Natural Causes (31 page)

I stared at the sign for a second. I didn't know if
it was my pride or my mean streak, but I felt cheated.

"He came all that way to sell his house?" I
said. "That's what this was all about?"

"What what was all about?" Ramirez said
politely.

I shook my head. "It's not important. Did Dover
do anything else while he was in town--other than meet with the buyer
from Texas?"

"I don' know. I didn' see him after I picked him
up at the airport."

I stared at the house again. It was an elaborate
thing for such a remote spot. Full of plate glass. Modern A-style,
rather than the traditional Spanish of the haciendas in Mesilla.
There was a pool behind it, covered with a tarp. And a tennis court,
fenced in wire.

"How much did he get for it?" I asked
Ramirez.

"I don' know. A hundred and fifty thousand,
maybe. That's what he was asking. He was taking a beating, man. It
cost him a lot to fix the place up after the last flood."

"Who was the buyer, do you know?"

"He say a man named Clark. Gene Clark. Big
rancher from El Paso. He wanted a place to spend the winter--some
place close to home."

"Did you meet this guy?"

"No. I don' see him. Senor Dover said he was
gonna meet him at the ranch."

A gust of wind kicked up a spout of dirt at my feet,
as if someone had taken a shot at me with a rifle.

I felt a little like I'd been shot at. "For
chrissake," I said aloud.

"You wouldn't have a key to the place, would
you?" Ramirez shook his head. "Senor Dover took the keys."

"Chrissake," I said again.

I walked back to the jeep, Ramirez tagging along
beside me.

"Do you know how to get in touch with Clark?"

He shook his head. "Senor Dover handled it. All
I do is pick him up and take him back to the airport."

"Might as well take me back to Mesilla then,"
I said. "I guess I'll have to get in touch with Clark from
there."
"Yes, Senor," Ramirez
said.

As soon as I got back to the hotel, I called El Paso
information and asked for Gene Clark's number. They didn't have a
listing for him, under Gene or Eugene or G. or E.. I thought about
calling Seth Murdock to see if he knew anything about Clark, but I
was almost certain that he didn't--Dover hadn't mentioned him or the
sale of the ranch to his lawyer. He'd just told Murdock that he was
involved in some business deal. I couldn't really understand
that--why he hadn't told Murdock about the ranch sale. I could see
why he wouldn't have mentioned it to his mother or to Marsha. Connie,
particularly, wouldn't have had a hard time putting two and two
together, especially if Dover had been as sentimentally attached to
the place as Murdock had claimed. She knew that her son was having
problems on 'Phoenix'; the sale of the ranch would have tipped her
off to how serious those problems really were. But Murdock was a
different case. He didn't know about 'Phoenix.' In fact, he'd been
urging Quentin to unload the New Mexican property. There was no
reason not to let him in on a possible sale, unless Dover's pride had
kept him from admitting to Murdock that he'd been right about selling
the ranch.

I didn't really believe that. No more than I really
believed that Dover had taken all of those extraordinary precautions
just to disguise the sale of some property. True, it was a large
sale--a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, according to Ramirez. But
Dover was well over a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Between the
mortgage payments on his estate house and his mother's condo, fifty
grand wouldn't have bought him much time.

I decided to phone around in Las Cruces, anyway, to
see if a bank or savings and loan or realty office recognized Clark's
name or knew about the sale of the ranch. I went through the Las
Cruces phone book. There were only a couple of dozen banks and
realtors. It took me two hours to make the calls. No one I spoke to
knew anything about Clark. No one even knew that Dover's ranch had
been for sale. All of them recognized Quentin's name and said some
sad word about his death. They seemed to have liked Dover in Las
Cruces--that's about all I learned. Ramirez seemed to have liked him,
too. I remembered that Connie Dover had accused Ramirez of fooling
around when he visited Cincinnati. But after meeting the man, I
doubted it. Ramirez didn't look like the type who fooled around at
anything. He struck me as being a tough little New Mexican cookie.
But then most of the people I'd met or talked to in Las Cruces seemed
hardboiled and tough.

