At Ease with the Dead Read online

  “Did you hear him say that?”

  “Not actually hear him, no. But it makes sense. That day, the seventh, my father suddenly stopped sulking and became his old self again. As though he’d come to an important decision. He and my mother talked for a long time in the study before she came up to bed.”

  I said, “And you really feel your mother was capable of murder?”

  She smiled. “I think that given the proper circumstances, anyone is capable of murder. And my mother was not a terribly pleasant woman, I’m afraid. She was rigid and unyielding and physically withdrawn. The classic Ice Maiden. She hated to be touched, by me or by my father. And sex, good Lord, sex was something that only happened to animals. It was at her insistence that they slept in separate rooms.”

  “Which doesn’t mean she killed him.”

  “No. But she also hated Indians.” She smiled. “Along with blacks, Jews, Catholics, and Democrats, in approximately that order. I think she must have found it especially galling that my father would leave her for a physical relationship, and with an Indian woman. I think that brittle reserve of hers must’ve simply shattered.”

  I nodded. “And so during the night, you think, your mother went back downstairs and killed him. And took the stuff from the study to make the death look like a burglary.”

  “Yes. She knew how to drive, and in the middle of the night no one would’ve seen her leave. She could’ve easily gone down to the river and tossed everything in.”

  “But why take a boxful of bones?”

  “Perhaps she wasn’t thinking clearly. Or perhaps she just wanted to get them out of the house. I know she hated having them around.”

  “But with your father dead she could’ve gotten rid of them any time she wanted.”

  She shrugged lightly. “As I say, perhaps she wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “If she killed him, what did she use for a weapon?”

  “I don’t know. An old candlestick, perhaps. A hammer. The police had only her word for it that nothing of that sort was missing from the house.”

  “Did you tell them any of this?”

  She shook her head. “My mother’s lawyer kept them pretty much away from me.” She smiled. “For my own sake, of course.”

  “They searched the house?”

  “Yes. And the grounds. And so did I. Frequently, over a long period of time. Whenever my mother was out.”

  I had a sudden sad vision of a young girl, as the years passed around her, slowly searching through a silent house for bits of pottery, splinters of bone, a dead man’s missing wallet: something, anything, that might be prove her mother a murderer.

  What would she have done had she found it?

  Alice Wright misread my reverie, and smiled more softly than she had before. “You’d rather she wasn’t the one responsible, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry to say so, Joshua, both for your sake and for Mr. Begay’s, but I think those remains are somewhere at the bottom of the Rio Grande. I don’t think you’re ever going to find them.”

  “Did your mother ever remarry?”

  “No.”

  “No boyfriends, no male companions?”

  “No.” She smiled. “She was one of those women who come into their own with widowhood.”

  “Hi. This is your dreamboat speaking.”

  “Wilbur?”

  “Rita, Rita, Rita. Here I am, all by myself in a empty motel room, a stranger in a strange land. And all you can do is make jokes and play bumper cars with my heart.”

  “Why alone? Why aren’t you and Grober out hitting the boites of El Paso? I’m sure he knows all the elegant night spots.”

  “I haven’t talked to Grober yet. But I spent part of this afternoon with Alice Wright. She’s Dennis Lessing’s daughter.”

  “I know. The computer gave me that, off the database. She was an anthropologist. Apparently a very good one. Studied with Ruth Benedict at Columbia.”

  “If you’ve got a computer to give you all this good stuff, what do you need me for?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. Banter?”

  “What else did the computer have to say?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got first.”

  I told her what I’d learned from Alice Wright about her father and mother.

  “She’s right, Joshua,” Rita said. “If her mother did it, you’re never going to find the remains.”

  “But maybe her mother didn’t do it. We’re talking about things that were seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old girl and then filtered through an awful lot of time.”

  “She was trained as a professional observer, Joshua.”

  “Not when she was a kid.”

  “You’re going to assume she’s wrong then.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  A pause. “For the time being, I suppose. If you assume she’s right, there isn’t much point in your staying down there.”

  “Way I figured it.”

  “So what are your plans?”

  “I got a couple of names from Alice Wright. First off, there’s a guy named Peter Yazzie, a Navajo. The only address she had for him was a trading post on the Reservation, and that was fifty years ago. But maybe we can locate him. I tried calling Daniel Begay, in Gallup, but there was no answer.”

  “Give me the number,” she said, “and I’ll see if I can reach him tomorrow.”

  I gave it to her.

  “And why are we trying to find Peter Yazzie?” she asked me.

  “He was the son of Lessing’s Navajo guide, and he went along with Lessing and his father on those field trips. If he’s still alive, he may know who this woman was, the one Lessing was seeing.”

  “You’re thinking that jealousy, if it actually were the motive, could work just as well from someone on her end.”

  “Did I ever tell you how much I admire clever women, Rita?”

  “But this woman’s husband, or boyfriend, or whatever, why would he steal the remains?”

  “If he was a Navajo,” I said, “he might’ve known what they were. Maybe he wanted to bring them back to the Res.”

  “Wouldn’t someone on the Reservation have known about it if he had?”

