The Lies that Bind Read online

  Cindy sipped her tea and moved the conversation back to a more entertaining subject. “I hear you’ve got a, um, young hunk, Neil.”

  “The Kid? He’s too skinny to be a hunk. Who told you that?”

  “My mother.”

  “Your mother said the Kid is a hunk?”

  “Not exactly. She said he was tall, thin, had lots of black hair and was … Spanish.”

  “Is that anything like being a spic?”

  Cindy threw up her hands. “You know my mother.”

  “Actually, he lives in Albuquerque, was born in Argentina, grew up in Mexico. His father is of Spanish descent, his mother Italian. He speaks English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. He has a business here. He has a green card. I’d say that makes him an American.”

  “Hey, you don’t have to defend him to me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you getting in deep?”

  “Not that deep.”

  “So is he good-looking or not?”

  “He’s all right. The Kid doesn’t care what he looks like.”

  “Don’t bet on it. The older Michael got, the more he looked like Emiliano, and that was a problem for Whit. Here, I want to show you something.” She took a small box out of her purse and opened it. Inside was a silver heart-shaped locket on a bed of cotton. The locket was engraved on the back with the initials VF. Cindy opened it and showed me the picture inside, a handsome young couple smiling like newlyweds for the camera, a fair-haired boy, a dark-haired girl. “Michael and Justine,” she said.

  “People still wear lockets?” I asked. “It seems kind of old-fashioned.”

  “This one had been in Justine’s family for ages. Mina Alarid gave it to me at the funeral Sunday. She said Justine would want me to have it.”

  “What does VF stand for?”

  “Verónica Falcón. It was Justine’s grandmother’s name.”

  I examined the picture. I still thought Michael looked a lot more like Cindy than Emilio, and I said so.

  “Really?” she asked, surprised. “Michael and Whit never got along very well, and it got worse as Michael got older. That’s why he came here to live with Mother. I had Michael for such a short time, Neil, and I loved him so much. He was a wonderful kid. I wish you could have known him. You would have loved him too. Losing him was like cutting my heart out with a pair of pinking shears and flushing it down the john. Sometimes I’ve almost wished I’d had an abortion. I wouldn’t have had Michael, but I wouldn’t have lost him either. You know I would have had an abortion, but Mother found out I was pregnant and wouldn’t let me. Besides, I didn’t have the nerve.”

  “It takes courage to raise a child too,” I said. And to have an illegitimate child back then took a lot.

  “But an abortion? They performed them on the kitchen table with a paring knife and no anesthesia. Remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Emilio enlisted and went to Vietnam when Mother wouldn’t let us get married. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” That’s what the sixties were like. The women had illegal abortions, and the men fought an illegal war. Both of them confronted their darkest fears, found out exactly what they were capable of, and nobody was ever the same again.

  The phone on the kitchen counter rang. Cindy stared as if it were a coiled snake and let it go on ringing. It takes a lot of patience or a lot of denial to sit beside a ringing phone. I don’t have that much of either. I was close to picking it up myself, when Cindy sighed and reached for the receiver. “Hello,” she said in a tentative voice and then: “This is Mrs. Reid.”

  She kept a message pad beside the phone, and she drew birds in flight on it while she listened. “You’ll get it next week,” she said. She hung up and went back to our talk. “I’ve envied you sometimes, Neil.”

  “Why?” Because I wasn’t married? Because I was a lawyer? Because I had a lover who was younger and darker and fixed cars for a living?

  “Because you’ve had so many men. I’ve only had two, Emiliano and Whit.”

  She’d hit the high end and the low, maybe what was in between was filler. “It only takes one good one,” I said.

  “Guys always liked you. Why, do you think?”

  Because even back then I had the husky voice of a woman who smoked? “They didn’t like me that much.”

  “Yeah, they did. Come on, what was it?”

