The Drum Within Read online

  He was near the old, unfinished cathedral, still missing its spires more than a century after construction began. It should be dark here. It was dark when he’d stepped out of the bookstore. But now adobe walls danced in flashing red and blue lights.

  Three

  Aragon knew why there were no cameras for the girl in the trunk. The television stations with Santa Fe bureaus were setting up across the street from Fager’s Finds. She wished she had more officers. She yelled for a young cop to put something over the business’s front window so no one could see inside.

  Lewis came out the front door behind her. He took a deep breath of the night’s clean air.

  “Santa Fe, the city different. That was different.”

  “I want to forget it,” Aragon said. “Shit, that’s never going to

  happen.”

  “Found this under her legs.” He placed a key fob on Aragon’s bright blue palm. They both wore plastic booties and two fresh pairs of rubber gloves. Crime scene supplies were going fast tonight.

  “Fager’s?”

  “He drives a Mercedes. That’s a Range Rover.”

  Aragon turned the key fob over and found the remote. “What are the chances?”

  “That would be pure, stinkin’ luck.”

  “You got a problem with luck?”

  Aragon pressed the key’s alarm. A car horn sounded down the block and they spun to the sound.

  Geronimo was coming up along his Range Rover when the horn went off. He went rigid and slapped at empty pockets. Then he saw the cops, a white guy the size of a defensive end and the short Hispanic woman who looked bald.

  The car horn blared. The Rover’s lights pulsed. The cops took a step closer. Geronimo wrapped his hand around the treasure in his jacket pocket. He had lost his keys in the store. He didn’t want to lose anything else important tonight.

  The shadow darted into an alley.

  Aragon leaned against a parking meter to strip off the plastic booties covering her cross trainers. Lewis was doing the same as he yelled for uniformed cops to secure the Range Rover.

  Lewis could lift a man over his head and stuff anyone into a police cruiser. She was faster. It was her job to catch the shadows and hang on until he caught up.

  She pushed off the parking meter and ran. The cool air caressed her head. No need for a wool cap down here. She almost had too many clothes. She’d be dropping her coat soon if pursuit went long. Above the roof line a State Police helicopter rose into view. Half a block behind her she heard Lewis radioing the chopper where to swing its searchlight.

  She turned into a dark alley. She had lost sight of her target but not before seeing a ponytail flying behind him. Five-six to five-ten, medium build. Maybe a fringed leather jacket. The guy was running funny: knees pointed out, flapping his feet on the street, making her think of someone in a clown suit trying to move fast. She paused to speak that little bit of identifying information into her shoulder mike. Then she unholstered her Springfield Armory .40 and charged into the shadows.

  Geronimo cursed his stiff cowboy boots. The steel tips wanted to trip him. The helicopter rose above the alley. He squeezed into a gap between two buildings and emerged into a neighborhood of bungalows and big trees. A thick hedge separated the closest house from the street. He checked the helicopter. It was rising, swinging its beam in ever wider arcs across neighboring streets. He had lost them.

  He pushed his way into the hedge. Branches snapped behind, sealed him in. He pulled out his cell phone, hit number one. He got an answer on the third ring.

  “Cody, goddammit. Call tomorrow. I have a life, you know.”

  “Marcy,” he couldn’t finish, too short of breath.

  “So, I’m listening. What?”

  Aragon knew this alley and the breezeway connecting to the next street. She had walked this beat when she first put on the uniform. This used to be D.I. Row—drunk Indian, but don’t say that out loud. Back then you could locate the drinkers’ havens by broken glass. Now it was the little plastic bottles of hand sanitizer distributed at homeless shelters, the people with big hearts ignorant about the alcohol they were giving away for free.

  She stepped into the neighborhood of brick bungalows and big trees. Sweet-scented cedar smoke hung in the air. Branches were moving inside the tall hedge at the corner. The guy with the ponytail could be armed and aiming at her if she stood there in the open. She dropped to the ground to make herself small and was glad he hadn’t caught her in the narrow breezeway.

