The Other Side of Death Page 9

  He shrugged, laid the bag on his desk. Police are not always known for the care with which they store evidence, either.

  “If you don’t believe me, go downtown to Climb High and take a look at their bags,” I said.

  “How do you know it came from her sleeping bag?”

  “I don’t, but her sleeping bag was missing, and I found this a few feet from where she died.”

  “When?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Lonnie Darmer died Sunday morning.”

  “It’s not like a whole lot of people are going to break into the ruins and sleep in a cave where a woman has just died suspiciously.”

  “We went over that cave with a fine-tooth comb.”

  An Afro pick would be more like it.

  “And what was suspicious about her death anyway?” Railback asked. “She killed herself.” He squeezed the paper clip and it sprung from his fingers, pinging as it hit the desk.

  “A former medical investigator told me it was unlikely anyone would try to kill themselves with Valium. Someone could have dissolved it in a drink and given it to her. It would also be possible to smother a person or compress the carotid arteries and cut off the blood supply to the brain without leaving any bruises or marks, he said.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Robert Fitch.”

  “That sounds like Fitch. That guy thinks he’s some kind of crime expert. Just for the record, the crime lab examined your friend’s clothes and the coat she was wearing and they didn’t find any blood, semen or saliva, no hairs but hers and some cats’, no fingerprints but her own, no evidence, no crime.”

  “You didn’t examine the sleeping bag.”

  “You’re the only one says there was a sleeping bag. You mind telling me what your interest is in all this?”

  “The Darmers hired me to represent them. They’re concerned that there’s been no investigation of their daughter’s death.”

  “Maybe it’ll make ’em feel better to blame me, but I didn’t kill her. I can’t bring her back neither. Their daughter did it to herself, plain and simple. They might as well face it and the sooner the better.”

  “There is something else that bothers them. Lonnie’s journal was missing from her drawer.”

  “Well, I’m no psychic, but from what I heard about the way that girl lived, she had plenty of reasons to get rid of any record she kept.”

  “It was there the night she died.”

  “Who saw it?”

  “Me.”

  Railback lifted his palms and shrugged, as if to imply that was one more piece of evidence that only I saw. “Is that it?”

  “For the moment.” Nature’s law of bureaucratic inertia is that whenever one of our elected or appointed officials takes a position it gets engraved on his or her stony heart, and Railback’s was as stony as anyone’s. Like Robert said, he was a stubborn shit. Well, he wasn’t the only person I knew in Santa Fe County law enforcement. I happened to have gone to law school at UNM with Dennis Quinlan, who was now the district attorney. I stood up, pulled my shades down and got ready to leave.

  “Your Ray-Bans are crooked again,” Railback said.

  ******

  My next stop was Rick’s party. I drove downtown to First Associates’ office, which was in a low-slung territorial building with a long portal in front and Santa Fe blue trim on the windows and doors. Either Rick’s taste had improved or Marci Coyle had picked the spot. It gave me hope that the Ugly Building wouldn’t be so bad after all; maybe Lonnie had let emotion get in the way of judgment. I remembered an office Rick once built himself in nearby Madrid that was made out of metal and shaped like a snail on end. It made a statement, but you couldn’t stand up straight on the curly floors, the metal rusted and the skylights leaked on your head. It was built during Rick’s experimental extended-sixties period, in a New Mexico mountain town where the sixties will never die. Obviously, no historic preservation board would ever approve that. They could be tough in Santa Fe. I attended a hearing for a client a few years ago when a man (not my client, thank God) was trying to get permission to paint his window sills lilac. Trim had to be in natural colors, the Historic Preservation Board said; lilac did not qualify. The man showed up at the meeting in a purple shirt carrying a bunch of lilacs and a jar full of lilac-colored sand. The HPB was not amused, the lilac was not approved.

