Free At Ease with the Dead by Walter Satterthwait Page B

station, I put the price of four new tires on the credit card and paid cash to have someone haul them over to the motel and slap them on the station wagon. At the rental agency, I signed a piece of paper only slightly less imposing than the Magna Carta and took possession of a Chevy Citation with a bad case of emphysema and an interior that smelled of Pine-Sol.
    Last night, Alice Wright had told me how to reach Martin Halbert’s place. I took Rim Road off Mesa and then climbed up the mountain. Before people started living here, this had been a barren place—no trees, no shrubs, no brush. Now the rocky brown slopes were notched with bright green lawns and terraced gardens. The homes were pretty, beautiful even; but they seemed out of place against the rock, gumdrops on an obelisk.
    The road wound and unwound as it rose, the houses getting more and more elaborate, the view getting more and more spectacular. The air was warm and clear, the sky was blue. Below me lay El Paso, a huddle of glittering downtown towers at its center, and then the long brown curl of river, and then Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side, stretching out across the flat valley to the distant gray mountains in the west.
    Toward the top, I found the private paved road with the small wrought-iron sign that discreetly announced HALBERT . I wheeled the Chevy onto the road, did a bit more climbing, then came around a hairpin turn, and saw the house.
    Alice Wright had told me that Halbert owned a larger home in Midland. It must’ve been a warehouse. This one was huge. Perched above a lake of asphalt, all straight lines and sharp angles, it was a science-fiction wet dream of redwood, glass, and stone, poised to blast off the mountainside and go soaring across the valley.
    I parked the Chevy on the empty asphalt lot, walked past the double doors of a garage built directly into the mountain, then trudged up a steep stairway made of old railway ties. After an hour or two I arrived at the front door. I pressed the button. I heard nothing, but only a moment later the door opened and an Asian man in black slacks and a white houseboy’s jacket stood there. Short and slight, his jet-black hair combed straight back from a round forehead, he could’ve been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five years old.
    â€œYes?” he said.
    â€œJoshua Croft,” I said. “I’m here to see Mr. Halbert.”
    â€œPlease come in, Mr. Croft.” He spoke without an accent.
    We crossed an enormous living room. White carpeting, massive white leather furniture, a sunken conversation pit encircling a fireplace of stone. Heavy redwood beams and clerestory windows overhead. Then we slipped through an opened pair of French doors and stepped out onto a triangular redwood deck that angled out over the valley like the bow of a ship.
    â€œMr. Croft,” said the Asian, and turned and padded away. Heading off, probably, to finish buffing up the Green Hornet’s roadster. Or maybe the Green Hornet himself.
    I’m not sure what I expected Martin Halbert to look like. Probably like one of the cartoons who strut through “Dallas,” a beefy good ole boy with a beer-belly swagger. A silk snap-button shirt and a pair of ostrich skin boots. A feathered Stetson he unscrewed only when he lay down, and sometimes not even then.
    Halbert looked nothing like this. Maybe fifty years old, he was tall, about my height, and he was slender and very trim. His face was narrow and ascetic, his eyes were blue. His skin was tanned and his hair was short and snowy white, a color exactly matching the white poplin East Indian shirt and the loose-fitting white cotton pants. On his feet were a pair of white plastic flip-flop sandals. He might’ve stepped from an ashram in Varansi or off a yacht in Cannes.
    When I arrived, he had stood up from a round table at the apex of the deck’s triangle. The table was set for two: white damask tablecloth, bone china cups and