by M. S. Karl
“I hope you’re all right now,” Newberry said, testing the salad. “Because if you die, it makes a hell of a lot of trouble for the government.”
The others laughed. “I’ll try to behave,” I said. “I’d hate to make work for you.”
“Already have too damn much, with LaCour.” His fork pointed at the hostess, “Did you know I’ve been on the phone half the day with Mexican Customs and with Gobernación, trying to find out what to do with the body?” He jabbed at his plate angrily. “The damn man was down here so long nobody knows who he belongs to. Nobody claimed the body from the States, at least not yet.”
“But he was still a U.S. citizen, wasn’t he?” Alexandra asked.
“That’s the goddamn thing. If he’d just been fully naturalized down here, see, instead of a damned emigrante, they could bury him here. This bureaucracy …” He slashed a piece of cheese loose and, thrust it into his mouth, frowned his displeasure. “Give me a nice place like Luxembourg, where nothing ever happens.”
“Did you know LaCour?” I asked.
The consul gave his food a few more chews. “Know him? I knew him.” The fork jabbed at Alexandra Whitcomb again, as if she needed to be convinced. “But goddammit, Alexandra, I didn’t like the bastard. He may be dead and almost buried, but I didn’t like him and that’s why having to do all this running around pisses me off.”
Alexandra patted my arm. “If Jonah had liked him, it would be different.”
“I didn’t say that. But it wouldn’t be as bad.” The others laughed.
“What about the man in jail?” I asked gently.
Newberry’s brows raised a fraction. “What about him? He’s still there.” Again a laugh from the others. Fueled by the attention, the consul went on, “I can’t do a thing about it. This is Mexico; we go by their laws. In the U.S. the guy could be gotten off with hunting out-of-season, if he had a good lawyer. No, even if he had a bad one. But this is Mexico. It makes one hell of a problem when U.S. nationals kill each other down here.”
I caught Laurie’s face out of the corner of my eye. She was watching me carefully, her expression giving nothing away.
“What do you think about all this?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t even know them. I just came back the day before yesterday.”
“Laurie,” her mother explained, “attends Barnard. She just arrived for spring vacation.”
“How do you like it? This is your second year, isn’t it?” Mrs. Newberry asked.
Laurie gave a quick grin. “Not half as much excitement.”
“Well, I tell you what, I’ll trade you,” Jonah Newberry said. “I could stand the quiet of a nice girls’ school.”
“Did the man in jail do it?” I asked.
Alexandra Whitcomb shook her head. “Who knows?”
“Oh, he did it,” Newberry said. “It was a fight between queers. That’s what it was. You know what happens.”
“Paul LaCour, queer?” There was scorn in Alexandra’s laugh. “What about that girl, Vivian, that lived with him? I hear she’s gone now, by the way.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was both ways, you know. But what else could it be? The other guy was a butterfly collector, for chrissakes. They had an argument over a butterfly! I mean, I get this from the police. Butterflies, for chrissakes.” He waggled his hands in imitation.
“Well, I have to say, I never got that impression,” Mrs. Newberry said. “I mean, if anything, I’d have thought—”
“But that’s the thing, Loraine, you can’t tell just by looking.”
“I’d never have thought Harold Bassett could kill anyone,” Alexandra said.
Newberry said, “That’s exactly right. You never can tell.”
“He was such a quiet little man,” Alexandra went on. “We hardly even knew him. Not much like Paul LaCour.” I detected a heavy note of sarcasm.
“Well, they say it’s the quiet ones,” Loraine Newberry ventured.
“It’s still hard for me to believe,” Alexandra said. “All morning, while we were out riding, I was thinking about it—what an unlikely sort of person he is.”
“Yes, I remember, you said that,” Loraine said. “It was such a terrible thing.”
“Only for me,” her husband lamented. “I get stuck with the paperwork.”
“All of which goes to prove,” Alexandra declared, “that none of us must ever kill anyone, in Mexican territory, while Jonah is consul.”
“That’s right. Step over the border into Belize to do it,” Newberry agreed.
“A compassionate group,” Laurie said when the meal was over and we had drifted apart from the others. “But don’t think too badly of them. Nobody down here liked LaCour.”
“You didn’t know him?”
“Only slightly, a few years ago. When he’d first come. Since he’s dead, I won’t say anything about him.”
We went to the side of the pool. It was already a purple from the setting sun and its bottom was too dark to see.
“How long will you be here?” Laurie asked.
“Depends,” I said. “I have to see what kind of story I can put together.”
“Good luck, then.”
I watched her walk across the patio, pick up a towel and put it around her shoulders. She turned once to look back at me, gave me a little smile, and started for the house.
The garden lights were on now and some of the guests had already left. But not the one I wanted to talk to most of all. She was standing across the pool from me, staring into its depths.
“Señora,” I said.
She gave me a nod of acknowledgment. I looked around for her husband, didn’t see him, and went over to her.
“The sunset is very beautiful,” I said in Spanish.
“Sí.”
“But haven’t we met before?”
