9

Sometime later, back in her room, Sam climbed into bed. Harpo leaned his feet against the side of the mattress, and she picked him up and tucked him in with her. He sniffed her cautiously, all over. Could he smell death? What did it smell like to him? Then she began to cry again, and Harpo licked her face. She patted him, felt his soft little bones. He snuggled firmly against her hip and began to snore.

I’d give anything, she thought, if I could turn off my mind like that and simply disappear. But how can I do that? I close my eyes, and I’ll see nothing but Momma. The two of us laughing yesterday about old times. Momma crying, upset. Momma lying dead. Momma, who Vigil said maybe committed… No, I’m not going there. I’m not thinking that word.

Go back home, Sam. Leave Santa Fe now. I want you to leave.

I could use a little help here, she thought. A drink. A drug. Something. Anything.

Opium. That would be good. She wanted to be Julie Christie in the movie McCabe and Mrs. Miller, lying on a shelf in an opium den. Mourning for her lover who’d been shot down, his blood making red flowers in the snow. Sam remembered Christie, at the end of the movie, taking a long pull on an opium pipe. The smoke had worked its magic on her sadness. You could see it in her face, as the hard edges, those sharp corners of reality that scrape and puncture and slash the soul, were smudged and blurred and greased by blossoms of limbo.

Oh, what she would give for some smoky surcease. Something to quiet her mind, to ease the chewing on her viscera. Of course, there was always her old friend Jack Daniel’s. Now, there was an idea. Call up room service; ask for Jack. Not a good idea, but an idea nonetheless.

With that, her telephone sounded. No. Sam shook her head. Negatory, absolutely not. She crammed yet another pillow over her ears, but the ringing wouldn’t stop.

“What?” Her voice sounded very far away to her, as if strained through fog soup.

“It’s Lo Ellen. We’re coming to visit with you. We’re having some coffee sent up.”

“Thanks. That’s nice, but I’m going to pass.”

*

A few minutes later, Lorraine Ellen was perched like a bright parrot at the edge of Sam’s bed. Sam lay where she was, propped by pillows. Room service coffee and a plate of muffins sat between them. Harpo had sniffed the muffins and rolled back over. “Does a girl want to talk?” Lo asked.

“I don’t know. Mostly I just want this to all go away.”

“We know. It’s miserable, isn’t it?”

“Did you know about me, Lo? Did Johanna tell you she had a daughter?”

Johanna’s lawyer nodded. “She told us about a week ago. Before that, we didn’t even know a girl existed.” Sam stared at the tiny woman, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. Lo Ellen spoke a strange language, especially when it came to pronouns.

Lo continued, “It was then Johanna asked us for a meeting. She wanted to talk about her will. She’d written it a long time ago. We had a copy of it, of course, being her lawyer. It left everything to one Samantha Adams. All her money, investments, the house, an old turquoise mine out on the edge of town. Now, we’d never known who this Ms. Adams was, but, then, it wasn’t necessarily any of our business. This meeting, though—the one we’re talking about—Johanna tells us that she’s been thinking, maybe the will’s not valid, seeing as how it’s written using her alias. ‘Johanna Hall,’ she says, the name we’ve always known her by, that’s bogus.”

“And you’d never had any suspicion she wasn’t who she said?”

“You could of knocked us over with a feather. But, you know, Johanna was very private.”

Sam said, “I know very little about her, Lo. Until yesterday morning, I’d thought both Johanna and my father died in a plane crash in 1962.” She explained about Johanna’s letter coming to her house, their all-too-brief visit, the phone request that she leave Santa Fe. Then, this morning, Victor Vigil and his news.

“Good God! This is hard to believe.” Lo washed her words down with a big gulp of her coffee. “And that Victor Vigil; we’ve half a mind to call his momma, Magdalena. She’d straighten Victor right out.”

“I don’t think so, Lo. You saw the way he was upstairs.”

“And you don’t know Magdalena Vigil.” Then Lo sighed. “The whole police force hasn’t been worth shooting since that big brouhaha a couple of years ago. The mayor brought in an Anglo woman as chief. Well, you can imagine, the good old boys on the force got their panties in a twist. Ran her out of town, and now Victor’s older brother is the chief. Cops’ attitude toward women wasn’t exactly improved by the experience, particularly toward white Anglo women with cojónes.”

“But the man doesn’t even know me.” Then Sam repeated Vigil’s words: Smart reporter like you. “How’d he know that?”

“It’s hard to imagine Victor doing his homework that quickly. But you never know.”

“Johanna wouldn’t have mentioned me to him?”

