Wall of Glass (7 page)

He nodded. “I violated one of my own cardinal rules last night.”

“Which one was that?” I asked. Gordon put the drinks in front of us and I paid for them.

“Never sit down next to an ugly woman when you plan to do some serious drinking. By the time last call rolls around, she's lost forty pounds and gained a face lift.”

“Bad night, was it?”

He shook his head in disgust.

I smiled. “I thought you'd already slept with all the available women in Santa Fe.”

“Now I'm down to the ones who are
really
available.” He tossed back what was left in the first brandy snifter, slid it away from him toward the edge of the bar, moved the full snifter into its place. “We're talking your basic disaster here.”

“Look on the bright side,” I told him. “Tourist season starts pretty soon.”

The thought didn't cheer him. “School teachers from Cincinnati. Secretaries from Dubuque.”

“You bring a little excitement into their lives, Peter. Glamour. Romance.”

“I've been seriously thinking about entering a monastery.”

“The pay's not all that great, I hear.”

“Yeah, but the hours are terrific.”

I tasted the Jack Daniel's. “I've got a question for you. What do you know about the Leightons?”

He looked at me. “Felice and Derek?”

I nodded.

“You working on something?”

“Yeah.”

“For them, or against them?”

“For them, indirectly.”

“You'd be better off working against them. They'd probably treat you better.”

“Does that mean they're not swell folks?”

“Are we talking professionally or personally?”

“Both.”

“It doesn't matter. They're not swell folks in either capacity.”

“Why?”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“Professionally.”

He shrugged. “Leighton is one of those people who manages to raise mediocrity to new middles. He's the guy who put up the Bel Grande.” A new luxury hotel on the outskirts of town, off one of the exits from the main highway. “Everything was substandard. His block, his mortar, even his rebar. The place'll probably topple over in five years. Kill three hundred school teachers from Portland, Maine.”

“Peter Ricard found crushed beneath the rubble.”

“Not me. I'll be off in the monastery, picking hops. Or hopping picks. Whatever it is they do in monasteries.”

Peter was in the same business as Leighton, development and construction. Which was, after all, why I'd wanted to speak to him. But there might have been, I knew, some bias blended with his expertise.

“How'd he get away with it?” I asked. “What about the building codes?”

He shrugged. “Money.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Not anything admissible in court. But a fact, yes. The guy's been involved in more shady land deals than anyone in Santa Fe. And that, believe me, is saying something.”

“How's his business doing?”

“A whole lot better than it should.”

“No problems, no difficulties?”

“He was in some trouble for a while last year.” He sipped at his Amaretto. “A note came due on that project of his over on St. Michael's, those rinky-dink condos, and he was strapped for cash. Overextended, like half the contractors in Santa Fe.”

“When was this?”

“Fall sometime. September. October.”

“Did he raise the money?”

He nodded. “Probably printed it in his basement.”

“How much was involved?”

“Not a lot. Thirty, forty thousand.” Peter, who's been known to drive all the way to Albuquerque to save twenty dollars on a pair of slacks, could dismiss thirty or forty thousand with a shrug.

“What about his wife?” I asked.

“What about her?”

“The two of them get along all right?”

“Now we're into the personal stuff.”

I nodded.

“Well,” he said, “personally, the two of them are a bucket of worms.”

“How so?”

“They're into kinky.”

“What kind of kinky?”

“Derek likes to watch.”

“His wife and other men?”

“Other men, other women, dogs, cats. Otters. Woodchucks.”

“I sense a certain level of exaggeration.”

He grinned. “Okay, maybe not animals. But anything human the two of them can drag up there to the house. And just to keep from getting bored, both of them play around on the side. Derek likes little Indian girls. Felice likes truck drivers and props.”

“Props.”

“Bondage stuff. Handcuffs, paddles. Punish me, you brute.”

“Guns?”

“Why not?”

“Are you speaking here from personal experience?”

