At Ease with the Dead (8 page)

“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 off 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

O
n 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 white, 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.

“So,” he said. “What can I do for you? Alice said you wanted to know something about her father's connection to Halbert Oil.”

For the third or fourth time now, this time adding an edited version of what Alice Wright had told me yesterday, I went through my missing-body story.

Between chapters, I enjoyed the breakfast. Strong coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, cold and sweet. Crisp English muffins, nicely browned Canadian bacon, perfectly poached eggs beneath a glossy lemon-yellow Hollandaise. It was the kind of meal that ultimately provides work for the surgeons who specialize in liposuction.

“Amazing,” he said when I wrapped it up. “More coffee?”

“Please.”

He poured each of us a cup. “An amazing story. And Alice genuinely believes that her mother was responsible for her father's death?”

I nodded.

He shook his head slightly. “Funny, isn't it, how you think you know someone, and then suddenly you learn something like this.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Must've been a hell of a burden for her to carry.”

“But maybe she's wrong. It all happened a long time ago.” I took a sip of coffee. “She said that Lessing sent regular reports to your father. I was wondering if I could take a look at them.”

“Certainly. I've got them here, with the rest of my father's papers.”

“Did you ever read them?”

“A long time ago.” He smiled. “Not the most thrilling reading in the world. Synclinal troughs, fossilliferous limestones, Permian deposits. The characters are weak, the plot's rather thin.”

I smiled. “Nothing personal in them, nothing about the woman Lessing was involved with.”

“No. Sorry.”

“Did your father ever get any personal letters from Lessing?”

“Probably, but if he did, he never kept them.”

“Aside from the woman, was there any good reason for Lessing to be looking for oil on the Navajo Reservation?”

He nodded. “People have known about oil in that area since the late Eighteen hundreds. The first wells were sunk north of the San Juan at Goodrich, just off the Reservation, around Nineteen ten.”

“Why weren't more oil companies out there looking for it?”

“Two reasons. The quality of the Goodrich crude was high, but the quantities were low. There just wasn't enough of the stuff down there to justify additional drilling. And more importantly, the Navajos didn't want to lease out their land. To anyone, for any reason.”

“Then why would your father bankroll Lessing's trips?”

He sipped at his coffee. “By Nineteen twenty-one, when Lessing came to him with the idea, my father had already done pretty well for himself. He could, afford to speculate. How much would it've cost him to outfit the trips? A couple of hundred dollars? A thousand? If Lessing came up empty, then the loss was insignificant. And if Lessing found a promising location, then maybe my father could talk the Navajos into letting him drill.”