Authors: Judith Van Gieson
I continued a little farther down the road, supposing that Terrance had hired Brown to either kidnap or kill Deborah and take Perigee along for authenticity. In this case Brown had to have had an associate. It could have been Katrina, or the
malinche,
Sara, or his cousin, or anyone else willing to wear a feathered mask, a cowboy hat and a duster. I'd turned over half the ransom to someone, come across Brown smuggling parrots and recorded it on Terrance's equipment. Maybe Brown was supposed to give some of the money back to Terrance, or he wanted more money, or Terrance knew too much about Brown's involvement, so Brown and/or his partner found a clever way to get rid of Terrance.
Next I played the tape that had only Wes Brown's words.
“What do you think? You're coming with⦔
“Yeah, you are.”
“Fuck Terrance. Ouch. Goddamn it. He bit me.”
“Move it.”
And
then I began filling in the empty lines. Knowing Brown, I filled them in with a woman's voice, an angry woman's voice. But this time I played around with the order of Brown's words.
“Terrance thinks you're a scumbag of a smuggler.”
“Fuck Terrance.”
“Do you think Terrance cares that I came here?”
“What do you think?”
“Move it. You're coming with⦔ (Here I imagined him talking to a parrot and a parrot answering back.) “Yeah, you are. Ouch. Goddamn it. He bit me.”
“What did you expect?”
The parrot in this scenario could be any parrot. It didn't really matter. Both Deborah and Brown's voices were real, but the roles they'd played could easily have been faked.
Next I played back the microcassettes I'd made of the voice on the R line in the handheld recorder I used for dictation.
“I'm so lonely without my mate. Bring me home soon, please.”
“Max a million. I am verrrry valuable.”
“Not enough. Double or nothing. Indigo dying without mate.”
Just for the heck of it I called 12441 on the R line again. It hadn't taken long for them to assign the indigo's number to someone else. This time I got a woman speaking up talk with a southern drawl. “Oh, hi? It's really nice of you to call? I'm from Kentucky and a newcomer to Albuquerque and I⦔
I'd heard enough of that and hung up. Terrance had said that anyone with a Scrunch could change a voice from deep male to high female, from Amazon parrot to indigo macaw. Of all the suspects, Wes Brown was the least likely to have a Scrunch or any high-tech equipment at all. The
r
rolled off the tongue in verrrry, which is a sound I've never been able to duplicate.
I had another microcassette to play, but I wasn't sure whatâif anythingâwould be on it. That tape came from our ancient answering machine. The newer models erase every time you rewind, but on our machine the new messages record over the old ones, and if you've been out of town or had a busy day, some messages (or fragments thereof) can stay on the tape for weeks. I put the microcassette into my recorder, rewound and pushed the Play button. First I got Vi Sommers asking me to call her back. I'd already done that. Next was Stevie for Anna, with his bass booming in the background. Then Nancy for Brink. I couldn't hear any background noise, but I got the scent of cookies baking in the oven. Then came the Kid for me. “Pick up if you're there. If not, I'll hang.” Didn't anybody ever get work-related calls here? After the Kid I heard someone trying to sell us legal forms and then, “Can't make the appointment 'cause I'm gettin' back with my Jimmie. Sure am sorry about that, ma'am,” in the cowgirl twang of Roberta Dovalo. When I'd imagined a woman to go with that voice, I'd seen a red dress with a full skirt,
silver
tips on her blouse collar and cowgirl boots. I saw makeup that had been applied with a trowel, and hair as full and fake as Dolly Parton's. It's not unusual for a client to want to investigate a lawyer before hiring her. It usually isn't done over the phone. I called the number I had in Ruidoso, got the B & L Bake Shop and asked to speak to Roberta Dovalo.
“Nobody by that name here, ma'am,” the person who answered said.
“Is this⦔ I repeated the number.
“You bet.”
“Thanks,” I replied as I hung up.
There were three women circling in this case's gyre. One of them had masqueraded as Roberta Dovalo and taken my measure. Had she done it for Terrance Lewellen, for Wes Brown or for herself? Was she working with or against a man?
