At Ease with the Dead Page 4

  Only here ten minutes and already I had a fan.

  I debated for a moment whether to call Phil Grober. Decided not to. Grober was a good P.I., but I had no real need, so far, for the kind of help he could provide. As a person to socialize with, he could be moderately entertaining; but he could also be, as many people had remarked, militantly offensive. He was an acquired taste—“like kerosene,” Rita had once said—and I thought I’d wait for a while before savoring it.

  I went through the suitcase and selected what I thought the well-dressed investigator might wear to a Texas university. Ever-reliable blue blazer, dark blue sweater vest, light blue oxford button-down shirt, jeans, Luchese boots.

  The temperature was in the sixties and I had the Subaru’s windows rolled down as I drove up Mesa. The sky was a paler blue than Santa Fe’s, the air denser, heavier. Students were ambling along the sidewalks in couples and clusters, all of them looking better fed and better dressed than I remembered students being, back when I was one myself. Looking younger, too; but that could’ve been mere jaundice.

  I turned left on University Avenue, and then waited in line with the other cars to collect a campus pass at the guard house. This was evidently a system designed to keep out the riffraff. I got in anyway.

  The guard told me how to reach the anthropology department, and a few minutes later I was parking before a large rectangular red-brick building that, like all the other buildings on campus, was topped by a curiously sloped, almost Oriental roof. A plaque at the front door explained that the wife of the first president of the school had been enchanted by the Bhutanese temples she’d seen in National Geographic. To my eyes, the buildings looked a bit stiff and awkward against the sweep of southwest sky, like Anglican bishops at a rodeo.

  But she could’ve done worse, I suppose. She could’ve been enchanted by igloos.

  Inside, I talked to the secretary. In her forties, with Prince Valiant hair and Clark Kent glasses, she was short and wiry and protective, like a terrier. She told me that the only archaeologist currently in the building was Dr. Lowery. I asked if I could speak with Dr. Lowery. She asked me what this was about. I gave her the Bureaucrat’s Special: told her I was an investigator licensed by the State of New Mexico, and that I was inquiring into a crime committed back in 1925, one that involved a university staff member.

  “Dr. Lowery wasn’t on staff at that time,” she said, and adjusted her glasses with the satisfied air of someone who’s achieved a small but important victory.

  “I’m sure he wasn’t,” I said. “But I’ve got to start somewhere.” I presented my best puckish smile.

  She eyed it, and me, dubiously. But she picked up the phone, stabbed at a button, turned slightly away to speak into the receiver. After a moment she set down the phone and turned back to me, her lips pursed in disapproval. “Dr. Lowery will see you,” she said. “Upstairs. Room 208.”

  I thanked her, then climbed up the stairs, wandered down the corridor till I found room 208, and knocked at the door.

  “Come in,” called a voice from inside.

  I opened the door.

  It was a small room, shelves everywhere, all crammed with books and bric-a-brac. Behind the gray desk, a person stood atop the office chair with his arms outstretched above him, adjusting a black ceramic bowl on another shelf. At first glance he looked maybe twelve years old. He was about five foot three and his hair was dark black, cut in a Beaver Cleaver bang across his forehead. He wore a UTEP sweatshirt, sleeves lopped off at the elbows, and a pair of old blue jeans, knees worn down to a band of thin white horizontal threads. “With you in a sec,” he said, and showed me two rows of bright white amiable teeth.

  A moment later, when he had the bowl arranged to his satisfaction, he bounded off the chair, landed lightly on his feet, and came bouncing round the desk. “A gift,” he grinned, jerking his thumb at the bowl. “Just got it. Santa Clara bowl. Nice piece.” He held out his hand and I held out mine. He was one of those men who perceive the handshake as an Olympic event. “Emmett Lowery,” he said, pumping my arm.

  “Joshua Croft.”

  He set me free and he grinned some more. “Barb said something about a crime? Grab a seat and tell me about it.”

  Closer up, I could see he was in his forties and fighting it. There was a network of lines at the corners of the bright brown enthusiastic eyes, a thickening of jowl in the square enthusiastic face.

