Jennifer's Weave

        The envelope wedged above the lock on my front door warned me I'd had a visitor. I spotted it the moment I drove onto the gravel between my house and garage in the mountains above Placitas in central New Mexico. I parked by the door and stood a few moments, listening to the wind and looking at the envelope.
        The sun had only two slender hands of blue sky left to fall before dusk deepened the shadows beneath the pines. The air still held a trace of the late-October sun's warmth, but the shadow near the house was chilly. A jay chattered on the mountain behind me and a woodpecker hammered at a tree down by the county road that leads to my property. I had no sense of any presence but my own. Still, the part of my back between my shoulder blades troubled me, the part that tingles when I'm feeling vulnerable.
         The envelope was yellow. The advertising on the outside told me Jenny Murphy had probably won a million dollars, if only blah blah blah. One end had been opened carefully. I shook out the contents. A key and a dollar bill. A word was scrawled hastily in pencil on the bill with a distinctive looping script that I recognized immediately. JENNY.
         That sent me dashing back to the car. The uneasy feeling grew worse. Jenny was one of the five people who live on my road, the only one I care about, say more than hello to, and the only one who knew what a dollar bill, signed that way, meant to me.
         For the last month or so, we've had a standing date for Sunday dinner at my place. The groceries I'd picked up on my way home slid back and forth on the seat beside me as I drove. I didn't know what Jenny had tried to say with her dollar and her key, but they had bought my attention, brought my heart to my throat. I pushed the car as fast as the twisting road let me.
         Her driveway began less than a mile south of mine on the same poorly-maintained road. I reached it in under a minute, slid into a left turn that showered the brush beside the road with gravel and left a cloud of dust hanging in the air. Skidded to a stop by her front door, left the car running, ran to the house.
         Her door stood partly open and that stopped me. Jenny never locks her door, but she always closes it. I pushed it open with the back of my hand and called, "Jenny! Hello! Anyone here?"
         The words echoed in the house. I stepped in. The door opened directly into the front room. It was in good order. Her couch, chairs, and loom were all in place, ready for sitting or weaving. The doorway opposite me led to the kitchen. A corner of her dinette cut into the opening, along with part of an overturned chair and a man's shoe on the Mexican tile floor.
         I called again. "Jenny! Hello? Jenny!"
         She didn't answer. No one answered. I backed out, backed all the way to the car. Turned off the engine and pulled my current favorite handgun from the glove compartment and stepped back into the house with greater confidence. I didn't bother to call out again, just made straight for the kitchen with the pistol cupped in both hands and aimed upward at a forty-five degree angle. Ready to point and shoot.
         As I approached the kitchen, the shoe turned into a foot and part of a leg encased in jeans. There was something dark under it that wasn't a shadow, something sticky, and now I could hear the faint pounding of drums, the soft beat of a guitar from the back of the house, and a louder, nearer buzzing of flies.
         The thing on the floor could be ignored for the moment. The rest of the room held places where a body might hide. I'd been there often enough to know them all, and now I spun into the room, crouched low. Both hands and the weapon drifted from one empty concealment to another. Nothing lived in the room but the flies and me, and the flies were too pleased with their good fortune to pay attention to larger issues.
         I had an adrenaline rush going. That would have been good, but I'd slept with Jenny, fed her, cared about her, and suspected my own judgment. The adrenaline came as much from fear for her as from excitement. I controlled myself, breathed with my mouth open so the whistle of air wouldn't distract me. Listened to the house.
         The radio played softly back in the bedroom wing, tuned to one of the Spanish stations in Albuquerque. Not Jenny's normal station. Some woman lamented a lost love with those lingering cries of anguish and loss you hear south of the border. Aaiieee, mi carida, mi amore. My darling, my love. My eyes wandered the kitchen, kept returning to the thing on the floor. It had been a man in his late thirties. He lay on his back with one leg extended and the other cocked at a steep angle. His left arm was twisted and that hand lay partly under his waist. The other arm stretched above his head. His hand lay flat. The last two fingers curled. He looked like a priest dismissing his congregation, but surprised, as though he had been laid out unexpectedly. The immediate cause of death seemed to be a butcher knife whose handle protruded upward from the angle between his right collar bone and his neck.
         In addition to brown shoes and faded jeans, he wore a blue and white flannel shirt. The top buttons had been torn away, the shirt pulled open to expose his chest. He wore no rings or jewelry other than a slender chain and a gold crucifix that had slid up into the blood that pooled in the hollow of his neck. His hair was black and so were his eyes under the glaze that had settled on them. His skin was dark, swarthy, and his face narrow. Tanned. Large eyes, open and blind now, wept red from their corners. His jaw hung open and the blood that filled it had overflowed, run down his cheeks and outlined his body before it thickened, skimmed over. The pockets of his jeans had been pulled inside-out. Coins were scattered on the floor. Those nearest the body were also covered by the man's blood.
         He had been good-looking once. I took him for Mexican on at least one side, maybe both. Someone's carida, someone's amor.