At two o'clock, I gave up on my phone survey and
decided to drive back out to the ranch. I thought there might be
something inside the house that would lead me to Gene Clark--if there
was a Gene Clark. I wasn't quite ready to write him off as another
one of Dover's inventions, aimed, this time, at keeping his overseer
from knowing what he was really up to on Saturday. But I was leaning
that way.

It was scorchingly hot outside by that hour of the
day. I could feel the heat rolling off the parking lot as I walked to
my car. The tar was soft and sticky underfoot. I rolled down the car
windows, opened the doors, switched the air conditioner on full blast
and started the Mustang up. When I could get inside the car without
breaking into a sweat, I rolled the windows back up and took off,
down the long dusty road on the eastern side of town.

It took me ten minutes through the desert to get to
the turnoff. I babied the car across the dry wash and pulled to a
stop in front of the ranch. The tires kicked up a mighty cloud of
dirt. I waited for the dust to settle, then got out and walked up to
the front door. The door was set in a low brick wall; a triangular
picture window ran above it to the tent-shaped roof. I rattled the
door but it was locked. Then I stepped back and tried to look into
the high window. There was a heavy curtain hanging across it. I
walked around to the west side of the house and continued along the
brick wall to the back yard. There were a couple of smaller windows
in the back wall and another door. I tried the door but it, too, was
locked.

There was no way in, unless I broke a window or
jimmied a door. I thought about it for a moment and decided that it
was worth the risk. What I needed was a large rock or piece of
timber. I scratched around the back yard looking for a crowbar.
Eventually I settled on a long metal pole I found on the deck of the
pool. I picked it up and took it back to the house. There were two
small windows on either side of the rear door-probably bathroom or
kitchen windows. I picked the one to my right and tapped it with the
pole. The glass was thick and I had to whack it a couple of times
before it shattered. I knocked all the loose glass out of the
casement with the pole. Then I went
back to
the pool, sat down on the deck in the shade of a palo verde tree, and
waited.

The window glass hadn't been wired or taped. But
there might have been a vibration-sensing or photoelectric device
connected to some alarm system that ran through the underground phone
lines to the Las Cruces police department or to a private security
firm. I gave the cops fifteen minutes to respond to the alarm. No one
showed. I waited another five minutes just to be sure, then I walked
over to the window and boosted myself in.

It was a bathroom, like I'd thought. The shattered
glass on the tile floor gave me pause for a second. That was what it
must have looked like in the Belle Vista on Monday morning, I
thought, only there would have been blood everywhere and Quentin's
torn-up body lying in the middle of it. I walked quickly over to the
bathroom door and opened it. It was very hot in the house, and I
broke into a sweat immediately. There was a short hall outside the
bathroom, with a low ceiling overhead. The hall stopped abruptly at
the rear of the living room--a huge room, with a cathedral ceiling
that made it seem even larger. A balcony ran around the walls, like a
cut-out second story. A staircase on the west wall led up to the
balcony.

I went into the living room, dripping sweat from my
arms. There was a huge stone fireplace on the east wall, with a
thirty-foot-high chimney running up to the roof. An Indian rug was
laid out in front of it with a couch and two chairs arranged around
the rug. The rest of the flooring was hardwood, polished like gun
metal. There was a study area on the east side of the room--a
plexiglass desk and chair and a couple of wood file cabinets. The
desk was littered with papers.

A small picture of Marsha Dover was propped on the
edge of the desk. I picked it up and looked at it for a moment, then
put it back down. Most of the loose papers were 'Phoenix'
materials--breakdowns and scripts. But there was a
xeroxed manuscript on top of the heap that looked too big to be a
breakdown. It was stapled on the side and someone had written "Here
it is" in the margin. I sat down and skimmed it. It was some
sort of story line--not a very good one, as far as I could tell. But
it was definitely a story line.