“We doubt it. Like we were saying, Johanna was very private. To the point, you might say, of being a little strange.” Lo stopped. “Maybe you don’t want to hear this now.”

“No, no.” Sam sat up straighter. “Tell me everything.”

“Well, Johanna always kept very much to herself. Hardly socialized at all. We were friends, in addition to our professional relationship, but we knew zip about her past. You could ask a question; she’d give you a look, change the subject. Anyway, this meeting about the will, she says her name’s Johanna Hewlett Adams. Samantha Adams, that’s her daughter. Wants to make sure we understand that.”

“Anything else?”

“Said she’d abandoned you when you were eight.”

“Abandoned? That was the word she used?” Sam felt a huge bubble rise up in her chest. She swallowed hard. “What else?”

Lo shook her head. “Nothing. Didn’t say why she’d used the alias. We have no idea of where she’d been, what she’d done, how she lived before she came to Santa Fe. Didn’t know if she’d been in touch with you or not. She didn’t say.”

Sam said, “All I learned from our conversation yesterday was (a.) she was alive and (b.) my father did indeed die in the plane crash at Orly. Oh, and that Johanna had kept tabs on me for a long time. Seemed to know everything about me.”

“Really? Did she say how?”

“Private investigators.”

Lo sighed. “The hoops human beings make themselves jump through. The pain they cause themselves, as if just surviving this old universe weren’t enough.”

“There’s so much I don’t know. Like, why did she contact me now? I can’t help but think that it has to somehow be related to why she died. Jesus!” Sam slammed her coffee cup into its saucer. “Look at it, Lo. After thirty-four years of playing possum, Johanna asks me to come to Santa Fe in a letter asking for help. She’s staying in a hotel, registered under an alias, not the alias she’s been using, Johanna Hall, but yet another one, J. Hilton.”

“We know, but this doesn’t mean—”

“Wait.” Sam threw the covers back and climbed out of bed. She stood, ticking off the facts on her fingers. “When I’m talking to her yesterday, she says she called me from time to time. Never talked with me, of course. Hung up after hearing my voice. ‘But,’ she says, ‘it wasn’t even safe to call.’ What does that mean?”

“That she was afraid she’d slip and speak and a girl would recognize her voice?”

Sam was pacing now. “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s more. She says the reason she called me here is to answer my questions, but she puts it, ‘Mostly’ to tell me everything. What did that mostly mean? Why else? For what other reason did she want me here? Because she was in trouble? Because she thought her life was in danger? Then she turns around and warns me off. Says I have to leave town immediately.”

“Wait a minute. Where are we going here? Is a girl saying she thinks it’s possible her mother’s death really wasn’t on the up and up?”

“Yes.”

“That it wasn’t suicide?”

“Definitely not.”

“That she was murdered?”

Sam wheeled to face her mother’s lawyer. “Yes, Lo, that’s exactly what a girl is saying.”

*

More coffee had been ordered. Sam sat on one end of the sofa now, Lo on the other. Harpo snoozed in the middle.

“Natural causes,” said Lo.

“Let’s hear your case.”

“Extraordinary timing, we grant you, but there it is. Johanna asks her daughter to come, sees her once, then dies, happily, in her sleep.”

“Of what?”

Lo’s blonde curls trembled beneath the orchid feathers of her hat as she shook her head. “It doesn’t wash, does it? Her health was tip-top. Looked fragile, but she was strong as an ox. Worked harder than any ten men we know. Oh, we could talk with her doctor, Alice Stewart, but Johanna never said a word about any problem.”

“Heart attack? Aneurysm?”

“Cancer. Could have been any of those. Timing’s still ten million to one, but an autopsy’ll clear all that up.”

Sam gave Lo a look.

“I know, I know,” the lawyer said. “Sometimes an autopsy does. Sometimes it don’t. And sometimes the coroner delivers his verdict based on what someone else wants that verdict to be. Maybe a little money changes hands…”

Yes, indeed. Sam herself had once been involved in a case where a sheriff and the coroner, who was the local vet, declared a man dead of drowning, winking at the huge exit wound in his chest. She asked, “Do you have a candidate for that someone who might have a personal interest in the cause of Johanna’s death?”

“Nope. We’re just saying, as far as understanding how things work, particularly in small towns, neither one of us just fell off the back of a turnip truck. Now, you want to move on to suicide?”

Sam winced.

“It’s not something that a girl wants to think about, is it?”

No, no one ever does. And particularly not in this case. Sam couldn’t bear the thought. The timing was too macabre. Too cruel. Johanna had come back from the dead just to knock herself off? Yet, Sam had to look at it. “Motive?” she asked Lo.

