by Ron Hansen
“Real neighborly,” he said.
He smiled. “You can say that without irony! Aren’t you quaint!”
“You know medicines?”
Stuart looked at him oddly.
He heavily sat down on the dining room chair. “Why I said that is Renata used a word: pharmacopoeia? Means you know about pills and such, I take it.”
Stuart blinked slowly and said, “What a pity that I do.”
Atticus shifted to the right and got out his wallet from his trousers pocket. Tucked under a flap was the pharmacy receipt María found on the bathroom floor upstairs. He held it out to Stuart. “You know what this would be for?”
He read it quickly and a shade seemed to go down in his face. He hobbied as he said, “We have cancer cures here, quote unquote, that you can’t get in the United States. And if you’re desperate enough, you get a prescription for that. Whose is it?”
“Was it Scott’s?”
“We’d have known if Scott was that ill, wouldn’t we?”
Atticus smoothed his hair with his hand. “Well, I’ve seen people who keep it pretty quiet. Don’t want to make a fuss. You know.”
“That hardly describes your son, does it.” Stuart shifted flowers in the jar until he seemed satisfied, and then he gathered the cuttings into his hand as he said, “We were desperate rivals, Scott and I. We fought all the time.”
“You were both in love with the same woman.”
“Can’t fool you.” He went into the kitchen and threw the flower cuttings into the trash. He said from the kitchen, “She has complete power over me. I find it frustrating, but I presume it was just as frustrating for Scott.” Stuart folded his arms at the doorway. “One thing I’ll always regret is the twinge of gladness I felt when I heard he was dead.” High color flushed his face. “Common decency deserts me on occasion.” He tried to smile, but his mouth trembled. “Even now, for example.”
Atticus fiercely stared at him and then offered, “You do try to be honest, don’t you.”
“Rude is more like it, I’m afraid.” Stuart put his hands on a dining room chair and faced him squarely as he said, “I have cancer.” He put on a happy face as he held up his pack of Salem cigarettes like it was show-and-tell, then frowned as he shook one out and flipped the pack back onto the dining room table.
“I’m real sorry.”
“Well I’m angry. Absolutely furious, if truth be told. I guess I’m in the first stage of grief.”
“Have you told Renata?”
“Oh, that would be fetching, wouldn’t it.” He dug out a fancy lighter from his front pants pocket, got a flame, hungrily inhaled on the cigarette, and coughed wrackingly. His face was crimson as he said, “Quod erat demonstrandum.”
Atticus was silent, and then he asked, “Where were you Wednesday night?”
Stuart faced him with wonder and then forced a laugh. “My God, you’re detecting! You’re a sleuth!”
Atticus just stared.
Stuart inhaled his cigarette again and funneled smoke out the side of his mouth. “With Renata and Scott at The Scorpion and at the Marriott for the fiesta and the Williams play. And then I went to the bookstore and finished up some paperwork.”
“You there for a long time?”
“Yes, from about ten o’clock to one-thirty or so. Tweaking the debits and credits, if you must know. My financial shape isn’t any more healthy than I am. My thanks in advance for your sympathy.” Stuart got an ashtray from the kitchen and gently carved the ash from his cigarette. “Are you trying to establish if I have an alibi?”
“Yep.”
“I have none. Shall I expect you to grill me further?”
The front door opened and Renata called, “¡Hola!”
Stuart whispered, “And now, for the sake of the children, we pretend nothing’s happened.”
Renata walked in, looking harried, her mind elsewhere, with a white sack from the farmacia in her hand. “More Lomotil,” she said. “How are you now?”
“Sitting up and taking notice,” he said, and got up from the dining room chair. “I’ll go fetch my hat.”
Stuart may have spoken about their talk while he was upstairs, because Renata drove Atticus through the centro in silence—so daughterly that silence, as if she’d been wrongly punished and thought a sentence might heal the rift she wanted prolonged. She finally said, “I hate it when he talks about me.”
“Wasn’t much said.”
“Stuart has this unfunny way of teasing, playing the British twit, the scoundrel, the thoroughgoing cad. I find it defensive and maddening.” Renata shifted down to first gear as a Bohemia beer truck lumbered into her lane, then impatiently shifted to second to swerve around it and was halted again by the white cart of a man hawking chicharrones. “You haven’t seen his good side. Stuart’s really a Renaissance man. He’s good at business, he’s suave, he’s fluent in five languages, he’s practically a walking library. And he’s sane. Stability was a big plus for me.”