“Almost.”

“Almost?”

He sipped at his Amaretto. “I drove her home one night from some charity thing at the Hilton. Derek was out of town. Probably off laundering money somewhere. We had a drink, Felice and I, and started playing around. She's a good-looking woman, takes care of herself, and I admit I was tempted. But when she told me what kind of games she had in mind, I lost interest.”

“What kind of games?”

“Like I said. Handcuffs on the bedpost.” He shrugged, smiled. “I've just never felt that I make a very convincing brute.”

“Maybe if you took up cigars.”

“They hurt my sinuses.”

“I think you're right,” I said. “Brute is out.”

He grinned. “Anyway,” he said, “if I were you, I'd do what I could to avoid both of them.”

S
OMETIMES IT'S NOT
so easy to avoid people. After I left Vanessie's, I stopped at the McDonald's on Cerrillos Road and picked up a couple of quarter-pounders at the window. When I reached my house, about twenty minutes later at nine-thirty, I saw that a gray Saab Turbo was parked in the driveway. It was the same one that had been parked at the Leightons', or its twin.

I drove the wagon onto the side of the road, left it there, and carried the McDonald's bag up the moonlit driveway. Nothing like a bag full of hamburgers in your fist to give you that feeling of accomplishment and that air of mystery.

Mrs. Leighton opened the car door and stepped out, wearing the same clothes she'd had on earlier, with the addition of a white fox jacket and a dark scarf at her throat. In the moonlight, the jacket seemed to glow with a light of its own. She wasn't carrying a McDonald's bag, and she looked as if she probably never had.

“I came to apologize,” she said. “Your address was in the phone book.”

“No need to apologize,” I said. “I hope you haven't been waiting long.”

She shook her head. “Five minutes. I've been thinking all day about the way Derek behaved this afternoon, and I finally decided to come make amends.” She smiled. “He means well, Derek, but sometimes he can be overprotective.”

I had circled around her, and now I leaned my hip against the Saab's front fender. Curious, I put my hand out along the hood. Not cold; but not five minutes warm, either. I said, “It happens to the best of us.”

“You
are
still going to help me with this, aren't you?”

“I'm going to try to find the necklace, yes.”

“Good. Thank you.” She smiled. “Is there anything I can do to help?” She said it seriously, with no erotic undertones in her voice.

“Well,” I said, “since you're here, you could answer a few more questions.”

Nodding to the bag I carried, she smiled again. “I don't want to interrupt your dinner.”

“This isn't dinner,” I said, lifting the bag. “I just cart this around once in a while to make myself seem poignant.”

She smiled. “ It succeeds.”

I smiled back. “Come on in.”

Inside the house, I said, “Let me get a fire started. The heating system here is a little primitive.”

The Sunday
New York Times
lay on the sofa where I'd left it, unread. I tore sheets from the business section—I'm not usually planning a merger or updating my portfolio—crumpled them into balls, and tossed them into the
kiva
fireplace. Hands in the pockets of her jacket, Mrs. Leighton moved across the room and stood in front of the bookcase, scanning the titles.

“A private detective who reads books,” she said.

“Only the ones with pictures.” Squatting, I arranged some pinon logs in a tepee formation above the newspaper, then lit the paper with a kitchen match from the box on the
banco.

I stood. “Can I fix you a drink?”

She turned from the bookcase. “Please. Scotch?”

I nodded. “No soda. Water all right?”

“Fine.”

I went into the kitchen, built a Scotch and water for her, a Jack Daniel's on the rocks for myself. When I returned to the living room, the fire, burning nicely now, had taken some of the chill from the room. Mrs. Leighton had removed the scarf from her neck, the fox jacket from her shoulders, and she was sitting back on the sofa, her long legs crossed. I handed her the drink, she thanked me, and, since the only other available chair was occupied by the jacket and scarf, I sat down on the sofa beside her. It's always been a small sofa, but it seemed even smaller today.

