The Lies that Bind (22 page)

“Whew,” he said. “Were you attacked by a skunk?”

“You could say that.”

“Did you let him in?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“
I wanted to see his face.”

“Didn't the front desk tell you to leave the security lock on?” Already the incident bore the unmistakable imprint of becoming my fault.

“I was expecting you at any minute,” I said.

“I got here as quick as I could.”

“I bet,” said I.

“Did he take anything?”

“No.”

“Do you want to file a report?”

“All right.”

******

I went to the police station and went through the motions. The police didn't think coming across two crooks in one day was anything out of the ordinary and didn't believe there was any relationship between the two crimes. When it came to the limp, they didn't seem to think I was a reliable witness. They did run a check on the license number and found out it belonged to a rental car that had been stolen.

19

M
OTEL
9
GAVE
me another room in which to finish off the night, one that smelled more like new disinfectant than old skunk. But they weren't exactly generous about it. In fact, they made me pay another $29.95; it was my fault the room smelled as if a skunk had crawled under the foundation and croaked. By the time I left, the second room didn't smell too great either. You could spend the rest of your life smelling like road kill, I thought. Maybe some smells—like some pains—went too deep for neutralizer.

As soon as it became light enough and late enough to make phone calls, I took out the directory and looked up Harry Chambers Auctioneers. I asked Harry's secretary if I could come by and visit.

“Sure,” she said. “Come on by. He's not doing anything but listening to himself talk anyway.”

Harry Chambers Auctioneers was in a low-slung stucco building xeriscaped with white pebbles for a lawn and a beat-up saguaro that might have been used for target practice. It was low-water, no-maintenance landscaping, but inside, the ubiquitous fountain bubbled and gushed, white noise to hide the sounds of the city, white water to make you think the temperature is double digits when it's really one hundred and ten. The reception area was paneled in dark wood, had orange shag carpet on the floor and a Southwest painting in dubious taste on the wall, your basic pink sunset and purple mesa. I heard Harry's voice the minute I walked in the door. It was loud enough to get your attention and had the singsong rhythm of a rap artist or a Southern Baptist preacher. “Who will give me fifty, who will give me fifty? Would you give me fifty-five, would you go to sixty?” I spotted him—a talking red head about three feet by four on a color TV. “Say hello to a good buy,” he said.

“Is that how it's done these days?” I asked his secretary. “By remote control on the auction channel?”

“Oh, no. Harry appears live, but he likes to watch himself practice on video. Helps him perfect his routine, he says.” Her puffy blond hairdo could have been set on orange juice cans, and she wore black-framed glasses with rhinestones in the corners. She rolled her eyes as she buzzed Harry on the intercom. “What did you say your name was?” she asked me.

“Neil Hamel. I don't have an appointment.”

“That's all right. He'll see you. Harry will talk to anybody anytime. Harry, Neil Hamel's here.”

“Send him in,” Harry growled.

“See?” the secretary asked. She pointed toward Harry's door, which was down the hall and wide open.

I
stepped into the office and found myself looking at Harry Chambers and two of his exact replicas. Harry sat behind a large desk, the replicas were on either side of the room on large TV screens. All of them wore navy-blue blazers, white shirts, red and blue striped ties. Two of them were talking. “Who will give me ninety. Can you go one hundred? Yes or no, gotta go. Do I hear a hundred?” Harry's red hair was slicked back, and he had the sharp nose and glittery eyes of a fox. He was well groomed and not bad-looking, but too loud and too fast, like Robin Williams on speed. One of him was more than enough. He picked up the remote, turned to the east and zapped off Harry One, turned to the west and got rid of Harry Two. “Isn't Neil a man's name?” he asked me.

“Not when I'm wearing it,” I replied in the edgy voice of someone who'd fought off an assailant and hadn't had any sleep she could remember.

“Whoa! Did you check your gun at the door?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Hey, we all have days like that. Sometimes I work up enough lather to shave the city of Phoenix.” He laughed, showing a number of gold-capped teeth. “What can I do you for?”

