At Ease with the Dead (11 page)

I swallowed some bourbon and nodded. “I'll probably pack it in tomorrow.”

“Listen,” he said, “while you're down here, why don't we hook it over to Juarez, check out the action?”

“Can't,” I said. “I'm supposed to meet some people for dinner.”

“Well lookit, let's get together afterwards. I got a new squeeze, Connie, she can call a friend. The four of us can go out, do the town.”

“I don't think so, Phil. I'm beat.”

He grinned. “You still got a thing for Rita, right? What're you guys, Mr. and Mrs. North?”

I smiled. “Really, Phil, I'm tired.”

“Josh, you got to break loose now and then. I mean, hey, it's a crummy thing happened to Rita, a tragedy and all, I feel terrible about it personally, but you got to remember that life goes on. You got to go for the gusto. World's gonna pass you by.”

I sipped at my bourbon. “Thanks, Phil. I'll bear that in mind.”

Smiling, he shook his head. “Jesus, Josh, you probably still help little old ladies cross the street.”

“Whether they want to go or not,” I said. “Kicking and screaming, some of them.”

He laughed, picked up his glass, saw that it was empty. He turned to me. “One more?”

I shrugged, smiled. “You've got to go for the gusto.”

10

P
lump roast duckling in a brandied orange sauce. Wild rice. Buttery baby peas. Spinach salad tossed with a tart vinaigrette and sprinkled with crisp bacon bits. Icy white wine as dry as the desert air. All of it arranged on china and crystal atop a table spread with glossy white linen, beneath a crystal chandelier.

I was living well lately. Too well. If I wanted to work off all these carbohydrates, I'd have to swim the Rio Grande back to Santa Fe.

This evening I was sporting a tie, something I usually do only at funerals, but I still felt underdressed. Alice Wright wore a black velvet shift, simple and elegant, and a single strand of pearls. Lisa wore an Oriental-looking pantsuit of red brocaded silk. I had determined, early on, that the round breasts beneath the material were loose and free. The uncanny eye of the trained detective.

Lisa, it transpired, was an artist. The painting that hung over the sofa in the living room was one of hers, a view through a pair of ruddy sandstone buttes toward an elaborate sunset. So was the painting here in the dining room, a night scene looking up the length of a deep gorge. Moonlight draped the dark rocks, glazed the pale white sand and the black ribbon of river. The area looked vaguely familiar, and I said so.

“It's the east gorge of the Grand Canyon,” she said from across the table, and sipped at her wine. “I spent a few weeks there two years ago. Do you like it?”

The chandelier was wired to a dimmer switch, and Alice had adjusted it to a level just above candlelight. In its pale yellow glow, Lisa's long black hair had the same liquid sheen as the river in the picture.

“The painting?” I said. “Sure. But I'm the wrong person to ask about paintings. What I know about art would fit in a Dixie cup.”

Alice Wright, who sat on my left at the table's head, smiled and said, “Now, Joshua. You oughtn't give a compliment with one hand and take it away with the other.”

Lisa laughed. “Oh, let him be, Alice.” She turned to me and said, “I'm sure Joshua's able to use both hands at once.” She was smiling, and those extraordinary blue eyes of hers seemed to be glowing.

If this was a come-on, and to the base of my belly it sounded like one, I wasn't sure how to react while Alice Wright was there. And I wasn't sure how I'd react if she hadn't been.

Alice herself solved the problem, temporarily, by taking up the conversational slack. “Lisa had a show just last month. Very successful too, wasn't it, dear?”

Lisa looked at her with mock severity and said, “Cool it, Granny.”

Alice smiled. “Ignore her, Joshua. She's one of those artists who refuses to toot her own horn. She has galleries all over the southwest begging for her work. Even one in Santa Fe.”

I nodded to Lisa, acknowledging the achievement. “Santa Fe's a tough market to crack.”

She smiled, and her young face actually flushed. “I haven't actually cracked it yet. I'm supposed to fly up there next month and see some people.”

Despite myself, the machinery of my mind started clanking. Lisa Wright in Santa Fe: an interesting prospect.