  “Maybe he didn’t tell anybody. Maybe he was afraid he’d get busted for killing Lessing.”

  “If the remains have been back there all this time, then that woman’s dreams are meaningless.”

  “Meaningless dreams happen all the time. You should see mine sometime.”

  “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  “You said a couple of names. Who else?”

  “A man named Martin Halbert. The head of Halbert Oil. His father was the guy who sponsored Lessing’s field trips, and Lessing sent him regular reports. Maybe I can pick up something there. Alice knows him, he used to be one of her students. She called him up and arranged for him to meet me tomorrow morning.” Lisa had left by then, off to some cocktail party.

  “Anything else?” Rita asked.

  “I’m going over to the university tomorrow to see if I can find addresses for any of Lessing’s former students. The ones who went with him on the field trips.”

  “Joshua, if any of them are still alive, they’ll be in their eighties now.”

  “I know.”

  Another pause. “And is that it?”

  “Pretty much. I’m having dinner tomorrow with Alice Wright, at her house. Maybe she’ll remember something else by then.”

  “And maybe you’ll remember to ask her a question you seem to’ve forgotten.”

  “Which is?”

  “How did her mother learn about her father’s adultery?”

  “Ah. Right. Good point there, Rita.”

  “But none of this sounds terribly promising, does it?”

  “Not really, no. I’ll probably be heading back to Santa Fe on Friday morning. So, tell me. Did you get anything interesting of
f the computer?”

  “Nothing helpful about Bedford or Randolph. And nothing about Lessing that you don’t already know, evidently. But I called up Jack Hogarth at the American School of Research here in town.” The ASR was a kind of heavy-duty anthropology think-tank specializing in Native American cultures.

  “Who’s Jack Hogarth?”

  “An archaeologist. William and I did some work for him once.” William being her late husband.

  “And what did old Jack have to say?”

  “He told me an interesting story about your friend Alice. Did you know that she lived for a while with the Jivaro Indians in South America?”

  “Yeah. The headhunters. Nice fellas, according to her.”

  “Yes, well, according to Jack, for years there’s been a rumor going around that while she was with them, the family she lived with was attacked by a neighboring tribe and that one of her friends was killed. A woman.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “The story is that, afterward, she went out with the Jivaro war party on its revenge raid. She found the man who killed her friend and she killed him. And then she took his head.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “And does Hogarth believe that?”

  “He does, as a matter of fact. He’s spoken with another anthropologist, one who did fieldwork with the Jivaro in the fifties. A man named Lewison. Lewison told Jack that the Jivaro were still singing songs about the tall white woman who took heads.”

  “Well, look, Rita, even if that’s all true, it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to her when she was eleven years old.”

  “No,” she said. “But before you have dinner with her tomorrow you might want to ask her what’s on the menu.”

  The thought of Alice Wright as a headhunter was a fairly diverting one. I lay there for a while, wondering about it.

  I wondered, first, if it were true. Under the proper circumstances, she’d said, anyone is capable of murder. Had she been speaking from personal experience? The “tall white woman” detail in the Jivaro songs seemed persuasive. But then, maybe the Jivaro were a bunch of zanies who thought that slandering anthropologists was a nifty thing to do.

  I wondered, if it were true, how she’d felt about taking a life. I wondered if she’d ever told anyone about it.

  I wondered what a Jivaro song might sound like. Did it have a good beat? Could you dance to it?

  But all this mental activity wasn’t enough to stop a sharp splinter of guilt from jabbing occasionally at the back of my soul. I hadn’t told Rita that Lisa Wright would be there at dinner tomorrow night. I hadn’t told her about Lisa Wright at all.

  Later, as I was falling asleep, three different images kept tumbling over each other in my head. The first image was of the young girl prowling round and round the empty house. The second was of the same person, older now, a woman in a khaki skirt and blouse, swinging a big bright machete down through the air to hack a muscular brown neck. The third was of another woman, this one in jeans, smiling as she brushed a strand of black hair away from big bright cornflower-blue eyes.

  7

  On Thursday morning, when I went outside to the Subaru, I discovered that all four of its tires were flat. Each had been slashed through the sidewall.

  I reported this to the overweight woman behind the counter at the front office. She received the news with admirable aplomb: She tapped cigarette ashes into a Cinzano ashtray and told me that these things happened. It was the Mexican kids, the pachucos. They go out and they get stoned, sometimes they get nasty. They all carry knives, I was lucky it was only the tires that got slashed and not my belly. She was sorry, it was a tough break, but didn’t I read the sign?

  She jerked her thumb over her shoulder: THE MANAGEMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGE TO ANY GUEST’S VEHICLE.

  Yeah, she said, there was a gas station up the street, and a car rental place farther along.

  None of the other tires in the lot had been slashed, but I didn’t attach much importance to that. The only people in El Paso who knew where I was staying were Alice and Lisa Wright. I could picture Alice using a machete on a human neck, but not on an automobile tire. I couldn’t picture Lisa using a machete at all. And there was no real reason for them, or for anyone else, to attack me by way of the Subaru.