  He was fit and certainly he was vibrant. He worked out, he probably ate right, he smiled a lot with those impossibly white teeth. His soul was forever young. But gravity and time were beginning to catch up with the envelope that held it, and this was something, I suspected, that he didn’t care to hear. It’s something I don’t particularly care to hear myself.

  I sat down in what I supposed was the student’s chair, and I started to tell him why I was there. He leaned back against the desk, head cocked, arms folded, legs crossed, the toe-tip of his right Reebok poised against the floor, balletically.

  He didn’t interrupt, and he nodded in all the right places, and from time to time he murmured “Um-hmm” and “Hmm” and “Ah” to prove he was actually listening. When I finished, he uncrossed his arms and put his hands palms down on the edge of the desk, on either side of his hips.

  “You really think,” he said, eyebrows raised, “that after all this time you’ll be able to learn anything?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d be able to answer that for me.”

  He smiled, shook his head. “Doesn’t look good, my friend.”

  “What can you tell me about Dennis Lessing?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. My father knew him. Worked with him. But Lessing was way before my time.”

  “Your father was a teacher here?”

  A nod. “Oil geology. Same as Lessing.”

  “Can you tell me why Lessing would want to bring the remains he found in Canyon de Chelly back here, to El Paso?”

  “Haven’t got a clue. Maybe he was an amateur archaeologist, like my father.” He grinned. “That’s how I got into the bones business.”

  “Your father’s deceased?”

  He nodded. “He died in ’fifty-nine.”

  “Is there anyone here in town who might have known Lessing?”

  Lips puckered thoughtfully, he looked up at the ceiling as though the answer might be written there. He looked back at me. “His daughter. Alice Wright. But I couldn’t guarantee you’d get much out of Alice. A little long in the tooth these days, our Alice is.” He grinned again, perhaps to demonstrate that he didn’t suffer from the same affliction himself.

  “You know where she lives?”

  He shrugged. “Alumni Office’d know.”

  “She was a student here?”

  “Student. Professor. Professor Emeritus. One of the legends of the anthropology department.” He grinned again. “The local Margaret Mead.”

  “I’ll try to locate her. Any other suggestions?”

  He did the ceiling trick again, then said, “The library? They must have some kind of records over there. Yearbooks, whatever.”

  I stood up. “Well,” I said. “Thanks for the time and the help.”

  “Hey, no sweat. Sounds like a fascinating problem you’ve got there. Archaeology and detective work, they’re a lot alike, don’t you think? Digging through the strata. Unearthing the clues, piecing them together.”

  “I doubt they’ll ever put me on staff here.”

  He grinned again. “Who knows? Strange things can happen in the halls of academe. You take care now.”

  Grinning still, he put his hand out. I took it. He mauled my fist again, but this time I gave him a little something in return. In the right circumstance, I can be as dopey as the next guy.

  The grin only widened. He released his grip, looked me up and down appreciatively, and said, “You’re in pretty good shape. You work out? Martial arts?”

  “A little origami on the weekends.”

  He laughed. “Listen, kee
p in touch, okay? Maybe I’ll think of something. Maybe I can help.”

  I nodded. “Sure,” I said.

  I stopped at the Alumni Office in the Administrations Building and picked up Alice Wright’s address. The woman at the desk wouldn’t give me Wright’s home phone number—against regulations—so I had to use shrewd detective work, and the El Paso phone book, to discover it. I dialed it from the pay phone in the foyer.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice, just a hint of drawl in it. It sounded too young to be the voice of Lessing’s daughter.

  “Hello,” I said. “Is Alice Wright there?”

  “She can’t come to the phone at the moment. May I ask who’s calling?”

  She didn’t sound like a bureaucrat, and Alice Wright wasn’t a skip and she wasn’t a suspect in anything that I knew about. “My name’s Croft. I’m a private investigator and I’m trying to learn something about her father, Dennis Lessing.”

  “Her father?” Curious, interested. “Why?”

  “It’s a fairly long story. Do you know when I can reach her?”

  “You could call again around four-thirty.”

