want to come inside for something to drink?”

  “Okay.” I followed him into the trailer to his neat and tiny kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, took out two pink plastic bears and poured us some juice.

  “Me and King go for a walk every morning,” he said. “King don’t get excited much, but he smelled something wrong and he took me to your friend. She was dead, you know, when we got there. She looked like a little girl sleeping curled up but she was dead.”

  “Was she in a sleeping bag?”

  “No, only her coat, thrown over her like she was trying to keep warm. The fire had gone out.”

  “Was there anything under her head for a pillow?”

  “No, it was on the sand.”

  “Did you see any footprints?”

  “Everywhere. The ruins are full of footprints.”

  Especially after the police got there, I thought. “The police say it was suicide, but I was with her that night. I can’t believe that.”

  “You wouldn’t want to believe it, if you were her friend.”

  “Did you see anything wrong, any sign that someone else had been there?”

  “No, I didn’t see anything. She looked very peaceful. How could somebody have killed her when she wasn’t bleeding or hurt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry for you and for her family. It’s very, very sad to lose a child or a friend. I know because I lost my boy in Vietnam, and it was the saddest thing that happened to me ever. I’ll show you.” He went into a tiny bedroom and came back with a picture of his son, a boy in a marine uniform, part Indian, part Hispanic, with straight black hair, liquid brown eyes and cheeks that had been tinted rosy pink in the photograph. He was beautiful enough to make you cry, even if you didn’t know he was dead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said hoping it wasn’t tragedy that had made Pete Vigil so kind.

  He lifted a pink bear. “Some more juice?”

  “No thanks.” I pulled out one of my cards and gave it to him. “Would you call me if you think of anything?”

  “I sure will.” He looked at the card, HAMEL AND HARRISON, it said, LAW OFFICES. “A lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a good thing to be. If me and King think of anything, I will call you.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  6

  THE SANGRE DE CRISTO Mountains which frame Santa Fe turn sangria pink at sunset. Albuquerque lies at the base of the Sandias, gray hulks of mountains that look like resting elephants to me. While I drove to work the next morning I thought about the differences between the two places. I do that after I’ve been north, maybe because somebody always says “Albuquerque? Why would anybody want to live there?” Santa Fe is sixty miles away, two thousand feet higher, three hundred thousand people smaller, and the difference is greater than any of these. It’s the difference between historic preservation boards and urban sprawl, the walled in and the wide open, second homes and the homeless, the rich and the middle class. The closest thing Albuquerque has to the City Different is its historic district, Old Town, which has an Adobe of God, narrow streets and the kind of tourist shops they call galleries in Santa Fe. Except for Old Town, Albuquerque is a grid with parallel and perpendicular streets named after the numbers, the states, the elements—Silver, Gold, Copper and Lead, where my law office is located.

  It’s a place of fast-food chains and strip development, a place where you find Big O Tires, Octopus Car Wash, Desert Treasures Indian Jewelry, Checker Auto Parts, Safeway, Furrs Cafeteria, Custom Hitches U-Haul Rentals, Weinerschnitzel, 7-11, Fat Humphrey’s Sub Sandwiches, Soupski at Schlotsky’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers in a couple of city blocks. We know something about ugly in Albuquerque, but there are times as the sun sets or rises that it lights on a gas station or wall and transforms Lead to gold. A legend that lured the greedy conquistadors ever deeper into New Mexico was the Seven Cities of Cibola, supposedly made of gold. It may have been flecks of straw in the adobe that were illuminated by the rising or waning light, but at the right time of day any city in New Mexico turns golden. The gaudy and cheap appear ugly in old Santa Fe, but here, driving to work early or coming home late, the tacky can be inspiring. A red stoplight is dazzling against the orange sky, plastic flowers are brighter than real and neon shimmers in the sunset.

  It was midmorning, however, when I got to my office and Lead was lead. Anna and Brink had already finished breakfast and were wondering what to do next. She handed me a message saying Bunny Darmer had called from a Motel 6.

  “Darmer?” said Anna. “Why is that name familiar?”

  “Lonnie Darmer was a friend of mine,” I answered.

  “What do you mean … was?” asked Brink. I had forgotten that he’d made moves on Lonnie during one of the off times from Rick. She had been depressed, but not that depressed.

  “Wait a minute,” said Anna. “I know where I heard the name. Wasn’t that the woman who died last weekend near Santa Fe?”
/>   “Yes.”

  “Lonnie’s dead?” asked Brink.