  Lewis’s heavy breathing was now in her ear. “IR shows someone inside that foliage,” he said on one knee, gulping oxygen. “He’s not moving.”

  “Shh. I know. Let’s spread out, come at it wide.”

  “Roger that,” he said, sounding a little better. “I’ll go right. Count of three.”

  She raised her hand to cut him off. A man was speaking inside the hedge. The talking stopped. Silence. Then the voice started again.

  “Help.”

  “Cody, you only call, one, when you’re in trouble, two, when you can’t pay your bill. Which is it this time?”

  Marcy Thornton took Geronimo’s call at her mahogany desk, a dark brown fortress atop a Persian rug in the center of her law office. Beamed ceilings high above her. Paintings on the walls by the guy on the phone—fees from a case when he was out of cash. She pushed a thick legal file out of the way with her toes and leaned back into a wide red chair. Padding swallowed her tight naked body. Cody had interrupted a little party she was giving herself. Across the room she watched the two people on the sofa, where she had been before she jumped up to get the phone.

  She twirled the stem of a wine glass and listened to a desperate man.

  He was now giving her the full story, step by step, covering the past couple hours. Dinner and a photo op with the mayor about paintings donated to City Hall—paintings he couldn’t sell in L.A. or New York. Later, drinks and tapas and something called crudo with people who had been collecting him for years, excited about the new path he was taking with his art. No other Native artist was going there: again, him, breaking new ground, standing apart, defining the genre. The prices he’d be able to ask.

  “What is that?” Thornton asked. “Crudo.”

  “Italian sushi.”

  She was bored with his windup, but if he wanted to run the meter talking food …

  She studied the level in the wine bottle. He’d burn through a thousand dollars of her time before it was gone.

  Thornton filled her glass and tuned him out when he started talking about the desserts after the raw fish, sketching portraits on the tablecloth, cognac and coffee. Then, finally getting to it, his voice excited, talking faster.

  How later he went into the shop for a book on something called “found art.” When this woman looked at him.

  He stopped, as though he had now given his lawyer all she needed to know.

  “Looked at you how?” Thornton asked. A woman looked at him. She was supposed to understand why that led to whatever had him calling, frantic, almost hyperventilating. When she had better things to do. And what the hell was found art? She wasn’t going to ask and get him going in another direction, even if it was his money.

  Across the office, Lily Montclaire sat up and leaned her breasts into the sofa’s cool leather. She watched Thornton on the phone, the muscles in her legs taut as she stretched her feet across her desk, the kind of body Montclaire had twenty years ago. She checked her face in the mirror over the dressing table, the one Thornton used to get ready for court. She still had the looks that had earned her a living modeling lipstick and eyeglasses and clothes she never wanted to wear off the set. But the neck wouldn’t do anymore. And she had little lines in the corners of her eyes and mouth that she could no longer hide. She could still do lingerie, the body was good. Maybe American Eagle or Penney’s, but not a chance at Victoria’s.


  Who was she kidding? She hadn’t been in front of a camera except for a driver’s license since jelly shoes and skorts and everything was denim.

  Her own modeling was petering out. No more calls, even for Walmart. Then the years of moving furniture onto sets for younger girls. Arranging cowhide chairs and Navajo rugs for a shoot in Santa Fe. Nights at a motel off the interstate, mariachis and shouting coming through the walls. Early in the morning, dragging rope and saddles from a van, the young models still asleep at the Hilton. Bringing in sandwiches and sparkling cider, running out for lint rollers. After-shoot drinks at the Staab House, finding herself alone. Not even the make-up hag interested. Except the hot little woman at the bar staring at her, Marcy Thornton coming over, forgetting her briefcase. Later cruising Santa Fe in a big English car with Montclaire holding a bottle of red wine between her legs. The top down, a full moon, just like tonight. Marcy’s hand going for the bottle, slipping off, staying there.

