“The woman simply vanished. No one has seen or heard from her in almost four weeks.”
“Are the New Mexico police still working on it?” I asked.
“I suppose they are,” Lourdes said, “but they don’t seem to be getting much of anywhere. Nothing from the hospitals or planes, trains, buses. They even checked all the taxi companies. No dead body has turned up.”
The last line sounded rather brutal for Lourdes, necessary as it was. “You mean all the homicide victims since then have been identified?” I said.
“Exacto.”
“How long was the woman in Albuquerque before she vanished?”
“She arrived on a Sunday. By Wednesday the hotel was aware there was something wrong. Her bed hadn’t been slept in on Tuesday night, and no one saw her after that.”
“Are you a friend of her daughter or just an acquaintance?” I asked.
“She works for us part-time at the office. She asked me to recommend a private investigator if I knew of any.”
“How old is the woman — what was her name? — who disappeared?”
“Nancy Canales. She’s forty-one. She teaches in the Astronomy Department at the university”
By now I was so interested I’d stopped eating. Lourdes sipped at her beer with lovely bps.
“So, as I understand it, she decides to take a week’s vacation in New Mexico, flies to Albuquerque, and disappears, probably on her third day there. The police have no firm leads, and her daughter wants to hire me to go up there and sniff around.”
“Actually, I don’t know if she can afford you,” Lourdes said. “She did mention that she and her mother have a joint bank account.”
“How old is the daughter?”
“Haidée is twenty-one, I think. A pretty, sensible sort of girl.”
“I’m not all that busy right now,” I said. “I’m willing to give it a few days. Tell her I’ll do it for the expenses of the trip.”
“You could look on it as a working vacation,” she said. “Have you ever been to New Mexico?”
“No. I was thinking the same thing. Have her come to see me.”
“When?”
“As soon as possible. This afternoon?”
“I’ll send her over when she shows up at two,” Lourdes said.
We pushed aside what was left of our cold enchiladas and ordered coffee.
Haidée was well named: lovely, dark-eyed, slim and curvy at the same time. She made me pop out of my desk chair. She spoke a rapid, educated Spanish, and I soon learned that she was a senior at the university.
After the usual opening amenities, which included offering her some of Maria’s macho coffee, I got down to cases: “What possible reason can you see for your mother’s disappearance?”
“I think something happened to her,” Haidée replied. “Something very bad. Or I would have heard from her by now.”
“Does she have enemies?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“So why should ‘something bad’ have happened to her?”
“There are all sorts of horrible people out there,” Haidée explained, making me feel like an idiot. “Murderers, rapists, crackpots, drug addicts. These days you don’t have to have enemies.”
“The common thread to most of the crime on this island is drugs,” I said. “Could that possibly have any connection to your mother?”
She shook her head wearily. “I believe she smoked some pot in college twenty or so years ago. All the activist students did.”
“So your mother was a sixties rebel.”
“More early seventies, but yes. She demonstrated against the ROTC on campus and against the United States presence here in general.”
I recalled those days clearly. I had been young then myself. I’d seen the shoo touts at the University of Puerto Rico on television.
“Do you have a photo of your mother?”
She had a wallet bulging with photos, and the one she handed to me showed a woman who looked about forty with short, dark (dyed?) hair and a face that had once been attractive but had been hardened by the twenty years since her youthful activist days. You would never mistake it for a happy face.
“I’ll need this,” I said. She nodded. She was dabbing at her adorable nose with a Kleenex.
“You have a cold?” I asked commiseratively.
“No—” snuffle “—an allergy.”
“What are you allergic to?”
“I don’t know. Everything.”
I swung back to the subject. “Tell me what you’ve learned from the police.”
She reeled it off rapidly:
“Well, my mother did get on the flight to Albuquerque, and she did arrive there and check in at the hotel, El Descanso, on the eastern edge of town. She signed the registration card; she had a reservation for seven nights. The third night she was seen leaving with a man about her own age. No one knew how she met him. She didn’t sleep in the hotel that night apparently. No one saw her after that. The police were not able to identify the man she left with.”
She paused as if trying to recall whether she’d omitted anything.
“You assume this man is connected with your mother’s disappearance.”
“It certainly looks that way,” Haidée said. She tugged out a fresh Kleenex.
“Your father is deceased?”
“No. He and my mother divorced when I was four.”
“Do you keep in touch with him?” I asked more out of curiosity than anything else.
“He works in Chicago now. I see him very occasionally.”
“Does he know your mother’s disappeared?”
“I wouldn’t know. I guess not.”
“You have no brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
I pushed out of my chair and extracted the office bottle of Palo Viejo from the filing cabinet. “I’ll leave tomorrow,” I said.
“I do hope you don’t drink too much,” she remarked baldly.
“No,” I said, “just enough.”
That cynicism seemed to satisfy her. I offered her a drink but she refused. She said she had to go back to work at Lourdes’ office.
The next day I flew from Puerto Rico to Houston, sat around the airport for two hours, and then went on to Albuquerque, arriving near evening. The sky over the Albuquerque airport looked like something by El Greco when he was in an evil mood, but it didn’t rain.
I’d had my travel agency book me into El Descanso, the same hotel Nancy Canales had stayed at. The agency had also arranged for a rental car at the airport. Following the directions of the guy at the rental desk, I drove north and east towards my hotel on Central Avenue. My first impressions were that Albuquerque was built very low — even compared to San Juan — and spread out. All the architecture seemed to be tan-colored and in the adobe style of the Indian pueblos. I wondered how they enforced their city planning laws; in Puerto Rico we couldn’t even enforce our traffic laws.
El Descanso was also built like an Indian pueblo, right down to the jutting beam ends. It shone almost red in the huge setting sun. Its lobby was rustic — Indian rugs and sombreros on the walls — and cosy. Behind a dark wooden counter a businesslike young man took my information and gave me my key. It was an electronic key.
I’d eaten on the plane, and I wasn’t hungry. After a shower and change of clothes, I went downstairs to the lobby to see how they reacted to private detectives investigating the disappearance of one of their guests.
The businesslike young man was all alone. He looked at me as if he was anxious to solve whatever problems I might have. I told him what I was and why I was there. He insisted on seeing my P.I. license, which I showed him, along with the photo of Nancy Canales.