“You’re trying to tell me why you chose him over Scott. You can’t put that sort of thing into words.”
She glanced at his face and again fronted her glare. “I find the choice so foolish sometimes. Even hellish. But he has such power over me. I hate it.”
“He said the same thing about you.”
“Really? I haven’t felt in charge at all.”
“Well, I believe that. Seems to me every one of you here oughta try living according to Bible values and see how that works out.”
Renata sighed.
“Well, I had to say it.”
She parked the Volkswagen near the shaded porches of the shops on the west side of the jardín. A public telephone was bolted to a great pillar there, and a shoeshine boy stood on his box as he pretended to make a call. His friends grinned as he shouted, “Quisiera denunciar un carterista. Un cochino enano.” Atticus couldn’t translate it. Un carterista, he thought, was a pickpocket.
Renata said, “I found the car here. Where we’re parked.” She got out.
Teenaged boys were busily soaping and rinsing cars in the street while the American owners skeptically watched. On the great plaza of the parroquia, twenty grandfatherly men in white shirts and trousers were tuning the instruments of an orchestra, and Stuart’s beggar was behind them there, swinging forward on his crutches and his one leg until he got to the back of the parroquia and abruptly disappeared as if through a held-open door.
Atticus followed Renata under the loggia in front of Printers Inc, which was closed, and toward a grand but foundering city hall and la comisaría de policía. Half a dozen frowning teenagers in hand-me-down navy blue uniforms defended the police station with machine guns and fifty-year-old rifles that they seemed eager to try out.
Renata was waiting at the street corner for the halting passage of a hotel tour bus filled with Americans his age in golf visors and sunglasses. A fairly young mother knelt on the sidewalk with a feeding infant at her left breast, and she talked to Renata with a face full of such frank misery that Renata put a peso bill in the upraised hand and got a pack of Chiclets from an offered box. “I have zero discipline. Zilch,” Renata said. “You always feel so guilty. Stuart has the right idea.”
“I just saw Stuart’s beggar,” he said.
“Really? Where?”
“Heading into the church basement looked like.”
Renata stared behind her at the parroquia. She seemed fascinated. And then she gave Atticus a fleeting glance and walked across to the police station and in Spanish explained who they were to a boy who’d looped and crossed canvas straps of cartridges over his pigeon chest. The boy gloomily heard Renata out and jigged his rifle sight toward the interior, and Renata and Atticus walked inside.
A jaunty man with the yellow stripes of a sergeant’s rank was feeding on a banana as he sat at a wide mahogany desk in a room that was otherwise as open as a night-train depot. The green tile floor was unswept, gray cobwebs waggled in the air, and a hundred years of boot marks
and spitting stained the green walls. An oranged map of Resurreccíon behind the desk was covered with Saran Wrap and pleated with tape. The jungle along the highway was roughed out with X’s and with the words Las Ruinas. Renata told the sergeant their names and purpose in Spanish, and the police sergeant looked fully at Atticus like he was no more than fancy clothes he didn’t want and fine boots that he did. He finally held out his hand. “We wish you visa.”
Atticus found it in his wallet and the sergeant took his time spelling out the English words on it, then he folded up his banana peel before squeezing it into his pocket behind a name tag that read “Espinoza.” His skin was a freckled, caramel brown, and there was only a faint hint of gray in his hair though he seemed to be in his sixties. While still focused on Atticus Cody’s visa, he offered, “I have know your eh-son. We pass on the street, my mind take a picture.” Sergeant Espinoza handed the visa back and said, “Siempre muy borracho.” Always very drunk.
Renata replied in irritated Spanish, and Espinoza sheepishly hunted through an upper drawer in the mahogany desk. When he’d got out a ring of old skeleton keys, he held a harsh policeman’s stare on Atticus and asked, “¿Está listo?” Are you ready?
“Sí,” Renata told him.
“You look not well,” Espinoza said.
“Montezuma’s revenge,” Atticus said.