  “Tits.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Basically. Do you ever wonder what it will be like to walk into a bar or anywhere else and not have every guy in the place staring at them? It’s like going through life holding an armful of squirming puppies. I kind of look forward to being a gray, sagging old lady that nobody notices.”

  “There’s got to be more to it than your body.”

  “Men are easy; you like them, they like you. My mother always liked men; maybe it’s genetic.”

  Cindy probably remembered that my mother was a lonesome highway that I didn’t often travel on, but she took a tentative step. “They say the best thing you can do for your daughter is give her a happy mother. Was your mother happy, Neil?”

  “Why not?” I asked. “She always did exactly what she wanted to do.” That was about as far as I was willing to go. “What about yours? “

  “Are you kidding? She knows duty, she knows doing the right thing, she knows survival, but happy? That’s one word she’ll never know the meaning of.”

  The phone rang again. Cindy picked it up on the third ring. She listened for a while, said okay and hung up. “Whit broke his glasses,” she told me. “He’s downtown at the Small Business Association. He works there as a volunteer, helping minority businesses get started, and he wants me to bring him his extra pair.”

  Working as a volunteer for anything sounded out of character for the self-centered Whit. I let that one go by, but I had my say about the rest of it. “Whit wants you to go all the way downtown to bring him another pair of glasses?”

  “It’s not that far, and I can drop you off at Mighty on the way.”

  “The Mighty van will pick me up here. Whit’s a grown man. Why can’t he just tape his glasses back together?”

  “That’s the way grown men are, Neil. Spoiled. The ones who grew up rich anyway. They’re told from childhood that they’re wonderful, and they believe every word of it.” She stood up and grabbed her purse. “I think we should get going. He’ll complain if I’m late.”

  “Let him.”

  “It’s not worth the aggravation. Believe me.”

  It was her house and her husband, and she was determined, so I followed her out to her car, a beat-up blue station wagon with Arizona plates and a country club sticker on the rear window.

  On our way to Mighty we passed the Arroyo del Oso soccer field, where a girls’ game was in progress. The girls wore short plaid uniforms and knee socks. One of them scored a goal, and while her teammates cheered, she ran down the field strong and graceful as an antelope. When she reached the end, she did a cartwheel and a flip that were victory in motion. Some progress had been made in the last twenty years, I thought. Girls had learned how to run.

  8

  WHEN CINDY DROPPED me off at Mighty, Ramón Ortiz was standing at the counter, surrounded by admirers, two miniskirted young women with big blond hair and one older woman with tight blue curls.

  “Is my car ready?” I asked, pushing through to the counter.

  “Neil Hamel, right?” He studied me with eyes that seemed considerably less cavalier than they had in the morning.

  “Right.”

  He pulled out my bill, and I paid with plastic. He searched through the keyboard and found my keys among a bunch that had probably been sitting on their hooks as long as or longer than mine. There were only two keys on my ring—one to the Nissan’s door, one to its trunk—but some people kept all their keys on one ring, I noticed: keys to their cars, their houses, their mailboxes, maybe even their hearts. They left them here all day on Ramón Ortiz’s keybo
ard, disobeying one of nature’s more important laws: never trust a man who knows he’s good-looking. A guy wearing a grease-monkey suit came in from the shop and took a set of keys from the rack.

  “You guys aren’t very careful with your keys,” I said to Ramón.

  He handed me mine with a look that said: So? His words, however, were “What is it you do?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I replied, expecting to be either asked for advice or dismissed as a scumbag.

  “Verdad?” he replied.

  “Yeah,” I said. True.

  ******

  On my way back to the office I took a detour by the Albuquerque Women’s Club on Siringo, where Martha had attended her two-martini meeting. It was a sprawling one-story stucco building landscaped with the kind of non-native plants that take water greedily from the environment and give back generously in pollen. The garden club met here, I knew, as well as the AWC. I drove down the driveway, which ended in a parking lot. The parking spaces started behind the building, circled the lot and were filled with large American cars. Nobody makes them larger. Anyone who parked on the far side of the lot facing away from the building wouldn’t see the front of the car before getting into it. If you parked the same way when you got home, you wouldn’t see it then either. If you were under the influence, you might not notice if your car wobbled or handled funny. It was a long shot, but it was one way Martha Conover and her car might have been set up. Another was in the unaccounted-for hour between the time she left here and the time Justine Virga’s body was found in the road.