  After, lying on this same sofa, Marcy said her face could open doors. I need an investigator, she had said, drawing lazy circles around Montclaire’s nipples. People will talk to you.

  Grow old and dried up moving furniture for teenagers with eyes and lips painted black, one of the ghosts hanging off-camera, out of the lights, out of the action. Out of money. Or take a shot at being Marcy Thornton’s private dick—the way Marcy put it, being cute and tough at the same time—and see what happens.

  The investigating was mostly what Marcy had said, talking to people. Dressing from Chico’s, almost going Annie Hall, to talk with white people. Sharper, crisper for Hispanics. In between, she served subpoenas, copied documents, backgrounded jurors, and fetched party supplies.

  Warm skin brushed her arm. A young man with an unbuttoned shirt sat up on the sofa next to her. It had been a long day. They’d dropkicked the DA out of the courthouse. Five eyewitnesses, a co-conspirator who rolled on his vato brother, airtight ballistics, and they’d still walked their client. A special celebration, Marcy said. I deserve it. Go get us something fun, Lily.

  She’d found this one at the mall, wearing a white hoodie, by himself. She couldn’t understand why.

  Marcy mouthed “Cody.” Montclaire rolled her eyes. She sank her teeth into the boy’s ear and pulled him down and out of sight.

  Geronimo said, hushed, Thornton could barely hear, “I think the cops found me. I think they’re listening.”

  All the wine she’d been drinking didn’t matter now. She saw it and told Geronimo, “Tell me in detail how you killed her. Don’t leave anything out. Speak up and speak clearly.”

  “They’ll hear me. I’m in in this bush and they’re out there. I see one of them.”

  “I want them to hear. Everything. Now do it.”

  And Geronimo told her. Then they turned to business.

  The man’s voice inside the hedge was indignant. “I’ve got cash. My show’s almost sold out. You don’t have to hold my work as collateral again.”

  Aragon was taping it on her belt recorder, unclipped and held at the edge of the dark green hedge. After wandering all over the place, talking about food and hanging with people from L.A., he had now given them a full confession, what set him off, what he did to Linda Fager, ugly stuff, really brutal, but he talked like he was in front of an art class, explaining technique, composition, staging. Proud of himself. How the cops had chased him, but he wasn’t worried. He’d lost them.

  Now he was negotiating.

  He spoke a woman’s name and Aragon knew who was on the other end of the conversation.

  “Marcy,” the man’s voice pleaded. “What do I do?”

  Aragon had heard enough. She didn’t want this guy getting any bright ideas from a lawyer she hated even more than Walter Fager. She wanted him now, while he was scared and vulnerable.

  She met eyes with Lewis. He had his gun out and nodded. Aragon parted the leaves and exposed a man she recognized.

  She had seen 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper tagging along through his studio and stables, the barn that held his car collection, to the tumbledown hogan on the Navajo reservation, his home as a boy, open now to the sky with the roof fallen in. At the end, his story told, Geronimo faced the orange glow of a New Mexico sunset, the lights of Santa Fe twinkling below the veranda where he threw his famous parties.

  “To all my ancestors, I thank you from the depths of my humble, unworthy soul.”

  Fade to black as he pressed a fist against his heart and squeezed eyes shut.

  Aragon remembered saying out loud, “Oh, give me a fucking break.”

  The Native American Picasso, the 60 Minutes producers had dubbed him. A genius with brush and canvas. But he was stupid to hide in a hedge while his voice broadcast every detail of his crime up and down the street.

  “Excuse me for interrupting, sir.” Aragon leaned in with a smile. Then her face went hard as she dangled the key fob Lewis had found under the body. “Drop something?’