  I looked at my watch. Two-thirty. “All right. Thanks.”

  “What was the name again?”

  “Joshua Croft. I’ll call back.”

  The library looked, from the outside, exactly like a Bhutanese temple with a lot of windows, one that happened to be half a block long and six stories tall. Inside, at the information desk, I was told that I could find the yearbooks on the fourth floor. I took the elevator up.

  Opposite the elevator doors, behind a glass wall, was a small reading room. Bookshelves, tables and chairs, a young girl in charge behind a metal desk. I told her what I wanted and she disappeared off into the stacks for a few minutes, then came back with two thick hardcover books, the bound yearbooks from 1921 to 1930. The yearbook was called “The Flow Sheet.” Somewhere there’s a guy whose job is to think up clever names for college yearbooks. He may be the same guy who invents the names for hair salons.

  I sat down at a table and started leafing through the first of the volumes. The paper was frail and smelled of dust and of time long past.

  In 1921, there were only three buildings on the campus of the Texas School of Mines and Metallurgy. A photograph showed them atop the barren unlandscaped rock, Bhutanese temples of learning somehow plunked down in an expanse of rubble.

  Among the photographs of the teaching staff, I found one of Dennis Lessing, professor of oil geology. He was an imposing man in his forties with a thick swept-back mane of black hair and an elaborate black handlebar mustache. Dark deep-set eyes, high strong cheekbones, a wide sensual mouth. He wasn’t smiling, but then none of the others were either. Maybe 1921 wasn’t an amusing year. Or maybe, back then, geniality wasn’t a selling point in college professors.

  I looked for a photograph of Emmett Lowery’s father. Didn’t find one.

  The 1923 yearbook held a photograph of Lessing and five of his students, just returned from the first of the oil geology field trips, August of ’22. They stood in front of a Model T Ford, their bodies stiff and awkward, their smiles strained, as though none of them were really quite comfortable with this photography business. Smiling, eyes narrowed against the sun, Lessing looked less imposing and more handsome than in his formal portrait.

  The trip had been to Steamboat Canyon, in Arizona. Steamboat Canyon was on the Navajo Reservation, only twenty miles or so from Piñon, the site of Lessing’s final trip. I asked myself the same question I’d asked Daniel Begay, the same question Rita had asked me. Why there? Why not in Texas, where oil fields were already turning up? Arizona was three or four hundred miles away, over roads that couldn’t have been very comfortable back then. Did Lessing know something?

  Emmett Lowery’s father, Jordan, made his first appearance in the 1924 yearbook as an associate professor of oil geology. Clean-shaven, topped with a helmet of dark dashing Byronic curls, his features as striking as the early Barrymore’s, he looked young and intense and like he’d be hell on wheels with women. He wasn’t smiling; but probably he didn’t need to.

  Lessing’s 1923 field trip had been to Many Farms, less than fifty miles from Piñon. Jordan Lowery, evidently, had not gone along.

  The ’24 trip was to the area around Fort Defiance, perhaps sixty miles from Piñon. Once again, no Lowery.

  The 1926 yearbook was dedicated to the “Memory of Professor Dennis Lessing, Whose Untimely Death Has Diminished Us All.” The field trip photograph showed Lessing with a new batch of students. The picture had been taken in August of ‘25, and from Lessing’s big satisfied smile it was clear he didn’t expect to be dead within a month.

  Few of us ever do.

  During that same academic year, presumably because of Lessing’s death, Jordan Lowery had been promoted from associate to full professor.

  Lowery bumps off Lessing so he can take over his job?

  Strange things, I’ve been told, can happen in the halls of academe.

  But why steal the remains of a long-dead Navajo Indian?

  I checked my watch. Four twenty-five. Time to call Alice Wright.

  She was home. Her voice, smoky with age, had a hint of Texas drawl, similar to the voice I’d heard earlier. She told me to come right over, and then told me which streets to take to do that.

