by Ron Hansen
When he heard Scott walking out the front door and then heard nothing more, Atticus simply watched the reels turn, waiting for a further sound he knew would have to come. A flutter of unease troubled his stomach. His hands, he knew, would shake if he lifted them. The flint gray night was fading and the blood of sunrise floated in the east. Atticus looked at the fattening reel for a few minutes, and then he heard the front door of the casita open, and panting, and the sandpapering sounds of shoes in hard effort across the floor. And it was like the old days of radio theater when he was a kid, a few actors and a few sound effects and his mind flying at five hundred miles an hour. A fierce kicking noise was followed by the grief of the green wingback chair being skidded around on the planks. And he knew this was Wednesday night and he was hearing the murderer haul his son inside.
Atticus harbored a hate so huge he felt owned by it; he was afraid of what it might do. And then he imagined he heard the sounds for the ugly things he’d already seen in his mind, his son being heaved up into the green wingback chair, his feet and legs being arranged, the shotgun being stood upright on its stock and his hand being forced onto the trigger housing. Atticus got his handkerchief and pressed it hard against his eyes.
Exhaling heavily, he tilted his head close to the speaker, heard the murderer walk outside, and he flinched at the firing of the shotgun. Right after that he heard the faraway tattoo of fireworks. The fiesta. Hangers rang as Scott’s blue jeans and yellow shirt were taken from the closet, and then there were the faint noises of clothing being changed: tugging and shuttling, the fall of an arm, the purr of a zipper, his shoes being taken off. The horror of it folded him forward, his face in his hands, his head nearly touching his knees, and then the player abruptly clunked off, the reel finished.
Atticus held his position, hardly breathing, fractured with pain, filled with straw. Was it harder to hear that his wife had been killed? This was a flood line so high on the house it would never be touched again.
Much later Atticus was grimly trudging along the hillside to the house when he saw an old Ford 150 pickup truck halted in the driveway. He put the Radiola on the refrigerator and peered out the kitchen window at an old Mexican gardener unlatching the gate of a truck bed that was filled with leaf blowers and mowers, bamboo rakes, and gunny-sacked bales of cut grass. Atticus walked outside and watched the gardener, who seemed not to mind that there was no talk between them, but merely hauled out a tray of what may have been pansies and knelt underneath a flow of pink bougainvillea on a high white boundary wall and furiously stabbed at the earth with his trowel.
Atticus guessed it was a quarter till eight. A listing white bus was in front of the Maya Hotel and a full shift of Mexican workers were getting out. A few doors down and across the street a spunky white bichon frise that he’d heard called Winslow was poking his nose in a hedge while a blond American woman in white jean shorts and an untucked man’s shirt held sunglasses up to the morning.
The gardener walked forward on his hands and knees and got something from underneath the bougainvillea trunk. Sitting back, he held up and puzzlingly turned a used green shotgun shell. “Un cartucho, señor,’ he said, and handed the three-inch Federal shell to Atticus as if it were merely an item of family embarrassment.
Atticus went inside and found the Winchester shotgun and fitted the shell inside the loading gate, then pumped the forearm on the magazine tube and watched the shell fly onto the floor. When you shot the gun, the shell stayed there, but it was lost when you filled the chamber again. Atticus stood in the hallway for a long time, imagining how it could have happened there, seeing his fallen son, the blood on the rug, an angry Spanish message scrawled in lipstick across the dining room mirror. He knew what he had to do. Atticus got the ignition key for the Harley and on a hunch got the Schlage key from the upper drawer in the kitchen counter, then locked up the house and rode Scott’s motorcycle toward the pink spires of the parroquia, past the jardín, and, if he recalled correctly, four blocks down Cinco de Mayo. And there the pink mortuary was, the name “Cipiano” in big brass letters over two brass entrance doors that a janitor was polishing. Atticus braked and tilted onto one leg and yelled over his nickering engine, “¿Abierto?” Open?
The janitor offered only half a glance before saying, “Cerrado.”
