Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  “A salvage consultant doesn’t have to do all that paperwork with licenses and all that, and he doesn’t have to report to the law every time he enters a new territory. McGee, are you hired out to this professor?”

  “We’ve been close friends for many years,” Meyer said with enough indignation to be convincing.

  Sigiera picked up the card with the name and address Meyer had gotten from the university records. “Set still,” he said, and headed out of the room, leaving the door open.

  He was gone almost forty minutes. Time dragged. The fan made a clicking sound. An insane mocking-bird played its endless variations in a live oak outside the window. It was too hot for conversation.

  When he did come back, it was obvious that something had sobered him. He had a file folder in his hand, a buff folder of the type where the sheets are fastened at the top with metal tabs that come up through two holes in the sheets and are bent over. The metal fasteners were rusty.

  “Had to go over to the courthouse annex to get this,” he explained. “There was a card on it here because it’s still an open file. It’s still an open file because I think we’re looking for the same fella.” He checked the name again. “Cody Tom Walker Pittler, who, if he’s living, was forty-two years old the twenty-fourth of this month. And what we want him for, it happened twenty-two years ago last month. I was a little kid then, but I can remember hearing about it because it was something dirty. You know how little kids are. Everybody whispered about it that summer. First, let’s double-check on him being the same one.”

  He slipped a photograph out of the file. A boy of about seventeen stood grinning at the camera. He was in football togs, helmet under his arm, hair tousled. The young Evan Lawrence, we agreed.

  “High school,” Sigiera said, “before he went away. Before he had the trouble.”

  He seemed thoughtful and in no hurry, and we made no attempt to push him. He flipped pages, read for long minutes.

  He slapped the folder shut. “It’s all in our damn cop language,” he said. “The decedent, the angle of entry, the alleged this and that. Too many words. That’s the trouble with the law lately. Too many words. Too many writs. Too many pleas. We can live with it. We have to live with it. But sometimes it gets a little scratchy.

  “Here’s what happened. Cody was apparently a normal kid. No juvenile record. No problems. His father, name of Bryce Pittler, owned a small contracting business that did foundations, put in septic tanks, and so on. Had a yard and a little warehouse and three transit-mix trucks. Worked hard at it and did okay. When Cody was about thirteen and his sister, Helen June, was eighteen, their mother died sudden. She caught the flu and it went into pneumonia and she tried to keep right on going no matter what, and they got her into the hospital too late. Bryce Pittler waited two years and then he married a twenty-five-year-old woman that worked in the office for him. Her name was Coralita Cardamone, half Mexican, half Italian, and she was supposed to be one very hot number around town at that time. If he hadn’t up and married her so fast, his friends would maybe have had a chance to warn him off her. A year after they were married, that would be when Cody was sixteen or thereabouts, one of the big building supply outfits from Houston came down to all these little places along the river, buying up small contracting firms. They gave Bryce Pittler an offer he couldn’t refuse, because it gave him a good piece of money, and they kept him on to run it the way he had before. They did that with the other outfits they bought, and some of the ex-owners turned out to be good managers and a lot didn’t.