Holding her wine glass lightly with the fingertips of both hands, Lisa said, “How do you like living there?”

“It's okay,” I said. All the thing needed was a casual suggestion.
Why not give me a jingle when you get into town? We'll do lunch.

Lisa raised an eyebrow. “Only okay? Most of the people I've talked to are crazy about it.”

I shrugged. “Most of them probably see only one side of it. The galleries and the glitz.”
Rita, this is Lisa Wright. From El Paso? Remember I told you about her
? Except I hadn't told Rita about her.

“I've been there a few times,” Alice said, “and I must say I wasn't very taken by the place. It's lovely, of course, all those adobes, the mountains in the background, but it seemed terribly rich and terribly incestuous. Like high school, with money.”

I smiled. Not a bad description.

Lisa took a sip of wine. “When are you going back?”

“Tomorrow.”

Alice said, “Have you given up, then, on finding the remains?”

Till now, we hadn't spoken about my reason for being in their city. I nodded. “As far as El Paso is concerned. I'll see if I can locate your friend Peter Yazzie on the Reservation. But that's a long shot. And even if I find him, he probably won't be able to help.”

“Did you get any help from Martin Halbert?”

“Some.” I had decided before I arrived here that I wouldn't tell her about Brian DeFore and her mother. “He seems a pretty nice guy.”

Alice smiled. “He is.” She turned to her granddaughter. “Isn't he, Lisa?”

“Very nice,” Lisa said. She turned to me. “Sad, I think, but very nice. He and I dated for a while. A few years ago.”

“Why sad?” I asked her, telling myself that I was asking only because the answer might somehow bear upon the case. Ignoring the flicker of—what? irritation? jealousy?—that said Lisa was far too young for him. Ignoring, too, the urge to linger over the observation that she dated older men.

Lisa shrugged lightly. “He wants children, and he can't have them.”

“He can't adopt one?” I said.

“It wouldn't be the same,” she said. She smiled wryly. “It wouldn't fulfill the same dynastic urges.”

Alice said, almost defensively, “Martin's very proud of his father, and very proud of his father's company. He's given up the day-to-day running of the business to write a book about it.”

Lisa said, “The book's become a sort of substitute for the child he can't have.”

Alice thought about that for a moment. “Perhaps. Men like to leave something behind. Monuments to posterity. But he's still a very nice man, and very bright. One of my best students. And one of the few oilmen in Texas—in the country, for that matter—who's demonstrated a concern for the environment.”

Lisa leaned slightly toward me, cupped a slender hand around her smiling mouth, and said in a stage whisper: “Don't get her started on the oil companies.”

Alice turned to her, eyebrows arched, and grandly said, “One day you'll be a feeble and senile old woman yourself. I only hope that
you
find yourself saddled with wretched, thankless grandchildren who sit there and mock you.”

Lisa laughed. “Granny, I'll be feeble and senile before you are.”

Alice smiled and turned to me. “It's not merely the oil companies, although certainly they share the blame.” She shrugged her angular shoulders. “Finally, of course, it's the human race.”

Lisa smiled at me. “Alice thinks we're a rogue species.”

Alice said seriously, “I do, yes. If you see the world as an organism, a single entity, which of course it is, then you can't help but see the human race as a kind of virus on its surface, actively engaged in killing off the host.”

I took a sip of wine. “That sounds like a pretty bleak way to look at it.”

She smiled. “Well, at least we're doing it more swiftly these days. That's something, I suppose. We're putting her out of her misery more quickly. We can dig hydrocarbons out of the soil, where they've lain dead and buried for millennia, burn them at an absolutely staggering rate, and destroy the entire atmosphere. We can bulldoze and dynamite and torch the tree forests, thousands of acres of them a day, and deplete the major source of oxygen for the planet. We can spill millions of tons of industrial waste into the seas, and kill off the plankton that provide the ultimate basis for all aquatic life.”

“Yeah,” I said, and smiled. “Pretty bleak.”

Another smile from Alice. “The irony is that from another perspective, equally valid, the human race is quite simply the pinnacle of evolution. Really quite a remarkable thing, isn't it: Matter become conscious of itself.” She shrugged again, her smile became rueful. “Not conscious enough, alas.”