Atticus thought a moment and then accelerated until Cipiano’s was out of sight, then he angled over toward the shade beside a tienda where he killed the engine and knocked down the kickstand. Walking around the block, he found the alley Stuart had driven his station wagon along on Saturday and halfway down saw the dirt parking area behind the pink mortuary. And there he peeked through a green screen door into the still-dark interior, and he lightly tried the handle. A hook-and-eye lock held it closed, so he got out his penknife, snagged out the biggest blade, and forced the blade up between the frame and the door until the hook was tucked up above the iron rim of the eye and he could softly pull the green door free. Sagging into the hot stucco wall, he heeled off his boots and went inside.
The floor had been hosed down and he heard water trickling into a drain at his feet and elsewhere the soft chatter of talk on a radio, but under that he heard as well the faint purring of a fan behind a door to his left. He found the fan on a stool in a preparation room, blowing through a half-opened window the stink of human flesh in fast decay. Lying on a tin-topped dining room table was the corpse he expected to find there, a green plastic sheet tenting all but one foot. A beige luggage tag was wired around the big toe and on it was written “Renaldo Cruz.” R., Atticus thought. He held a handkerchief to his nose as he hoisted the green plastic sheet and, just as he thought he would, gazed at the faintly sallow face of the teenager he’d found at Scott’s funeral and inside the house, his black hair now like weeds on his head, his frail eyelids weighted shut with peso coins, the heart wound from the handgun just a ragged black hole no bigger than his thumb. And he was so positive that Renaldo Cruz murdered his son that he wanted a hammer or crowbar to pound the kid with, anything iron and aggressive to swing into the pretty-boy face and angrily change it, to kill Renaldo again, kill him right. Avenging Scott was the only thing that any part of Atticus was saying; his rage was great enough that it took all the governance of his old age to keep him from hauling the kid off the table and kicking him in the head. But he cooled and finally pulled the green plastic sheet over Renaldo’s face.
The kid had been naked. His clothing would be in a box or gunnysack in the room. Atticus gently tugged the high cabinet doors and gently nudged them shut, spying only chemicals and dyes and cosmetic paints until he came upon a green paper package tied with a string that he dropped down to the floor. He worked at the knot with his fingernails until the string loosened up, and he flattened the paper without rustling it. Renaldo’s Dallas Cowboys jersey was stained and caked with blood and stank with too much use in the heat; his stiff blue jeans held the odor of sweat and dirt and urine; his Nike Air running shoes were size nine and orange with the earth you found in the jungle. Underneath the clothing was a plastic bag like those you put your fruits and vegetables in at the grocery store. And in it were some peso coins, a red pack of cinnamon chewing gum, a fine gold necklace with a crucifix on it, and a calfskin wallet, the paper money gone, no health or bank or credit cards, no Mexican driver’s license, just a folded green receipt from Los Tres Hermanos auto body shop in Mérida and a Kodak color snapshot of a primped and pretty Mexican girl of sixteen or so in the plain white blouse and blue plaid dress of a high school uniform. She was sitting before a photographer’s gray curtain with a faint, shy kink in her smile. Her fluid black eyes shone in the spotlights. Written in felt-tip pen on the back of the snapshot was: “A Renaldo, para siempre, con amor sempiterno. Carmen.”
“To Renaldo, for always,” Atticus said, “with love everlasting. Carmen.” Looking again at the handwriting on the garage receipt, Atticus figured out that a fender and windshield were repaired and the fender painted, but one or all of the three hermanos forgot to note
for whom and for what car. The job was finished on Monday of last week. Atticus grimly put things back as they were in the plastic bag, wrapped the green paper package, and hefted it up to where he’d found it.
The Mexican janitor walked in from the front of the building, a tin pail and a striped can of brass polish in one hand, a gray mop in the other. Atticus held the door open an inch and watched as the janitor skidded the pail on the floor, angled the dirty mop inside it, and turned up to high volume the box radio that had been quietly muttering Spanish. Attaching a hose to a hot water spigot, he twisted the tap on and gradually filled the pail, shaking a bathroom cleanser until it foamed, and then bending far over to sneeze.
Atticus walked silently behind him, and when the janitor sneezed again and went for his handkerchief, Atticus was pushing through the green door and out into the brilliant sunlight of the alley.
