Ariel Gore: Santa Fe Noir

But there were no officially missing persons to connect the remains with.

A few years after Portland Noir was published with my story in it, I was down in Santa Cruz reminiscing about my ill-spent youth hitchhiking through redwoods. Santa Cruz Noir editor Susie Bright double-dared me. Would I write another?

Why, yes . I wanted to return to this idea of the shady narrator.

I wanted to understand the history of the West.

I wanted to explore why humans prey on those more vulnerable. It goes against all ethical doctrines, but it’s as if we can’t stop ourselves. We seem to hate being reminded of our own weakness so much that we’ll even murder that which is vulnerable within ourselves.

In Santa Fe, evidence pointed to Doug Foote, a real-estate appraiser from Oklahoma who’d lived with his mother in that house with all those rosebushes.

Where was Donna Foote now? Doug Foote’s story seemed questionable. He said she’d moved to Maryland. But DNA evidence said the body under the rosebush was hers. Doug told investigators he’d been taking a lot of hallucinogenic drugs in the 1970s. He could only remember that “something bad” had happened in Santa Fe.

The jury never saw that part of the video — where he talks about the hallucinogens.

Doug Foote was acquitted in 2003.

The Night Stalker died of natural causes in 2013.

Noir affirms our experience: Humans aren’t ethical. The good guys don’t win. Violence impacts. The bodies don’t go anywhere. But lipstick looks good. And people still smoke cigarettes. No, they really do. They still smoke cigarettes.

After my mother died, I left Santa Fe. But just as my neighbors had warned me, Santa Fe would soon lure me back.

All of life, maybe, is a struggle between different voices for control over the telling.

Something bad happened in Santa Fe.

A pretty mouth whispers: Believe the more vulnerable .

Ariel Gore

Santa Fe, New Mexico

November 2019

Eldorado

I work at home, but my office has its own entrance, even its own can. When I bought the place, the office was kitted out like an artist’s studio — easel, palette, the works. I saw a half-finished painting of an adobe wall below one of those iridescent salmon-streaked sunsets, the kind that makes tourists cream their panties. Go ahead, finish the picture. How many people get in car crashes while snapping sunset pictures, I don’t want to know.

I tossed that crap in the trash right after they handed me the keys. I know, I could have left it with the local school. Shoot me.

I had an hour to read the paper before my first client, Sam. I was soon shaking my head about a Good Samaritan — on his way to get married — who got killed helping some jackass without AAA change a tire on I-25.

How often do you accidentally find that you’ve veered onto the shoulder of the interstate when you’re driving somewhere? Never, right? So you’re gonna wait until there’s an El Camino stacked with ratty furniture and boxes, some guy sweating in the sun as he jacks it up, and that’s when you swerve to the right?

My office doorbell went off with the staccato of a vintage telephone. It needs replacing. I did get rid of the cast-iron green-chile door knocker that felt like palming a choad. Why is Sam so early?

I opened the door to a stranger. Cropped hair, windblown, dark. Tanned skin with constellations of dots across her nose and cheeks. A red mouth.

“You’re not Sam,” I said.

“No, I’m Delphine,” the woman said. “Delphine Hathaway.”

Hathaway: you see that name around here. Above the brokerage, the wine shop, and on the nicer mailboxes, on the most tucked-away cul-de-sacs. I’ve only been here a few years, but long enough to know the taxonomy.

The first time I visited Eldorado, I drove out to a dinner party at night. My hosts didn’t warn me that community covenants forbade (among many other things) streetlights, to protect night sky viewing, and that the street signs are affixed to their poles above headlight level. Although I never did find my friends’ house, I found Eldorado.

As I finally pulled over at the end of some dirt road, my headlights pierced the night, pressing their beams against a muscular darkness that pushed back harder. I walked out a few feet before sitting down in sandy dirt. Stars pulsed with an eerie tempo: dots and clusters, arcs and whorls.

When I returned in the daytime, I saw that these sand-colored houses sit on several acres each, oriented toward the sun and away from each other. Piñon trees, gold chamisa, and swarms of cholla cactus dot the land. Prickly pears mound and bristle below their fuchsia blooms. Wild grasses grow every which way: blue grama, sage, galleta. Mountain ranges hug the town; some round like bellies and breasts, others crepuscular, jagged.

The Hathaways bought one of the first houses here in 1972, on what used to be the old Simpson Ranch. They had an Irish amount of children, and all of them went back east to college, got married, and bought houses so tucked away here you could spend years without going down one of the long, groomed dirt roads from which their long, groomed gravel driveways branched. Except Delphine.

I have an ear for stupid gossip like that, overheard at the grocery store when matriarch Bonnie Hathaway was there selling Girl Scout cookies with her glossy, gap-toothed granddaughters.

“And how is Delphine?” asked some woman in ill-advised white capris.

“Delphine is Delphine,” Bonnie sighed with stately resignation. “We got a postcard from Ibiza last month. She’s been teaching flamenco dance on a cruise ship.”

“She was always... different,” White Capris tittered.

Different.

“Are you going to ask me in?” Delphine asked, stepping forward in a fawn-leather Cuban-heeled shoe.

“I don’t know you,” I said, as I opened the screen door.

“Don’t you know who I am?” she vamped with a throaty chuckle. “The black sheep of the Hathaway clan.” She headed toward the black leather Eames lounge chair, trailing tuberose.

“Nope,” I said. “Mine.” I pointed toward the sofa. “So when you’re on the cruise ship,” I asked, “do you always drop by the shrink’s without calling first?”

“The cruise ship ,” she said. “Is that what Mother’s telling people these days?”

“What’s the truth?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “For that, I’ll have to pay you a pretty penny.” She smiled with a squint. “I will lose my mind staying here. I already know that. But I can delay it with a therapist. One I can walk to. Who doesn’t know my family. Which narrows it down to you.”

“You don’t drive?”

“I’d like to see you three times a week,” she said. “I’ll pay cash. Tomorrow at eleven works for me.”

I looked at my book, furrowing my brow as if I were trying to spot an empty slot in a sea of clients. But she was halfway out the door. A moment later, a car rumbled out of my driveway. I walked outside and watched the low, sun-sucking, gray-primed Trans Am drive too fast toward Impulveda Road, dust plume behind it like a squirrel tail. A family of quails skittered across the dirt road in their wake. Someone else was behind the wheel.