Rainbow's End (28 page)

“What's ‘not much'?”

“Nothing.”

Oñate nodded. “I'd say that's not much.” He returned his gaze to the file. “Her friends say she was nice, talented, nice, spiritual, nice, generous, nice. No deviations from that list, so no enemies, or none we heard from.”

“What about men? As they say, ‘significant others'?”

“Hard to tell, but this one guy, Malcolm Corey, might have been. He also has an artsy little shop on Canyon Road. This one's a gallery. He claims to be a painter—who doesn't around here?—but what he really is, he says, is an actor. He says.”

“How'd he react when he was told about her death?” Jury leaned over to see the address in the file and wrote it down.

“Pretty shocked. Might have gone pale but with the guy's tan, it's hard to tell.”

“You don't sound overly fond of him.” Jury watched a long streak of magenta diffuse and spread into pale pink and lavender underlined with dark gold melting like caramel. “You said this Corey's an actor?”

“No, I'm saying what
he
says. There are a lot of movies made around here. So they need extras for big scenes, or just people wandering around the streets. That's the sort of thing this Corey guy does, except he wants you to think he's really set for big roles. Claims he has this shop of his as a ‘hobby.' He paints when he's ‘resting between roles.' That's what these actors say when they're out of a job. Meaning Corey's not much in demand as a movie guy. Anyway, he's got a high-profile agent. You want to talk to him, he just might be over at Rancho del Reposo. That's one place they're shooting. It's a high-priced sort of hotel, main lodge and casitas, several miles outside of town.”

Jury held his bottle up to the light, brooding on its emptiness. “Then you get a lot of California types here?”

“Oh, hell, yes, but not just because of the movies. They flock here from Southern Cal. They
love
it, think they've ‘discovered' Santa Fe.”

“You've lived here a long time?” Jury thought he could sit here, slumped in this chair, feet resting on the porch railing, for the rest of the night. He was tired, but not with a London bone-tiredness. He felt as if a lot of tension were seeping out of his body, leaving him feeling wilted.

“All my life. It used to be so different. Now it's citified, know what I mean? Sophisticated, trendy, beautiful—but in a whoring kind of way. Paid to be pretty, paid to keep itself up.”

Jury laughed. “This place isn't cheap like that.”

“Who said cheap? Believe me, this is one place in the U.S. of A. that is decidedly not cheap. You can see the way the edges are rotting away, though. You drove here, you came on Cerrillos Road.”

“The highway with the string of motels?”

“Right. Cerrillos Road is like afterbirth; it's the mess left behind because of tourism. Don't get me wrong; I don't hate tourists. In fact, it ticks me off when I hear these fancy store owners complain. Where the hell would they be without the tourists? Who is it spends the money? But it's the concept of ‘tourism' that gets to me. It's like a monster the city itself created and now the monster's clumping around town demanding a room for the night.” Oñate sounded sad. “Hell, another ten years, old Santa Fe'll be gone.”

“You could say the same thing about old England.”

Jack Oñate shook his head. “It'd be pretty hard to bury England under a pile of turquoise and carved coyotes and cactus. I just don't think a culture can stand this much hammering. Want another beer? You've been doing everything with that empty except standing it on your head.”

Jury grinned. He'd been watching two women at the end of this row of sunset watchers light up cigarettes. The women were good-looking in a perfectly coiffed, enameled sort of way. But it was the cigarettes that made him salivate. “Yes, I want another. Do you smoke?”

“I used to. Gave it up some years back. Why?”

“I'm trying to quit.” He watched the threads of smoke from the freshly lighted cigarettes turn a bluish-pink against the mellow umber
of adobe wall. “But then I see that—” Jury nodded toward the women, both with cigarettes held within bare inches of their moist, red lips—“and it's like . . . sex. It's lust; it's a hunger, devouring. When I watch, I
lust
after them. The cigarettes, not the women.”

“Took me years to stop. Must've tried two dozen times.” He got up and clapped a hand on Jury's shoulder. “So, listen, man; let's have another beer and talk about stuff.” He went off towards the rooftop bar.

