by Farris, John
Seventeen going on eighteen, but she had always seemed more mature than that. And, as usually happened when I saw her unawares, watched her from a distance, I had to think hard about something else to get my heart to behave.
After coffee and dessert I loaded up my vest pockets with film of different speeds and an auxiliary flash unit, packed away my minicorder and extra cassettes, and went downstairs to the lobby, which was crowded with people wearing name tags, groups of well-dressed older people who had the kind of formidable assurance that only wealth and political dominance can give you in a place where ninety-five percent of the population is poor and hostile. The women with hairdos like spun glass, the men with jowls heavy as ticks ready to pop from overfeeding. I also heard a lot of American spoken. They were partying it up pretty good in the mezzanine club called Bahía, and the coffee shop was doing a lot of business. I saw a couple of familiar faces inside when I went by: the red-headed archeologist Glen Hazen, at a table with Sharissa. He was helping himself to her fries and talking with the kind of animated earnestness some guys adopt when they want to make a big impression.
My new friend Achille wasn't at his post by the bell captain's desk, so I waited for him. I had been laying some good tips on Achille for a week, in case I might need him for something important eventually. He was a half-Haitian Carib from Guatemala's Creole coast, the color of burnt toast. He wore an eye patch, was loosely hung together, walked with a prance, smiled happily, and was hell with the ladies who worked at the Itzá Maya. He was just the man to understand my own lovelorn condition, all alone in the sensual tropics like I was.
"Boss! Taking manny more peeksures today?"
"Many pictures, Achille. Looks like the hotel is jumping tonight."
"She jomping for sure. When you tink I see my peeksures?"
"Day after tomorrow, that's what they told me at the photo shop in town."
I saw, past Achille and some women in high-fashion cocktail dresses, Greg Walker on the move. He was wearing dark glasses and not looking in my direction as he threaded his way through the traffic in the lobby with an expression that could be called ominous. He went to the door of the manager's office beside the reception desk and let himself in without knocking. His attitude was that of a man who owned the place, or at least some important part of it. I felt the pulses in my throat and my temples thumping.
Achille was distracted and about to veer off in response to a signal from one of his boys. Also the phone on his desk had been ringing for a full minute.
"Achille, maybe you could help me with a little something?"
I had his full attention. He smiled. "Ya boss! I am only too 'oppy."
"There's this woman I met. I think she's related to the owner of the Itzá Maya—"
"Mon, I am knowing exactly who you mean! Her name Veronica, she?"
"That's the one. We had this little conversation a couple of days ago, and I think we hit it off. At least I hope we—"
"Claro! She plenty guapa womans, even wit de face, you know?" He scratched quickly at one cheek with his hand like a claw, indicating scars. "But there sometink 'bout she—I no have de word in English, apartada we say." He gestured, boxing Veronica with his hands. Making smaller and smaller boxes.
"Yeah, I think I understand. I heard that she's a recent widow. But the point is, I'd like to get to know her better, only I haven't seen her lately; and I don't have any idea how to get in touch—" I sighed in frustration.
"Yes, yes!" Achille gestured again, like a genie about to fulfill my heart's desire. He whipped around to the computer terminal on his desk, danced his fingers over the keyboard, peered at the screen and smiled again, broadly.
"¡No problema! You see?"
I looked past him at the screen. Veronica Nespral. Telephone number, address, a hotel ID code beside her name. Achille had snatched up a pad and was jotting it all down. He tore off the sheet with a flourish.
"All yours, mon. ¡Buena suerte! De woman like to have she peeksure taken. It very flattering way to, what you say, 'come on to she.'"
"I don't know my way around Cobían. Where do I find—"
"¡No problema! Behind dis hotel. Ruta Tres Altares. You are going one kilometer, entonces izquierda. Den two houses only. No number. De house, she blue color I tink. Con permiso, boss, I must answer dis crazy phone. ¡Buenas noches, Botones!"
I slipped a folded twenty-quetzale note under his other hand, made my way through the lobby and past the entrance fountain. More people were arriving outside. The night was still cooling off. I heard a helicopter, and saw lightning in the distance, illuminating some dirty-looking clouds. But the moon was still visible.