I moved on to the physical evidence, the lock of dyed red hair and the feather. The feather was Colloquy's or Perigee's. The hair was Deborah's in color, but could have come from anybody's head. Then I reread the ransom note: “Indigo dying without mate. Put two hundred thousand in Deborah's BankWest Account.” The
Journal
had been clipped, taped and xeroxed, making the note impossible to trace. The hand-printed note on the back of the deposit slip (which might be traceable) remained with Charlie Register, unless he'd turned it over to the APD or the FBI, but if he had, I should have heard from them by now.
None of the evidence I'd examined so far was leading in the direction I wanted it to go. I took the videotape I'd labeled Cotorra Canyon into Brink's office. He'd returned from lunch and was peering into his computer. I had to clear my throat twice before he realized I'd entered the room.
“Oh, hi,” he said, shifting his body to hide the computer screen from view as he hit the Escape button. His document went into a computer file, and the screen went blank.
“What were you working on?” I asked.
“Just a little will I'm doing for a client of Nancy's,” he said.
“A client of Nancy's?” Who was his partner anyway?
“She's overworked now, and I'm not busy and⦔
Doing Nancy's work on Hamel and Harrison's time verged on
malinche
behavior, but it did give me leverage to do what I wanted to do right nowâlook at my videotape. “I have a video I want to look at,” I said. “Now.”
“Okay.”
Brink watched the video with me; he and Anna are always ready for a diversion. As I slipped my tape into the slot, I remembered how easy it had been to climb to the top of the butte, the rock stairs that seemed to have shown up exactly when and where we needed them. A man came on the screen, in black
and
white and at a distance, but clearly Wes Brown. He smoked a cigarette, waited and then exchanged a small amount of money for very valuable parrots, killing at least one of them in the process. The parrot transfer concluded, the video moved on to Wes Brown's boat. I should have straightened my hat for this one. There was the back of the Kid's head. There was a tippy image of Brown aiming his gun at the Kid.
Brink gasped.
The Kid knocked the gun out of Brown's hand.
“Whooo,” exclaimed Brink.
The minicam zeroed in on Brown's face and I felt my own rage expand. It was a strong force, but I could control it.
The video was irrefutable evidence for the FWS and pretty much as I had seen it, except that the date and time showed up in the corner of this tape, which they hadn't on Terrance and Sara's. That information would be useful in court, but I hadn't put it there.
“Do the date and time usually show up on the videos?” I asked Brink, since he knew more about this subject than I did.
“Sometimes. Sometimes you have to program the camera to put it there,” he replied. “Depends on the equipment.”
I wondered if Brown always met the smugglers at the same time. It made sense; the desert was cool, dark and lonely at night. Did he meet them on the same day every week? Every two weeks? Every month? The tape finished, I rewound it and popped it out.
Leaving Brink to Nancy's will I went back to my office, where there was one more piece of physical evidence to consider, the still photographs of Wes Brown and the feathered mask at the ATMs outside Midnight Cowboy and on Tramway. Brown wore his black cowboy hat, a going-to-town striped shirt and a hangdog expression. I didn't have the videotape of this transaction, but Charlie Register at Bank West did. I ran through the transaction in my mind. Wes Brown had put Deborah Dumaine's ATM card (or a reasonable facsimile) in the slot, punched in her PIN number, deposited two hundred dollars into her account and left instructions in invisible ink on the back of a deposit slip. Whose deposit slip? I wondered. Everybody assumed it was Deborah's, but had anybody ever checked it out?
Deborah's PIN number and the number that put Brown into her account was 2473. I looked on my telephone dial to find the corresponding letters: ABC, GHI, PRS, DEF. Customers usually have the option of taking the PIN number the bank assigns them or choosing their own. People pick words or numbers that they find easy to remember. I had no idea what the numbers 2473 meant to Deborah or anybody else, but the word those letters spelled out (the only word they could spell out) was BIRD. With ten numbers to fill four digits, there are ten thousand possible combinations and there's bound to be duplication. Deborah would be the only person with her account number, but she might not be the only
one
with a PIN of 2473. The question, in this case, was who had gotten BIRD first? The person who would know was Charlie Register. I called and asked him.
