“The press doesn’t give a damn if Veronica was registered or not,” Sonny said. “They’re going to play it up as ‘death at the fiesta’!”
“Yes,” Madge said, “and that’s the rub. But she went up alone, not from our field. The woman went up alone, ran into problems, and panicked. She fell.”
“You’ve got the whole story, don’t you.”
“That’s our statement to the press.”
Protecting the fiesta, protecting the tourist dollar. Sooner or later it came around to money. It was the fiesta’s first day, and if the balloonists and the thousands of tourists stayed away, or left early, the 20 or 30 million bucks they brought to the city went with them.
Sure accidents happen. A few years ago two men had been killed on the first day of the week-long festival. Their balloon hit power lines, but the next day the program continued. But that was an accident. If Veronica’s death was murder, the board would be forced to close down the fiesta. And if the pilots and their families felt there was a murderer stalking the fiesta, they’d pack up and go home.
“It’s going to cost us,” Madge repeated. “I talked to the mayor. We’re trying to smooth things out.”
Sonny was studying her carefully. He knew that after high school Madge Swenson had married a California entrepreneur who was interested in New Mexican artists. The Santa Fé style was the rage in California, and there were buckets of money to be made. Madge and her husband, Bud Swenson, opened an art gallery in Santa Fé; they prospered, acquired an international clientele, and moved higher and higher. Those who came to their opening receptions began to expect lines of coke, as well as the usual champagne and caviar.
Even the “Californicated” upper crust of Santa Fé raised eyebrows when Bud Swenson threw one of his openings. They knew the coke flowed, the afternoons grew wild, and in the evenings all kinds of sexual combinations were available. And it was well known that Madge orchestrated the parties.
Then one day, so she told Sonny that afternoon at the Heights bar, she had stepped outside her million-dollar home in Santa Fé to enjoy the autumn morning. She was drinking coffee and trying to awaken in the primal light of the dawn when a red hawk landed on the adobe wall.
The epiphany of sunlight and a hawk told her the darker side of the Santa Fé lifestyle had gotten out of hand. She left Bud Swenson and landed a job directing the balloon fiesta.
She had learned to fly a hot-air balloon when she was running the Santa Fé gallery. She became enthralled by flying; it became part of the relaxation they offered the rich clients who came to stroll the Santa Fé plaza and buy art. But drinking champagne and screwing dumb, rich bozos a quarter-mile high lost its glamour. More and more she wanted to be alone in the silence of space; ballooning became her meditation.
That morning she drove downtown, filed for divorce, and walked away from Bud, the gallery, and everything it had come to represent.
She met and became acquainted with some of the early New Mexican balloonists, the Abruzos and Andersons of world fame, so during the last two years she had traveled to the major balloon events in the world. She and a few others had turned the Alburquerque fiesta from a local event into a multimillion-dollar business. She had created a power niche that she loved.
“You lost something, too,” she said. “The Dubronsky case is washed, isn’t it?”
Sonny nodded.
“Sorry,” she said.
“El destino.” Sonny shrugged.
“Destiny?”
“Yeah,” Sonny acknowledged. “This morning Veronica Worthy ran into someone who had a different idea about her fate.”
“It wasn’t murder,” Madge said, arching an eyebrow and crossing her long legs. She leaned toward Sonny. A very seductive perfume touched Sonny’s nostrils. Her blue eyes bore into him.
“It was,” Sonny answered.
“By whom? Tamara Dubronsky? From that spa?”
“Everything’s possible.”
“That’s crazy,” she said. “The woman is too smart.”
“Yes,” Sonny agreed.
“I need your help,” she said, and took his hands in hers.
Here comes the hook, Sonny thought, feeling the soft coolness of her fingers, inhaling the sweet cologne.
“The fiesta can’t afford this kind of publicity. Believe me, the press is going to milk it. The prime witness of the most interesting murder case in thirty years falls from a balloon. But the press will call it murder. It could ruin the fiesta, and it could plague us in the future. Work with me, Sonny. Clear this up. Discreetly.”