  Rick’s office being in downtown Santa Fe, there was no place to park and I had to drive five blocks farther before I found a space. The car in the spot ahead of me had Santa Fe plates and a bumper sticker that said FUCK OFF AND DIE, one native, maybe, who had seen too many tourists. I walked back and as I turned the corner I heard the chant, “Ugly, ugly, ugly.” While I parked a number of demonstrators had materialized in front of Rick’s office wearing ugly masks: Jim and Tammy Bakker, Ron and Nancy Reagan, Leona Helmsley, Donald Trump, Richard Nixon. Greedy people and ugly, too. The demonstrators carried signs that said STOP THE UGLY and WHO GOT $NUGGLY WITH UGLY? It was good to know that demonstrations were still alive and well. Lonnie would have been proud of them. She would have been one of them.

  The uglies annoyed the guests, but they didn’t keep anyone from going inside. Santa Fe society, in their best turquoise and silver jewelry, crossed the ugly line. I hesitate to cross a picket line myself, and I stood at the edge of the portal, obviously not one of Santa Fe’s best, wondering what to do next. Richard Nixon came up, offered me his arm and escorted me to the door. “Thanks, Dick,” I said. He nodded his large, rubber elephant-man head and his oversized jowls shook. “Stop the Ugly,” he mumbled in a voice heavily muffled by the mask.

  Once inside I made my way to the bar, where they were serving fruit, cheese and champagne. I helped myself to a glass, took a chocolate-covered strawberry and began circling the party, working my way slowly from the perimeter to the center where the model was located, keeping an eye out for Rick and wondering which of the women present was the shark-faced Marci Coyle. There were a lot of architects around talking architect talk.

  “I’ve made a conscious decision to stay inside the perimeter and manipulate the existing space.” That came from an elegant, silver-haired guy in a blazer.

  “I can understand it. A new building is a blank slate, but renovation, now there’s a living animal.” Spoken by a longhaired cohort in jeans and boots.

  “I’m dressing the bones, making no attempt at a statement beyond its own sake, you understand. As an expression of its function, the exterior will have no unnecessary apertures. I’m interested in the effect of the variant upon the mass obtained by popping out the kitchen window. The irregular symmetry of the courtyard will prepare you for the rest of the house. As you enter things become less geometric, more fluid. It may be a game but it works.”

  “It’s the only game in this town.”

  “That’s for sure. I’m making videotapes as we go and sending them to the clients.”

  “In L.A.?”

  “Yeah.”

  I needed a cigarette after that so I lit up. “Do you mind?” A fit blonde stood next to me nibbling on a slice of kiwi and sipping a designer water. She’d probably played three sets of tennis, run round the track and been to an aerobics class already today.

  “Mind what?” I asked.

  “Not smoking. This is a smoke-free environment.”

  “It is? I thought it was a party.”

  “Please,” she replied, waving her hand in front of her nose.

  I took a few more drags and looked for a place to put out my maligned Marlboro. As there were no ashtrays I was forced to fertilize a ficus tree. Eventually I made my way to Rick, who was standing beside the table that supported the model. It took a large chunk out of the center of the room. There were a lot of things wrong with the First Building; proportion was one of them, the Penitentiary Modern style was another. It did make one wonder that the Historic Preservation Board would turn down lilac and approve this. The construction most likely would be cinder block and stu
cco, but the exterior finish had the rounded look of puddled—or, in this case, muddled—adobe. It works for small, human-scaled buildings and churches, not institutionally inhuman large ones. Rick had striven for monumentality but had created a blob, leaden and massive, with tiny windows spaced high up and evenly like cells. There was a walkway along the top floor and two turrets that would provide good lookouts for guards. The central courtyard was huge and user unfriendly, with wrought-iron grillwork that resembled bars, a perfect place for prisoners to riot or exercise, but no place anyone would want to sit and have a drink or coffee. As Lyndon Baines Johnson once said about his own portrait, it was the ugliest thing I ever saw.

  “What do you think?” asked the proud architect.

  “I’m a little surprised that the Historic Preservation Board approved it,” I replied.

  “Why? They know the value of a good project.”

  “They know the value of something. Well, if anything goes wrong, and your building doesn’t get built here, you can always sell the plans to the Texas Department of Corrections.”

  “You know, that’s just about what I’ve come to expect from you, Neil, a bitter, smart-ass remark.”