She frowned, then her eyes came up slowly and looked deliberately into mine for the first time. I thought of the photographs and the body that was under the chic dress.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Not earlier, in a house in the Calzada Juarez?”
A tremor passed through her body and her breath sucked in. “No. You are mistaken. I—I don’t know anyone there.” She started away, but I followed.
“Not now,” I said. “But you did. It won’t do any good to lie. I know everything.”
Her face fell apart, and I thought for a moment she was going to scream.
“If you want to talk about it, I’m in the Hotel Margarita,” I said and watched her wheel away like a startled deer.
I found the Newberrys making their goodbyes. Alexandra Whitcomb had wrapped a terrycloth robe around her, and her hand felt cold as I took it.
“Delighted you could come.”
I shook hands with the Newberrys and, turned the corner of the house into the drive. The blue Chevelle was gone.
Chapter Seven
By the time I reached my room I was violently ill. Suddenly, everything I had eaten in the past week seemed to want to get out and the throbbing of my head was an urging that sent pain to the pit of my stomach. I flopped on the bed, and then hauled myself into the bathroom and vomited an endless stream of brown, mudlike poison. I continued to spasm for a quarter hour, but eventually the spasms grew further apart and I was lying in a state between sleep and coma when I heard the knocking on the door.
At first I thought it was across the hall, and tried to wish it away, but it was no use. I struggled to the door, flipped the light on, and opened it.
Gloria, the wife of Alfredo Peón, stood in the hallway, her dark eyes full of humiliation and hurt. I stood aside and closed the door behind me. She had changed into slacks, and her rounded buttocks and full hips brushed past me tantalizingly and she took a chair beside the french windows.
“So I am here,” she said simply. “What do you want?”
I sat down heavily on the bed and tried to sort out my thoughts. My stomach felt as if it were tightening
for another attack.
“I have no money,” she went on. “I could not give you money without my husband finding out.”
“I don’t want money,” I said.
“Please …” Tears had sprung to her eyes. “Don’t make me do it again. Once, with that man, was enough. Please, in the name of God, don’t ask me to do this again.”
“What did LaCour do?”
“You know. You said you knew—”
“Yes. But I mean how?”
She shook his head and bit a painted fingernail. “Because Alfredo is a terrible gambler. We needed money. That man said that he would take care of things if I would …”
“Your husband didn’t suspect?”
“LaCour let him win it in a card game. That was two years ago. I was so ashamed. But I thought it was over.”
“It’s not. LaCour is dead.”
“Yes, and God’s blessing on the man that did it.”
I did not like to prolong the woman’s agony. “The man in jail?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he didn’t do it.”
“They say he did. What difference does it make?”
“This,” I said, touching the wound on my head. “I went to LaCour’s house today and someone was waiting for me. He—or she—hit me on the head and then tried to run over me. That may be the person who killed Paul LaCour.”
“I was not there.”
“How do I know?” I started to say something about the car, but decided to wait. “You have the motive—the best in the world. For all I know you had the opportunity.”
“Who are you? Of what importance is it to you?”
“That doesn’t matter. The question is what importance is it to you? Just because LaCour and the man they locked up weren’t well liked isn’t enough to let me want to see somebody innocent suffer. I don’t care who it ruins; Harold Bassett deserves a chance.”
“It will ruin me—Alfredo, our whole family—if this is known.”
“It won’t be known if you can convince me that you aren’t involved. Where were you this morning at ten?”
She tried to think, and I saw that the once-polished nail had been bitten to the quick. Sudden hope leaped into her face. “At ten? I was in the supermarket in Avenida Montejo. They know me there. Ask the clerks, the boys who carry groceries.”
It might or might not be true. There was nothing I could do just now. I had untaped the manila envelope from its hiding place when I came in, and now I withdrew the photos of her. “Here,” I said. “These are all I found.”
She reached for the pictures greedily and her body shook as she held them, realizing I had seen.
“Unfortunately,” I told her, “there were no negatives.”
“What?” The cry choked in her throat.
“Either the killer or whoever hit me got them. I’m sorry.”
She stood shakily, her face twitching, then went for the door and out. I heard her feet on the stairs, and opened the louvered window with its view of the street. I saw her come out in the night and get into a car parked halfway up the block. It was dark, but the car was under a street lamp. It was a blue Chevelle.
It took me twenty seconds to get to the bottom floor and another thirty to cross the street to where my car was parked. By then the Chevelle was pulling out, but I sped through a yellow light and kept it in sight, half a block ahead.
I had not had a chance to replace the manila envelope and now it lay on the seat beside me, slewing to the side as I wove through traffic. The Chevelle turned toward the river and went along the waterfront for half a mile in the direction in which we had come. When it reached the highway, it turned up onto the bridge ramp and I slowed. There could be nothing on the other side of the bridge but a hundred-odd miles of unbroken highway until Escarcega. I let her pay her toll and then started to try to catch up.