  Sitting on a curb with Geronimo between them, wrists zip-tied behind his back, Aragon radioed again to ask where was the car to transport their prisoner to the detention center. She’d been taking calls on her cell while they waited, talking about other things not for the ears of the police-scanner fan club. Already the department was scrambling to manage news of the celebrity arrest in the murder of the wife of the city’s top criminal defense lawyer. They would get no sleep. They’d be in conferences with deputy chiefs and PR flacks until dawn, working out the department’s line, getting grilled about anything that could blow up on them, writing and rewriting their reports with prosecutors and captains flyspecking every word. They’d be the lead story tomorrow on the TV news and grab headlines in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe papers. This would go national in twenty-four hours.

  Lewis leaned forward to catch Aragon’s eye. “One of those nights. Didn’t I call it?”

  “I hope Rivera’s as good as you say,” she said, thinking of the girl in the trunk they had to leave behind.

  “We can get back to that. This one’s done except for paperwork. We solve the crime and catch the killer, half an hour from call to cuffs. New SFPD record. Taking longer for a car to get here.”

  “You mumble something?” Aragon asked Geronimo.

  He said, “I lost a toe.” He lifted a foot. The silver tip had fallen off his right boot. “These are Tres Outlaws. From El Paso. Not another pair like them anywhere. They cost more than you earn in a year.”

  “Shoot,” Lewis said. “I got Western Wearhouse State Fair specials. Forty bucks. Look just as good and don’t break.”

  “Where you’re going,” Aragon said, “you get a new pair of plastic slippers, free, every year for the rest of your life. They come all the way from China, how about that?”

  Geronimo said, “Keep your slippers. I’m going home. I have work to do.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. Marcy says so.”

  Four

  “Counselor, I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

  Walter Fager rubbed his eyes and nodded back at the clerk clutching an armful of files against her chest. He had almost dozed off on the bench in the hallway of the Steve Herrera Judicial Complex. The police kept him until dawn. He had shaved badly. He hadn’t eaten. But he forced himself into a crisp white shirt and his standard pin-striped suit.

  He wanted to see the man who had killed his wife.

  The clerk hovered, then continued down the hallway with her files. Fager rose and crossed to the courtroom doors. They had been locked when he arrived. They were still locked. The electronic bulletin board said the case of State of New Mexico versus Cody Geronimo was set for a 10:00 a.m. bail hearing. It was now almost eleven.

  Fager moved to the alcove leading to the chambers of the Honorable Judith A. Diaz. He pressed the black intercom button.

  “Yes? How can I help you?” a woman�
�s voice crackled through the wire mesh speaker.

  “I’m here for the Geronimo bail hearing. Has it been postponed?”

  “Judge Diaz is hearing that matter in chambers.”

  “I would like to attend.”

  “She wanted only lawyers.”

  “Twenty forty-seven.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My State Bar number. This is Walter Fager.”

  He stepped back and faced the camera.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Fager.” Pause. “I’ll check with Judge Diaz.”

  The speaker went dead. Fager closed his eyes. He saw Linda from the back, over a kitchen sink washing tomatoes from her garden. In the sun, under a broad hat, reaching for a rose from the bushes she cherished. In her store, shelving books.

  He could not see her face.

  Last night she had not met him at their restaurant. He had gone to her store, found the front door open, darkness inside. A crack of light toward the back, the small bathroom lit from within by the bulb over the sink. Water running. The rug soaked. Linda’s cat hissed at him before fleeing into the shadows. A foot blocked the bathroom door. Linda’s shoe. Her green pants, her orange linen shirt, the silver necklace he had bought her on the plaza. A staple gun and boxcutter on the sink. On the wall, God, waist high, still dripping …

  “Mr. Fager?”

  He blinked at the intercom.

  “The hearing’s over. I’m sorry about your wife.”

  The door opened as the intercom clicked off. Out came Marcy Thornton in a black silk suit carrying a thin attaché case. She had been on friendly terms with Linda. When Thornton was a first-year associate in his office, it had been almost mother-daughter. He had seen her name on the electronic bulletin board. Now she was representing the man who had stapled Linda’s face to a bathroom wall.