The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  “There’s a grocery store,” Jim said. “Let’s eat.”

  A fat Indian woman sat behind the counter. She smiled when she saw them. “How do you do?” she said. “Iss nice day, no?”

  “A lovely day on which to go south,” Jim said in Spanish. “Which road?”

  “The left,” she said.

  “And can one here purchase food?”

  The Indian woman replied in what she must have thought was English.

  “For surely, so, yes. Of the beans, are good.”

  “We will have of the beans,” Jim said.

  The Indian woman waddled through a bead curtain to the back of the store and came back with two bowls of beans. She set the crockery down in front of them and leaned comfortably on her side of the counter, resting her weight on her glistening arms, to watch the gringos eat her frijoles.

  The beans were so hot with chile that Jim’s mouth felt as if it were on fire. He saw that Hope wasn’t any happier than he was.

  “I bring you two good damn beers,” the Indian woman said.

  She fished the bottles out of an olla hanging in the doorway, sweat beading their sides, and ripped off the soft Mexican caps. Jim took a quick drink, to put out the fire in his mouth.

  “The mister has had trouble from out the car, no?” the Indian woman said. She pointed at Jim’s gashed hand and his muddy clothes.

  “Flat tire,” Jim said.

  “So. You want to buy this?” She produced a kit for mending tubes from under the counter.

  “Sure,” Jim said.

  “Señora,” Hope said, “have you a first-aid kit for men?”

  “That I do not comprehend.”

  “The Red Cross,” Jim said.

  “Sí, sí, señor.”

  She brought out a tin first-aid kit with the familiar red cross. Jim looked at Hope. They both smiled.

  Jim finished his beer and his beans, and took out his wallet. He pretended to hunt for small bills, and put a twenty on the counter.

  “Can you change that, señora?”

  “Sí, sí.”

  The Indian woman took a chamois pouch from the bodice of her black dress. She emptied the pouch on the counter, spilling Mexican and United States coins. She poked among them until she had set aside the right change from a dollar. Then she probed in the pouch and brought out a roll of worn United States one-dollar bills of the old, large size. “I make the change Americano very good,” she said, putting three ones beside the silver, and then a worn old five-dollar bill.

  She reached into the pouch again and brought out a crisp new ten-dollar bill and laid it on top of the pile. “So iss hokay,” she said. “You count. You find all right.”

  Jim took the change. He had hopes of that new ten. But there was no way to be sure with the naked eye. He looked at it as if doubtful.

  “Iss hokay?” the woman asked.

  “Sure,” Jim said. “But where did you get one so new?”

  “Since four days,” the woman said.

  “From a gringo?”

  “Sí, sí,” the woman said.

  Hope turned to the Indian woman and asked for water and pointed to Jim’s hand.

  “Sí, sí, señora,” the woman said and disappeared through the bead curtain.

  She came back with a bowl of water. Hope washed the dried blood off Jim’s hand and got a bandage with a backing of adhesive tape out of the first-aid tin she’d asked for, and put it over the cut.

  “There,” she said.

  They got into the car and went south, passing the winery on their left. A quarter of a mile out of town Jim stopped the car. He took a magnifying glass out of his pocket and went over the ten-dollar bill the Indian woman had given him. The counterfeit was so good that bank tellers would take it without question. But it had a flaw. The two branches of a conventionalized olive tree met in the original Treasury engraving. There was a gap, too small to be seen with the naked eye, in the counterfeit. He found the telltale gap. Fitz Jordan had passed that way and he had been so hard up that he’d run the risk of using one of his counterfeit tens.

  “What are you doing?” Hope asked.

  “Proving to myself that I’m on the right trail,” he said. He put the bill back in his wallet.

  “You mean that’s a counterfeit.”

  He nodded, and started the car again.

  “Are you trying to make me think you really are somebody official?”

  “No,” he said. “Just playing games.”

  He saw that she wasn’t worried about his discovery of the counterfeit. That probably meant she didn’t know the real reason behind what Fitz Jordan was doing here. He hoped she didn’t. They drove downhill, following the ruts toward a clump of trees that looked like live oaks.

  “You don’t suppose that sound behind us could be a plane, do you?” Hope asked.

  “Look,” he said, and stepped on the gas to make the shelter of the trees.

  Hope Graham turned and looked back. “It is,” she said.

  He pulled up under a tree and they got out of the car. The plane was coming very low. As it got nearer, Jim saw that it was a Mexican army ship. He guessed it wasn’t more than a thousand feet up. The foliage was so thick that they couldn’t see the plane when it passed, chuttering, overhead.

  “They didn’t see us,” Hope said.

  “I don’t believe they could have,” Jim said. “But if they’re looking for us, they’ll be back. We’d better wait and see…”

  They’d been sitting in the shade for five minutes when they heard a car coming from the south. There was no way to hide from a car. Jim stood up and looked down the road. He could see only a hundred yards, to the top of a small rise.

  A truck came over the hill with two men in the front seat. As it came nearer, he saw that the man beside the driver was a Chinaman.