“I was just getting ready to call you,” he said.
I'll bet, I thought. “Does Wes Brown have his checking account with you?” I asked.
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Do Deborah and Brown have the same PIN number?” I asked.
“They do. I looked it up; it's 2473.”
“2473 means BIRD. Did you know that?”
“No, but it figures, doesn't it?”
“Yeah,” I said, “it does. Who got it first?”
“Brown's had it for three years.”
“And Deborah?”
“She got hers in July.”
“Whose account number was on the deposit slip?”
“Brown's.”
“But the money went into Deborah's account.”
“Initially, yes. The deposit was made with an ATM card that had her account number on the mag strip. You may remember that we were preoccupied with the message on the back of the slip.”
I remembered.
“It didn't have anybody's name on it, but we assumed it was Deborah's deposit slip until we took a closer look.”
“Doesn't the name go on automatically?”
“It's the customer's option.”
“How can the code be transferred from one mag strip to another?”
“You take a credit or ATM card that's been stolen or is out of date and erase the magnetic strip with a magnet. The raised numbers on the card are only there for the customer's information. The ATM doesn't read them. A nine-volt battery and a couple of wires can copy the information from one mag strip to another. Or you can buy a mag card reader that'll do it for you.”
“So my Visa card could access Deborah Dumaine's account if I transferred her information to my mag strip.”
“And you knew her PIN number.”
“Right.”
“Is there any money in Deborah's account now?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“
Was Brown making regular cash deposits to his account?”
“Every two weeks.”
“And writing checks to the IRS?”
“Every month. That's all he used the account for.”
Brown was in a cash business, but he couldn't pay the IRS in smelly money. He had to launder it somewhere. No need to put his name, address and phone number on the checks and deposit slip for that. Besides, he didn't have a phone, didn't have a real address and had a name that shifted with the seasons.
“His last check bounced,” Charlie Register said.
“Because his deposit went into Deborah's account.”
“That's right.”
“Have you talked to your attorney yet?”
“No, but I intend to.”
Somebody had to call Detective Hernandez, and it couldn't be me. “I think you better put a flag on Deborah's account.”
“Good idea.”
“Will you call me immediately if there is any activity?”
“I will,” he said.
I had one parting shot. “I hear Candace Lewellen is going to donate the Lochovers to the Dallas Fine Arts Museum.”
“I know.” He sighed. “I sure have enjoyed having them here.”
I said adios to Charlie Register, he said good-bye to me, and we hung up our respective phones. I'd be willing to bet that he leaned back in his chair, beneath the lamp that turned his hair to silver and gold, and admired the Lochovers.
I took a moment to look at the kidnapping myself. There was a boldness and brilliance to that scheme that made it, in its own way, a work of art. I wished I could hang it on my wall and admire it. I wished I had a wall big enough to hang it on. The details had been sketched in carefully, but the overall effect was of water on the road, a shimmering illusion. It looked different up close than it did from a distance, which must have been the artist's intent. There was no bold signature scarring this work of art yet, as there was on the Lochovers, but there might be a line like the one that led out of the rug. It had, after all, been the work of an imperfect human being.
The whiteness of my bandaged finger flagged my eye and brought me back to my office on Lead with the bars on the window, the diploma on the wall and the plants that needed watering. I'd forgotten the pain in my finger while I'd been working this out. The pain began to beat again. The bandage was still far too white. With my left hand I took a magic marker from my desk drawer and marked it with an
X.
19
I
FIGURED THAT
if Charlie's call came at all, it would come before morning. I lay in bed, waited and listened to the Kid's soft and regular breathing and the raspy, erratic rustle of the wind. It was a feline and feral presence howling in La Vista's hallway and rubbing its back against my window. I got up and paced the yellow shag carpet, keeping time to the wind's restless rhythm.