Probably it wasn't in my best interests to go walking down an unlighted country road with a lot of valuable camera equipment. Maybe, I thought, I should wait and see her in the morning. But I was restless.
In the tropics rain doesn't begin with a gentle pattering of drops through the trees. One second I was dry, the next I was scrambling for cover, as if I had suddenly walked under a waterfall. I'd come about half a kilometer. The bright lights surrounding the hotel were obscured as I tried to stay dry next to the trunk of one of the mahogany trees that grew shoulder to shoulder along the graveled road. There was no wind, so the rain fell straight down, most of it sluicing off the canopy overhead to run in rivers down either side of the road. I was damp but not drenched. Lightning flared, but not in my vicinity. The flashlight I'd brought had enough beam to allow me to pick my way over exposed humps of roots from tree to tree.
I came to a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire, all of it rusted. The fence enclosed a construction site, six open floors of poured concrete. Past the uncompleted building there were rows of small one-story houses with tile roofs, heavily barred windows and gated carports. The protected cars were VW bugs or dilapidated Detroit models, all of them two or three decades old. There were some yellow outside lights, but the metal window louvers of the houses were tightly closed. Everybody had at least one dog, and the dogs were all barking up against the gates as I dodged from tree to tree. But nobody in the modest homes was curious enough to look out.
The rain was still heavy when I came to an intersection with some commercial buildings not unlike the houses nearby; a few were two stories high, with metal awnings over upstairs porches. There were cars parked haphazardly in front of a café, where I saw the only signs of life in the neighborhood, and heard music. A rockola was playing Paul Simon's "Graceland." Next to the café were a Laundromat, a beauty shop, and a grocery. Then the buildings petered out, and there was nothing to see but a few isolated lights shining through the rain.
I had run out of big trees. The landscape along the road that angled left off the main road featured cedar and broom and small varieties of palm. I was disoriented, and wondered if that was the way Achille had meant for me to go. Izquierda, he said. "Left." But I didn't see any houses by the fading flashes of lightning.
I waited ten minutes under the storefront awning of the peluquería, until the rain stopped, and then I slogged down the hump of the secondary road, which had just enough gravel mixed with the mud to give me some footing. The flashlight kept me out of some bad potholes.
Then the road took a turn and went downhill. I made out lights and rooftops, off to the left in a thick grove of trees. Two crude log bridges spanned a ditch. I passed the first house, which was closer to the road, and seemed deserted. The second house wasn't visible through the trees. But I saw the taillights of a car parked in there among the cedars.
Across the bridge the drive was paved with concrete blocks thinly covered by run-off mud from the wooded slopes. The rain had erased most of the tracks made by whatever vehicles had passed that way recently. I walked up the drive. It started raining again, with a whoosh. The canopy of cedar boughs above the driveway didn't keep me from being soaked this time.
Shielded floodlights at the corners of the house glared through the deluge. It was a blue house. The car parked in the drive wa
s a dark-colored Mercedes, blue or black. The headlights were on. Somebody was behind the wheel, smoking. The gates of the carport stood open. There was a Toyota Land Cruiser parked inside. Next to the Land Cruiser a husky black dog with the mixed look of Mastiff and Rottweiler was lying very still on the terrazzo floor. It was raining hard enough so that the junkyard dog might not have been aware of me. I probably could've walked all the way up to the gates without being noticed by the dog, or by the driver of the Mercedes. I was sick of the rain running down the back of my neck. But I stopped and turned my flashlight off.
Probably just in time to avoid being spotted by the two men who came quickly out the front door of the house and crossed the small porch connected to the carport and breezeway.
The porch lights were off. I didn't recognize them until they moved into the perimeter of a floodlight below the carport roof and paused there, one of them swinging the heavy iron gates shut. Francisco Colon. Greg Walker watched him, not offering to help. From the way he was rubbing his right fist with his left hand, he had hurt it.