  The driver blew his horn as he caught sight of Jim and waved his sombrero in greeting. He pulled up his truck in the shade and hopped out, a plump, middle-aged, smiling man who looked as if he might be an American.

  “You want some beer?” he asked.

  “Sure. We could use some,” Jim said.

  The truck driver called to his Chinese helper, “Hola, chino! Three beers…! I am the peddler,” he said to Jim. “This is my last trip of the year. I sold my flour, my cloth and my shoes at San Quintin. At Carmichael’s I sold my oil and my gasoline. I am sold out. I start for home. And then I find this dumb Chinese has three bottles of beer he forgot. Now everything is fine. You buy two bottles. I drink the third. My stock is all gone.”

  The Chinaman, in blue denim levis and a cowboy hat, waddled over with the three bottles of beer. The peddler uncapped a bottle, keeping an expert thumb over the mouth to prevent the warm beer from foaming out, and handed it to Hope. He did the same thing for Jim, and finally for himself.

  “I would treat you,” he said, “but I am a businessman. That will be forty cents American.”

  “Fair enough,” Jim said, and gave him the money.

  “Here’s to your good health,” the peddler said.

  The Chinaman had gone back to the truck. He must have cached a bottle for himself. At any rate, he had one.

  “You talk like an American,” Hope said.

  The peddler grinned. “A businessman must talk everything in this country. I talk Swedish with the old man at Johnson’s. I talk English with the Americans who stay at Carmichael’s. I talk Mexican, Indian, and a little Chinese.”

  Jim wanted to keep him talking, so his questions would seem casual.

  “Are you Mexican?”

  “My mother was French and my father was Armenian. I was born in Port Said, grew up in Fall River and came to Baja to look for gold when finders was keepers. What does that make me?” He laughed at his own humor and finished his beer. “You folks goi
ng to Carmichael’s for the hunting?”

  “Yes,” Jim said.

  “Take my advice and don’t stay too long. You won’t be driving your car back after it starts to rain. This dobe soil makes a mud you can hardly get through with a horse. And the planes no longer go to Carmichael’s.”

  “We saw a plane go over a little while ago,” Jim said.

  “That was a Mexican army plane on patrol,” the peddler said. “The army doesn’t take passengers.”

  The peddler picked up the three empty beer bottles. “I gotta shove off,” he said. “I want to make Ensenada tonight, and you know what the road is like.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jim said. “Can you change a twenty-dollar bill?”

  The peddler looked at him shrewdly. “I can if it’s good.”

  Jim took a twenty out of his wallet and handed it over. The peddler studied the bill and took a leather bag with a drawstring out of his back pocket. He untied the string and brought out a roll of bills with a rubber band around them. He counted out ten ones and two fives. They were all worn old bills.

  “You haven’t got a brand-new ten-dollar bill, have you?” Jim asked.

  “Yes,” the peddler said, “just one.”

  He riffled through the roll and drew out a crisp ten. “That’s the first one I’ve seen in a long time. I got that from the boss at Carmichael’s when I sold my gas this morning.”

  Jim took the two old fives and the new ten and put them in his wallet. The peddler got aboard his truck, tooted his horn and waved his hand as he drove off. Jim got out his magnifying glass and the new ten. He found the telltale gap where one olive branch failed to join the other.

  “Well?” Hope Graham said.

  “The trail is hot,” Jim said.

  “Are you really looking for a man who has been passing bad ten-dollar bills?”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “The Indian woman at Santo Tomás remembered the man she got her ten-dollar bill from. She could have told you what he looked like. But you didn’t ask her.”

  “Why should I?”

  “So you’d know what he looks like.”

  “I know what he looks like,” Jim said.

  “Oh,” she said, “one of your own gang.”

  “Let’s get going. I want to get to Carmichael’s before midnight.”

  He wondered, as he drove on, how far behind him Johnson was. Knowing Johnson, he was afraid it wasn’t more than a day or two. It might be less. Johnson never traveled fast. But then, he never stopped.

  * * *

  —

  It got hotter, minute by minute, and Jim could not drive fast enough to make a breeze. His hands were sweaty on the jerking wheel, his eyes were nearly shut against the glare of the sun, and he could think of nothing but water—water to drink, water to swim in—cool, wet water.

  He struck a stretch of badlands, the alkali crunching under the wheels and rising in clouds to dry their lips and sting their eyes. He stole a glance at Hope. She was using one hand to shield her eyes from the sun; the other hand held the corner of the purse that lay in her lap. She was powdered with alkali dust.

  He ran out of the alkali into soft sand. He had to drop into first, in order to pull through it at five miles an hour. The sand seemed endless. He had driven through a mile of it when a rear tire blew with a sound like a pistol shot.

  He got wearily out. He had used the jack at dawn that morning after they’d got out of the tules, so it was on top of everything else in the luggage compartment. But he couldn’t find the lug wrench. He began throwing everything out of the compartment. He had tossed all the stuff out on the sand except the two cans of gas when he found the wrench.

  “Can I help?” Hope asked.

  “No!”

  He realized, as he hunted for a stone to put under the jack, that he had yelled the word at her in anger, as if it were her fault that the tire had blown. His shoes were full of sand when he found a proper stone and went back to the car.