  Probably the woman was right. Probably it’d been done by kids, Hispanic or otherwise. Or by grownup morons. New Mexico and Texas were still bickering over Rio Grande water rights. Maybe the New Mexico tags on the station wagon had gotten someone’s dander up.

  It was nine o’clock. If I hurried, I could still make my ten o’clock appointment with Martin Halbert.

  At the gas station, I put the price of four new tires on the credit card and paid cash to have someone haul them over to the motel and slap them on the station wagon. At the rental agency, I signed a piece of paper only slightly less imposing than the Magna Carta and took possession of a Chevy Citation with a bad case of emphysema and an interior that smelled of Pine-Sol.

  Last night, Alice Wright had told me how to reach Martin Halbert’s place. I took Rim Road off Mesa and then climbed up the mountain. Before people started living here, this had been a barren place—no trees, no shrubs, no brush. Now the rocky brown slopes were notched with bright green lawns and terraced gardens. The homes were pretty, beautiful even; but they seemed out of place against the rock, gumdrops on an obelisk.

  The road wound and unwound as it rose, the houses getting more and more elaborate, the view getting more and more spectacular. The air was warm and clear, the sky was blue. Below me lay El Paso, a huddle of glittering downtown towers at its center, and then the long brown curl of river, and then Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side, stretching out across the flat valley to the distant gray mountains in the west.

  Toward the top, I found the private paved road with the small wrought-iron sign that discreetly announced HALBERT. I wheeled the Chevy onto the road, did a bit more climbing, then came around a hairpin turn, and saw the house.

  Alice Wright had told me that Halbert owned a larger home in Midland. It must’ve been a warehouse. This one was huge. Perched above a lake of asphalt, all straight lines and sharp angles, it was a science-fiction wet dream of redwood, glass, and stone, poised to blast off the mountainside and go soaring across the valley.

  I parked the Chevy on the empty asphalt lot, walked past the double doors of a garage built directly into the mountain, then trudged up a steep stairway made of old railway ties. After an hour or two I arrived at the front door. I pressed the button. I heard nothing, but only a moment later the door opened and an Asian man in black slacks and a white houseboy’s jacket stood there. Short and slight, his jet-black hair combed straight back from a round forehead, he could’ve been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five years old.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Joshua Croft,” I said. “I’m here to see Mr. Halbert.”

  “Please come in, Mr. Croft.” He spoke without an accent.

  We crossed an enormous living room. White carpeting, massive white leather furniture, a sunken conversation pit encircling a fireplace of stone. Heavy redwood beams and clerestory windows overhead. Then we slipped through an opened pair of French doors and stepped out onto a triangular redwood deck that angled out over the valley like the bow of a ship.

  “Mr. Croft,” said the Asian, and turned and padded away. Heading off, probably, to finish buffing up the Green Hornet’s roadster. Or maybe the Green Hornet himself.

  I’m not sure what I expected Martin Halbert to look like. Probably like one of the cartoons who strut through “Dallas,” a beefy good ole boy with a beer-belly swagger. A silk snap-button shirt and a pair of ostrich skin boots. A feathered Stetson he unscrewed only when he lay down, and sometimes not even then.

  Halbert looked nothing like this. Maybe fifty years old, he was tall, about my height, and he was slender and very trim. His face was narrow and ascetic, his eyes were blue. His skin was tanned and his hair was short and snowy whit
e, a color exactly matching the white poplin East Indian shirt and the loose-fitting white cotton pants. On his feet were a pair of white plastic flip-flop sandals. He might’ve stepped from an ashram in Varansi or off a yacht in Cannes.

  When I arrived, he had stood up from a round table at the apex of the deck’s triangle. The table was set for two: white damask tablecloth, bone china cups and saucers, sterling silver flatware, a narrow cylindrical crystal vase holding a single red rose.

  Now he crossed the deck and shook my hand. He moved with the easy grace of someone who doesn’t need to prove much of anything to anybody. Yoga or karate can sometimes give you that. So can money. He grinned, a good grin, one that crinkled up the corners of his eyes and knocked fifteen years off his age. “Mr. Croft. Pleased to meet you. I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet, because you’re just in time for the food. I was able to con Milton into doing his eggs Benedict.” There was still some Texas in his voice but you had to listen for it.

  I told him I hadn’t eaten yet, and thanked him, and I nodded to the French doors through which the Asian had disappeared. “That was Milton?”

  He nodded, smiled, and then gestured toward the table. “Please. Have a seat.”

  The two of us sat. He asked me if I wanted coffee or tea and I told him that coffee would be fine. He poured it from a silver pot into my cup. He didn’t spill a drop, and I hadn’t thought for a moment that he would.

  “Now,” he said, putting down the pot, “first of all, tell me how Alice is doing. I haven’t had a chance to visit with her for a long time.”

  “Fine,” I said. “She’s an impressive woman.”

  “An amazing woman. Really the last of the great ladies.”

  Milton came back onto the deck just then, carrying a tray that held two plates of eggs and a crystal decanter of orange juice. He served us without a word and then left again, taking the tray with him.

  “Orange juice?” Halbert asked me.

  “Please.”

  He poured some for me, poured some for himself.