         Something was wrong with the body, with the way it lay. I've seen men dead by knife, mostly bayonet but also machete and street knives. They tend to curl up around the wound in their last moments. This one hadn't done that. It looked like he may have been unconscious when the blade went in. And the blood had seeped rather than spattered. He had been disabled, searched, and then someone had taken the time to find the right knife, long enough, and the right entry point to reach deep into his body, to find the large arteries, so that most of the blood would pool in his lungs and chest cavity. It had been done well, and studying it sharpened my anxiety over Jenny, over what I would find when I found her. I stepped around the mess and into the hall.
         Again, there was no sound but the radio. Louder. It came from the guest room, the first door on the left. The master bedroom was on the right. My gun came back up to firing position as I kicked at the door, saw it bounce all the way to the wall, and then stepped through. The room was in disarray. Clothes scattered on the floor and on the bed. But not all the drawers in the chest were open. The room had not been searched. Someone had packed hurriedly, left quickly. My unease faded but I didn't drop my guard.
         The master bathroom was empty. So were the hall bath and the smaller bedroom, where the radio played. Neither of them was disordered, exactly, but the bed had been used and not made, and a damp towel lay on the floor in the bathroom. A small mound of clothes had been dumped on the mattress. Men's clothes. Someone had been staying here, someone Jenny hadn't mentioned to me. I snagged a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt from the pile and held them up long enough to decide, based only on their size and style, that the dead man had owned them.
         The other bedroom was full of crap. Junk. Boxes and sacks and bags of it, and if it wasn't exactly the way Jenny left it, only she would ever know. I went back to the kitchen. Jenny's telephone was on the counter beside the refrigerator. A large brown paper sack and a plastic grocery bag sat beside it. The name on the paper bag didn't mean anything to me. It was full of yarn. The plastic sack came from the only market in Placitas. It held a quart of white soup that had once been vanilla ice cream. I touched it with the back of my hand. Room temperature. I picked up her phone and pushed the redial button. The handset emitted a rapid series of tones and then my own voice came over the line. My answering machine. That was enough. I pushed a series of random numbers to erase the call, then dialed the police emergency number.
         Placitas is in Sandoval County, north of Albuquerque and well outside the city limits. The sheriff's department and the state police both responded to my call about the time the sun dipped below the horizon and eased day into night. I didn't know the officers from the sheriff's department, but one of the detectives from the state police was named Andrew Martinez. We'd met before.
         I was outside, standing in the shadows and repeating my story for one of the deputies, when Martinez drove up in his personal vehicle, a dark green Trans Am only a couple of years old. He sent a sour glance my way, then walked past us into the house. He was in there for a long time, long enough for the deputy to finish taking my story and copying my name, Paul Porter, and address in Placitas from my driver's license to his report. He had just handed the license back and begun trying to think of a question that would make me break down and confess when Martinez walked out and relieved him of the burden. "Why'd you do it, Rainbow?"
         "It's my duty as a citizen," I said. "Always report bodies." I grinned but my heart wasn't in it.
         "Don't be an asshole. You know what I mean."
         "You think I made that mess and then reported it?"
         He relaxed a little, but not much. "You found it?"
         "Yes."
         He looked around the yard. "You live here?" He knew damned well where I lived, but I told him anyway. It gave him an opportunity to ask his next question and for me to get the lie out of the way.
         "What were you doing here?"
         "The owner asked me to look after the place while she was out of town."
         "And?" He waited. I gave him a break, repeated the rest of the story, from the moment I skidded to a stop outside Jenny's door to the time the Sheriff's deputies arrived. It didn't take long. The only parts I left out involved the envelope, the telephone, and the gun, now safely back in my glove compartment. He thought it over for a few minutes, then asked, "You searched the place?"
         "Jenny might have been in there."
         My voice got a little unsteady when I said her name. He noticed and softened his tone a little. "That's the owner? Jenny?"
         I nodded. "Jennifer Murphy."
         He started writing. "Describe her."
         "She's around thirty-six. Five-eight. She weighs about one-thirty. Red hair, cut short and curled, like one of those old rag dolls. Blue eyes. Some freckles, but not many. An oval kind of face. Good figure. A sense of humor. She has a nice smile."
         He stopped writing and stared at me. "That it?"
         "She can't cook." I thought about what I'd said and added, "That's about it."
         He didn't bother to write down my last comment. "What is your relationship with her?"
         "We're neighbors."
         "Friendly neighbors?" He emphasized friendly.
         "On and off."
         "When did you see her last?"
         "A week ago. Last Sunday afternoon. We had dinner at my place."
         "Is that when she asked you to look after her house?"
         "No. That is a standing arrangement. She looked after mine too."
         "So you had a key?"
         "That's right, Martinez. I had a key."
         "When did you use it last?"
         "I never had to use it. She didn't much believe in locks."
         He looked up at that. "So the deceased might have just walked in?"
         "He might have."
         "Who was he?"
         "I never saw him before."
