Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  “You didn’t know old Coy Lee good as I did.”

  “No jokes, hmm?”

  “No good jokes, at least.”

  “I was wondering what we would do. Suppose we found him in Corpus Christi? What if he was Evan Lawrence and Jerry Tobin and Coy Lee Rodefer? And we appear in front of him in these indigenous clothes, these big hats and twill pants and funny shirts. What then?”

  “We try not to appear in front of him at any time.”

  “Just locate him?”

  “And bring him to justice. Like they used to say in the series there with Marshal Dillon. Gunsmoke.”

  “Isn’t that going to be exceedingly difficult, Travis?”

  “If we never get any more evidence than we have now, which is next door to nothing at all, exceedingly is a mild word.”

  “So what then?”

  “Meyer, for God’s sake, we can’t lay it all out in advance. We’ll play it by ear. Maybe he has been messed up in other things. We might stumble across something that can be proved against him. He seems to like killing women. For money. Maybe he was clumsier some time we don’t yet know about. Martin Eagle would like to know where he is, if and when we find him. I just have the feeling that the farther down the back trail we go, the more we’ll learn. I am not going to sneak up on the ridge and dry-gulch him. As far as we know right now, he isn’t wanted by anybody for anything. Maybe he didn’t kill four people. Maybe somebody set the charge to kill him, thinking he’d be on your boat that day. Maybe he was on the boat. You’re supposed to be the logical one, not me.”

  He managed a smile. “I’m not doing very well, am I? I can’t seem to think about it. I want him shot. I want him dead.”

  Early the next day we were well down into the Valley of the Rio Grande. We went on into Harlingen, which had every fast-food chain either of us had ever heard of, and a lot we hadn’t. We found a place to stop and look at the map. The likely counties were Willacy, Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Brooks, and Kenedy. Lots of grove land down in the valley, more big vegetable farms and ranchlands as you went north.

  If this was the area where Evan Lawrence a.k.a. Jerry Tobin peddled his thirty tons of Japanese stone lanterns, they were going to be right out in the weather in plain sight, if you could get close enough to the house. And that was a problem. Out in the ranch and farm country, the houses and barns and sheds were a couple of hundred yards down narrow private lanes.

  We needed some kind of a cover story to avoid being shot for trespass. If we got the necessary gear to look like surveyors, we would probably be shot for surveying. Meyer finally came up with something suitable. It involved finding a specimen net for capturing insects and rigging up a specimen box.

  We drove up to Raymondville and turned left on State Road 186. By the time we hit the third farm, he had the routine under control.

  “Madam, we are working on a project for Texas A and I up in Kingsville. There has been an infestation of Brown Recluse spiders, or fiddlebacks as they are sometimes called. We’d like your permission to check around the foundations of your house and around your outbuildings. We don’t have to go inside any building, and we will not damage any plantings. It is a small drab-looking spider with an oblong body. The bite can cause fever, nausea, cramps, and ulceration at the location of the bite. If we pick any up here, we will let you know.”

  The old blue van looked plausible, and soon we were sweaty enough to look plausible. There were no refusals. The people were not exactly bursting with friendship and goodwill, but Meyer’s fussy professional manner seemed to allay most of their suspicion.

  We wandered the little roads, country roads, 1017 and 681, and went through towns named Puerto Rico, San Isidro, Agua Nueva, Viboras, Robberson, Guerra. I lost track of the number of stops we made. No stone lanterns. We had a bad sandwich and orange pop in a place named Premont, and an hour later we came upon the first stone lantern. It stood in the front yard of a small white farmhouse just north of a town named Rios, on County Road 1329.

  A little round woman with a lot of gold in her smile gave us permission. By prearrangement, Meyer went about his net work, and I said, “Couldn’t help noticing your stone lantern there. I had a friend who used to sell those. Maybe you bought it from him.”

  “Oh, no! We are being here only seis year. Eet wass here.”

  “Have other people got them too?”

  “Very pretty.”

  “Yes, they are. Anybody else have one that you know?”

