Authors: John Donohue
grounds of the hotel property, lush grass a deep green sparkling
in the sunlight. Birds chirped and uniformed service workers
moved quietly around in the half-light, cleaning walks, tending
the pools, and stocking up on towels in the cabanas.
The hotel had a measured running trail that wound around
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the edge of the resort and up a little ways into the seared hills.
You’d think after yesterday, I’d know better, but I had to run
and that was where the path led. It was an old pattern in my
life. I got to the trailhead and started some stretches. A fit-
looking, deeply tanned woman arrived right after I did. She
was wearing a stylish pastel ensemble, including a pink baseball
cap. Her streaked blonde hair was pulled through the back of
the cap, a high ponytail. It bounced along with the rest of her,
as if her good health couldn’t be contained. She smiled tightly
to acknowledge my presence, a tight flash of white teeth in
a lean face. Then she turned away and, with a show of great
focus, began her own warm-ups. Exercise is serious business.
Or maybe she didn’t approve of my outfit. I was wearing
a pair of ratty shorts that were questionable even by my stan-
dards and a faded T-shirt that proclaimed “I’ve Seen Elvis!” It
had a few rows of pictures of the big E variously disguised as
a nun, Marilyn Monroe, and a Russian soldier to name just a
few. Maybe the lady in the hat was a fan of his. Or maybe she’d
actually seen Elvis and knew he wasn’t living in a convent.
I shook off the vision of too many Elvises and hit the road.
The trail wound past the hotel golf course, behind the corral
where the electric carts were penned up, and then out into the
hills. The transformation from manicured lawn to brown earth
was dramatic, as if a line had been drawn across the terrain.
Without the constant irrigation of sprinklers, the wild land
beyond the hotel’s property appeared as sterile as the surface of
the moon. But the light was soft and the desert landscape was
soothing. I settled into the rhythm of the run, happy that the
path was long, the terrain open and I didn’t see any suspicious
characters in a Jeep. After twenty minutes or so, I headed back.
I could feel the growing force of the sun as it climbed higher
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into the sky. As I approached the hotel grounds, I looked up
and caught sight of a still form standing deep in the shade of a
tree near the pro club, watching me.
Xochi
He was motionless, and I doubt I would have noticed him
at all if I weren’t still a little on edge from yesterday. People who
spend a great deal of time outdoors have a knack for silence and
stillness. Good naturalists have it. So do hunters. So, I noted,
did Xochi. I looked back down to the trail, as if concerned with
my footing. I didn’t want him to know that I had spotted him.
He faded back around the corner of the building as I came
closer. I headed off toward my room, taking a winding route in
the hopes of catching another glimpse of him. But Xochi was
gone.
Charlie Fiorella was at his desk, though, reading a report of
some sort. His blue pastel golf shirt was pressed and his fore-
arms were brown and thick. He looked up and peered at me
over his reading glasses.
“I got jumped last night,” I started as I sat down and filled
him in on the details.
Charlie pursed his lips as if tasting something unpleasant.
He took the report he was reading and carefully filed it away in
a desk drawer. Then he got up from the desk and quietly closed
the door to his office. His gray pants had a crease as sharp as a
blade; his tasseled loafers gleamed.
“You OK?” He asked softly as the door clicked closed
behind him. I nodded and he continued. “You want to file a
report with the locals? I’ve got some contacts.”
“Would it do any good?”
“Honestly? No. A big waste of time.”
I’d come to the same conclusion. I could imagine myself
telling the story to the cops: out-of-towner takes a wrong turn
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down an unmarked trail, comes across a few locals, gets in a
scrape, and gets away. I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t
get the license plate number on the Jeep. They could follow
up with Xochi the guide, but he would probably stonewall and
claim he had just wandered by. Nothing against the law about
being a Good Samaritan. Cop work is an exercise in triage: you
identify the crimes you’ve got a good chance of solving and
pretty quickly get a feel for what you can’t. The cops would take
my report, make mooing noises at me, then file it and forget it.
But I had some questions I wanted to pursue. “What’s the
deal with this Xochi guy?” I asked.
Charlie stared off at a wall. “Ah, our friend Rosario. He’s
been kicking around the university here for a while. Picked
up master’s degrees in Native American Studies and Cultural
Ecology.”
I shook my head. I never understood why anyone in their
right mind would get two master’s degrees, when in academic
circles a doctorate is the only really acceptable degree. “How
long’s he been on unemployment?” I asked sarcastically.
“Oh, he seems to do pretty well. He’s big with promoting
Native rights and moaning about the Anglos destroying indig-
enous culture. Works as a counselor at the university part time.
And he’s developed a pretty good business taking tourists for
desert hikes.”
“So he doesn’t like Anglos, just their money,” I commented.
Charlie grinned but said nothing. “He spend a lot of time out
there in the desert?” I continued
“A bit,” he said cagily.
“So what’s that suggest to you?”
Now he had his poker face on. “What do you mean?”
I leaned forward. “Come on, Charlie. Those guys I met
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yesterday weren’t out for a nature hike. They had binoculars
and a radio and were waiting for something. What do you wait
for out there?”
He shrugged. “Lots of things. People. Drugs. Whatever’s
coming over the border.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And what does it tell you that this
Xochi fella got those guys all calmed down long enough for me
to get away? Seems to me that it suggests he may have some
involvement.”
