“As a matter of fact I do. I met him a few months ago in D.C. We had some drinks together.”
He was silent a moment. Leafing through his book of phone numbers?
“Here he is: Daniel Serpe. I’ve got his office number and his home.”
“Give me both.”
I jotted down the numbers on a tiny pad thoughtfully provided by El Descanso.
“Thanks a million, Bill.”
“You owe me one,” he said. “Let me know how things work out.”
“I’ll do that.”
I put down the receiver and wondered if I should call Daniel Serpe before going to the police station or afterwards. I decided to do it afterwards.
Writing the statement was a formality, and the cops knew it as well as I did. They weren’t going to find those bullets in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, and I hadn’t got the Ecense number of the truck — which was probably a phony anyway. But I went through the motions, and they smiled and thanked me, and I found a public phone and called Daniel Serpe’s office number.
He remembered Bill Evans and suggested that we meet somewhere for lunch — did I know Albuquerque? No, I said, I didn’t. Then I remembered the steak restaurant I’d almost made it to and suggested that. He said fine, he’d be there at one o’clock.
The air conditioning in the car didn’t seem much affected by the holes in the windows. I couldn’t lower them because they’d fall to pieces. I had to close the door gingerly.
El Vaquero was a large, very Southwestern looking place with roughhewn wooden tables and a tiny stage for a danceband. There was no band at one in the afternoon but a surprising number of people, mostly tourists and business types. Daniel Serpe was waiting for me on a sofa just inside the entrance next to a “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign.
He was a middle-aged man with distinguished looking silver temples that matched the conspicuous Indian-silver ring on his left hand. He wore a well-cut grey suit and a necktie that must have cost forty dollars. He appeared to be sucking something — which I later learned was a Tic Tac. A woman in an ankle-length suede skirt and a Jane Russell blouse seated us in a booth next to the windows.
“What happened to your face?” Daniel Serpe asked.
“Someone took two shots at me yesterday evening. It was a very close thing.”
He sucked his Tic Tac. “Do you think he was trying to kill you or just scare you?”
“Kill me.”
“He’s a bad shot.”
“We were both moving, and he was using a pistol. I was just lucky.”
“What are you involved in, Bannon?”
“I thought it was a missing person case; now I’m not so sure.”
“Fill me in.”
We ordered lunch, and while we waited for the food to arrive, I talked. I didn’t leave anything out.
“At this point it doesn’t make sense to me,” I concluded. “If Nancy Canales is connected with a leftist Puerto Rican independence group and Jeb McGrath is possibly associated with some right-wing militia group — I’m just surmising—”
“He is,” Serpe interrupted. “We know all about him. They call themselves the American Eagles.”
“Well then, what could they possibly have to do with each other? I understand he hates foreigners.”
“They have one thing in common,” Serpe said. “They’re both militant against the U.S. Government.”
“But from completely different sides of the political spectrum.”
“There’s an angle you haven’t thought of,” Serpe suggested. “These groups here have tremendous stockpiles of weapons. They are easy to come by.”
“I noticed a lot of gun shops along Central Avenue,” I said.
“Right. So it’s not guns they need, it’s cash. Guns bring high prices when they’re purchased by groups that find them hard to come by.”
“Our gun-control laws are as tough as New York’s,” I said.
“There you have a possible reason for their meeting,” said Serpe. He looked quite pleased with himself.
The waitress brought our food. I’d ordered a steak sandwich after my big breakfast, but Daniel Serpe had ordered a meal large enough for two. How did he keep that trim figure?
“It still doesn’t make sense to me,” I said. “You don’t kill a person who’s here to buy guns from you.”
“Perhaps he took the money and then killed her to keep the weapons,” Serpe proposed. “Perhaps he just didn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut.”
“If that happened, she was pretty stupid,” I said. “And she’s a professor at the university.”
Agent Serpe shrugged.
“Maybe Jeb McGrath’s only connection with her was sexual,” I said, “and we’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Not even a shrug to that one. “This steak’s very good,” Serpe said. “I’ll put this lunch on my expense account. Do you like jazz?”
“What?”
“I was wondering if you like jazz. I’m a collector, mostly bebop. It’s my passion.”
“Yes, I like jazz,” I said, “but I’d rather talk about Nancy Canales’s disappearance right now.”
“What more is there to say?” Serpe said. “Either I’m right or McGrath probably isn’t involved. As far as I know, his sexual activities are normal, not lethal.” He took another mouthful of steak.
We finished our meal without my learning anything more except that Daniel Serpe had been trained as a lawyer.
Out in the car I pulled out El Descanso’s little notepad and made a list:
1. Disappeared on purpose — no reason evident
2. Kidnapped — political reasons?
3. Hurt — amnesia? (too ciné noir)
4. Dead
a. Murdered — politics? sex?
b. Accident
My high school English teacher would have been proud. It didn’t help much.
I turned the car north toward the rattlesnake farm. Knowing where I was going, I made it in much better time than the day before. I found Yellow Glasses leaning against the split-rail fence in front of the building smoking a cigarette. I didn’t see his sidekick Carvy. This time there were two other cars in the lot besides the red pickup and the Ford.
Yellow Glasses squinted at me over the smoke of his cigarette. “What happened to your car window?” he asked.
“Somebody thought I needed more ventilation.”
“Well now, you’re lucky they didn’t ventilate your head,” Yellow Glasses smiled.
I waved my hand at his lot. “Business is picking up.”
“It’s pretty good on weekends,” he said. He was wearing his nice brown cowboy hat. “You been busy yourself?” he asked.
“You could say that. I learned that you’re a Boy Scout.”
That confused him. He pondered on it.
“A member of the American Eagles.”
He flicked away his cigarette butt. “And proud of it,” he said quite seriously. “You do get around, Bannon.”
“I’m surprised you’d be spending the night with a Puerto Rican woman.”
“I’ll take any woman I can get,” McGrath said. “Mr. Peter doesn’t know any prejudices.”
“The FBI thinks you and she were up to something else.”
I could almost see his ears go tense. His whole body seemed to freeze, but his voice remained exactly the same — soft and steady. “You been talking to the FBI?”
“I had lunch with them. They think you were selling weapons to Nancy Canales. They think she represents a terrorist group in Puerto Rico.”
He laughed. “Why the hell would I do that?”
“For the money. More money for your cause.”
“So where is she, and where are the weapons?”
“They think she may be dead and that the weapons are right where they always were. The theory is that maybe you took her money and...” I snapped my fingers like a gunshot.