Francisco closed the padlock on the gate and they hurried through the rain to jump into the Mercedes. That was when I left the driveway and scrambled up a slick embankment, grabbing at anything that grew there to keep from sliding backwards, hauled myself up to a thick clump of broom and watched while the Mercedes turned around and drove by me toward the road. The Mercedes was a diesel, and it left a noxious spoor that was quickly washed out by the rain.
I turned my flashlight on and picked my way through tangles of vine to the clearing around the house. Some cedar trees had been carelessly chainsawed, leaving uneven stumps everywhere. There were stone pots filled with plants and twig baskets of bromeliads and orchids hanging the length of the carport inside the pierced-concrete outer wall. With my flashlight I could tell that the mixed-breed dog had lost some blood, but he stirred slightly on the terrazzo floor when I rattled the bars of the padlocked gate. I didn't know if he'd been shot or bludgeoned.
There was no point in wasting time yelling for Veronica Nespral. If they'd half-killed her guard dog to keep him out of the way, they hadn't been very nice to Veronica either.
I needed to find a way inside, but the small house was like a fortress. I went out into the rain again and circled beneath the overhanging tile roof. The louvers of the first four windows I came to were closed. Screens covered them, then jailhouse bars bolted to concrete. In the walled backyard, thickly planted with banana trees and bamboo, there was a casita. But the metal door was padlocked too, no way I could break in to look for tools. A porch with pierced concrete walls ran the length of the house in back. A croton hedge, waist-high, surrounded the porch. There was a broken downspout at one corner of the porch, creating a narrow waterfall off the roof. The floodlight was out.
I worked my way close to a wall of the porch and flashed the light around inside. I saw a washer and dryer, an ironing board, a plastic basket of clothing turned upside down, a broken broom handle on the floor, Veronica sprawled facedown. She was wearing bikini underpants and a bra. The soles of her feet were dirty. Her back was livid and welted from the beating she'd suffered. I couldn't tell what the rest of her looked like. I couldn't be sure that she was still alive.
She didn't respond when I called to her. The rain cascading off the roof a few feet away from me made a lot of noise on the paving stones that encircled the house. I went down on my hands and knees to dig up one of the flat rectangles of cast concrete. It was about eighteen inches by twenty-four inches, and heavy. I put the flashlight in an oblong opening of the concrete wall, aiming it at one of the appliances inside. The bounce light off the enameled side of the dryer gleamed on the back of Veronica's head. Then I maneuvered the paving block under the waterfall from the roof. Water poured onto it, and was diverted through another opening in the pierced wall.
I had to experiment to get the angle just right. The rain was cold, and I was trembling. I kept the diverted stream of water aimed at Veronica's bare welted back for much too long a time, getting no response at all.
"Wake up, damn it! Wake up, Veronica!"
I thought I saw a shudder pass through her body; then one hand closed in a slow convulsion, and she gasped. I put the slab of concrete down and turned the beam of the flashlight on her face, calling her name.
It took her a while to drag herself into a sitting position. She was shivering uncontrollably, moaning. Some blood ran in a trickle from one corner of her mouth. Her eyes were closed.
"My name is Butterbaugh! I'm a detective. I want to help you, Veronica! You have to get up. Don't lie down again." I splashed around to the padlocked porch gate and rattled it. "Let me in! I'm here to help you!"
"No más," she protested, in a weak voice, then groaned more loudly. "¡Dios mio! Estoy suffriendo! Ay, ay!"
"I'm not going to hurt you! Please let me in, so I can get you to a doctor!"
She groped blindly along the floor, teeth chattering. She moved on hands and knees, very slowly, toward me.
Bright blood dripped from her open mouth. I think she was following the beam of the flashlight on the terrazzo floor to the gate. When she got there, she pulled herself up, hand over hand, breathing harshly. Her eyes were barely open. I don't know if she saw me or not. I was afraid she would lose her grip and fall down hard. I didn't know what was causing the internal bleeding. If she was lucky, it was only a broken rib. But she could die from shock if I didn't get some help for her right away.