“We don’t know. Probably not her health, like we just said. Her business is sound as a dollar. Booming, in fact.”

“I don’t even know what her business was.”

“Oh, hon, Johanna was a decorator. An interior designer. She did most of the best houses around town.”

Sam nodded. It fit. Her mother had been a wonderful amateur painter with a good eye and great color sense. “Okay, say it wasn’t her business. Was she depressed?”

“What’s depressed? Everyone’s down in the dumps these days. Half the country’s on Prozac. Johanna was never the most cheerful person, but she was getting on with her life. She wasn’t lying around pissing and moaning.”

“Didn’t seem to have anything unusual on her mind recently?”

“Well, hell, she had something on her mind, didn’t she? She checked into La Fonda as J. Hilton. There had to be a reason for that.”

“Did I tell you I had to go through a bunch of hocus-pocus with the desk clerk to even make contact with her?”

“Really? Who was that?”

“A young woman named Estela. I definitely want to talk with her.”

Lo sighed. “And we probably have to face the fact that Johanna’s concern about her will at this particular moment points to a possible foreknowledge of her death.”

“Maybe. But was that foreknowledge of her own actions, or someone else’s? From what we know so far—the aliases, staying in a hotel, the cry for help—seem like strong indicators someone was after her. So, who was that? Who were her enemies? Let’s start with her business. Someone, say, she’d swindled in a deal?” In a corner of Sam’s mind, a finger scratched. Business. Something about Johanna and business.

Lo said, “Johanna was honest as the day is long. And we don’t know of anybody who commits murder over a decorating job gone bad, if that’s where you’re heading.”

“A crime of passion?”

“Johanna wasn’t romantically involved with anybody, hadn’t been, as far as we know, in the five years since she came to town.”

“Someone who was jealous of her?”

Lo shook her head. “It’s tough to think of anyone. Not that Johanna was the easiest person in the world. She knew her own mind. She liked to have her own way. But then, that would describe me. Probably describe you too. But, like we said before, Johanna just wasn’t close to many people. She pretty much kept to herself.”

“How about someone who worked for her?”

“Carpenters, plumbers, craftsmen—that’s what you mean? We never heard her talk about any problems.”

“Her secretary?”

“Didn’t have one. Worked out of her home. Had moi, her lawyer, and an accountant on retainer.” Lo poured herself another cup of coffee. “There was Jesus, of course. But he adored Johanna.”

“Jesus?”

“Jesus Oliva. Johanna’s man Friday.”

“Drives an old pickup truck?”

“Drives a whole raft of wild vehicles. Paints them up. Calls them his art. How do you know Jesus?”

Sam told Lo about sliding down the driveway on Upper Canyon the night before. “He saved my life. Or, at least, he didn’t run over me.”

“That must have been Johanna’s driveway.”

“What?”

“Jesus lives in a casita behind Johanna’s house. Second driveway on the left, just after Upper Canyon begins, above Cristo Rey Church?”

“That was my mother’s driveway? I can’t believe it.”

Lo shrugged. “Not the least bit strange for Santa Fe. There are no coincidences here, m’dear.”

“Jesus said he’d been dreaming of me for years. That I’d been sent by Our Lady to make him and his art famous. Is he a little strange?”

“No more than any other artist, or anyone else living here, for that matter. Stick around; you’ll find the bizarre, the weird, and the miraculous are the rule rather than the exception in northern New Mexico.”

“Okay. You know, I’m thinking, the major disadvantage we have in thinking about foul play is all those blank years in Momma’s life. You said she came here about five years ago? That leaves twenty-nine unaccounted for. A lot of time for a lot of people to have a motive.”

“True.” Lo paused. “You know, Sam, we’re following everything you’re saying. But Johanna looked so peaceful…”

“Cause of death? That’s what you’re asking? Poison. Suffocation. Bubble of air injected by hypodermic. Alcohol and pills ingested under duress. GHB, or some other designer drug, slipped into a drink. Tiny little pick inserted in the back of the neck. There are a million ways to kill someone which leave no readily apparent evidence.”

Lo shivered. “We’re glad we don’t know everything you know. What we do know is enough to make us despair of the human race.” She reached over and ruffled Harpo’s ears. “You know what we think? That we ought to saddle up, right this minute, head straight for Johanna’s house. Take ourselves a look. See what we can find.” She reached for her purse. “We’ve got keys. Grabbed them when we left the office, when Vigil called. So what does a girl say?”