  “That city is not safe.” That came from Anna, who thought a lot about the subject. She was at the dangerous age, between fifteen and twenty-eight, when 73 percent of the crimes against women are committed, and most of them are committed by men the victims know: lovers, husbands, ex-lovers, ex-husbands. Only 9 percent of known murderers of women are strangers, although those kinds of crimes are on the rise. I get these statistics from FBI studies; they are numbers I remember. Anna continued, “The police called it a suicide, right? Ha! Do you remember the story about the guy in Taos whose head was found in one room and his body in another? They said that was a suicide, too. It pisses me off. How many girls my age have disappeared in Santa Fe in the last few years? Five? Six? And every time it happens the police say ‘A twenty-year-old girl disappears, that’s no crime.’ Then a year later somebody’s dog shows up with the skull in its mouth.”

  “What happened?” Brink asked. Apparently he hadn’t watched TV or read a paper this week.

  “Lonnie was found dead in a cave at the ruins Sunday morning. She’d been drinking and taking Valium,” I told him.

  Anna swiveled her chair away from her typewriter. She was sitting with her black nylon legs crossed, tapping a spike-heeled, pointy-toed shoe against the desk. Anna was one person you’d never see in running shoes. There was an advantage to the spike heels she wore; they kept her out of places it was wiser not to go. She was of a generation that didn’t feel the need to take risks and explore dark alleys, one that had gone back to the basic American values of comfort and greed. “They’re saying she went out to that place alone at night? Forget it. What girl in her right mind would do that?”

  “A woman who wanted to die, according to the police,” I replied.

  “If she wanted to die, she could have done it in her own bed,” Anna said. Her generation didn’t go out in the wilderness to meditate either.

  “Not really, because I spent the night at her place after my car broke down.”

  “You were with her? Was something wrong?” Brink’s eyes were filling up.

  “Rick was getting married. She was upset about that.”

  “If she wanted to be alone, she could have gone to a motel,” said Anna.

  “Maybe she didn’t have the money,” Brink said.

  “She could have charged it. What difference would it make if she were going to kill herself anyway? Girls don’t go into lonely places alone to die. Men take them there to kill them.”

  “How old was she?” asked Brink.

  “Thirty-three.”

  “So young,” he sighed.

  I thought so, too, but it probably wasn’t so young to Anna. The phone rang. Before she answered it, she told me, “I hope those cops don’t get away with this.”

  ******

  The Darmers’ Motel 6 was on University in the shadow of I-25 where trucks roared through all night long; not a place anybody stayed for more than one night. When Bunny answered the door it became obvious why she’d insisted on meeting me there and not at my office. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet and looked like she might never get dressed again. She was wearing a flannel nightgown, flip-flops and an old plaid bathrobe, the same bathrobe, maybe, whose shoulders Lonnie’s head had rested on as a baby thirty-three years ago, the same bathrobe she put on every morning for cornflakes and coffee with Arthur, the same bathrobe in which she was likely to die. I could see her getting into a compact car with Arthur wearing that same bathrobe and driving back home to Roswell. I could see her sitting in that house in Roswell, smoking menthol cigarettes, watching soap operas every day, wearing that bathrobe. She’d let her hair go gray and forget to wash and set it. There were already silver roots at the edge of the gold. She hadn’t bothered to put on any new makeup or wash off yesterday’s, and there were black streaks of mascara shadowing her eyes.

  She let me in to their room (vintage Motel 6) and motioned me to a chair. She and Arthur sat down on the bed. There was a wrought-iron chandelier over a phony wooden table, brown wall-to-wall carpeting and white fake stucco walls. The curtains were drawn, the TV was on but the sound and color weren’t and a gray horizontal pattern flickered across the screen like a transmission from Voyager II, a galaxy away.

  “Bunny’s not feeling well,” Arthur said, patting her hand, which lay between them on the tacky motel spread. He didn’t look so good himself; his eyes had a glazed stare, his cheeks were caving in and his chin was sprouting gray and white stubble.

  “Let me be, Arthur.” Bunny took her hand back and opened a manila envelope that lay on the bed. “I want to show you something, Neil. This is a copy of the Office of Medical Investigations report they gave us.”

  It said pretty much what I had expected, that the most probable time of death was in the early morning hours of March 18. The only signs of trauma on the deceased’s body were the bruises that could have been caused by rough consensual sex. No defense wounds, no scratches, no needle marks. Her blood alcohol level was high and there was a significant amount of Valium in her system. Not enough of either to have killed her separately, but in combination they could have. The body was covered with a down coat, she was lying beside the ashes of a fire, there was no evidence of hypothermia. The deceased had a history of alcohol and substance abuse, she had been despondent over the breakup of a relationship, she had been seen drinking heavily earlier in the evening, there was an empty container of Valium in her pocket.

  “What do you think?” Bunny asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “You were with my baby the night she died, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell us what happened,” Arthur asked, patting Bunny’s hand again.