         "Uh, huh." He took that for what it was worth and asked carefully, "When did she leave town?"
         "I don't know."
         "Look, Porter, I'm trying to determine whether she might have been around when . . . ." He hesitated, nodded over his shoulder at the house.
         "I know what you're trying to determine," I told him, "and the answer stands. I have no idea when she left. Do you have a guess when the guy was killed?"
         "The medical examiner will let us know when he gets around to it."
         "Or who he was?"
         "Don't tell me you didn't search him."
         "I didn't search him. I didn't figure the corpse was any of my business."
         Martinez snorted at that. He pushed it for the record. "Exactly what business are you in, Mr. Porter."
         I smiled at his sudden formality. "I'm still retired, Detective. And you forgot to tell me who the deceased was."
         "I did, didn't I? Do you know if this Jenny Murphy is married?"
         "Divorced. Three times, I think."
         "Family?"
         "There was a kid somewhere."
         "But she didn't have custody?"
         "No, she didn't."
         "Did she tell you where she was going?"
         "No."
         "When she spoke to you last," he consulted his notes, "last Sunday, did she say anything about having trouble with anyone? Did she seem worried about anything?"
         "No. She seemed fine."
         "Were there any other men in her life?"
         That angered me. "How the hell would I know? If there were other men, she kept them a secret."
         He backed off. "Okay. Calm down. Who were her women friends?"
         "I don't know."
         He shook his head at that. "You don't know a hell of a lot about her," he said. "Are you sure you were friendly."
         Again that accent on friendly. I didn't answer him directly because he was right. There were a lot of things I didn't know about Jenny. Too many. I took one final stab at the corpse. "Look, Andy, how about telling me who the body belonged to? It can't hurt anything. You know I won't talk to the press, and I've been as helpful as I can."
         He shook his head again. "Sorry, Porter. I can't do that." But he dropped his arm enough to show the form on his clipboard, held it while I read the name in the deceased field. John Murphy.
         When I looked up, I saw a question in his eyes. "Are you sure you don't remember where she was going? It would be nice if we didn't have to look too hard. Or if she turned up at the station tomorrow, even with a lawyer."
         "I'm sure," I told him. But there was a question in my eyes, too. "How long do you need me to stick around? And when can I lock up?"
         "You can take off now. If I have any more questions, I'll stop by in the morning. In the meantime, leave the key with me. I'll see the place is locked."
         I handed it to him and turned to go. He stopped me. "Porter . . . ?"
         "Yeah?"
         "This house won't just be locked. It'll be sealed. You know what that means."
         I nodded and left him to his business. The groceries for our aborted dinner were still in my car. The most perishable of them, two pounds of Mexican prawns, were still cool. As soon as I got home, I shoved them in the freezer and brewed a pot of coffee, carried a cup out to the deck behind my house.
         It extends the full width of the house. The house itself is built on the downhill side of the parking area, about three hundred feet below the crest of a ridge on the northern end of the Sandia Mountains.
         Sandia means watermelon in Spanish. The story is that the mountains were named because they take the color of a watermelon's heart at dusk, when the sun turns crimson over the western desert, the sky fades to a soft purple, and the granite face of the thousand-foot cliffs glows like freshly cut fruit.
         That magic moment had passed while I waited for the cops outside Jenny's house and thought about the crimson stain turning slowly brown on her kitchen floor. What was left of the sun had moved west with the terminator, into Arizona, and only a universe of stars lit the deck.
         A faint, cold breeze came from the northwest. I leaned into it, rested my arms on the iron railing, cupped my hands around the heat of the coffee. Thought about the name on Martinez's clipboard.
         John Murphy. Bodies can darken when the blood trapped in the capillaries under their skin coagulates. Sure. But that body never carried any Irish blood. The name was a lie. I knew it and Martinez must know it. The name behind the lie would be Garcia or Hernandez or Barelas, one of the old names that came to this country with the conquistadors, half a millennium ago.
         Martinez had probably copied the name from a driver's license. It didn't matter where he got it. The name was damning. A body named John Murphy in the kitchen of a woman named Jenny Murphy focused suspicion. Martinez would never buy it as a coincidence. I didn't.
         The coffee cooled quickly in the forty-degree temperature. I sipped at it and stared over the rail, down fifteen feet into the darkness where my cactus garden lay. It was mostly prickly pear down there, along with a few yuccas. I'd planted stuff that would keep uninvited guests well away from the back of the house. It was pretty in a spare way, and Jenny told me she liked it once when we sat together here. We'd had a special kind of relationship for a couple of months. It was special because we were getting to be friends and doing it without sex.
         Friendship was a luxury I rarely permitted myself. Like all luxuries, it was expensive. Friendship carries obligations, creates a debt. You make payments on it for the rest of your life. But it had seemed that I was ready for the expense. I'd begun to look forward to the time we spent together.
         As usual, there was a rat in the soup. The closer I grew to Jenny, the more I thought of her sexually. She'd known, of course. They always do, though they frequently pretend not to notice. But Jenny wasn't much of a pretender.