  “Bryce Pittler turned out to be one of the good ones, so what they did after not too long was to make him a regional manager, covering all the way from Brownsville to El Paso. The daughter, Helen June, got married and moved out. Bryce Pittler had to be away three and four nights a week. That left Coralita and the kid alone in the house. I don’t know how they got started, but bet your ass it wasn’t the kid’s idea. He thought his old man was absolute tops. They were close. But it was going on. They interrogated Coralita’s best friend, a woman named”—he flipped the folder open, turned a few pages—“Leona Puckett, who said Coralita had told her about the whole affair. Leona said she had begged Coralita to stop with the kid because it was a mortal sin. Apparently when the kid got back after his first year in college, they picked right up again, just like they probably did whenever he came home for vacation. She was a very ripe woman, and they say she never got as much as she needed, and from what Leona reported, the kid was so well hung she just couldn’t bring herself to give it up. So it was the old old story, except it was the traveling man that came home to find his wife in bed with his son. He heard them and went and got his target pistol, the one he’d taught the boy to shoot. From the coroner’s report, the woman was on top, and the headboard of the bed was against the wall opposite the kid’s bedroom door. Maybe he didn’t even know it was his son under there when he nailed her with one shot right to the base of the skull. She was instantly dead in mid-stroke. There were signs of a struggle. A chair tipped over. Bryce Pittler was on the floor, still alive, with a bullet that had gone through his lower right chest at an upward angle, nicked a big artery, and lodged against his spine. The pistol was near his right hand. The wound was consistent with what could have happened if they struggled for the gun. Pittler never came out of it. A neighbor walking his dog in the yard next door heard two shots, and then as he was wondering whether to phone it in, a car came roaring out of the drive and turned north. He phoned it in. Pittler died on the table. Never said a word. They had a double service. There was an all-points bulletin out. The law looked, but not very hard. I don’t think the kid was running from us as much as he was running from what happened. I mean, that’s about as rough as it can get for a kid. It’s like in those old Greek plays. The neighbor recognized the profile of the kid driving the car as it passed the streetlight. And he hasn’t been seen since. Here’s a picture of the woman.”

  I looked at it and handed it to Meyer. Five-by-seven black-and-white glossy of a slender girl standing by a boat pulled up on a rocky beach. You could see the trees on the hazy far shore. She had turned to look back over her left shoulder, to smile at the camera. Her face looked small and sweet under the heavy weight of dark hair. Her smile was provocative. Her hips were rich and vital in taut white slacks below the narrowness of her waist. It was a starlet pose, hip-shot, canted. I wondered if Meyer was as surprised as I was to see how young she looked.

  “So let’s say Coralita started making it with the kid when he was seventeen. It wouldn’t be any big problem to get him started. Kids that age don’t think of very much else. So she would have him whenever she could when he was eighteen and nineteen and twenty. He must have felt real guilty about not being able to stop. A good strong boy that age could give Coralita a pretty good run. Maybe she tried to end it too. Who knows? But the old man would be away, and they would be alone in the house, eat supper, watch the TV, maybe try not to look at each other. Go to bed. Each one thinking of the other one in the other bedroom, both of them getting hornier and hornier. Both of them with the perfect excuse. What harm can one more time do? Who’s to know? Then one or the other coming cat-foot down the dark hall, sliding warm into the bed, all arms and mouths and groans and shudders.”

  He shook his head.

  “Human sexuality. A hell of an engine. Let it get out of control, and it can kill. You ever hear about the doctor that got asked to speak to the PTA about human sexuality? No? He went home and told his wife he was going to talk to the PTA and she said what about, and he didn’t want to get into some kind of discussion with her about what he should or shouldn’t say, so he told her he was going to talk to them about sailing. She was out of town the day he gave the speech, and when she got back a friend came running up to her and said, ‘Mary, your husband gave the most wonderful talk to the PTA yesterday! You should be very proud of that man.’ The wife stared at her and said, ‘I don’t understand. George just doesn’t know anything about it. He only
tried it twice in his life, and once he got motion sick and the second time his hat blew off.’ ”

  After our dutiful and politic laughter, Meyer said, “What you are telling us about Cody and Coralita, Sergeant, is that you don’t see them as evil people.”

  “What’s evil? They got thrown together. She had the hots and he was just a kid. They were weak and they were stupid, and they happened to get caught. Maybe the best answer would have been if Bryce Pittler had killed them both and then himself. Not because of the punishment or anything like that, but just to keep from turning Cody loose on the world. You talk about psychology, I don’t know shit from Shinola. All I know as a law officer is that there would be no way in God’s world Cody T. W. Pittler could ever feel okay about himself. And the worst crimes I get are the ones done by people who are trying to punish themselves. I think they want to be dead, and they can’t go at it direct, so they keep circling it, giving it a chance to happen.”

  All of a sudden there was a coughing roar that steadied into a loud hum, and cold air began coming out of the vents in the side wall. Paul Sigiera jumped up and closed the small window. He went and stood in front of the vents and bared his chest and said, “Ahhhhh. Finally.”