  He jacked up the offending rear wheel. He got it high enough and the foot of the jack slipped off the stone into the soft sand. He centered the jack on the stone and tried again. The car stayed up until he tried to get the spare wheel off. The spare was stuck. He put his foot against the car and yanked. The car fell off the jack. He was too hot and tired to swear.

  He got the spare on finally and knelt in the sand to tighten the nuts on the studs. He had to rest before he’d finished. He sat down and wiped his sweating forehead with a sand-encrusted arm.

  Hope came around the car with an open can of tomatoes and a tin cup.

  “Try this,” she said.

  She poured the cup full and gave it to him.

  He drank the liquid and ate the tomatoes and remembered that it was an old desert trick to carry tinned tomatoes where there was no water. He’d been stupid not to have thought of the tomatoes sooner. He had bought them and the other tinned stuff in San Diego on his way to Baja. He got up on his knees again and tightened the nuts methodically and put the hub cap back on with a blow from the heel of his hand.

  Hope climbed into the compartment and he handed her the things he had thrown out and she fitted them neatly into place. She put the aluminum pail in which she’d made coffee that morning into the larger pail, with the cups nestled inside. She took the canned stuff out of the wooden box it was in and arranged it on the floor. She gave him the box.

  “It’s good for kindling,” she said. “If you break it up it’ll pack better.”

  He jumped on the empty box and smashed it and pulled it apart and gave the pieces back to her. Then he passed up the blankets rolled in the tarps.

  “How about letting me drive awhile?” she asked when she had finished.

  “If you like,” he said. She got in behind the wheel and tucked her purse under her. He found dry matches in the pocket of the jacket he’d laid back of the seat and lit a cigarette as she drove. He saw that she knew how to drive in that country. She wasn’t taking it as hard as he had. But she didn’t have Solid Man Johnson on her mind. She didn’t know that Johnson was somewhere back yonder, plugging along.

  Toward sundown they came to a watercourse that wasn’t quite dry.

  Hope stopped the car. “Can we take time to eat?” she asked.

  “If we hurry it up,” he said.

  She ran the car off the road under a tree. Without another word, they went down to the nearest pool and washed their faces and hands and arms.

  “If you’ll open tins,” she said, “I’ll make coffee.”

  They ate canned salmon and biscuits and tomatoes. The coffee was too hot to drink quickly.

  “Come on,” Jim said.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” Hope asked, taking a sip of coffee.

  “I’m trying to catch up with a guy,” he said.

  “You’re sure it isn’t the other way around?” she said, and got in another sip of coffee.

  “Have it your own way,” he said.

  “I thought you were pretty thick with Colonel Ortega, even if he did tell his men to stop you.”

  “The colonel is friendly. We went to the same prep school. He may have felt he had to go through the motions of stopping me. But he must have known there was a back way. He knows who I am.”

  “That’s more than I know, Meestair ’Ovard.”

  “My name is Jim Howard, and ’Ovard is just a Mexican mispronunciation.”

  Hope finished her coffee and stood up. “Just the same,” she said, “men run faster when there’s somebody after them.”

  They threw stuff into the car and started on again.

  “So you think I’m a fugitive from justice,” Jim said.

  “I think you probably are. You act like it. It doesn’t matter, does it? You drop me off when I ask you to and I’ll pay y
ou the hundred dollars I promised you. It’s not my affair what you are.”

  “It’s not my affair what you are either,” Jim said. “But just the same, I’d like to know.”

  “I told you.”

  “But your story wasn’t good enough. No American who knows anything about Mexico would bother with a mine in Baja. No matter how good a prospect it is, he can’t make money out of it under the present laws. So I don’t believe your boss has gone into the Sierra San Pedro Mártir about a mine.”

  “Did I say anything about the San Pedro Mártir?”

  “I don’t remember that you did. But that’s the name of the range that’s thirty or forty miles inland from here.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “The name isn’t on my map.”

  Jim watched her face when he spoke again. He could only see it in profile.

  “I don’t believe you’ve got papers for Fitz Jordan in that purse you’re so careful of.”

  “What do you think I’ve got?” she asked, without turning her head.

  “Money,” Jim said. “Probably stolen money.”

  Her face didn’t change. “You’re a romantic guy, aren’t you, Jim?” she said.

  The sun went down. The dark came on so fast that it was as if someone had put a lid over the earth.

  Neither of them spoke for two hours and then Hope leaned over and looked at the speedometer.

  “We’ve come a hundred and ten miles,” she said. “We should be there.”

  Jim drove on for another two miles and came suddenly to an open space. On the right was a graveled drive. He turned into it and they saw a long low adobe building without a light showing. The drive led to an open gate in a wall. Jim went on through the gate and they were in a big patio. He could smell the sea, and when he stopped the motor he heard the sound of surf on a beach beyond the building ahead of him.

  Hope got out of the car. “I see lights,” she said, and pointed.

  “I’ll get your bags out,” he said.

  He found her bags and his own suitcase and set them down.

  “I’ll carry them in as soon as I’ve found a place to put the car,” he said. “I think that’s a shed over there.”