  She beamed and waved a chubby arm that included the whole world north and west of Rois. “Minny minny peoples haff,” she said.

  We headed north and turned west at the first intersection. We were in stone lantern country. At the third lantern stop, we encountered a man who had bought one.

  “Hell, it must have been fifteen, seventeen years back, she got me to buy that sucker. Young fellow selling them from an old pickup. Real nice young fellow to talk to. The big ones were forty-two dollars cash money, and the little ones were thirty-five. She had to have the big one, naturally. She loved that fool thing. She’d run out on warm nights and put a candle in it, then stand inside and look at it through the screen. It made her happy to see it out there. I used to kid her, saying you could buy a lot of oil lamps and lightbulbs for that forty-two dollars.”

  He was a stringy man in his fifties, baked dry, straw hat tilted forward, his eyes the same washed-out blue as his work shirt. His big hands were permanently curled by hard labor, and the veins in his leathery forearms were fat and blue.

  “Do you think she’d remember the salesman’s name?”

  “Allie died six years ago, friend. On a rainy June day just one day after her forty-fourth birthday. I took her a present but she didn’t know me. She didn’t know anything at all by then. She was never real well. She didn’t have a good heart or good kidneys or good lungs, and they all seemed to go bad at the same time. Don’t know why I go on like this. Man doesn’t see people all day, he tends to talk their ear off.”

  “Did you happen to see the salesman?”

  “Not up close. Saw him standing there when she came to me to get the money. I thought you fellows were after some kind of spider, but you sound like you’re after that lantern salesman.”

  I laughed in a jolly hollow manner and said, “Two birds with one stone.” At that point Meyer came trotting up to us, holding a twist of the netting with great care.

  “This is a fiddleback,” he said nervously.

  “It sure is,” I said, and we transferred it to our improvised specimen box. It seemed slow and lethargic. Meyer took out his notebook and wrote down the time and place.

  “Could you describe the lantern salesman?” I asked the man.

  “Hell, he looked like any other young Anglo around here. But he sure could talk Mexican. I heard him and Allie jabbering away like crazy. I met Allie when I was working down in Vera Cruz a long time back. Prettiest thing I ever saw in my life. I never could get my mouth around that Mexican talk. God knows I tried. She was a real smart woman. Trouble was, I had things to say to her that I never really could say, because she just never did get to have that much American.”

  “Where did he work out from?”

  “I can tell you that. The one she wanted, it had a kind of a gouge in the top of it, into the stone. So he went right away and got a new top. Very obliging of him. He said it was a little less than a fifty-mile round trip. He had his stock at a place north of Freer, off State Road Sixteen.”

  Meyer said, “You have a remarkable memory, sir.”

  The man smiled and shook his head. “Not really. Out here there aren’t so many stopping by you can’t remember them all. And Allie did talk to him a long time. I guess it made me kind of curious to look him over good.”

  We told him how much we appreciated his help. He seemed a little disconsolate at having us go. It meant company was leaving. The land around his buildings looked reasonably tidy, but the quick glance I had at the interior showed a fat brown dog
stretched out on a welter of newspapers, and a young turkey pecking at something on the floor beyond it.

  A couple of miles down the road, I stopped and Meyer dumped out the Brown Recluse. When he got back in, I asked him if he’d stomped it. He said that he had thought of it but decided that the spider had its rights, and had played its part in a charade reasonably well and at the right time, and anyway it was part of the scheme of things, just like the snail darter, the snow goose, and the ACLU. I reminded him that they were poisonous, and he said that you usually have to provoke something in nature to get it to bite. You have to threaten it or make it think it is threatened. Western sheep ranchers are poisonous, he said, because they believe they are threatened by coyotes, when all scientific data from reliable sources indicate otherwise. Wolves never chased the Russian sleighs, he said. A tarantula bite is less bothersome than a bee sting, he said. The more precarious the existence of all living creatures on the planet becomes, he said, the more valuable is each individual morsel of life. I told him he seemed to be getting one hell of a long way from stomping or not stomping a little brown insect, and he told me that the spider is not an insect at all but an eight-legged predacious arachnid of the order Araneae. I asked him if his veneration for life extended all the way from brown spiders to Evan Lawrence; he too was part of the scheme of things. Meyer told me that I had a tendency to put discussions on an emotional basis, thus depriving them of all intellectual interest. I told him I was sure lucky to have him along to straighten me out on all these things.

