“I’ll remember it when you become famous,” I said.
“I hope you don’t have to wait too long,” Milly Taber said.
I crossed the street to the hotel and found the same woman, Alicia, sitting behind the desk. She was working on something and did a fine job of ignoring me. Her long black hair needed a good combing.
“I’m looking for a snake farm,” I said.
“Isn’t everybody,” she said.
“Seriously. A rattlesnake farm north of town somewhere off I-25.”
“I don’t know much about snake farms,” she said. She had eyes that reminded you of Anna Magnani in old black and white films. “Maybe Sonia would know about snake farms, but Sonia isn’t here today. She took off at the last minute.”
“Have you got a phone book I could look at?”
Her Latin eyes smoldered as she hefted one onto the counter.
Possibly it was listed in there, but I didn’t find it. I hadn’t the slightest idea what to look under. But I’m a private eye, little problems like this don’t deter me. I thanked Alicia for the phone book and went out to my rental car in the lot. There was a roadmap in the glove compartment that got me onto 1-40 and then onto I-25 north.
As I drove out of town, the land grew arid and gullied, with occasional stark hills. There was some brush and dry streambeds but no trees. Signs indicated there were Indian lands everywhere — there also seemed to be gambling casinos everywhere. I stopped at gas stations to inquire about rattlesnake farms.
Above San Felipe Pueblo, I found a kid at a gas station who knew where it was. He directed me to turn left at a road that led to Cochiti Pueblo. I’d see the snake place about a mile down on the left side.
Right after pulling out of the gas station I saw the first sign advertising the “Don’t Miss It!” snake farm. After the turn there were three smaller signs. The kid’s directions were good: it was almost exactly a mile down the side road. A four-foot-long red arrow directed me under a massive wooden sign that said Rattlesnake Farm and below that, A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME EXPERIENCE. The sign was flanked by two American flags. I pulled up in front of still another adobe-looking building that sat behind a split-rail fence separating it from the parking area. Only two other cars were parked in the dusty lot, an old Ford and a red pickup. A man in cowboy clothes was leaning against the door-jamb of the building sipping a beer. Unless he’d grown a potbelly and added twenty years in a month, this wasn’t the man I was looking for.
I approached Potbelly, his straw hat low over his eyes, and asked him about the man I wanted. “You police?” he asked.
“No.”
“Insurance investigator? Something like that?”
“Nope.”
I didn’t feel like being cooperative.
“Well, what are you?” he said finally.
“A friend of a friend.”
“That’s pretty damn vague, friend.” He crushed his empty beer can and tossed it expertly into a nearby plastic trash receptacle. “Come on in,” he said.
I followed his bluejeaned bottom into the building. It was about eighty by thirty feet and all one room. Along the sides and in two rows down the center were many glass cases full of snakes. To the right of the entrance was an old slant-topped desk and behind it a chair that leaned back against the wall. On the chair lounged a long-legged type in tan boots, jeans, and a plaid cowboy shirt. He rested a scuffed high-heeled boot against the desk. Next to the boot sat a plastic ashtray holding a burning cigarette and next to that a brown felt cowboy hat.
This one was wearing yellow shooter’s glasses.
“Ticket?” he asked.
“Actually I came to talk to you,” I said.
“Buy a ticket,” he suggested.
“How much is it?”
“Only two fifty.”
I gave him the money, and he looked friendlier. “Now, what did you want to talk about?”
“A woman you met in Albuquerque about a month ago. Her name was Nancy Canales.”
“I don’t think I know her,” he said. He had dry, worn-looking skin. His eyes were the kind of washed-out blue you see in drunkards and the people who run Nazi concentration camps. He got up and wandered around the desk. He was several inches taller than me.
“Why’m I supposed to know this woman?”
“Some people saw you meet her outside the Descanso Hotel on May twenty-second. A waitress in a bar across the street from the hotel also saw her with you the same night.”
He wandered along the cases of rattlesnakes against the wall, and I wandered after him. I noticed he had a ten inch hunting knife, with a nice stacked leather handle, on his belt. His fat friend had taken the chair behind the desk and was watching us.
“Why are you interested?” Yellow Glasses asked.
“She has disappeared. Her daughter hired me to find her.”
I showed him my license. It was in Spanish, of course, and I doubted he could read Spanish.
“Puerto Rico,” he said. “I’ve never been to Puerto Rico.”
I said, “She came here on vacation — or so she said — was seen with you that Tuesday night, and wasn’t seen again after that. It doesn’t look good for you. I’d hate to have to go to the police.”
He pointed to a huge brown rattler that stuck out its tongue at me. “That’s our biggest,” he said. “He’s a prize. And so’s this next one.” He moved to the following case, which contained, of all things, a white rattler. “Albino. Very rare.”
He shot his spent cigarette out the door and lit another from a dented Zippo.
“We’ve got every kind of rattlesnake here. Big ones, little ones, local ones, ones from far away — even foreign ones. Yes, this is a rattlesnake lover’s paradise.”
“I didn’t know there were rattlesnake lovers.”
“You want me to take one out?” he offered.
I declined.
Yellow Glasses took a deep drag on his cigarette. “What’s the story on this woman?”
“As far as I know, there is no story. She came up for a vacation, and she just disappeared. Nobody knows why, how, or even exactly when.”
“You have yourself quite a job, Mr...”
“Bannon.”
“I’m Jeb McGrath. That there’s Carvy.”
“Is that his first name or his last name?”
“He’s just Carvy.”
Carvy tipped his sweat-stained straw hat with his forefinger.
“Look, Mr. Bannon, let’s just lay out the cards,” Jeb McGrath said. He looked more like he was talking to the yellow rattlesnake in a case in front of him than to me. “I met this Nancy in Old Town on Tuesday afternoon. Frankly, I was trying to pick somebody up. She was a little older than I was looking for, but she was receptive. I spent some time talking to her and arranged to meet her again at her hotel that night. We went to the bar you were talking about and had a few drinks. That loosened her up. I suggested we go out to my place and have a few more drinks. She was in the mood, and we drove to my house out near Sandia. It’s a small place but I like it — private, even cosy, you might say. She stayed overnight, and I drove her back to town in the morning. She asked me to let her off at the Indian Cultural Center. That’s the last I saw of her. It was what you’d call a one-night stand.”
“Well, it’s all very neat,” I said. “Even plausible. But unfortunately you were the last one to see her alive.”
He turned on me suddenly like a rattlesnake. “I can’t help that.”
“You’re not helping me much,” I observed.
“I can’t help that either,” he said evenly.
“What do you think happened to her?”
“Maybe she wanted to disappear.”
“I doubt it. At least, I haven’t run into anything to suggest it.”
“Maybe she had an accident. Maybe she fell into the Rio Grande. How the hell should I know?”