But it was not easy. She must have had it wide open, because with the Dart’s engine trembling from vibrations and the speedometer showing a hundred sixty kilometers an hour, I was not catching up. It was a lonely, silent road, with the massive hills of the highland plateau looming up to the right against a starry sky, and a sloping plain on the left. Now and again we passed trucks and buses and the dim lights of peasant huts. But it was a road I did not like, would not take at this speed in daylight, because it had potholes and hills, and there was always the chance of running up on a burro or a stray cow. The wind whistled past the windows and I sweated as I thought of the punishment being given the tires. I had always heard that Mexican tires were no good. Now where had I heard that? I struggled for the answer and tried to keep my eyes on the right edge of the asphalt. The dossier. It had given me several Mexican missions. Oaxaca, Sinoloa … but Chiapas and Tabasco? I must have been here some time or other; I might even have been down this very highway before. But when?
We had driven for an hour when it happened. It was a cargo truck, parked on the right of way with its lights out, and I only guessed what was happening when I saw her brake lights go bright. For a few seconds they wavered as the car skidded across the road, and then there was a red blur and a noise that reached me two seconds later. I was out of the car and running when I smelled the gasoline fumes. Any second everything could go. I dragged her out from behind the wheel and had her halfway to my car when the gas went up.
There was a travesty of sunset as the fireball climbed into the night sky, tortured shapes dancing against the gloomy background of the hills. The woman beside me was talking, but her eyes were closed. I leaned forward to hear what her lips were saying. “… que no sepa Alfredo …”
I turned around in the middle of the road and started back. Of course. She had been running from panic, that was all. She didn’t want her husband to know.
I called the number Obregon had given me, and after a minute he came on. He listened as I told him about the injured woman.
“Bad?” he asked.
“Hard to tell. But I think it may be no worse than a mild concussion.”
“I’ll come get her,” he said, “and take her to the hospital myself.”
I thanked him and waited in the filling station, parked far off in the shadows. Luckily no one had been anywhere near the truck. I didn’t know what story Obregon would tell, but he would think of something. The injured woman had lapsed into silence, but her breathing was regular and her pulse rate was steady. Twenty minutes after the call, Obregon came. I told him I’d see him tomorrow and helped him carry her to his car. When he was gone I drove back to my hotel.
While I was out someone had rifled my room.
“An unfortunate thing,” the lieutenant said, shaking his head. We were in the same dusty office as before, and he was again shoving the cigar box toward me. “Of course, it was not your fault. Fortunately, she will live. The physical damage was minimal.” He let the word hang in the smoke.
He turned in his swivel chair to face the window behind him, looking through it over the plaza. People were crossing it, going about their morning business. “Whoever knows what is going on in the life of another?” he mused. He came back around to face me. “Then that is all?”
Of course it wasn’t, and we both knew it. I had lied to him by not mentioning the pictures. The hurt woman, I merely said, had heard me asking questions about LaCour and had come to see me in my room, to beg me not to divulge what she was afraid I knew. It was close enough to the truth and maybe I could use it as a lever to get more information. A show of cooperation. But the lieutenant only puffed his cigar and shook his head.
I said, “It seems to me that a number of people had reason for Paul LaCour to be dead. I think the case should be reopened.”
“Reopened?” His gold tooth glinted in the light. “But it has never been closed. Though it soon may be. I received a call before you came. There is an interest by Federal Internal Security—as we knew there would be. It has taken four days for the matter to work its way through the bureaucracy. But now is—how do you say?—the moment of truth. I t
hink very soon a federal interrogation team will arrive.”
“When?” I asked, mouth dry.
He shrugged. “Today, tomorrow, the day after. Once more, the bureaucracy. Somewhere someone has put some names together and has seen that they fit. The next step is a phone call. But there are arrangements to be made, meetings to be held. The bureaucracy again. ¿Qutén sabe? But now that they know that the LaCour who is dead is the LaCour who also had certain other interests, I do not think it will be very long.”
“I need more time,” I told him.
“What can I say? But it seems to me that there is something more here, verdad? Something personal?”
“Nothing personal,” I said, knowing even as I said it that, of course, it was. Lieutenant Obregon smiled sardonically.
“You don’t really like him, do you—this Bassett?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Why?” He eased back in his chair, his hands a steeple under his chin.
“I don’t know. Maybe because I believe him, I believe his story, and I don’t want to.”
“¿Cómo?”
“You should understand, Lieutenant. A man has certain duties, responsibilities. And Harold Bassett—”
“Exactly. He has run away from his, whatever they were, to live here, with a Mestizo woman and hunt mariposas.” He straightened in his chair. “Then that should be an end to it. If he is telling you the truth about who he is, it does not mean that he is telling you the truth about not committing the crime. He would hardly do that. In any case, you do not like him, so what does it matter? Yes, yes, I know, your gringo sense of guilt. Well, if he is what he claims, then at least he can say nothing harmful to your country. And there the matter ends.”
I thought of the interrogation team, with its cattle prod and the field telephone that could be wired to a man’s testicles and the hot paper clips it could stick under the fingernails. But maybe he would be lucky. Maybe they would start with the sodium pentothal.
“Tell me,” Obregon said. “Have you ever been to Dallas, Texas?”
The question caught me off guard and my mind raced. Sometime, in some year … “Yes,” I said, and waited uneasily.