“I'm a lawyer. I represent a woman whose husband developed a destination resort that you're going to be auctioning off for the RTC. He told her they'd get some money out of the sale.” It wasn't the exact truth, but as close as I wanted to get.

“She believes that and she's either a sap or a saint. There's a woman that ought to be looking for a new husband, one with an MBA, a massive bank account.”

“You could be right,” I said.

He stood up and began pacing behind his desk. Like most comedians, he joked better on his feet. “I found a chain letter on my wife's bureau the other day. You know what it said? Don't send money. Put your name on the bottom of the list and send your husband to the name on the top. By the time
you
get to the top of the list you'll get sixteen thousand husbands, and one of them has gotta be better than that SOB you're living with now. But whatever you do, don't break the chain—you're likely to get your own husband back. You got a husband?”

“Nope.”

“You're smart.”

“Well, what do you think? Is she likely to get any money out of the sale?” I knew she wasn't, but this wasn't exactly a rhetorical question. I was fishing, although I wasn't quite sure for what. Bottom feeders, perhaps.

He laughed. I'd become the comedian now. “You know what these RTC laundromats are going for? I call 'em laundromats because S&Ls were a great place to launder money: mob money, drug money, campaign money, any kind of no-good, no-account money. They're going for pennies on the dollar. And
it's
not because I don't know how to talk people out of their wallets either. Hell, I've been doing it for twenty-five years. We're lucky if we get half the amount of the mortgage. Of course, most of them were overmortgaged to begin with. Bankers lent money to their developer buddies, gave the kickbacks to the politicians and spent what was left on gold faucets for their Learjets. They thought they were bulletproof, but when one went down he'd plea bargain and take all his cronies with him. It was like trees dropping in the forest. Kathump, kathump, kathump.” His hand imitated the motion of falling trees.

“Do you get many bidders?”

“We get lots of lookers. Everybody's looking for a deal, and there's plenty of action up to a hundred thou. But the amount of serious bidders we get for the big properties could fit into a small room, a very small room—they could fit into the cubbyhole under my desk. The market for destination resorts in Arizona in this economy is as dead as Tucson in the summertime. You go to Red Rocks in peak season, and they aren't even half full. I keep seeing the same guys over and over again at these auctions. One takes his phone out, dials a number, the other guy, sitting across the room, answers. I'm trained to look for moving hands, you know. That's my business.”

“What are they doing?”

“Divvying up the properties. One gets one, the other takes the next one. They keep the prices down by not bidding against each other. Real estate investors are the biggest bunch of crooks I've ever seen. These guys would screw their own mothers. Myself, I'd rather be auctioning estates or Elvis Presley memorabilia—better class of people,” He paused and thought for a couple of seconds. “If your client wants to get rid of her husband, she could try siccing the feds on him. Where you had real estate development in this state in the eighties, you had bank fraud, and that's a federal crime. They'll take his money, but she might have the pleasure of seeing him do time. The feds have their own destination resort. Club Fed. I hear it's a hot place to spend the summer.”

“Well, thanks for your help,” I said.

“My pleasure,” he replied. He sniffed and wrinkled his sharp nose. “What
is
that smell?”

“Road kill,” I said.

He zapped the TVs on as I left the room, and the talking Harrys started flapping their gums like ventriloquists' dummies. “Do I hear one hundred? Yes or no, gotta go. That's as cheap as I can dance.”

“Is he always on like that?” I asked the secretary on my way out.

“Always.”

Harry's tone of voice and expression changed suddenly into a scowl and a scold. He moved up close to the camera. “I know you're on the sofa, Rex,” he barked. “I can see you up there. Get down right now, do you hear me. I said get down!”

“His dog,” the secretary said. “He leaves the tapes on at home too.”

“
Atta boy,” Harry said.

