Twenty

I COULD SEE TWO OF THEM through the peephole in the door, standing out there under the lamplight in the softly swirling snow. Neither matched the description of the Hispanic man who was looking for Juanita Carrera. One was slightly shorter than the other but both were tall and both wore dark overcoats pulled shut against the cold. Knotted ties showed at their necks. Their faces had that absolute lack of expression that came from too many years of seeing and hearing too much. They didn’t have to wear badges on their chests for me to know they were cops.

“Who is it?” I called through the door.

“State police, Mr. Croft,” said the taller one. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

I opened the door, and they stamped their feet, wiped snow from the shoulders of their topcoats with gloved hands, and stepped in, the taller one leading. I closed the door. The taller one said, “I’m Agent Hernandez. This is Agent Green.”

Hernandez was about thirty. A black crew cut, a square red face, broad shoulders. Green was probably younger but looked older because he was balding. A broad forehead, a round face, gray jowls, unreadable brown eyes that were glancing casually around my living room. Twenty years from now he would be able to describe the kachina doll that stood atop my bookcase.

As they peeled off their gloves, I said, “Could I see some identification?”

Still expressionless, they reached into their suitcoat pockets. I examined their IDs. “Thank you,” I told them. I gestured toward the couch. “Have a seat.”

I sat down opposite them in the leather chair.

They were sitting forward, their weight on their feet. Green took from his topcoat pocket a small spiral notebook and a Cross pen.

I said, “How can I help you?”

“You were up in Hartley this evening, talking to a woman named Deirdre Polk.”

“What’s happened?” I asked him. I think I already knew. There was a sudden coldness in my chest.

“She’s dead,” Hernandez said. Green said nothing. Both watched me.

“Jesus,” I said. I sat back and shut my eyes. In the darkness I saw Deirdre Polk’s face. It was concerned, worried, her brow furrowed, her wide lower lip lightly caught between her white teeth. “Jesus,” I said.

Hernandez said, “How well did you know her, Mr. Croft?”

I opened my eyes. “How was she killed?”

Green’s dark brown eyes flicked to Hernandez, flicked back to me. Hernandez said, “Could you please answer my question, Mr. Croft.”

I took a breath. “Yeah. I will. I’ll be happy to cooperate. But I need to get some bearings here. I hadn’t expected this. I liked the woman. How was she killed?”

Hernandez watched me. “She was strangled,” he said.

“Shit.” I took another breath. Suddenly the air in the room was too thin. “Was she tortured?” My voice seemed to be coming from someone else. I wished it had been.

Green’s eyes flicked again to Hernandez. Hernandez frowned slightly. “Maybe you’d better start answering our questions, Mr. Croft.”

I rubbed my forehead. It was cold and wet. I said, “You’ll want to talk to a Sergeant Bradley, out in Los Angeles. He’s Homicide, and he’s got the same kind of case on his hands. Same M.O. I’m not certain, but I think the man you’re looking for is a Hispanic male, probably a Salvadoran. Medium height, medium build. He has a small, thin mustache. Slicked-back black hair. He’s in his thirties.”

Green snorted lightly and produced an almost infinitesimal sneer, as though his contempt were so deep that he couldn’t work up enough energy to express it more fully. He looked at Hernandez and spoke for the first time. “I guess we can go home now, huh?”

Hernandez never stopped looking at me. He said, “How well did you know Deirdre Polk, Mr. Croft?”

“I met her for the first time today. You found my card at her house?”

Hernandez said, “What was the nature of your relationship with her?”

“There was no relationship. I was asking her some questions. About a case I was working on.”

“What case is that?” Hernandez asked me.

I told them. Everything. Told them about Roy Alonzo, Melissa, Cathryn Bigelow and her murder, all the people I’d spoken to out in Los Angeles, all the people I’d spoken to since I returned to Santa Fe. I told them about Juanita Carrera. If the Hispanic man had killed Deirdre Polk, then Juanita was in danger. Someone had to find her before he did. The police, as I’d told Chuck Arthur, had more resources than I would ever have.

The only person I left out was Norman Montoya.

When I finished, Hernandez said, “So you think there’s some connection between this Carrera, Melissa Alonzo, and Deirdre Polk?”

“I know there is,” I said. “I just don’t know what kind of connection. Listen. Deirdre Polk had a dog. A big German shepherd. Is the dog okay?” I knew, even as I asked, that it was a foolish question.

“The dog is dead,” Hernandez told me. “Shot.”

He would have had to kill the dog to get to Deirdre.

I took another deep breath. I wanted a cigarette.

“Okay,” said Hernandez. “Let’s go through it one more time.”

“What was the time of death?” I asked him.

Hernandez frowned slightly. He was supposed to be asking the questions. But I’d been cooperating, and he bent. “Body was still warm, from what we have. We haven’t been to the scene. We’re out of the Santa Fe station. Hartley comes under the Española substation. Taos County sheriff’s department called them at eleven. Española didn’t have anyone free to come down here, so they called us. Friend of Polk’s, a woman, found her at ten thirty. According to you, she was still alive at seven thirty.”