Talk about stuff.
That, and the childlike expression on Jack Oñate's face, made Jury smile; it took him back to the years he'd spent in the house of his uncle, after his mother's death, after the home he'd been put in. He was nine or ten. Behind the house was a long garden that emptied onto deep fields of grazing land belonging to some well-to-do farmer. There was a shed, a fairly large one that served as shelter for whatever farm animals might be stuck out in the fields in rain or snow. There was his best friend, Billy Oakley, a couple of years older than he, who used to nick his dad's cigarettes and sometimes his whisky. They would sit in the shed and make themselves ill, and often, a cow or a sheep joined them for company. Billy Oakley's favorite word was “stuff.” It sufficed largely for anything he didn't understand, anything beyond his comprehension. His dad did “accounting and stuff”; women had “tits and stuff.” And a couple of years into the shed visits Billy's mother died. It was “leukemia and stuff.”

Jack Oñate resettled himself and handed Jury another beer. He sighed. “Angela Hope. I didn't know her myself. Only to see, that is. Her and her sister.”

“I'll want to talk to anyone you know of who
did
know her. Who else besides the perhaps-boyfriend Corey and the little sister?”

“Well, there's some of the other people on Canyon Road. Since she had her business there, it stands to reason they'd have known her. On one side there's a Ms. Bartholomew. Sukie Bartholomew. My God—” Jack looked at Jury—“ ‘Sukie' Bartholomew. Go figure. She's into crystals, tarot cards, stuff like that. But you get more of that in Sedona. Actually I think this Bartholomew woman is from there. Which is kind of strange. Most of them leave Santa Fe to
go
to Sedona. Spiritual place, they say. ‘Vortexes' and stuff. Some kind of magnetic center that's supposed to be real spiritual. Holes in the ground. They call them vortexes. Me, I call it mystical shit.”

“You're talking about Sedona, Arizona.”

“Yeah.” Jack looked over at him. “Even in your business, you've heard of Sedona?”

“Coincidence. I just happened to read something in a newspaper about it. New Age people, that's what they were called.”

Looking down at his notes, Jack continued. “I get the impression no one who does business on Canyon Road really knew Angela Hope all that well. Except maybe for this Sukie person, I mean, they had tea together sometimes. Probably that ginseng, herbal junk.” Oñate studied his bottle label as if to compare ingredients. “And as for these two Brits of yours, Frances Hamilton and Helen Hawes—” Jack shook his head—“there's even less there. They both stayed here—” he pointed down at the roof “—for two days, and the Hawes woman was here longer. This Frances Hamilton checked in for the two days before they left. But no one I talked to—not the desk clerk, not the maid, not the dining room hostess ever saw them together.”

“Could Frances Hamilton have been staying somewhere else before that?”

“Sure. But I thought you only wanted to know where they were together. I can ask around some more—”

Jury shook his head. “Thanks, but I can do it.”

Oñate thought for a moment, then asked, “Did she have money?”

“Frances Hamilton? Yes, quite a lot.”

“Then try Rancho del Reposo. It's maybe ten miles the other side of Santa Fe.”

“Right.” Jury glanced at Oñate's notes. “Anyone else?”

“Then there's this scientist type, Nils Anders.
Doctor
Anders, I should say. He was a friend of Angela Hope. Again, how good, I don't know. He's over at the Santa Fe Institute. All I have is, he's a friend.”

“What's the Santa Fe Institute?”

“It's where all kinds of scientists hang out thinking up weird stuff.”

Jury rolled the cool bottle across his forehead, and said, “What kind of weird stuff?”

“It's like a think tank. All kinds of scientists—physicists, biologists, mathematicians, chemists—they get together and knock ideas around. They use computers a lot; they got more computers in that place than Macintosh.” Jack tilted his bottle, took a long drink. “They're mostly into something called ‘complexity theory.' ”

“What's that?”

Jack shrugged. “Some theory of the way the universe acts. It's after ‘chaos.' Don't look at me; I didn't make it up. It's got something to do with order. A kind of order.”

Macalvie might like that, thought Jury, returning his gaze to the dark mountains. He was getting hungry. There must be a hundred terrific restaurants in Santa Fe. “Where is this place?”