20

H
ARRY HAD A
point, but it seemed to me that if the feds had wanted Whit Reid they would have gotten him by now. His buddy Charlie Keating had been locked up and was already rattling his bars demanding the Grey Poupon. I went next to the Federal Courthouse and scanned the microfiche, looking for the name of Whitney J. Reid III. It wasn't there. Whit had not been tried and found guilty, had not been tried and found innocent, had not been tried at all. He could have plea-bargained, however, could have been one of those trees that took the forest down. A bank fraud settlement wouldn't necessarily be a matter of public record. A man I went to UNM law school with was an assistant U.S. attorney here, I remembered. I gave him a call from the pay phone in the lobby.

“This is Neil Hamel,” I said. “We were classmates at UNM. Remember?”

“You were the blonde from Texas, right? The one with great legs?” Jonathan Laswell answered.

“Wrong.”

“Oh. Well, what can I do for you?”

“I stayed in Albuquerque and have my own office there. I'm in Phoenix today, trying to get some information on Whitney J. Reid, who was a local developer before the market went bust.”

“Whitney J. Reid. I believe I've heard that name.”

“I think he was involved in S&L fraud, but I can't find a record of any prosecution.”

“Some of the S&L settlements fell under the Bank Board's veil of secrecy and were sealed.”

“You doing anything for lunch?”

“Not much. How about Romanos at twelve-thirty?”

“Okay.”

“You're sure you're not the blonde from Texas.”

“Positive,” I said.

******

The Romanos in Phoenix was an exact replica of the one in Albuquerque, down to the large parking lot, the soggy pasta and the waitresses who did look like blondes from Texas and who had been trained to say Hi, I'm Cheryl, or Debbie, or Allison, and wish you a nice day. Waitresses always have names that were up-to-the-minute eighteen or twenty years ago. At least a name like Neil doesn't mark you as being of a certain age or time, not if it's worn by a woman anyway. I knew I was marked by
something,
however, because Jonathan Laswell picked me out immediately as being the Albuquerque lawyer who—like him—was pushing forty and who also—like him—wasn't getting rich doing it. It takes a certain kind of courage or incompetence to be a lawyer for twelve years and not make any money. Jonathan's excuse was that he was a prosecutor, and prosecutors are a special breed of lawyer, a special breed of government employee too, especially the ones that stay with it. Most prosecutors leave government service after a few years. Some go to work for large prestigious firms representing the same white-collar criminals they once prosecuted. The less accomplished or more committed go to work for themselves, defending the Mexican nationals and the child molesters they get assigned by the public defender's office. It's one way to make a living, and there is always plenty of work. Laswell, however, seemed to enjoy being a prosecutor, to be in it for life.

He'd been short and slender when I knew him, with black bangs that fell across his forehead. He was still short, but he'd added a lot of weight-lifting bulk, and his bangs had gotten streaked with gray. His muscles were bursting out of his suit. He appeared to have convicted a lot of felons; his eyes had the hyper tenacity of a bulldog, and they took in everything that went on in Romanos, especially the blond waitresses.

“You haven't changed a bit,” he lied.

“Neither have you,” I lied back.

Once we'd been seated and the margarita (for me) and Perrier (for him) arrived, we began playing catch-up. “So what kind of law are you doing in Albuquerque?” he asked.

“Real estate and divorce mostly, an occasional homicide. I'm representing Whit Reid's mother-in-law, who may have been involved in a traffic fatality. His wife is an old friend of mine.”

“The mother-in-law didn't run into Whit, did she?”

“No.”

“Pity. So what's your life like? You married?”

“No.”

“Got any kids?”

“No.”

“A house?”

“No.”

“Pets?”

“No.” He sounded like a prosecutor, and my life sounded like the desert, even to me.

“You're lucky,” he said, indicating, perhaps, that he had all of the above and that he was looking to get out of it, maybe even that he could use my help. Fortunately I lived and practiced in another state.

“So what do you know about Whitney J. Reid?” I asked.