“I was here getting phone calls at ten thirty.”

Hernandez nodded. “From Gallegos and …” He glanced at Green. Without looking at his notebook, his eyes steady on me, Green said, “Cavanaugh.”

“Cavanaugh, yeah,” said Hernandez. “Take you a couple of hours to get here from there, this weather.” He shrugged. “So maybe you’ve got an alibi. Depends on what the M.E. tells us, after the autopsy.”

I had a sudden quick image of Deirdre Polk’s long body sprawled naked atop a stainless steel table. I said, “It was pretty smart of me to leave my business card there after I killed her.”

Hernandez shrugged again. “People do funny things.”

“I could’ve left the card there last week. Last month.”

“Neighbor saw a dark Subaru wagon driving into Polk’s driveway just before the storm hit. You own a dark Subaru wagon. You changing your mind? You saying you weren’t there tonight?”

“I was there.”

Hernandez nodded. “Let’s start from the top. Roy Alonzo came to your office.”

They left at a quarter to two. I walked into the kitchen, poured myself another drink. I walked back into the living room, stood staring down for a long time at the painting Deirdre Polk had given me. It was propped against the lamp on the end table. I took a sip of the bourbon and then, making a low growl in my throat that I heard only vaguely, as though from a distance, I hurled the glass at the wall. It trailed a comet’s tail of whiskey through the air and then shattered loudly against the plaster.

How had he found Deirdre Polk? If he’d had access to Melissa’s phone bills, he would’ve located her months ago. The FBI had.

How had he found her?

I stood there for a minute or two. Then I went back to the kitchen, ripped the roll of paper towels out of the plastic holder, carried it into the living room. I cleaned up the mess. I noticed that some of the whiskey had spattered Deirdre Polk’s painting. A few droplets were very slowly rolling down its smooth surface, like tears down a face.

One of those chance junctions of the commonplace that momentarily seem filled with significance. We’re creatures of meaning, acute to signs and portents. And we get them. The solitary raven circling the graveyard. The No Sale on the 7-Eleven cash register after some febrile moron blows away, in an instant of rabid excitement, a harmless clerk. Like a bad movie, life is happy to provide us with symbols that hint, briefly, at import. But they’re empty, cheap and tawdry, meretricious, and all they finally signify is the random association of lifeless objects in what must be, with all its casual cruelties, a random universe.

Or so I felt then, without any conscious thought. And for an instant, once again, I was enraged. I very nearly reached out and smashed the painting against the wall.

Instead, I took a breath, and then, carefully, gently, I patted the painting dry. If we can’t discover meaning, we can provide it.

When I finished cleaning, I made another drink, carried it back into the bedroom, set it on the nightstand. I undressed, climbed into bed.

I didn’t sleep well that night.

Leroy’s shop on Cerrillos Road didn’t open until eight thirty, but I was up and dressed by seven. Steel-toed insulated waffle-stompers, tan cords, denim shirt, crew-neck sweater. I knew I should eat but I wasn’t hungry. I forced down some toast and coffee. I cleaned the Smith & Wesson. I sat for a while watching smiling people on the television trade snappy patter. I cleaned the Smith again, and reloaded it. At eight I put on the sheepskin jacket, picked up the .38, put it in my right-hand jacket pocket, slipped on my gloves, and left.

I walked out into a world of glare. Sunshine, blue skies, brilliant white snow. The neighboring houses looked like ancient pueblos, lying abandoned beneath the drifts. Snow fell in soft clumps from the trees and blew like smoke from the rooftops, glittered through the air like tiny sequins. It was a beautiful morning. Deirdre Polk wouldn’t be seeing it.

In the station wagon, I opened the glove compartment and got out my sunglasses, put them on. I drove in four-wheel down to Acequia Madre, took a left, followed the narrow road until it met Paseo de Peralta, took another left, shifted into two-wheel, drove down to Cerrillos. The snow was already gone from the major streets and they were black with moisture and gritty with the sand laid down by the early morning work crews.

Cerrillos Road, as usual, was busy, cars splashing at speed through today’s slush and sand as though it didn’t exist.

Leroy wasn’t at the shop when I arrived. I waited in the car.

He showed up at eight thirty-five and I told him what I wanted him to do. I drove the Subaru around back and into his garage, turned off the ignition, got out.

Leroy was short and squat and he moved in a perpetual stoop. His hairy arms were too long and his heavy forehead was too low. He was a genius. Rita had once said that he was the sort of person who could make you rethink your position on evolution, whatever your position might be. But he wasn’t genius enough, this morning, to know that I was in no mood for chatter. As he stalked slowly around the Subaru, holding a small black box that looked like an oscilloscope, he would not stop yammering.