  I told them. When I got to the part about Lonnie crying over Rick, Arthur snapped, “She’d be alive today if it wasn’t for that lousy SOB.”

  “Be quiet, Arthur,” Bunny said, but this time she let his hand rest on top of hers on the motel spread: his was thin with brown liver spots and blue veins tunneling under the skin. Hers was plump, white, hand-lotion soft, and wore a microscopic diamond in a narrow gold ring. I continued my story and when I had finished Bunny asked me if I thought Lonnie had acted like she wanted to kill herself.

  “Not really,” I said, “but it could have been an accident. Maybe she went out there to meditate, got upset or frightened, took one too many Valiums.”

  “I don’t believe that either,” said Bunny.

  “There were no marks on the body that could have caused her death.”

  “They didn’t look hard enough,” Bunny answered. “My baby didn’t have rough consensual sex. Somebody raped her.”

  “There are a few things that bother me,” I told her. “One is, Who cleaned up before the wake?”

  “Bunny,” Arthur said. “She always cleans when something goes wrong.”

  “I stayed up all night Sunday cleaning. I couldn’t sleep,” Bunny said.

  “Did you take the journal?” I asked.

  “What journal?” replied Arthur.

  “The journal that was in the bedside table.”

  “No,” said Bunny. “There wasn’t any journal there on Sunday. Somebody stole it, I bet.”

  “There’s another thing.” I took the red sleeping-bag knob encased in plastic from my purse and showed it to them.

  “What’s that?” asked Arthur.

  “I think it’s the knob that goes on the tie to a sleeping bag. I went out to the cave at the ruins to see what I could find and this is it.”

  “You went out there?” Bunny shivered, pulling her robe tight. “I could never go to that place myself.”

  It’s what lawyers do—all the miserable things people can’t or won’t do for themselves. “For a while I thought you might want to see her ashes scattered there.”

  “Never. My daughter will be buried in a cemetery in Roswell where she belongs. If she’d stayed home, she’d be alive today.”


  “Her sleeping bag was in the car Saturday night,” I said. “It wasn’t there at the wake. Did either of you take it or put it in the trunk?”

  “There wasn’t any sleeping bag in the car when we got it,” Bunny said, “just an old blanket.”

  “The cops probably stole it,” Arthur said.

  “It’s always a possibility,” I replied.

  Bunny sat up straighter and pulled her robe tighter. “I’ll tell you one thing, my daughter did not commit suicide, no matter what this … this report…” She shook the manila envelope. “…Or the police say. She was murdered, and we are going to prove it.”

  With what? I wondered. There were no witnesses who’d come forward. The evidence we didn’t have could fill a black hole, the evidence we might have rattled around in the palm of my hand. As Bunny straightened up and stared at me with faded blue eyes shadowed by grief and mascara but fierce with determination, I saw a woman who would get dressed again, who would wash and dye her hair, a woman who would hire a lawyer to go to the police station and demand that her daughter’s death be investigated, go to the district attorney if the police didn’t respond, and to the attorney general if the DA didn’t respond. If the case ever came to trial this woman would take an active part in the prosecution. She’d listen to every word of testimony if she were admitted to the courtroom, and spend every minute outside the courtroom door if she were not. This was a woman whose fierce desire to see that justice was served would give her strength and could actually bring her to the moment when her daughter’s killer was convicted. The convicted might get a life sentence, might cop a plea and get only fifteen, might be a juvenile and be sentenced to a couple of years at the school in Springer. It would put a period at the end of the paragraph, but it would never be enough, would never bring her daughter back, and what then? Would she go back to Roswell and get into her plaid bathrobe all over again?

  Bunny watched me with her runny blue steely eyes. “Will you represent us?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  ******

  After I left them I drove over to the County Court to file some papers and parked the legger in the underground parking lot. When you leave the brilliant sunshine of New Mexico, it takes a blind moment for your eyes to adjust to the dark. I didn’t feel like going back to the office yet so I took a walk after I filed the papers. Downtown is not a neighborhood lawyers like to walk in, even if they do conduct their business here. They may sit in the sunshine of Civic Plaza and eat their lunch, but afterwards they get back to work. The people who hang out downtown—and maybe even live here—are the guys with bedrolls in Crossroads Park, which fronts on Central, the old Route 66, the road hobos once hitchhiked across the country on, looking for jobs. We don’t have hobos anymore, we don’t even have bums, we have the homeless, but it seems to me there was a time when we didn’t have any of these. The ranks of the homeless have increased exponentially in Albuquerque and a lot of other places thanks to the Reagan administration. Someday people will look back on the Reagan years as the big nap without the responsibility. While the administration dozed and stole, the nation’s infrastructure collapsed.