  “We’ve taken up a lot of your time,” Meyer said.

  He turned and shrugged. “This is Thursday morning, friend. The quiet time. Last weekend’s wars have been ironed out. The troops are regrouping. Tomorrow night there’ll be some skirmishes, and by Saturday the fire fights will start and I’ll be busy as a little dog in a big yard. This has been kinda interesting.”

  “For us too,” I said. “One question. Did you develop a set of prints?”

  “Sure did. Nice and clear. Beer bottle, bathroom glass, countertop, lots of good surfaces. They must have gotten a lot of sets of his and then picked the best and classified them and sent them in to FBI Central records. The theory is he gets picked up for something and the prints go in and they are cross-indexed in some damn way, and they identify him—sooner or later. It used to work better than it does now. But it didn’t work too well, I hear, way back when.”

  “What happened to the car?”

  “From the file they had hopes they could trace the kid that way. It was an almost new DeSoto, off-white. It turned up finally near Alpine. It was at the bottom of a steep cliff out of sight of the highway. A backpacker reported it.” He flipped the folder open again. “Says here they estimate it had been down there six weeks. I don’t know how they worked that out. There was no body near it or in it. It was a place where there was a kind of scenic lookout, where he could have got out and pushed it and let it roll over the edge.”

  I looked questioningly at Meyer. He knew what I meant. He gave a shrug of acquiescence. “What if, using the name Larry Joe Harris, he killed a young girl over in Cotulla eighteen years ago? What if, five years ago, using the name Jerry Tobin, he ran off with a girl from Dallas and killed her in a fake automobile accident down in the hill country? What if, as Evan Lawrence, he married Professor Meyer’s niece and blew her and two other people to bits. He made over two thousand dollars off the killing in Cotulla, two hundred thousand off the Dallas girl, three hundred thousand off his bride from Houston. What would you say to that?”

  “Identification okay?”

  “Through the picture we showed you. Total certainty.”

  “Like I said, I don’t want to get artsy-fartsy fancy, like the psychiatrists in the courtroom. But isn’t what he’s doing, maybe, is killing Coralita over and over, killing his stepmother?”

  “Punishing himself by killing her,” Meyer said. “I could agree.”

  “So then there’s more,” Sigiera said. “It adds up to four years between Coralita and the girl in Cotulla, then a gap of twelve years? He counted with his fingers, tapping them on the edge of his desk. “No, thirteen. Then five years until this one, this month. There’d be more in there. God only knows what his cycle is. If it’s every two years, that makes three you know about and eight you don’t.”

  “Women seem to be strongly attracted to him,” Meyer said.

  “Okay, he’s a compulsive. You take a rapist. They go on and on until you catch them. But that’s a crime of violence, not sex. They want to hurt and kill. This is different. He wants to love and be loved. He wants romance. He wants to heat somebody up until they’re as hungry for it as Coralita was. Then he’s got the excuse to punish himself and her for that kind of sex by killing her, depriving himself.”

  “Meyer and I had dinner with them aboard my houseboat.”

  “That’s the first time you didn’t throw in the word Professor, so now I’ll buy the idea you’re friends. Go ahead.”

  “I remarked afterward to Meyer there was a kind of almost tangible erotic tension between them, almost visible, like smoke in the air.”

  Sigiera shook his head slowly, making a bitter mouth under the droop of the mustache. “All the years,” he said. “All the years on the run. Roaming among the women, all smiles. Taking little jobs and then moving on. Roaming and killing, and in pain all the time. By now he must be damn well expert at picking up new identities. It’s never hard if you start with cash and with the smarts. But it can go wrong. Some little thing. He’d have to be ready at any time to fold the tent and run. I don’t think a man can stand that much tension for too long.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “When you’re a working lawman, you get used to every kind of criminal having a pattern. I got to know a very classy thief. I made a practically accidental collar when I was in Beaumont. He did rich people. Private homes. Coins and stamps and collectibles and jewelry. Portable stuff. He went to the big auctions in New York and Los Angeles. He got a line on his marks there. Would track one to, say, Atlanta. Research the house, the floor plan, the alarm system, the movements of the people who lived there. When the time was right and the house was empty, he’d park a rented van in the drive, with a sign he’d taped to the side saying BUGS-OFF INSECT CONTROL, and he’d walk in in his white suit carrying his spray equipment. Fifteen minutes after he’d bypassed the alarm system, he’d walk out with a pillowcase full of good stuff which he could fence for a very good score. Twice a year he did the same kind of job. I was cruising the neighborhood in an unmarked car, looking for an address of somebody we wanted a statement from. He had trouble busting into a safe and his time got so short he came out nervous, backed out of the blind driveway right into the side of my car. He thought I was a civilian. He came on very hard, but when I showed the badge and the gun he just wilted and sat down on the curbing. All the life went right out of him.