  He studied his notes and said, “Of the four students who could have been Evan Lawrence, we have eliminated one: Rodefer. Of the remaining three, the one most likely to be fluent in Spanish is Cody T. W. Pittler. Eagle Pass was his hometown, apparently. On the border. And he went to the branch of the University of Texas at El Paso, also on the border. That, of course, does not eliminate Wyatt and Broome. Nor does it mean that any one of the remaining three could have been Evan Lawrence. All it does mean is that if it took an equal amount of effort to check out Wyatt, Pittler, and Broome, it would be logical to try Pittler first.”

  “I think Allie was probably a pretty nice woman.”

  “We should inquire in Freer about a Mr. Guffey, if indeed there is one.”

  “And change our act, I think.”

  “To what?” he asked me.

  “We don’t have to have an act to go around asking where the Guffey place is. And when and if we find it, we’ll think of something.”

  Fourteen

  Freer was an intersection of three numbered highways. It looked flat and spread-out, with maybe two or three thousand people in it. On the edge of town I saw a farm equipment and supply agency, with a colorful row of tractors out by the shoulder.

  I found some shade to park in and went inside. There was a small office and display room, with a maintenance floor out behind it. Meyer wandered over to the line of tractors and stood there, studying them, his cowboy straw hat shoved to the back of his head, kitchen match in the corner of his mouth, thumbs hooked into the side pockets of his ranch pants. He looked almost—not quite—authentic. But I was glad to see him improvising. He was beginning, in small ways, to enjoy the small arts of deception. As in the old days, before Dirty Bob.

  I sauntered in and angled obliquely over to two men leaning against a monstrous piece of yellow equipment. I had no idea what it could be used for. It looked designed for the uprooting of trees and the mashing of small buildings. One was old, dressed in a yellow jumpsuit. He was the shape of a toby mug, had wild white hair sticking out in all directions, and wore a red embroidered Bunky over his left breast pocket. His face was almost as red as his embroidery.

  The other man was swarthy and much younger, and huge. Size of a nose guard. Six-seven, maybe, and two-sixty, thereabouts. He had a round amiable face and a nose that had been mashed almost flat.

  As I came closer I heard Bunky say, “Now I’m not trying to tell you the bank will go for it, Miguel. You know how the times are. What I can’t do, honest to God, is go on the paper with you. We’re up to our eyeballs on the building here and the floor stock. I know you got a good record, and I’m sure that counts with the bank. But you should go talk to them first. I gave you the figures, the allowance and all.”

  Miguel muttered something I couldn’t hear. They shook hands and Miguel left.

  Bunky watched him go and then shook his head, smiled at me, shrugged. “What happens to too many of these farmers, they turn into machinery junkies. They get three dollars ahead, they want to go deep in hock to buy something about half again too big for the piece they’re working. Bigger tires. Sit higher. A hundred more horsepower. Then suppose they drop the support level on his crop. He can’t meet the payments on all that equipment, and pretty soon he gets foreclosed and loses the land too. And everybody from John Deere to International Harvester helps push them into bigger stuff. Fancy advertising. Know the smartest man in the county? Old Lopez. He’s down on the Benavides Road. He’s older than me, which means older than God himself. Old Lopez has got three husky sons. He had tractors and cultivators and all that shit. But when the gas price jumped out of sight—it takes eighty gallons to work one acre of land—he sat down on his porch a whole day thinking it over. And then he went right back to the way he used to do it. He works his spread with six mules. He drives the county agent crazy. He’s making more money than anybody else in this part of Texas. Now he’s got his land all free and clear. Doesn’t owe a dime. You take Miguel there that just drove away. If he don’t owe two hundred thousand right now today, I’ll eat one of old Lopez’s mules. Now wouldn’t it be funny if you come in here to buy a thirty-thousand-dollar tractor and I turned you off before you could even ask? But I don’t think so. You’re no farmer. If you want to sell me something, forget it.”