Discreetly? Sonny thought. How in the hell do you “clear up” a murder discreetly? And what is there to “clear up” about an accident?
“There’s nothing discreet about murder.”
“It wasn’t murder!” she said, pulling away. “It was an accident as far as the balloon fiesta board is concerned.”
“I’m sure,” Sonny said, noting the sarcasm in his voice. He had no good feelings for Veronica—she had tried to kill him—but she was human and she had been murdered. Now Madge Swenson and her people wanted to sweep the murder under the rug.
“Sonny, we’re the biggest tourist moneymaker in the city. In ten days the fiesta drops thirty million in the city. We’re known worldwide. A murder could spoil things.”
“You can’t cover up a murder,” Sonny said, and got up.
She, too, rose. “I’m not asking you to cover up a murder. The community knows you. What you did in the Dubronsky case made you a hero. A Chicano detective, fighting for law and order, that’s something. If you said this morning’s tragedy was an accident, people would listen.”
“Lie?” Sonny retorted. “You’re asking me to lie?”
“Not lie!” Madge shouted back. “It’s not proven it’s murder! I talked to Garcia, he has no clues! I’ve talked to the mayor. Marisa doesn’t want to ask you personally to help, but she understands our position!”
“Holy tamales.” Sonny sighed. “Where else is the pressure coming from?”
“My board is meeting right now. Everyone wants an answer. The major networks are going to splash it all over the evening news. CNN is already here. I get interviewed next.”
She was in hot water, and she was asking for help. But it wasn’t the kind of help Sonny could deliver.
“My board is prepared to pay very well.”
“For me to say it was an accident?” Sonny shook his head. “Let the cops take care of it.”
“And let the chips fall where they will.” Madge frowned.
“That’s the way it is with murder,” Sonny said. “Thanks for the list. I’m sorry, I can’t help.”
“Can’t blame a woman for asking. If you change your mind, call me. Call me anytime. You know where I live,” she added, then briskly turned back to her desk.
She had tried to buy him, Sonny thought as he walked out to his truck. Damn the woman! He wanted to be angry, but no, he understood where she was coming from. The whole fucking city profited from the fiesta! You just didn’t throw a moneymaker like that away, not without turning every card you could find.
So Madge turned Sonny’s card, and he was a wild deuce. He wouldn’t make a statement for money. Madge was an aggressive woman. Now murder had clouded her empire, might even tumble it down. She was going to fight, fight with everything she had, including the see-me-anytime offer.
He drove home and sat in his kitchen and pored over the list of balloonists. It was a who’s who of hot-air ballooning. Many countries were represented. There were balloon bums as well as royalty on the list. Tough competitors, first-year entrants, and the wannabes who thought that by mixing with the pros, some of the magic would rub off. There were people from the movies and high finance. And there were the middle-class pilots who mortgaged homes and cars and wives just to buy a balloon to fly in the early morning, because flying had gotten into their blood, because it became their religion, because they got their jollies floating up to greet the morning sun.
Sonny scrutinized the list, circling, making notes, marking names. Three names he recognized from newspaper articles were the focus of Sonny’s attention.
Mario Secco was from Italy. According to the last account Sonny had read, Secco distributed South American cocaine in Europe. Heroin from the Cali cartel flowed through his network into Libya, into Sicily, then into small ports along the Adriatic. During the recent bust of Cali directors, Secco had also been arrested, but in Italy the mafia had protected him. Secco was acquitted.
Secco took time off and went around the world flying in hot-air balloon competitions, accompanied by an entourage of beautiful Italian women. Just yesterday the newspaper had reported that Mario and his friends had taken over an entire floor of La Posada downtown.
The second name that drew Sonny’s attention was John Gilroy. He had an Alburquerque address, and Sonny immediately recognized the name. Gilroy was an ex-CIA agent who, using the alias Juan Libertad, had flown money and supplies to the Nicaraguan Contras. He had been shot down and captured by the Sandinistas, exposed to the world, then freed. He was contrite while in captivity, but once free, he told the press he and his right-wing gang at the CIA, code-named Libertad, were flying into Nicaragua to rid Latin America of communism, to help the freedom fighters.