  A meeting had just ended, and women were coming out of the building, saying good-bye to each other and walking toward their cars. They were gray- and white-haired ladies, well dressed and prosperous-looking. There wasn’t much physically to distinguish one from another. No one was enormously fat, exceptionally tall, strikingly beautiful. No one was emitting any more pheromones than anyone else. I wondered what it’s like when looks and capacity to attract men are no longer a factor and you’re judged not on what you’ve been given and worked to preserve but on what you’ve done, what you’ve raised, what you own. The path I was taking, that wouldn’t be much.

  The ladies finished their long good-byes and drove away. I got out of the Nissan and took a look around. The only outside lights were attached to the building, I noticed, and wouldn’t do much to light the far side of the lot. I examined the paved area, looking for evidence like broken glass or metal on the ground, but I didn’t find any.

  I got back in the Nissan and drove north on Siringo, the route Martha would have taken on her way home. About ten minutes from the Women’s Club and five from Los Cerros, there’s an empty fifteen-acre parcel of land called the Atalaya lot, which is well known in the legal and real estate professions for the amount of litigation it has produced. There aren’t many large empty lots left in the Heights, and developers had developed a yen for this one. Fifteen dry and barren acres had generated reams of paper and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees simply because of their location, location and location, the big three in the real estate world. The developers figured the highest and best use would be as a shopping mall, but the neighbors disagreed. The local residents happened to be people with money and influence. They’d fought the developers and—so far anyway—had won. But the developers hadn’t given up, and every time they came back they had a more grandiose plan, and each hearing became more acrimonious than the last. A yellow sign attached to a stick in the ground told me another hearing was coming up soon.

  I wanted to take a closer look at this place, so I parked the Nissan behind the branch library on Siringo and walked across the lot, following pink scars, the paths dirt bikes had scraped, peeling the skin from the near-naked landscape. This particular piece of town had been imprinted by the tires of boys, not the watering cans of women. Some limp weeds had taken root, had their brief moment in the sun and turned to straw, but most of the ground cover was just passing through. Lizards rustled in the tumbleweeds. A rabbit crossed the path, stopped, wiggled its ears, kept on going. Plastic bags blew into the tumbleweeds and got hung up there. The neighborhood dogs had found their own best use for the property, so I kept my eyes on the ground while I walked it.

  When I reached the concrete diversion channel that bisects the lot, I stopped at the edge and looked around. A hawk’s black silhouette rode the air waves. A triangular kite got a lift, took a dive. A jet trail disintegrated in a sky that used to be bluer. The Sandias wandered south till they became the Manzanos. I was in the middle of the city and surrounded by space, standing on wasteland; just a few acres away, a condo development sat in a green oasis. A sprinkler system had made the difference.

  The diversion channel, which carried runoff from the Sandias to the Rio Grande, was ten feet deep and dry as bone. I followed it east across the lot to Calle San Sebastián. When the street is major, the diversion channels go underneath it. San Sebastián is not that heavily trafficked, and the channel had cut it in two. There’s a church on the north side, a school on the south, and you can’t get from one to the other unless you go through the ditch, which is marked by yellow wooden barricades to keep people out. Diversion channels present a powerful temptation to the more reckless members of our society, especially when the channels are full of water and the reckless are full of alcohol. The school parking lot was full now, but it wouldn’t be later. The church was hidden from view by a high stucco wall that ran along San Sebastián. I was five minutes away from Los Cerros, but this was as lonely a spot as you’d find in the city, and at night it would be even lonelier.