  “While we were holding him, I used to go in and talk to him. Know what? He had a wife and kids in Cincinnati. He was an investment adviser. He had an office in a bank building. He belonged to a downtown club and a tennis club, the Junior Chamber and the Kiwanis. He did a lot of investment advising, and he was good at it. He washed his own money by feeding it in through the office, as consultant fees. He lived good. He had respectability. He told me that every time he made a good score and got back to home base with the money, he’d say to himself, Never again. He was safe. He could breathe. When he was out on a job, his wife and everybody else thought he was off taking a firsthand look at some of the companies where he was thinking of recommending the stock. He told me that he’d say never again, and in a couple of months it would start to build. He’d begin to get restless. And he’d remember how it was when he was inside a rich home. It was a kind of excitement he never could find anywhere else.”

  “I see what you mean,” Meyer said. “This man Pittler might well have a base somewhere, a permanent identity he goes back to.”

  “I think he would have to have,” Sigiera said. “A place to catch his breath. Stash money. Get his ducks in a row. Home base, where they don’t know about his hobby.”

  “Would the sister know?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Helen June whatever.”

  “Good thought,” he s
aid. “They used to go grill her every few weeks until she moved away. She claimed she had never gotten a card or even a call from Cody. Let me see. Her married name ought to be in here someplace.” He looked and grunted when he found it. “Mrs. Kermit Fox. Kermit was called Sonny. But this address is way out of date. Helen June got to be forty-seven by now. There must be somebody in town still sending her Christmas cards. Old Boomer might know. He’s been working for the city for ninety-nine years. You like a little Mexican hot groceries? It’s about that time.”

  He made a call, and then we went out to eat. It was a drive-in called Panchos. We sat at a table in the back. The specialty was chili with chunks of Chihuahua cheese melted in it and on it. Meyer, one of the world’s great chili experts, was under close observation by Sigiera as he tasted it. Sigiera expected a gasp, tears, a mad grab at the ice water. Meyer smacked his lips, looked thoughtful, reached for the Tabasco bottle, put a dozen drops into the chili, stirred it well, tasted again, nodded at Sigiera, and said, “Just right, Paul.”

  “Professor, I’m beginning to like you.”

  He told us about the trials and foul-ups of working with the border patrol on immigration and drugs, and about his adventures as an undercover man in Beaumont.

  We were on second coffees when an erect old man with ample belly, white mustache, white goatee, and a fifty-nine-gallon straw hat came to the table. Sigiera kicked a chair out for him. “Boomer, this here is McGee and this is the Professor. They’re the ones want to know about Helen June Pittler Fox.”

  His handshake was big, dry, and muscular. He must have given his order on the way in. The waitress came with a glass of milk and a small order of tacos.

  Boomer crunched a taco and washed it down with milk, wiped his mouth and whiskers, and said, “After Cody shot his step-ma and pa, about a year after, Sonny and Helen June moved clear out of the state. They moved on all the way up north. Sonny’s folks had original moved down from there and he had some kin up there. Rome, New York. No point in giving you that address, because it isn’t any good any more. Sonny and Helen June had but the one kid and it died in the first year from something wrong with its breathing. Sonny is the best auto mechanic I ever come across. He could make a living anyplace at all. They broke up. Can’t say if there’s a divorce. Anyway, she calls herself Helen June Fox and here’s the address.”