Carlotta Muñoz,
championship swimmer for St. Michael’s Highschool her last two years there but
unable to afford college even with the swimming scholarship she’d been offered,
and not wanting to go even to Albuquerque when Drew was here, whether or not
she got to see him, had access to the files at Los Corazones (short for Los
Corazones Solitarios, or Lonely Hearts, the singles club on Garcia Street next
to La Leche League, where she was office manager). She could have told the police, had they asked, that there
were over 9,452 people living alone in the Santa Fe city limits, who would have
had no one to vouch for their whereabouts that night. No way of adding in exactly how many more were unaccounted
for one way or another: out
cheating on their respective husbands or wives or other partners, off on
business trips or long weekends in Las Vegas, in the emergency room at St.
Vincent’s Hospital, or in jail.
Or, of course, those who might have driven in from out of town, Española
or Belen or Truchas, Madrid or Waldo or as far as Socorro—one of the words
Carlotta knew best in all the world, help—or
might have been working together, in the darkness of late winter. Those who, like Carlotta herself, would
do absolutely anything for the person they loved. Whose elderly neighbor, snooping as usual, could report that
he or she had come home late, had been carrying a suspicious bundle wrapped in
garbage bags. Just as Carlotta’s
nosy neighbor, Mrs. Archuleta, who took in ironing and sold eggs, would report
the suspicious bundle she had seen Carlotta stow in her garage.
At 9:30 that Sunday night
Margaret Aspinwall, who with those 9,451 other Santa Feans lived alone, had
just put the last dab of cadmium red on a painting of hollyhocks, a 4’ x 4’
canvas purchased with some money her mother in St. Louis had sent her for her
fiftieth birthday, and was cleaning her red-saturated boar’s bristle brushes in
the stained bathroom sink of her studio apartment (with kiva fireplace and
vigas) on Camino Escondido, on the other side of the river, rented by the month
from the secretary to the Episcopalian bishop on the understanding that
Margaret would keep dusted the collection of priceless old kachinas that looked
down on her with unnerving penetration from the built-in bookshelves
there. Margaret found it ironic
that she should have found a place to live on the hidden road, thinking how perfectly that suited her need for
anonymity, the name she had just changed before driving the stolen Mustang to
this town in the high desert where no one knew her or what she was. Where no one had any idea, any more than
she did until now, this moment of reckoning, what she might or might not do.
Many hours after midnight
in the kitchen at Tecalote, on Cerrillos Road, Peter Trumbel slipped the knife
hot out of the commercial dishwasher into his cloth bag. The bag, sort of a Navajo saddlebag
rip-off, was from the Ortega weavers in Chimayo. He’d lived in Chimayo before Philip took him in, near the
Sanctuario; for three or four years after his brother was shot in L.A. had
joined the pilgrims walking along the highway on Good Friday. He had learned then—prayer had to be an
act. Though Peter shared a house
on Bishop’s Lodge Road with his partner Philip Gabriel, Philip was currently
making a fool of himself over a Japanese bath boy—a specialist in Flowing River
Stone Massage at one of the spas in Jemez Springs, deep in the mountains, whose
café au-lait skin always smelled disturbingly of pine oil and Lapsang Souchong
tea, who was a Buddhist. Peter was
sous-chef at Tortuga Café (galley slave, more like), and started work at 4 a.m.
each morning, making the thirty-five gallons of red chili sauce they went
through every day. Sauce for their
famous breakfast burritos, carne adovada, enchiladas, frito pie. Peter ground the chili pods from the
ristra, added oil, comino, oregano, salt, garlic. But lately he’d been coming in earlier still (the damned
insomnia again) and using the kitchen for his own cooking, for the twenty kinds
of flan he’d so-far invented, the
cookbook that Philip had promised he would print for him on the letterpress in
his print shop on Acequia Madre, which he called At The Sign of the Cottonwood
Tree (because he saw the little outbuilding first during a merry June blizzard
of cottonwood fuzz). Tonight Peter
was supposed to be experimenting with a new recipe for flan flavored with
Calvados, apple brandy from Philip’s cousins’ home in Normandy. As he downed another glass of the
stuff, furiously, not smelling or tasting it, he thought about the crisis of
faith the Buddhist massage therapist had caused—and what it had led him
to. His act of prayer. He reached down to touch the hard blade
of the knife through the rough woven fabric of the bag. He might be needing that.
It was well after nine
o’clock before Mirella Antonelli got to the last note of Ave Maria. She was
annoyed. She had been scheduled to
meet Dru at nine. But the bride
had been having doubts (smart girl), so the wedding started twenty, thirty
minutes later than it was supposed to.