He had received a medal from the Reagan White House and became a lecturer in ultraconservative, far-right circles. But he got too carried away. Iran-Contra was plaguing President Reagan, and “Juan Libertad” received a stern warning from his superiors. Get out of the limelight and keep quiet, or else. The publicity he was receiving had gone to his head, and he came close to admitting that the CIA was flying in arms and bringing out dope, which was either sold to buy more arms or to line the pockets of the agents.
Inside the CIA, Libertad’s job was to make sure the Contras beat the Sandinistas, if one believed the Washington rumor mill. And that revolution was to be only one in a long line that had begun with the fall of Allende in Chile. Libertad’s directive from within the CIA was to foment revolution against any government perceived to be left-leaning in Latin America.
Their most recent activity was reported to be advising the Mexican commander of the federal troops going in to put down the Chiapas peasants. Commandante Marcos had immediately been branded a communist.
But Gilroy talked too much, and he was drummed out of the CIA. He retired to Alburquerque and took up ballooning. It was a nice hobby, but Sonny suspected his real purpose in life remained to expose the evils of communism in Latin America.
Dope, Sonny thought. On the way back from Central America, those who knew the Cali cartel network and everybody else involved in supplying the Contras stopped by Noriega’s Panama and filled their planes with high-quality stuff. Fortunes were made, laundered through Swiss banks, and the junk piled high on the streets of this country. A finely tuned organization with enough money to buy government bureaucrats along the pipeline delivered the dope to America’s doorstep. And the cops kept blaming the pusher on the street corner.
And finally, Sonny studied the name of Alisandra Bustamante-Smith, a journalist from Bogota who had received worldwide attention when her husband was murdered by the cartel. Bustamante had written an expose on the Cali cartel, believing the Colombian government when it said it was getting tough with the kings of the drug empire. The government had promised her and her family protection, but the day before she was to hand her story over to her editor, her husband was shot and killed as he was leaving for work.
The Colombian government not only couldn’t protect her, but she had been fingered from the inside. She fled north with her young son. Staying in Colombia meant danger or death to her and her child. She wound up in a small college in Texas, teaching journalism. She swore she would never write again.
She became a kind of cult figure, but she wanted nothing to do with the publicity. She remarried, a journalism professor who was into ballooning. She traveled with him but kept a low profile. She obviously wanted to forget the world that had taken so much from her.
There were others, Sonny noted. A lot of very interesting people had come to Alburquerque for the balloon fiesta.
Was Garcia running these names through his computer? Was Matt Paiz over at the FBI? There could be a battle taking shape in the skies over Alburquerque, and Veronica Worthy was just the first casualty.
Around six he took a break and turned on the evening news in time to catch the interview with Madge. She sounded confident, Sonny thought, as he watched Conroy Chino holding the mike in front of her.
“I’m at Fiesta Control with Madge Swenson, the director of the balloon fiesta. There’s a big break in the investigation of the accident this morning. Miss Swenson, is it true you’ve found a witness?”
“Yes, a couple actually saw the accident,” Madge responded, and Sonny leaped forward and turned up the volume. “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Fiora from Corpus Christi saw the woman fall. She was flying alone, and apparently reached for a loose drag line.”
“Liar!” Sonny cursed.
The camera shifted to a nervous Arthur Fiora standing between Madge and his wife. “Yes,” he stuttered. “Me and my wife saw the woman fall. She reached for a rope and fell. Just fell. It was an accident. I told the police everything.”
His stolid wife nodded in agreement. “She just fell.”
The phone rang. “Sonny, are you listening to the news?” It was Rita.
“I can’t believe it!”
The phone signaled a call waiting. “Hold on,” Sonny said, and pressed a button.
“Cover-up,” Howard said.
Sonny groaned. “Do they think they can make it stick?”
“Sure they can.” Howard sounded cynical.