  There was an opening in the concrete wall of the diversion channel, where a pipe drained in. “Darlene Bador’s hole” some adolescent had painted in large orange letters. I hoped Darlene would forget about it and grow up to find some kind of personal power, but I hadn’t come here to worry about Darlene Bador. It was Justine Virga and Martha Conover that I was thinking about. There were places on either side of the channel where cars had driven onto the lot and parked. The kinds of places where, in the old days, you used to find condoms in the morning and maybe you still did. The dirt was crisscrossed with tire tracks, too many and too mingled to distinguish any one. On the school side, where I was standing, I saw a large dark spot where someone had changed his oil. I inched my way down the steep side wall of the channel and up the other side, where I found a patch of broken glass. Some shards were clear, and some were tinted sunglass brown. Headlights? I wondered. A windshield? I picked up a couple of pieces and put them in my pocket.

  Someone could have hot-wired Martha’s car, I thought, and driven it here while she was at the AWC meeting or after she went to bed. Someone with keys could have done it faster and been less conspicuous. Justine could have been run over on this lot and the body moved to Los Cerros. Who would be around on a rainy, dark night to notice? A criminal who really wanted privacy could have moved the barricades farther down the road and prevented access altogether. It was also possible that Justine was killed somewhere else, hit by another car, that Martha’s car was dented and evidence planted on it here. I saw oil on the ground, but I didn’t see anything that looked like blood. Blood washes away; oil lingers forever. It had rained hard on Halloween, and the diversion channel would have been as full and churning as the Rio Grande in snowmelt. Any evidence that fell or got thrown in would have washed to Belen by now.

  I felt exposed suddenly and vulnerable as a rabbit when the shadow of a hawk passes overhead, as if something dark and hungry were watching me. A big gray American car with tinted glass drove down San Sebastián on the other side of the ditch. Whoever was in it could see me clearly, but all I saw was dark glass. The car stopped when it got to the barricades, stared at me with a blank black windshield, then backed down the road, making it impossible for me to get the license number.

  ******

  When I got back to the office I called Saia and told him what I’d observed. “The Atalaya lot,” he said. “People park there all the t
ime. They walk their dogs, change their oil. At night kids get drunk or get laid. They fight, headlights are broken. What’s unusual about that? We’ll have less trouble when it’s turned into a mall, gets paved over and lit.”

  “Maybe it will never get turned into a mall.”

  “Right. I know a bridge in Massachusetts you might like to buy too.”

  “It’s not far from the Women’s Club and Los Cerros,” I said. “Someone could have hot-wired Martha’s car, driven it over there while she was at the AWC meeting or after she got home, hit Justine and driven the car back. There was time. The APD has Martha’s car. You could check out the glass on the lot and see if it matches.”

  “Come on, Neil, your client hit her. Admit it. She ran Justine Virga down in a Halcion mad-on. And now she’s got a Halcion forget-on and doesn’t want to remember she did it. Who would hot-wire a car in the Women’s Club parking lot anyway? It’s too busy.”

  “Los Cerros isn’t that busy. You’re the ones who said no one passed through there in the forty-five minutes between the time Martha got home and the time the body was found.”

  “Martha Conover’s car can’t be hot-wired.”

  “Why not?”

  “It has a kill switch.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An antitheft device that disconnects the battery. You push it in when you park the car, unlock it when you’re ready to go.”

  “Suppose someone had a key?”

  “Like who?”

  “She left her car at Mighty the week before Halloween,” I said. “The key was sitting around on a keyboard all morning just waiting to be copied.”

  “All right,” Saia said. “I’ll send someone out to Atalaya to take a look.”

  While I was talking to Saia, my partner, Brink, wandered into my office, acting like a bored teenager waiting for someone to tell him what to do and how to do it. “Stop drumming your fingers on my desk and get a life” was the assignment I wanted to give him. He humped his eyebrows as I hung up, which meant a question was on the way.