And then there was a lengthy sermon, endless readings by both bride and
groom, communion, and an ambling guitar solo by the groom’s friend. All the while she waited to sing, in
the chapel with that crazy circular staircase apparently built without any
nails (miraculous, they called it), Mirella worked on memorizing her part in
the The Marriage of Figaro. She would be part of the chorus, for
the summer opera. She had come to
audition for the apprentice program the previous August, had argued over
restaurants in Strasbourg with the Norwegian tenor whose favorite role was Tamino. He’d been staying at the ranch in
Tesuque of some rich eccentric local woman who taught show jumping and rode a
motorcycle with the sidecar all around town to do her shopping and errands,
carrying her riding whip. Mirella
hated the high desert, and especially the altitude, which left her heavy with
fatigue, as if she were much older than twenty-six, and unable to sleep
nights. So she’d sat outside the
sliding glass door of her bedroom staring out over the piñon trees and rabbit
brush, chamisa, the foothills touched with moonlight, the million stars that
you didn’t see in the cities she was used to, Paris, Munich, Rome, until she’d
heard the splashing in the pool below her room, and had gone down to find a
man—a boy really—swimming, grey-eyed, a kind of water spirit. Dru or some such funny name, who kissed
her in the deep end, who came back to her room with her and talked about how
alive he felt when he was in someone’s dark living room, in a strip of
moonlight, as if it was a new identity he put on. She didn’t understand all the nuances of English, so didn’t
understand until later that he was talking about breaking in, thieving. But it was all the same to her. Anything to counter the boredom.
The theft was discovered
when the church was unlocked for 6:00 mass on Monday morning.
The rector, Father Miguel
Baca, sank to his knees on the flagstone floor. He could not help but thinking, though he tried to stop
himself, of Jaime Lucero, Jaime with his little sister in St. Vincent’s, the
other six brothers and sisters he had to support.
Martin Lilienthal, an
archaeologist at the School of American Research, was on a plane to Washington
that afternoon, where he would be meeting in secret with museum officials.
Renee
Richard, owner of an art gallery off the Plaza, slipped out to the French
Bakery for coffee with a friend, in the room with steamed windows, polished
copper kettles, ferns. They shared
a crèpe with apricot jam, to go with their frothy glass mugs of café au
lait. The stories were flying. Even those who were not Catholic, had
not, perhaps, heard of La Conquistadora before. The newcomers, the gringos. About all of the little figurine’s dresses. Her jewels. Her crown. The
women who dress her. “One dress,
made by Cochití Pueblo artist Dorothy Trujillo, is of Native American design
and includes small silver bracelets and a miniature squash blossom necklace.”
Mrs. Archuleta, who lived
next door to Carlotta and took in ironing for a living, mounds and mounds of
other peoples shirts and sheets, phoned the police late in the afternoon,
before finishing a batch of tamales for her niece’s confirmation, the corn
husks she was spreading with masa and
then a tablespoon of roast pork and chili, to let them know what she had seen
in the night, suspicious activity.
She had never liked that girl, she told them.
The police wondered if the
crime were related to thefts over the past two years of other religious art
from churches and Penitente moradas
around the state. On July 5, the
year before, a valuable statue of San Miguel had been stolen from Santa Fe’s
San Miguel Mission, the oldest church in the United States, along with other
statues and paintings. A letter to be received by
the diocese office the following week would suggest that La Conquistadora had
gone off in search of the lost San Miguel, because he’d been gone so long and
clearly needed help in finding his way back home.
The APB bulletin out on the
woman who was calling herself Margaret Aspinwall, living among the kachinas and
painting hollyhocks, hadn’t yet been connected with her. The white Mustang, muddied by the
winter snows, sat in the garage with its Massachusetts license plates
unobserved. She walked
everywhere. A ginger cat had
adopted her. She walked to
Gormley’s Market on Canyon Road, to buy it Purina in cans. Feeling less nervous now that the deed
was done, she went to the Fenn Gallery, to see the luscious paintings by her
art teacher’s favorite painter, the Russian émigré Leon Gaspard. The gallery was marvellous, though
nothing to do with the fens she knew, the marshes behind the baseball park in
Boston.
The month went on. The town continued bereft. The police continued baffled. Lent started. A few sad crocuses bloomed. The wind blew constantly.
Phillip made flan with
amaretto, flan with ground almonds, flan with ginger. The bath boy loved ginger more than anything, he told
Phillip. But he said that about a
lot of things. For a Buddhist he
was uncommonly attached to things of this world, to the most intense sensual
pleasures. To commotions of the
senses: fear, jealousy, pain. The thrill of taking and destroying
things that others cared about.
. . .
—Christie
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