Conroy Chino was wrapping up his scoop. “Was there anyone else in the balloon?” he asked.
“No, she was alone. My wife and I saw everything.” Here he tugged at the stocky, tearful woman who stood beside him.
“It was an accident,” she said, and wiped at her pink eyes.
Conroy turned to face the camera and wrap up the newscast. He had beaten Francine Hunter to the interview and had scored a big story, and he smiled. Behind him Madge Swenson also smiled and led the shaken Mr. and Mrs. Fiora away.
“I can’t believe Madge would—”
“Cover it up?” Howard said. “She lives in the real world. There was a big meeting at city hall this afternoon. Apparently they cut a deal.”
“They can’t afford to lose the fiesta,” Sonny added. Madge Swenson’s very words.
“By the way, Tamara’s back home. Anything I can do?”
“Keep your eyes open, compa.”
“Don’t take it personal, bro. That’s the way the wheel is greased. When you’re black, you learn that early. Adiós.”
“Yeah,” Sonny said, and Howard’s phone clicked dead.
“Rita, sorry, that was Howard on the other line.”
“I can’t believe they would cover up. What can you do?”
“Go hunting.”
“Qué?”
“I’ll explain later. Buenas noches, amor.”
Sonny hung up the phone. He grabbed a light jacket on his way out. The October air was cool. Don Eliseo and his friends had put on sweaters. They had finished roasting the basket of green chile. In the warm afternoon they had been enjoying Toto’s wine. Now Concha rose, stretched, and walked into the house, on her way to check the chile con carne she was cooking. The old friends would eat like kings—two kings and a queen.
Meanwhile, in the dark of the river bosque, shadows were moving. Coyotes hunting. Or humans.
7
Creatures of the night, Sonny thought as he drove down the dirt road that dead-ended at the edge of the bosque. The Montaño bridge would rise somewhere to the south of him, one more link bonding the West Mesa to the east side of the city. This dirt path led into the bosque. Ahead was the murder site.
Sonny fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment and thought briefly of taking
the .45-caliber Colt that was his great-grandfather’s pistol, but decided not to. With only the light in hand, he started down the sandy trail.
When he came to the site, he aimed his flashlight at the tree stump. The hair on the back of his neck bristled, and a sudden shot of adrenaline made his heart jump. There on the cottonwood spear lay the impaled body of Veronica. Sonny gasped. He pulled back with a start, then cursed himself. He flashed his light again and the body disappeared. Shadows playing tricks. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“I don’t need another ghost,” he whispered.
And yet he would have sworn he had seen Veronica’s pierced body, her lifeless eyes staring at him, the cottonwood sliver stained with blood. He thought of the coroner’s crew who must have lifted the heavy body from its impalement. Those men and women had to go home to families. They had to sit down to supper and eat. How could they erase the image from their minds?
He heard a sound and turned. Sonny ducked as an owl swooped overhead, flapping its large wings as it skimmed just over his head, then disappeared into the dark.
As he turned he saw, in his peripheral vision, a shadow moving where the trail entered the river forest. “Hey!” he called, and the shadow disappeared.
He entered the bosque, pursuing the shadow he had seen, wondering if he was following human or creature. When he paused to point the flashlight into the river forest, he was alone. He listened. The huge cottonwoods hung over him, a dark canopy. Surrounding the narrow path were Russian olives, river willows, and clumps of salt cedars. This was the haunted forest wherein la Llorona and el Coco lived, creatures from scary childhood stories.
A bird cried, and far away an owl responded. A cold breeze rustled through the trees, like skirts brushing a floor. The presence of la Llorona looking for her baby.
The breeze subsided and the weight of the dark silence made Sonny shiver.
“Damn, I’m a grown man,” he said aloud, “not a kid.”
As a child, he and his friends played along the sandbars of the river in the summer. Sometimes they played late into the evening, and darkness caught them far from home, far from the lights of the barrio. Then someone would cry “La Llorona!” and they would run, their fear a rush in the blood.