She smiled at me and said, “Well.”

“Well,” I said.

It was the standard scene. Two strangers alone for the first time, crackle of fire off to the side, click and tinkle of ice cubes in the drinks, the bedroom and its promise only a few short paces away. Except that one of the strangers knew a great deal more about the other's private life than any stranger had a right to.

It wasn't my place to judge the woman. At any given moment, all over the world, people are getting off in every way you could imagine, and quite a few you couldn't, if you were lucky. So long as no one got hurt, so long as everyone had voluntarily bought his own ticket, or hers, then best of luck to them all. But personally I've always found the need for props—handcuffs, paddles, beanies with propellers, whatever—somehow rather sad.

And yet, maybe because what I knew about her was sexually oriented, it was impossible for me not to respond to her as a sexual presence. I was very conscious of the firm tanned flesh beneath her sweater, the faint herbal smell of her perfume, the intelligence and energy alight behind those impossibly blue eyes. She was, as Peter had said, a good-looking woman and, like him, I was tempted.

“My husband,” she said, “doesn't know I'm here.”

“Ah,” I said. Master of the Witty Riposte.

“As I told you, he can be overprotective. He's a good man, and an understanding man, but the burglary last year, the police investigation, it all upset him terribly.”

“So I gathered.”

She smiled. “Have you ever been married, Joshua?” She tilted her head slightly to the side. “Do you mind if I call you Joshua?”

“No to both.”

“Engaged?”

“No.”

“Does that mean you're a cynic?” She smiled again. “Or simply a romantic?”

“So far as I can tell, they're both the same thing.”

She smiled and nodded approvingly, either at the answer itself or at the fact that I actually had one. Her eyes narrowed slightly, quizzical. “What sort of relationship do you have with Mrs. Mondragon?”

“We work together.”

She nodded. “Allan Romero said something interesting.”

“That surprises me.”

She laughed. It was still a good laugh. “He's not really a very interesting man, is he? But he does know Mrs. Mondragón, apparently. And he knows you, at least
of
you. He tells me that there're all sorts of rumors about the two of you.”

“When did you speak to Romero?”

“This afternoon. After you left.” Another smile, another tilt of her head. “Does it bother you that I was curious?”

“No. Why should it bother me?”

“It shouldn't. But aren't
you
curious about the rumors?”

“There are more rumors in Santa Fe than there are green chiles. I can't keep up with them all. But Mrs. Leighton—Felice—none of this is getting us any closer to finding that necklace.”

A smile. “You really don't like talking about her, do you? You did the same thing when you were over at the house.”

“We're business associates. We work together.”

“Allan said that when you found the man who shot her, you nearly beat him to death with your bare hands. Is that true?”

“No. Suppose I ask you a question, Felice.”

She smiled, then sighed in mock resignation. She waved her drink gently. “All right. Ask ahead.”

“When did you stop sleeping with Frank Biddle?”

It was a cheap shot, but she took it well. She stared at me for just a moment, and then she laughed. “I love the way you phrase it. The syntax presumes the guilt.
Mr. Jones, when did you stop molesting little boys?
What can I say? That I
didn't
stop?”

“Did you?”

“Well,” she smiled, “after all, the man is dead. That's about as final a stop as you can get.” She sipped at her drink. “But what makes you think there was a beginning?”

“The police think there was.”

“Do they now.” Still amused. “That boring little man, Nolan?”

“Among others. They think that you and Biddle were having an affair, that your husband found out and fired him.”

She laughed again. “Then they're even more ridiculous than I thought.”

“You never slept with him?”

“Slept with him? We're being rather circumspect, aren't we? Are you asking me if we fucked?” She smiled as she said the word. I think I was supposed to be shocked.

“Yeah,” I said. “In my circumspect way.”

“Twice, as a matter of fact.” She tilted her head. “Does that surprise you?”