“Hyde Park Road. You go like you were headed for the ski basin or for that spa up there—”

“I'm not skiing or spa-ing, so you'll have to direct me.”

Jack nodded. “What I think is, if Einstein had been around when there were places like this Institute, he'd have gone there and chilled. You know?”

“And Dr. Anders. Which particular kind of weird stuff is he into?”

“Anders . . . Anders . . . Anders . . . ” Jack was whispering, leafing through the file pages. “Weird stuff . . . weird. . . . Ah, here it is: Ph.D., psychology. Ph.D., sociology. Ph.D.,
mathematics.
Hell, I'm impressed. Guy's got three of them.” He went back to the notes. “You going to see him? And the rest of them?”

“I imagine, yes. Right now, how about dinner?”

“Okay. Incidentally, Rich. These people at the Santa Fe Institute, they are
not
dumb.” Jack repeated this, his mouth an O, silently mouthing the words NOT DUMB.

Jury leaned over towards him, also mouthing, NEITHER ARE WE.

Canyon Road, the sign said, and given that the other streets Jury had passed were not posted with turquoise and brown wooden signs, he assumed that this one was one of Santa Fe's prime attractions. So variously and brightly painted were the adobe and wood buildings that bordered each side of the narrow, winding street, he thought he might have come upon one of those “Prettiest Villages in England.” They were selling either Native American crafts, or art, or food. In the summer months he imagined it would be a touristy hell, but now, in February, it lay quiet and golden, sunlight reflecting off turquoise and blue and rose-colored paint.

The Silver Heron was located around a bend and about halfway along. It was, like most of the shops here, very small, one room in front and one in the rear about the size of a walk-in closet. This must have been where Angela did her silver work. The small room was windowless, the only furniture a very long wooden table—something like a refectory table, but higher—and a high stool drawn up to it.

She had not been an orderly person, Jury thought. Her tools were lying in disarray, none of them returned to the wooden box fastened to the wall that was clearly intended for them. Tiny silver shavings were strewn, confetti-like, across the length of the table, mixed in with bits of colored stone. There were little piles of these semiprecious bits—agate, coral, malachite, azurite, black onyx, obsidian. On one end of the table sat a block of turquoise similar in size and design to Lady Cray's piece. There were a couple of small machines Jury couldn't identify, an acetylene torch, goggles to wear when using the torch, what looked like a hand grinding-machine, and a couple of jewelers' loupes. On the outer edge of the long table were dark scars, indentations of blistered, blackened wood that suggested burning
cigarettes had been parked there, lighted ends out. Angela Hope had been a serious smoker. For no reason other than his recent conversion, Jury counted fifteen of these marks, evenly interspersed in a line along the edge and creating a dark design. He could not help but smile at the sign of Angela Hope's addiction and he wondered how often she'd tried to stop and couldn't. He felt a kinship for her. The state of her worktable made it look as if Angela had simply risen from the high stool and walked out for a cup of coffee. And another cigarette. An air of expectancy, of imminent return, hung about her workspace. With a small camera he'd brought along, he started snapping pictures.

Back in the showroom itself, there were the usual glass display cases and the usual shelves lining both walls. One display case he was fairly sure held Angela's own work. It had a fineness of quality—the turquoise clusters set in hammered silver—that the pieces in the other case lacked. Also, every piece in it was turquoise or silver and turquoise. Even his uneducated eye could see the difference between that case and the other which held pretty but undistinguished jewelry. There were pins of abalone and coral, intricately worked gold and silver bracelets, bolo ties, and some of the Hopi and blackware pots that were so popular. On the wall opposite were shelves of books, a stereo, a row of kachina dolls that were not for sale. All of this together with the two armchairs positioned on either side of a rosewood table created a homey atmosphere, disturbed now by dust and dead petals fallen from a vase of withered roses. In one corner sat an aluminum coffee urn and plastic cups and a sign that invited customers to help themselves. The commercial side had been tempered by these efforts to create an atmosphere of welcome. He could imagine that Angela herself might sit in one of these armchairs and talk with a customer. It was more than likely, since she created original pieces of jewelry for people, that this would be the case. Talking over designs, taking measurements of wrists and ring fingers.