“You could be right, Burke,” he said quietly. “You hear
things. The Homeland Security people have tightened the
net in a lot of spots. We’re seeing more activity in some of the
rougher border areas around here.”
“And Xochi?”
He held up his hands. “The guy’s plugged into a lot of dif-
ferent groups with ties on both sides of the border. He’s an
expert on the desert. ”
“Did you run a check on him?” I asked.
“Didn’t get as far as I’d like,” he admitted, and sighed quietly.
“Why not?” I demanded.
He bridled a bit at my tone. “Hey Burke, don’t you think I
know my job?”
“Seems to me that your job is to do a thorough check on
your employees, Charlie.”
His eyes got a little hard at that. He started to say some-
thing, then moved his mouth silently as if he were chewing on
his words.
“Look,” he finally said, “I started making some inquiries,
but got pulled off it.”
“Pulled off it? By whom?”
He didn’t answer me directly. He didn’t have to. There was
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only one person at the hotel that could do that to him: the gen-
eral manager, Lori Westmann. Charlie looked me in the eyes
and said quietly, “Leave it Burke. They’re close.” He paused for
emphasis. “
Very
close.”
I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively.
“Look,” Charlie said, “when the old man took the tumble,
Lori had a lot on her plate: major restorations at the resort,
some big contract negotiations. She needed someone out at the
Kiva to be her eyes and ears… so she settled on Xochi. He’s out
there practically every day anyway. He cleaned things up, got
the old man’s papers organized. Nothing sinister.”
But it was just another strange wrinkle in the story. I headed
off to Eliot Westmann’s place and spent hours rummaging
through his library. Something bothered me. I couldn’t put my
finger on it, but it was there in the back of my mind. I pressed
on. There were files and files of manuscript notes that were
dated, and so could be correlated to his publications. They were
all Xerox copies, however. I wondered why, and also wondered
where the originals were. I got some e-mail responses to my
inquiries, most of which indicated that the people I had tried
to contact were either no longer around, or really not interested
in assisting me in my goofy little project. So I was essentially on
my own, faced once again with an unpleasant task.
I was really going to have to read Eliot Westmann’s collected
works. I suppose that it’s an essential part of literary forensics,
but from what I knew about his death, I suspected that the
cops were right and that all of my work was going to be point-
less. And besides, it didn’t interest me all that much.
So I procrastinated. I poked around the library some more.
Westmann was a prolific, even a compulsive writer. He hadn’t
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had much published, however, in the decade prior to his fatal
tumble. The sterile little office didn’t give me much insight into
what he was doing.
I decided to poke around a bit more. The entire second
floor of the main building had been Westmann’s living quar-
ters. I wandered through them, feeling a bit self-conscious at
invading a dead guy’s space. There was a living room, decorated
Southwest style. It had tasteful pottery on shelves and a fine-
looking Navaho rug hanging on the wall. The furniture was
square, darkly stained mission-style stuff. The room also had a
big leather sofa, a matching recliner, and a big screen TV. Aha!
Finally, something that looked like a person actually lived in
this place. It was still tremendously sterile, however.
I slipped into his bedroom. More mission furniture. I
poked around in the drawers of night tables and a small desk.
They contained the usual junk you discover in small drawers:
tissues, an old battery, a few paperclips, assorted plastic pens
without their caps. I would have thought the meticulous Ms.
Westmann would have had the house cleaned out by now.
There was a walk-in closet. Westmann’s wardrobe was
casual: denim and chinos. A canvas barn coat. A dusty daypack
was dumped in a corner on top of a pair of well-worn hiking
boots. There was a battered straw cowboy hat on a peg. The
closet smelled faintly of old cologne, wood smoke, and tobacco.
Finally, a place that didn’t appear to have been totally sanitized.
The clothes on hangers and shelves were neatly arranged, but
there was stuff in here that hadn’t been cleaned, as if someone
had been reluctant to scrub away the last private vestiges of
Westmann’s presence on the earth. Maybe she was more senti-
mental than I gave her credit.
As I looked around the closet, I noticed that there was a nail
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high up on the inside of the door’s lip with a braided leather
lanyard hanging from it. I took it down, the leather felt soft and
worn. A single key hung from it, shiny with use.
It took some skulking, but I eventually found the lock that
the key opened. Actually, even with the skulking, I wouldn’t
have found it, except that I tripped on a rock in front of the
door, and to save my graceful self from bashing my head on the
wall, I put my hand on the door and it gave just enough for
me to notice the entrance. The key slipped into lock easily, and
when I swung the door open, I knew I had found the mother
lode.The room was small and seemed dark and cramped when
compared to the library in the main house. A heavy old
wooden table was piled high with papers. I closed the door
and switched on the reading lamp that waited there. It threw
an intimate, yellow light across the table, and made the shad-
ows in the corners seem to swell and draw nearer. I sunk down
into a cane-bottomed chair that creaked with old age. I looked
around open-mouthed.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose. Eliot Westmann
was a bit of a recluse, someone who hid himself purposefully
from others. Even in the security of his own retreat, old habits
must have been hard to shake. Nestled here in this aromatic
cell, protected by wood and stone, were the pieces of his life
that he hid from view. Here were the pictures, newspaper clip-
pings, and other scraps that marked his passage through life.
A ceramic ashtray held a well-worn pipe, its bowl grown cold.
A thick, crude shelf rested on rounded pegs driven into the
wall. It held an oil lamp, its glass globe partially blackened with