“So I’m out with this chick, right, she’s Anglo, a honey, awesome body, dynamite legs, very bonita, and we’re gonna go to dinner, then maybe for drinks someplace nice, maybe Vanessie’s or that new place on Palace, whaddya call it, Armand’s, next to the gallery there, so I say to her, I say, So whaddya feel like eating, you know, and she tells me tofu. Tofu, she says. I say to her, Tofu? And she says to me, Tofu, yeah, it’s like made from soybeans, and I say to her, Yeah, I know what it’s made from, I ate it once, it tastes like spit only it’s solid. It’s very healthy, she tells me. It’s natural, she says. I say to her, It’s natural? Like it what, it grows on trees? You ever see a field with chunks of tofu growing all over? I’ll tell you what’s natural. You know what’s natural? You know what they eat in the rain forests, I tell her, those little guys with the blow guns and the leather jock straps, climbing trees all the time, you know what they eat? You know what’s natural for those guys? Sure, of course, they eat a lotta weeds and stuff when they don’t have any choice, rocks and dirt too, probably, who knows, but what really turns ’em on, what really floats their boat, is nice fresh monkeys. That’s what they really like. They shoot down a monkey with one of those darts they got and they’re happy as clams. Okay,” he said, and pushed a button on the machine. “Nothing.”

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“Means we eliminate the second string. Now we see about the first.” He stalked, long arms swinging, over to a locked metal cabinet. “So anyway, I say to her, I say, maybe, you want natural, we should go someplace they got monkeys. …”

I let his voice fade out and I glanced around the garage. Tape decks and CB radios, some used, some still in their boxes, arranged in stacks along the plywood shelves. Speakers, too, and amplifiers and graphics equalizers, and piles of complicated equipment that probably I would never be able to identify.

“… solutely gross, she says.” He was circling the car again, holding this time a red metal box, larger than the first. “I can’t believe you’d say that, she says. Are you some kind of—hold on, man, we are hot here.” Excited now, holding the box before him as though it were a treasure chest, he was approaching the rear of the wagon.

“Something?” I said.

“Something, man, Jesus Christ, you have got a goddamn honey in here.” He was at the tailgate. “You got the keys to the gate?”

I took them from my pocket, walked over, handed them to him. He unlocked the top gate, lifted it, swung the box inside. “Sonofabitch, man, you got the mother of honeys.” I moved closer as he turned and set the metal box on the floor. He reached into his pocket, fished out a small flashlight, lowered the bottom gate, leaned into the cargo space. He threw back a flap of the carpeting and tugged off the stiff sheet of plastic that concealed the spare tire well. “There you are, sweetie,” he said, his voice hushed. “Oh, Jesus, you are just one beautiful little honey, aren’t you now?” He looked back to me over his shoulder. “C’mere. Take a look.”

I drove up north on St. Francis past the Old Taos Highway, turned left on Camino La Tierra. This used to be called Buckman Road, back before the developers put in La Tierra, a community of expensive adobe homes tucked between the juniper and piñon on ten-acre lots. It was paved, and some traffic had already passed over it this morning—the snow was gray and rutted. Roy Alonzo’s house was somewhere back in here, among the rolling hills, but I wasn’t going to Roy Alonzo’s house.

Two or three miles in, the road went from pavement to dirt beneath the snow, and the station wagon began to fishtail. I slowed down and shifted into four-wheel. There were fewer tire tracks here, and after another mile or so there were none at all. I drove on for half a mile, found a space to turn around, angled the car to block the road, put the stick into neutral, left the engine running, and got out. Arms crossed, I leaned back against the right front fender. Once again, I waited.

The air was cold but the sun was bright. Snow was melting off the scrub pines, and above the huge silence of empty space I could hear the drip of meltwater patting against the drifts, and an occasional soft thump as clusters toppled off the branches and puffed against the smooth white banks.

About fifty yards ahead of me, back toward town, the road rose slightly and angled to the right, out of sight. Behind me, a thin unsullied swath of snow led off through the trees. Farther along, another mile or two beyond the hills, was the river and Diablo Canyon.

Time passed, maybe fifteen minutes. Except for the melting snow, nothing moved. If there were any animals out there, they were in hiding.

Cold started to seep into my boots. I stomped my feet.

I heard the car before I saw it. A big engine snarling low in its throat as it shifted. At least six cylinders, probably eight. I took the Smith from my jacket pocket, bent down over the fender of the wagon, sighted at the rise in the road, and waited some more.

The car came more quickly than I had expected, a big black Bronco bouncing over the rise, and it had two men sitting up front. I had believed there would be only one, and I thought for a moment that these two were a couple of cowboys out for some winter fun, and then the man on the passenger side rolled down his window and started shooting at me.

He couldn’t hit anything with a handgun, no one could, not at that distance, and not with the Bronco skidding in a slide to a stop, then kicking up snow and dirt as it spun, turning, into reverse. But it gave me pause for thought. And then, for just a second, the Bronco was broadside to me and I poked up my head to take a shot, but the man on the passenger side didn’t care for that at all and he had a gun with a lot of cartridges in it, and he used some of them. I heard a loud brittle pop as a headlight on the wagon went, and then a high-pitched buzz, like a wasp, as a slug zipped by my ear. And then the big Ford’s rear end was slamming left and right across the road as the car raced up the rise and over it, gone.

I jumped into the Subaru, banged the door shut, threw the stick into first, and jammed my foot against the pedal. Tires hissing, the car vaulted forward.