  5

  Alice Wright lived off Montana Avenue on a quiet street lined with large single-story houses built mostly of block or brick, with an occasional pseudo-adobe mini-hacienda thrown in to demonstrate that we were west of the Mississippi. They were the kind of pleasant, comfortable homes you find in upper-middle-class neighborhoods throughout Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson. The lawns here were a bit larger than usual, and maybe a bit greener. Certainly the trees, elms and oaks, were greener than the trees back in Santa Fe, where fall had already come and gone. The trees provided not only shade but a sense of permanence, of stability—people who plant oaks generally plan to be around for a while.

  Sometimes, of course, for whatever reason, they don’t make it.

  More oaks and elms shaded Alice Wright’s lawn. I parked the Subaru in the street, walked up the asphalt driveway, up the flagstone walk, up the cement steps, and thumbed the doorbell.

  The door was opened by a young woman—mid-twenties, at a guess—wearing designer blue jeans, a pale yellow blouse, and an open black wool vest. She was slender, and in her Frye boots she stood nearly as tall as I did. But even without the height she would’ve been difficult to ignore.

  Some women are pretty, some are attractive; this one was beautiful. Her face was oval, framed by straight black hair that reached down to the soft swell of breast. She had large almond-shaped eyes, cornflower-blue, striking against the backdrop of black hair. A nose just aquiline enough to give it character. Red lips too wide by just enough to make you wonder what they looked like when they smiled. She was the kind of woman who could make you wish you were fifteen years younger, or make you forget you weren’t.

  She smiled at me, and I wished I were fifteen years younger. “Mr. Croft?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hi. I’m Lisa Wright. Alice’s granddaughter. I talked to you earlier. Come on in.”

  She stood aside to let me enter, pushed shut the door, and smiled again. “This way.”

  I followed her, and it took nerves of steel to avoid watching the swing and sway of that taut trim backside. I don’t have nerves of steel.

  To the left, a wide archway opened onto the living room—a glimpse of gray carpeting, white walls, tan furniture, a brightly colored painting over the sofa—but we forged ahead, came to a hallway, and turned right. At the first door on the left, she stopped and turned, smiled once more, and gestured for me to go in. I did. “Alice,” she said behind me, “this is Mr. Croft.”

  Like her granddaughter, Alice Wright would be a difficult woman to ignore.

  She sat in a wingback black leather chair in the corner of the room, arms along the arms of the chair,
spine as upright as the chair’s back, holding herself with the poised languid angularity of an exiled queen. I could see that she was tall, almost as tall as her granddaughter, and that very likely she’d once been as beautiful. Even now, in her seventies, she was a striking woman, proof that large gray eyes and strong cheekbones will see you through the long haul. Her white hair was swirled back and held at the back of her head, Japanese style, with a pair of ivory chopsticks angled in a V. She wore a gray silk pantsuit, a white blouse opened at the collar to show a narrow chain of gold, and a pair of low-heeled gray pumps.

  On the shelves around her, standing at attention like courtiers, were her books. Two walls were lined with them, ceiling to floor, perhaps half of them bound in leather and looking older and wiser than I’ll ever be. More of them stood on shelves to the left of the door, above a dark roll-top desk.

  Another black wingback chair sat opposite hers, and between them a window looked out onto a rock garden, an expanse of patterned sand, small gray boulders rising from its surface like mysterious islands. Below the window stood two round teakwood tables, each holding a framed photograph. On the floor was a faded Persian carpet of rose and black; in the air, a faint fragrance of lavender.

  “How do you do, Mr. Croft,” said Alice Wright, and held out her hand.

  I took her hand. Her grip was as firm as mine.

  She nodded, smiling, to the other chair. “Please, have a seat. Would you like some sherry? It’s an Amontillado and quite good, I think. Or perhaps some tea? We’ve a nice Darjeeling.”

  “The tea would be fine,” I said, sitting down.

  She turned to her granddaughter. “Would you mind, Lisa? I’ll have the sherry. And bring something for yourself, dear, if you like. Mr. Croft and I shall restrict ourselves to pleasantries until you return.” She turned to me. “You don’t mind, do you, Mr. Croft, if Lisa joins us?”

  I didn’t, and said so; but even if I had minded, I didn’t see how I could have said anything. I had been, very graciously, boxed in.