I folded it up and stuck it in my back pocket. Then I
went upstairs. The balcony ran back to a small bedroom area at the
rear of the house, above the john and what was probably a small
kitchen. The bedroom was just a mattress on a wooden frame, a bureau,
and a chair. The sheets on the mattress were rumpled, as if someone
had slept in the bed recently. I went through the drawers of the
bureau. They were filled with clothes, men's jewelry, and toiletry
items.

I walked back downstairs to the study. My shirt was
completely soaked by then. There was a phone on the desk. I started
to copy down the number and then realized that I already had it--it
was the same number Quentin had forwarded his calls to.
 

37

After checking out the kitchen, which was spotlessly
clean, I went back into the bathroom and climbed out through the
window. The open air felt good after that hot, cramped place. I could
feel the sweat start to evaporate immediately, as if the sunlight
were a kind of breeze. Dover had spent the night in the house, but as
far as I could tell he'd been there alone. There was no indication
that he'd had visitors--Gene Clark or anyone else. No liquor glasses
lying about. No cigarette butts in ashtrays. No dishes in the sink or
food on plates. It made me wonder if Quentin had done anything more
than sleep there on Friday night and then go someplace else on
Saturday, after he'd spoken to Feldman and before he'd had Ramirez
take him to the airstrip. There should have been at least one liquor
glass in that house--Quentin's. There wasn't even that small sign of
habitation. Only the rumpled bedclothes and the papers scattered on
the desk.

But as I was driving back to Las Cruces, I realized
that somebody else had been in the house--at least once, on Monday
morning. Feldman had talked to him--a man who spoke Spanish and who
hung up on Feldman when he mentioned Quentin's name. Unless Ramirez
had been lying to me, it hadn't been him. He'd claimed that he didn't
even have a key to the house any longer. The house hadn't been
ransacked--before I broke the window--so whoever had been there
hadn't been there by accident. That meant that somebody else had a
key and a legitimate reason to be in Dover's house on Monday morning.

I decided to talk to
Ramirez again and see if he could explain it.

***

It was almost five when I got back to Las Cruces. I
stopped at the City Hall before I went to the hotel--to make one last
attempt at locating Gene Clark. I checked with a Mexican woman in the
Office of Titles and Deeds to see if the sale of the ranch had been
registered there. But she had no record of a sale and seemed
surprised that Dover would have put the ranch on the market. He'd
really loved the place, she said.

When I got to the Holiday Inn, I went up to
"Maximilian," took the document out of my pocket, and put
it in my overnighter. I took a quick shower, then phoned Ramirez. A
woman answered the phone.

"Jes?" she said.

"Mrs. Ramirez?"

"Jes?" she said again.

"My name's Stoner, Mrs. Ramirez. I'd like to
speak to your husband."

"He's no' here," she said and hung up.

I copied Ramirez's address on a Holiday Inn notepad,
got dressed, and walked down to the lobby.

"Can you tell me how to find this street?"
I asked the desk clerk and showed her the address I'd written down on
the pad.

"Sure," she said with a smile. "I'll
draw you a map."

She drew a diagram for me on the pad and printed some
instructions beneath it. I thanked her and walked out to the lot.

It was cooling off outside. The heat had been so
ferocious at the heart of the day that the sudden chill seemed as
miraculous as a change of season. I stared at the map and gazed into
the desert. It was deep brown now, in the setting sun. The El Capitan
mountains were still lit brightly on their peaks, but the slopes were
beginning to purple into shadow. A few houselights flickered in the
valley at their feet. According to the map, one of those lights was
where I would find Jorge Ramirez.

I followed the instructions of the map, getting back
on the expressway in front of the hotel and driving east ten miles to
Exit 2-B. There was a Shell station at Exit 2-B and a paved two-lane
road, running south parallel to the mountain range. I stayed on the
two-lane road for about three miles, until I came to a four-way stop
sign. I turned left at the stop sign onto another two-lane road that
went east toward the mountains. There were a few deserted ranch
houses along the road, with dusty, wind-bellied fencing surrounding
them. Eventually the fencing disappeared and the road turned to
hard-packed dirt and I was out in the open desert--among the sage and
the agave--heading into the shadow of the mountains.