  “And this is just about what I’ve come to expect from you—stupid, ugly crap.”

  “Just because your life hasn’t turned out the way you wanted…” said the newly-successful-and-proud-of-it architect.

  “What’s wrong with my life?”

  “I have to tell you? You have a two-bit law practice for starters, you can’t afford a new car or decent clothes and you have a greasy-fingered garage mechanic—a young one—for a lover.”

  “You want to know something? My greasy-fingered young mechanic knows a hell of a lot more about love than you’ll ever know. I’m not talking about pursuit or conquest, I’m not talking about technique, I’m talking about love.” No doubt everyone in earshot was eavesdropping on this conversation, former lover talk.

  “Oh, yeah?” He smiled one of those wide smiles that bared his canines. “How long has it been, anyway, since we, um…”

  That’s the kind of guy who mistakes any interaction between a man and a woman for foreplay. “As far as I’m concerned we didn’t,” I said.

  He put down his champagne glass as if to imply he was through with me. “It’s been great seeing you. Why don’t we get together again in another fifteen years?”

  “I’m not finished yet.”

  “Now that you’ve crucified me as a lover and an architect, what’s left?”

  I lowered my voice. The part of this conversation that might be amusing to an audience was over. “I want to know where Lonnie went the night she died.”

  “To the ruins,” he said.

  “I mean before that.”

  “How the hell should I know? You were the last person to see her alive, weren’t you?” He was trying to keep his voice down, but it was a struggle.

  “She told me she wanted to see you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So, where were you that night?”

  “Home.”

  “With Marci?”

  “Alone. Marci went back to Texas for the weekend. What’s your problem, Neil? You’re trying to blame me and Marci when you’re the one who let Lonnie go off alone and stoned?”

  “I didn’t let her go. She took off.”

  “And you couldn’t have prevented it? How come I always get the blame for Lonnie? Isn’t that what the women’s movement is all about—women taking responsibility for themselves? Blame yourself, if you want to, that she’s dead, blame her, blame her mother, but leave me out of it.” His voice was losing the battle to keep quiet.

  “Shh,” I whispered, trying to bring the conversation back to a private level. “Maybe she didn’t commit suicide.”

  “You think she was murdered? Someone slid Valium down her throat? Isn’t that what you’d like to believe so you don’t have to feel any responsibility yourself?”

  “Someone could have mashed it up and dissolved it in a drink. Someone could also have compressed the carotid arteries, cut off the supply of blood to her brain, or she could have been smothered and the evidence removed. There would be no marks if she didn’t resist.”

  “Well, if you think she was smothered, you ought to be talking to Ci, not me. That’s how she takes people into the next life, you know. She puts a pillow over their face and deprives them of oxygen till they black out and see what’s coming.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s pretty sick, and one more thing that drove Lonnie and me apart. Can I go now? There are other people here I’d like to talk to.” He was watching a dark-haired woman in a red suit across the room. Marci Coyle, I figured. She was talking to a guy in a business suit—a prospective tenant, probably—and not paying the least bit of attention to me.

  “Go for it,” I said.

  I went back to the bar, where I got another champagne and a handful of green grapes, and ran into a lawyer I knew from the old days at Lovell, Cruse, Vigil and Roberts. His name was Sandy and he was that kind of guy, sandy hair, ruddy complexion, eager to please. The kind of guy who failed the bar exam three times before he finally passed and got ahead by telling bad jokes. Sandy told me he was going to be transferred to Lovell, Cruse, Vigil and Roberts’s Santa Fe office when the Ugly Building opened.

  “I guess I’ll have to move up here,” he said. “It’s a bitch of a commute.”

  “How do you feel about it?” I asked since, considering the relationship between the two cities, moving to Santa Fe was like joining the enemy camp.

  “I can handle it.” He smiled and his sandy bangs flopped. “They sure take their architecture seriously here. I guess it’s the only war in town. Did you see those demonstrators? Whoa!”

  “You know, Sandy, there’s a lot of opposition to the project. Maybe Lovell, Cruse should think it over. Moving into that building is going to make the firm unpopular here.”