Her face was only a few inches below mine as she clung gamely to the bars, mumbling in Spanish, breath hissing through her teeth between expletives.
"The key," I said. "Can you get the key?"
"Kill them," she said in English. "K-k-kill them both."
"The key, Veronica."
She opened her eyes wider and stared at me. "¿Quien es?"
I said my name again.
"You are friend—of Kiki?"
"Yes," I said, "sure I am. The gate, Veronica. Can you unlock the gate?"
"Unlock these gate," she repeated thickly. "Sí, momentito."
She let go of the bars, one hand, then the other, turned toward the kitchen door. Hunched over, shuffling, she made it to the metal door, leaned on it for several moments, breathing with a raspy, sobbing sound. Then she turned the knob and slipped inside. I heard her fumbling in the dark. The fluorescent lights went on. After another long wait she reappeared, clutching a ring of keys. Shuffled back to the gate.
Blood from her mouth was smeared across one cheek. Tears ran through the blood. They hadn't touched her face. There was no way to know yet how much damage had been done to soft tissue and vital organs. Her thighs and hips were striped with ugly welts.
Sagged against the gate, shaking badly, she fumbled with the keys and managed to get the right one into the big padlock. I opened the gate carefully, reaching around to get a grip on her so she wouldn't fall. She screamed twice while I was trying to lift her in my arms. She wasn't very big but she was slippery from the dousing, and tremors made her hard to hold.
She kept saying "Kiki," over and over, as if she were delirious. That small, slow trickle of fresh blood persisted at one corner of her mouth. Light from the tiled kitchen was reflected off the white walls of a dining and living room, guiding me through the house to her bedroom. I put her gently on the canopied bed and turned on a lamp with a pink bulb in it. She lay in a fetal position, shuddering while I covered her with a comforter from the closet.
In the bathroom I soaked washcloths in water as hot as either of us could stand and packed her body with them.
The bra was drenched and I unsnapped it, took it off. She was about half-conscious, and didn't seem particularly aware of me.
"Bastards," she said. "Bastards!"
"Why did they do it, Veronica?" I asked her, but either she couldn't hear me, or she didn't have the strength to answer.
Once I had her chills under control, I looked for something she could wear. There were a couple of Fil jogging outfi
ts of a crinkly lightweight material hanging in the closet. She was going "Ay, ay, ay" on the bed, moving torturously under the comforter, trying to find a bearable position to ease the pain. I discarded the tepid cloths from her nearly naked body, talking soothingly to her while trying to get her to sit up. I wiped blood and froth from her lips again. Her eyes opened; although she was shrouded in pain she had a few moments of lucidity. She touched the dark nipple of a small bare breast and focused starkly on me.
"What are you . . . doing to me?"
"Getting you dressed. You need to see a doctor."
"¿Habla español?"
"No, I don't speak Spanish. My name is Butterbaugh. I'm a detective, from the States. Try to put this on, Veronica."
"¡Dios, Dios, Dios!"
"I know it hurts. He probably broke a couple of ribs. How many times did they hit you?"
"They . . . no. Him only."
"Greg Walker?"
"Yes. He said, 'These bitch should be killed,' but Francisco, he saying no, she learn her lesson. 'Doan you learn, Veronica?' Pig!"
"Learn what?"
But I'd lost her again. Her face squeezed tight and she quivered from a deep, electrifying pain. I zipped up the jogging jacket and lowered her head to a pillow. Her underpants were wet, too. I found a pair of scissors in a drawer of the table beside her bed and cut them off, then worked the jogging pants up over the broom-handle welts on her legs. At least a dozen of them, more on her back. Then, not satisfied with the extent of the punishment, he'd used his fists. There were swollen bruises everywhere, lumps the size of turkey eggs.
"Bad man," she said, gasping. "These Walker. Very bad man."
"I agree. He'll get what's coming to him."
"Next time . . . I see him, I will have a gun."
"Why did he do this to you?"
"Say . . . I talk too much to Sharissa. I did not know before if . . . if he was one of them. But I know it now. An' he will destroy his own daughter, so his life may go on and on."