Espinoza seemed offended but got up and unlocked the iron-barred door and ambled down a hot, green hallway, his knuckles grazing against the walls. On the right was a foul dormitory as big as a gym, with just one door and four iron-barred windows high overhead and probably twelve prisoners on their hands and knees, wiping the floor around their green canvas cots with sopping towels that they twisted into tin pails. Espinoza stopped to insert an iron skeleton key in an old plank door with a hand-printed sign on it that read DEPÓSITO, and he let Renata and Atticus step past him into an overwhelmingly hot storage space that was as jammed as a pawnshop with assorted luggage and boxes and car tires and Mexican Army rifles and a Chevrolet V-8 engine. Espinoza worked himself down a skinny aisle, talking to Renata in Spanish. She translated, “They’ve got his gun and clothes and motorcycle and he has no idea what else.” The sergeant got to a green paper package that he flung across the room like silage. “We’re supposed to check it,” Renata said.
Atticus squatted to tear the green paper away and saw Scott’s frayed wallet, a Swiss watch just like his own, a worn, yellow chamois shirt, and the fly and side pocket of his paint-dotted blue jeans. Opening the wallet, Atticus found no pesos, but he did find a Mexican library card, a Bancomex card, a passport picture of Renata, an expired Visa credit card, and a torn slip of paper with phone numbers on it. His Colorado driver’s license and American Express card were gone, just as Renata had said. Atticus thought about asking Espinoza about them but quickly imagined the sergeant’s shrug, his feigned or real ignorance, and he didn’t bother. Stolen, he guessed; he’d get Frank to cancel the credit card account. He fitted the wallet in his front pocket and laid a hand on the clothing. Even that wasn’t right. Atticus had been inside the police station for less than ten minutes, but already his perspiration was beading up from his hands and wrists. His shirt was grayly spotted with it. And yet Scott had been wearing a hot yellow chamois shirt and blue jeans. Atticus picked up the yellow shirt and pressed it to his nose but could smell neither blood nor sweat nor turpentine nor paints.
Espinoza was heavily breathing over him, and Atticus looked up to see in the policeman’s hands the handsome twelve-gauge shotgun with its checkered walnut stock. Atticus stood up to cautiously accept the shotgun, and Espinoza spoke to Renata in Spanish.
“He says not to worry, they took the shells out.”
“Shells?”
She seemed puzzled. “That’s what he said.”
“¿Cuántos?” Atticus asked Sergeant Espinoza and patted the shotgun’s magazine.
Espinoza frowned and held up three fingers.
“¿Donde están?” Where are they?
Sergeant Espinoza shrugged.
Atticus turned to Renata. “You don’t regularly put four shells in a gun if you’re fixing to kill yourself. You figure one oughta do it, don’t you?”
Renata just stared at him.
Espinoza was perusing an inventory sheet, and Atticus followed him past the Chevrolet engine to a nook where Scott’s Harley-Davidson, with a film of dust on its fuel tank and jungle grass on one foot peg and handgrip, was angled over into the anarchy of five or six misshapen bicycles. The key was still in the ignition. Espinoza tried to lunge it over its kickstand, but the six hundred pounds tipped into him before Atticus jerked the huge weight of it upright and adjusted it on its kickstand again. He put the shotgun beside the green package of clothes as the police sergeant rummaged through a gray steel file cabinet and pulled out a red folder and handed it to him. Atticus sat in an oak chair and hooked on his gold-rimmed eyeglasses while Espinoza spoke in Spanish.
Renata said, “He says he had an assistant fill out the report for him. He was fishing for tarpon off the Gulf of Honduras.”
Atticus looked up and out of habit asked. “You get anything?”
Espinoza smiled and held his stomach. “Mareado,” he said.
“Seasick,” Renata said.
“Mareado. I’ll have to remember that one.” Atticus paged open the red folder to a form filled out in Spanish, which seemed to be Sergeant José-María Espinoza’s report of his investigación de suicidio. The body was identified as Scott William Cody, a blue-eyed white male. His height was one meter ninety centimeters; his weight was eighty kilos. His ciudadanía was the United States; his birthplace Antelope, Colorado; his residencia provisoria was 69 Avenida del Mar in Resurrección. Whoever filled out the report was a gun fancier, for far greater detail went into its description: a four-foot-long Winchester Ranger SG twelve-gauge pump shotgun, model 1300, weighing seven and one-half pounds, with one fired Federal shell in the chamber and three shells in a magazine that held five. Everything else seemed of far lesser import. Atticus could make out little more beyond Renata Isaacs’s name and the hour the police arrived on the scene, “las diez menos cinco,” or 9:55 A.M. And that was it. It could have been the report of a household accident without injuries, of an American’s favorite shotgun having been stolen.