  “They’ll get over it. Carl Roberts feels that the people who are opposed to the building aren’t the people who’ll become our clients anyway.”

  That sounded like something Carl Roberts would think. “A lot of people are surprised the Historic Preservation Board approved it,” I said. “You don’t happen to know the chairman’s name, do you?”

  “Jorge Mondragon.”

  “What does he do in real life?”

  “He owns Land of Enchantment Real Estate. He likes the building, but I hear other people are calling it a rape, a rape of Old Santa Fe.”

  “Something like that.”

  His grin told me a joke was coming. It was time to move on, but I wasn’t fast enough. “Do you know the difference between rape and escape?” he asked.

  “No.” And I didn’t think I wanted to, either.

  “With rape you try to prove who’s out and gets in, with escape you try to prove who’s in and gets out.”

  “Ha, ha,” I said. “I gotta go.”

  “See ya,” he replied.

  I didn’t think Rick and Marci would spend their time together at this function; they’d want to be circulating. I wandered over to where Marci stood. Rick had gone back to crowing over his model, she’d resumed her conversation with the businessman—something about dollars per square foot and sprinkler systems and tax benefits. She was much too engrossed in the bottom line to notice me watching her. Marci Coyle was small, compact, immaculately dressed in a red suit and high-heeled shoes that cost at least $150 per. She had smooth and shiny brown hair that she probably set in hot rollers on the days she was too busy to get to the hairdresser. Her movements were tense and quick. She wore bright red lipstick, talked fast and, from what I could hear, knew exactly what she was talking about.

  9

  I MADE IT back to Albuquerque in time to watch “L.A. Law.” Victor Sifuentes was representing a small-time Mexican-American brewer who got forced out of business by a rumor (spread by the owner of a large company) that the brewery workers pissed in the beer. The small co
mpany sued; the large company hired a token Hispanic lawyer who Victor thought was selling out. As always, Victor was noble, doe-eyed, honest, my favorite character. Anna, however, preferred the sleazy womanizer Arnie Becker.

  She wore a purple pouf in her hair the next morning with a miniskirt and lipstick to match. It might be tacky, it might not even be suitable law-office attire, but on her it looked good. She sipped at a Styrofoam cup of coffee and ate something covered with sugary white powder that snowed all over her desk, a jelly doughnut, I guessed. Brink was fat-loading again—greasy sausage and greasy egg on a greasy English muffin, dripping on an already grease-stained suit.

  Anna put down her doughnut when she saw me and got tough. “If that means tearing you through the polluted sludge, I’ll do it,” she snarled in her best Arnie Becker imitation.

  “To them you’ll never be anything but a spic with a law degree,” replied Victor Sifuentes/me.

  “Friday morning … already?” Brink rolled his eyes up.

  As the older and presumably wiser woman in this organization I felt an obligation every Friday to warn Anna about no-good philanderers. “Arnie Becker is a sleazy womanizer in designer shoes,” I said.

  “He’s cute,” replied Anna.

  “He’s a snake.”

  “He’s nice to his secretary, Roxanne,” Anna argued. “He gave her a raise, he got her a divorce. He just needs to find the right woman.”

  “Please. A guy like that won’t be happy with any woman and he won’t make any woman happy, either.”

  “He dresses well,” said Brink.

  “He’s a scumbag,” I answered. “And Anna, how you can idolize a guy like Arnie Becker and turn around and complain about crimes against women, for God’s sake?”

  “He’s a lover, not a rapist or a murderer.”

  “Only of the spirit.”

  “Friday morning … again,” sighed Brink.

  And not that early on Friday morning either. Beginning the day at midmorning was a bad habit. I was a lot more productive when I got up with the sun and drove to work in the flamingo glow, but it didn’t happen often. There was already a stack of pink slips waiting for me on Anna’s desk, and one of them was from Pete Vigil in La Luz. I would have bet he never watched “L.A. Law.” I was wrong, however, because the first thing he asked me when I got him on the phone was if I liked Victor Sifuentes.