I said, “You don't think there's any hope?”

She shook her head. “Not for us, at any rate. Not for the human race. We're doomed, thank goodness. But I like to think that life of some kind will survive. Cockroaches, perhaps. Sharks. Some kind of new, mutated bacteria that thrives on radiation. Who knows? Life, after all, doesn't care who lives it.”

“And what do we do in the meantime?”

Another shrug of her square thin shoulders. “If we're inclined toward morality, I suppose we try to contribute as little as possible to the destruction. And I suppose that, collectively and individually, we take a kind of comfort from the fact that no matter how bad things are at the moment, they're the very best they'll ever be, from now on.”

“And,” said Lisa Wright, smiling, “we take coffee and brandy in the living room.”

The end of the world notwithstanding, there were a couple of questions I had to ask Alice Wright. In the living room, over the coffee and cognac, I did.

“Alice,” I said, “you told me that your mother found out about the woman your father was seeing. Do you know how?”

She and Lisa were on the sofa. Alice sat upright as though doing afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace, both feet squarely on the carpet, cup and saucer squarely in her lap. Lisa sat with her long legs tucked beneath herself, one long feline arm stretched out along the sofa's back, the silk of her sleeve a line of flame against the cream-colored fabric. I sat across the room in one of the two upholstered chairs that matched the sofa. A piano piece—something by Eric Satie, I think—was playing softly on the stereo.

At the question, Alice frowned slightly. “Learned about the woman, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

She cocked her head thoughtfully. “You know, I don't, really.” She smiled. “Isn't that curious. I assumed at the time that my father had told her. But that can't've been the case. Why would he?”

Lisa said, “Because he wanted a divorce?”

Alice shook her head. “No. If he'd asked her for a divorce then, I would've known about it. I don't think he mentioned divorce until that last day.”

I said, “But even then, you never actually heard him ask for one.”

“No. No, but I'm convinced he did.”

I nodded. “Do you remember a man named Jordan Lowery? He was a professor of oil geology at the school.”

She smiled. “Jordan. Of course. For the longest time I had a terrible crush on him. Physically he was probably the most beautiful man I've ever seen. Absolutely stunning.” Another smile as she inclined her head confidentially. “But a terrible rogue. What they used to call a cad. He cut quite a swath through the female half of El Paso. There were stories, I remember, about him leaping out of windows to avoid outraged husbands.” She smiled once more and sipped at her coffee. “His son, Emmett, teaches at the university now.”

“I met him the other day,” I said.

“Poor Emmett. There are all sorts of ways the sins of the fathers can be visited upon the sons. In Emmett's case, they simply replicated themselves. He became a womanizer like his father.”

She took a sip of coffee. “Jordan didn't marry till he was in his late forties. He really didn't have any interest in children, didn't quite know what to do with them. Emmett was an only child, and he spent most of his life trying to get his father's attention and approval. And I suppose he's still trying, although Jordan's been dead for thirty years now.”

Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters—somehow I'd gotten tangled in a web of family relationships stretching back to the twenties, a snarl of bygone lusts and longings, bygone loves and hates. I sipped at my brandy and asked her, “How did Jordan get along with your father?”

“Well enough, I suppose. Jordan was always pleasant and deferential.” Another smile. “But he was also ambitious, so I've no way of knowing how genuine that was.”

“How'd your father get along with him?”

“I think my father rather envied Jordan his freedom. His roguery.” A smile. “With a wife like the one he had, one can hardly blame him.”

“How'd your mother feel about him?”

She frowned. “The subject never really came up. Not in front of me, at any rate. Disapproving, I should think, given her feelings about sex.”

I nodded. This wasn't the time—the time might never come—to tell her that her mother's feelings about sex had probably been a good deal more complicated than she believed.

I said, “Do you think it's possible that Jordan might've been involved in your father's death?”

She blinked, surprised. “Why would he be? He was ambitious, as I say, and he liked the things money could buy, but why kill my father? To obtain his position? The salary wasn't that much larger. And why on earth steal the remains of a Navajo Indian?