Atticus flipped over the page and was aggrieved by a faulty, off-focus, black-and-white photo of the face he’d briefly seen in the coffin, flesh and sinews torn from the skull, the right eye just an ugly socket, the blond hair glossily matted in blood, and blood painting his jaw and neck, caking inside his right ear. Underneath that was another photograph taken from the front door without a flash so that Scott was just a faintly seen figure behind four unbusy policemen in the foreground. A high-angle photograph showed him sagged over in the green wingback chair with his first finger inside the trigger housing of the shotgun at his feet. Each photograph seemed to emphasize the head wound or the features of the room, so there was nothing to offer a father a painful, final glimpse of his son, he was just any human being in gradual decay. Atticus stared again at the high-angle photo. Scott’s bare left foot listed over onto his ankle; his right foot was square to the floor, and a dark saucer of blood was behind the heel.
Atticus frowned at Renata. “Shoeless,” he said.
“¿Cómo?” Espinoza asked.
Renata fidgeted with the green package of clothes but found no shoes. She straightened. “Wasn’t it possible Scott was barefoot?”
“Wouldn’t of been on a motorcycle. And if he got out of ’em while he worked, we’d of found his shoes on the floor.”
Offended, Sergeant Espinoza said, “Ustedes hablan muy rápido.” You are speaking very fast.
Renata worriedly peered at the photograph, her hand tenderly finding his shoulder. Her face was so close to his that Atticus could see the fine blond hairs on her cheek. Even in that filthy room, he could smell her perfumed soap. “You’re right,” she said. “It is strange.”
Espinoza was standing behind him, hissing out gray cigarette smoke and interestedly scowling over Atticus’s head, as if seeing the photographs for the first time.
Atticus tapped them together and looked at Renata. “Three pictures?”
Renata spoke to Espinoza and he replied.
“Ran out of film,” she said.
Atticus fumed as he handed the folder to him. “¿Esto es todo?” Is this all?
“Sí.” Espinoza clamped it under his left arm as he flipped through files in a gray steel cabinet and found the right place for it.
Renata said nothing as she gathered the green package of clothes. Atticus unhinged the shotgun and fitted it under the shock cords of the Harley-Davidson’s saddle seat, and Espinoza held the door as Atticus pitched his hundred fifty pounds into the heavy motorcycle, rolling it down the green hallway. He fought the Harley onto the floor tiles of the lobby, and Espinoza and another policeman helped him brake and bump it down the front steps.
Hundreds were in the square and the jardín listening to the church plaza orchestra’s guitars, violins, and trumpets play “Tú, Sólo Tú” as a seemingly famous old crooner in a green mariachi suit sang, “Y por quererte olvidar me tiro a la borrachera y a la perdición.”
Renata stood on the sidewalk as Atticus got on the motorcycle. “Shall I go back home with you?” she asked.
“Nah.”
Renata stared at him. With suspicion. “You’re not too faint?”
“I’ll be fine.” Atticus handed her his Stetson and said, “Hold on to my hat for me, will ya?” He adjusted the spark retard underneath his right leg and jumped down on the kickstarter, jacking the throttle with his right hand until the tailpipe’s black smoke grayed and the great engine’s roughness calmed into gentle nickering sounds.
Renata was still staring at him, but with a difference, as if they’d harangued for a good while and he’d brought her around to his way of seeing things. “Was he murdered?” she asked.
“I think so.”
Atticus clicked the Harley-Davidson into gear with his cowboy boot and jolted out into the street between cars, cruising along with the taxis and hotel rent-a-Jeeps until he happened onto Avenida de la Independencia, and from there on he knew his way and got up to speed on the gray highway into the jungle, sinking through fifty and sixty on the straightaways, just touching his age with the needle, the big engine crackling, the wind swelling out his cowboy shirt and swatting his gray hair awry. When he was far away from Resurrección, Atticus feared he’d missed the turnoff for Scott’s workhouse, but then saw a teenaged girl in a lime green dress urging a gray zebu cow along the highway by tapping its flank with a bamboo pole, and just behind her a red flag was hanging from a tree. Atticus tilted over into a sharp turn to the east and into the green alley of weeds and overgrowth that was increasingly tinged with the salt and seaweed odors of the Caribbean.