Then he rode the motorcycle out of town on the highway, hugging the middle of the tarmac to avoid farm people walking the hot pavement in their huaraches. But there was a winding in the highway and, in a flash, a little girl, right there in his lane, a full basket of limes balanced on top of her head. Atticus jerked hard to the left, but his speed was too great. His tires chirped on the tarmac and his locked back wheel screeched and the handlebars yanked at his right hand and wrist in the front wheel’s try to wrench against the force of the highway. But then the motorcycle righted itself again and Atticus skidded around, his heart hammering, and watched the girl totter along, her frayed blue dress tilting at her knees and with nothing but the basket on her mind. And that’s how it happens, he thought. Sudden death. Rolling past the highway memorials, his engine crackling in the heat, Atticus crept slowly enough to find a name or a date before he surged on to another. And then he found it. Crawling off the highway, he nudged the Harley-Davidson up to the freshly installed concrete cross with a heap of plastic funeral flowers at its foot. Chiseled into it was “Carmen Martinez.” She was killed a little more than a week ago, on a Saturday. She was sixteen years old. Con amor sempiterno.
He went to Boystown. Walkers jumped away from the great snarl of the engine as he crept down El Camino Real between taxicabs and Ford rental cars and air-conditioned hotel vans filled with Americans who were probably trying to find bargains on hand-sewn rugs and nineteenth-century antiques before the heat got too bad. Right after he passed the American Bar and the Bella Vista, Atticus saw the posada up ahead and tilted into a hard turn down a side street, then took a left into a still-shaded alley until he arrived at a blue stuccoed wall where “El Marinero” was sloppily printed over a sprung and often-battered steel door. Atticus shut off the cycle and went inside, walking casually down the corridor to the front as four fair-haired and sunburned Europeans of college age huddled at the high front desk and heard one of their group speak Spanish to the cashier. Others slumped against huge backpacks on the tile floor, one blond woman braiding another’s fine hair, a kid in filthy shorts and hiking boots abstractly twirling a finger in his here-and-there beard as he puzzled out a map. Atticus quietly passed through them and up the staircase, as confident as a paying guest who’d just gone out for coffee.
In the upstairs hallway he followed the numbered doors until he got to 13, where a plastic NO MOLESTAR sign hung from the brass-finished knob. Atticus lightly knocked on the door and put his ear to the wood. Hearing nothing, he fitted the Schlage key into the lock and gently turned the bolt from its home.
The havoc inside surprised him. Wonder bread going green with mold, hot bottles of Beck’s beer and Coca-Cola, a torn-open sack of Oreo cookies, a hot plate and a case of Campbell’s minestrone soup, a high stack of crime paperbacks in German, a box full of forty or fifty various sunglasses with peso price tags on them, an old-fashioned radio with a hanger antenna shinily dressed in aluminum foil, the floor littered with Kodak film cartons, and a tortured tuxedo shirt by Armani forgotten under a stuffed chair. A fourteen-inch neck, a thirty-inch sleeve. The plastic ashtray on the dresser was clean; there was no scent of cigarette smoke in the air.
Atticus looked into a closet and found no clothes, only a few hangers fallen to the floor, and the bathroom was free of personal articles, too, though there was a white stain of toothpaste beside the sink and a puff of four-inch blond hairs in the wastebasket, as if a brush had been cleaned. A blond man, he thought. He’d had it in his head that Renaldo Cruz had been hiding there.
Atticus petted the gray wings of his mustache with his hand as he sat on the bed and thought. Was there a connection between Renaldo and this guy? Why would his son have this phone number in his wallet? Was he putting a friend up here?
In frustration Atticus got up and tipped an ugly seascape away from the wall above the bed, but nothing was behind it. The fake wood vanity beside the bed was empty but for a Resurrección phone directory that was called a guía de telefónica. No Cody was listed in it, but when he backed up a page he saw Stuart Chandler’s phone number circled in blue ink. He thought that strange. Paging ahead through the whole book, he saw only two other numbers circled, one for The Scorpion and one for a farmacia on Calle Hidalgo, the same pharmacy on the sales receipt for the cancer medicine. “Who are you?” he said aloud.