  “No, sir. What we want to know is, would you know anybody around this area name of Guffey? A farmer, rancher, whatever.”

  He kneaded his pink chin. “Guffey? Guffey. Guffey. Last name?”

  “Last name.”

  “Know anything else about him that could give me a hint?”

  “A long time ago, more than fifteen years ago, he had a young fellow working for him who covered the whole area in a pickup truck, selling those stone Japanese garden lanterns that stand about so high.”

  “Well, hell yes! That was closer to twenty years ago. Two sizes. My Mabel bought two of the little ones for two corners of her rose garden, and I wired them for her and put the switch on the side porch. Pink bulbs she put in there. Turns them on these days only when company is coming after dark. Nice fellow sold them to us. Obliging as could be. Toted them to right where she said to put them, and she changed her mind three times. Now who in the world was he working for? Let me think.”

  “I was told he lived right around here.”

  “Right around here can cover a lot of land, friend. It’s starting to come back. He run off with the daughter. Crazy old coot bought tons of those lanterns. They came into Galveston by ship, and he freighted them on up here. What the hell was his name? Hold on. I know somebody that would know. I’ll give them a ring.”

  He went back into the office, and I could see him in there through the glass, talking and laughing. He came out, shaking his head, after a very long conversation.

  “There was a lot to that story that I’d forgot. I called a woman that remembers everything forever. Seems that over near Encinal, few miles east of the town on State Forty-four, there was a couple named Larker. She was close to thirty and he was closer to fifty. No kids. Mr. Larker, he worked in Encinal at the automobile agency there. His wife bought one of those lanterns when he wasn’t home. And about two months later, he started coming down with the flu at work, and he headed on home, about a fifteen-minute drive, and when he put his car away, he saw that pickup with the stone lanterns in it parked behind a shed. There was a good enough wind blowing so nobody heard him drive in. He tippytoed to one window after another until he looked in the parlor
and there they were on the carpet having at it, with her big long legs hooked over his shoulders, and her butt propped up on a pillow her mother had needlepointed for them for their fifth anniversary. Their two pair of pants had been flung aside, and he could hear Betsy Ann crying out over the sound of the wind. Hume Larker, he said afterward he just felt so terrible, what with having a chill from the wind blowing, teeth chattering, he just turned and sat down and leaned his back against the house and cried like a baby, sitting there hugging his knees. Then he got back into his car and drove out, and apparently they never noticed. He drove around for about an hour, and when he came back the truck was gone. Betsy Ann was in the kitchen, and she asked him why he was home so early and he said he was sick. He said he was going to go to bed, but before he went to bed he had one thing he wanted to do and he wanted her to watch him. She tagged along, looking puzzled, and he got a sledge out of the barn and went out to the kitchen garden and, with her watching, he sledged that stone lantern down into gravel. She didn’t say a word and she didn’t look at him. The next day and the next, he was too sick to go looking for the salesman. He had a high fever and he was out of his head part of the time. Nearly died, his sister told me. He sort of remembered hearing Betsy Ann yelling at somebody to go away. By the time he could rise up out of his bed and load the Remington and go looking for the salesman, the salesman had gone for good. And he had taken Walker Garvey’s youngest daughter with him.”

  “Garvey?” I asked. I felt a presence behind my left shoulder and glanced back and saw Meyer there, listening with a rapt expression. I was glad to see him, because it was beginning to be too much to remember and repeat. But Meyer would remember it, word for word. He has the knack.

  “Garvey, not Guffey,” Bunky said. “Walker Garvey. Crazy stubborn old coot. Seven kids, all girls. They married and moved out soon as they could, until just Izzy was left. Isobelle. Jumpy little thing about sixteen when she left. Scrawny. Hardly even any boobs yet. Little old lively girl with buck teeth and hair so blond it looked white. Joe the salesman had a way with the ladies of all ages.”