He went through the foods that were stored there but found nothing of interest. And then he went through the high stack of crime novels, hunting anything at all and finally finding in one the bookmark of a boarding pass on a Mexicana Airlines flight from Miami to Cancún, in the passenger name of Schmidt/Reinhardt.
Reinhardt Schmidt. Atticus walked over to the bed and heaved up the mattress with both hands. But finding nothing there, he let the mattress flop down again. And then he got down on all fours and frowned into the space beneath the box springs, and tugged out from between two boards a zippered plastic portfolio. He sat back on his heels to look inside it. A worn passport wallet held less than a hundred dollars in Deutsche marks, Swiss francs, and Dutch gulden, as well as an international driver’s license that was missing its photograph and was issued in Rome in the name of Giuseppe Grassi. Tightly wrapped in a rubber band was a stack of nine expired credit cards in the names of John P. Gillespie, Jr., Joseph L. Naegele, Page Edwards, William Peatman. Either a forger or a thief. He fished inside a hotel envelope and held the trimmed negatives of two photographs up to window light. The first was a photograph of his son’s Volkswagen on a highway at night, focusing on its taillights and framed license plate; the other was a photograph taken around noontime, of fender and front windshield damage to the VW, and behind it were other wrecked cars and a tin garage and a sign that read Los Tres Hermanos. Reinhardt crashed Scott’s car, was that it? Were Reinhardt and Renaldo in cahoots, or was that folded green garage receipt just something that Renaldo Cruz happened to get a hold of? And where was Reinhardt now?
Atticus walked around the bed, looked up the printed number for the front desk, and gambled by pressing 1 on the telephone and telling the Mexican woman who answered that he was Reinhardt Schmidt.
“Of course,” she said, though he was probably just a hotel room to her. She had the English of a person who’d spent a while in the United States, but she’d adopted the Mexican politeness of pretending to know people and things that she didn’t.
“You have any mail or messages for me?”
“Wait, please,” she said, and a few seconds later told him with feigned regret, “There is nothing.”
“Don’t recall your name.”
“Rosa.”
“Right. Rosa, are you keeping a record of my phone calls?”
She seemed defensive when she answered, “Sure, always; for all our guests.”
“Well, that’s good because I forget: When was the last call I made?”
“You will wait,” she said. Atticus pulled out his wallet and Scott’s handwritten phone numbers, then sat with the paper on his thigh and unscrewed his fountain pen.
Rosa got back on. “Wednesday,” she said. “Six o’clock.”
“Would you be so kind as to tel
l me the number?”
She read it to him and he scanned the list for a match, finding none.
“Hate to ask this, but would you please give me that number again?” he asked, and he wrote it on the paper. Mexico City. “And before that?” he asked Rosa.
She sighed and said, “Same time,” and she gave him the telephone number to Scott’s house. “We have to charge even for less than a minute.”
“Of course you do. And the other one was how long?”
“Four minute.”
“I hate to trouble you further—”
“It is no trouble,” Rosa said, plainly lying.
“Don’t recollect if there were any other calls.”
She seemed to scan a printout. “Sí. Lunes.”
“Monday. Wonder if I could get that number, too?” She read it and he wrote it down. “Anything more?”
“Nada, señor.”
Atticus suspected her Spanish meant she wanted their chat finished. He told her, “You see, I’m doing a little bookkeeping here, kind of double-checking my facts for my expense report.”
“Por supuesto,” she said. Of course. But a tone of suspicion was filtering through.
“Exactly how many days have I been here?”
Rosa sighed.
“Don’t count, just give me the date when I got here.”
“December eighth, Mr. Schmidt. You don’t remember?”
“Wasn’t sure if it was that or the seventh,” he said.
“I have business?” Rosa said, and after accepting his gratitude for her forbearance, she said good-bye and hung up.
Atticus lifted the half sheet of paper and looked at his handwriting. And then he dialed the first number Reinhardt had called. A female voice said, “Bueno. Cipiano.”
“¿Habla usted inglés?”
“A little.”
A half dozen things flew through his mind, but he remembered the call was made on lunes. “Would you be able to tell me if you had any wakes or funerals a week ago? Monday?”