Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  “What are we doing, Travis? Just what in the name of hell are we trying to do?”

  “We’re trying to find the man who killed Norma. And we might even succeed.”

  “Then what?”

  “There are no pamphlets about what to do. No instructions. He’s one kind of hunter. I’m another. We can do a little diving around the reefs, maybe a little fishing, call it a day, and head for the barn. Maybe it’s enough to know where he is.”

  There was an unexpectedly steely look in his small blue eyes. “Surely you jest, my friend. We owe something to his next ten years of victims, be they two, four, or twenty. We will find him. We will find a way to …” He hesitated. “All I can think of is a phrase I hear on television. A way to terminate him with prejudice.”

  The plane squealed its tires on the runway, taxied back to the small modern terminal building, and we climbed down the rolling stairs into twilight, sweat, far-off thunder, and the smell of something frying.

  We all stood in line at tall narrow desks where immigration officers checked our passports, then stamped our signed permits and slid them back to us. There was a lot of bright fluorescence in the airport building, and large clocks which did not work. The passengers stood waiting by the stationary conveyor belt which would start up and bring their luggage out of the holes in the wall. Tour guides were herding their customers into small groups, shouting at them about which bus to take. “We all going to Hotel Presidente. You say that, eh? All now. Presidente!”

  “Presidente!” they cried in ragged unison.

  “Good! That where you going. Boos numero saventy-one!”

  There was a guard by the glass doors. Nobody seemed to be going out into the main part of the terminal. I walked smiling toward him, Meyer behind me. I nodded and pushed the door open and he hesitated and backed out of the way. So much for bringing things into Mexico.

  We came out into the rental car area. Some of the stations were closed. Hertz, Avis, Dollar, and Budget were open. We nailed down a three-year-old Plymouth at Budget, pronounced Bood-zhett. It had fifty-two thousand kilometers on it and had recently been painted a curious pink. The air conditioning made conversation impossible. When we had to confer, we turned it off.

  It was about seventeen miles into downtown Cancún. We had to turn right before we got to the center of the city. We turned, as per instructions, at the Volkswagen garage and headed on out to the hotel district. It was a dark hot night and beginning to rain. The hotels were lighted like birthday cakes. I pulled into the Bojorquez, and then the Carrousel, waving away each time the bellhops who scurried out into the rain to take our luggage.

  Farther along, the Dos Playas looked suitable. Not too fancy, not too grubby. For eighty dollars a night, summer rates, plus tax, about twenty-two hundred pesos, we got a small fourth-floor suite with kitchenette. If you put your cheek against the window you could see the Caribbean. If you slid the glass door open you could go out onto a miniature balcony and see a lot more of it, as well as a corner of the pool and some vacant lighted tennis courts, the lights glinting off the bounce of rain.

  We had a big bedroom and a little bedroom. We matched, and Meyer won the little one. We went down to a busy bar. Most of the customers were Mexican tourists. There were a few senior citizens from the States, paired off, drinking tequila, going through the funny ceremony of the slice of lime between the fingers, the salt on the back of the hand. Lick the salt, toss down the shot, bite into the lime. This was creating a certain amount of amusement among the Mexicans, because the tequila they were drinking was a nice amber anejo, which is as smooth as bonded bourbon. The salt-and-lime bit is imperative only when drinking the coarsest kind of mescal, that second distillation from the maguey, which tends to remove the plaque from your molars.

  No Dos Equis at the bar, so we had a pair of Cervesa Negra Modela.

  Meyer said, “He could walk in here, you know.”

  “Totally improbable. But remotely possible. Sure.”

  “And what do we do then?”

  “We become thunderstruck. We stagger with the shock of it all. We point the quivering finger at him and say, ‘B-b-but you’re d-dead!’ ”

  “And then it’s his play?”

  “Exactly right.”

  “I will have absolutely no trouble looking shocked.”

  We took a look at the menu and decided to try a place we had passed on the right-hand side about four hotels back: Carlos ’n’ Charlie’s. When we looked outside, the rain had stopped, so we walked it, on a curving path, quite wide, made of some kind of red tile blocks, between plantings that smelled like flowers and richness after the rain.

  The restaurant smelled of good food, but the music was too loud. We were early. It was only seven. Mexicans eat at nine, and the tourists from Stateside soon catch the habit. The man who took us back to the table looked taken aback, astonished at his own bad guessing, and totally pleased when I dropped a hundred-peso note on him out of my beer change. He immediately moved us to a better table, by a window overlooking the lagoon, and snapped his fingers to bring a waiter on the run. He said the broiled fish was fresh and good, as were the tiny shrimp from Campeche. Shrimp cocktail, broiled fish, and a bottle of local white wine.

  “Who are we supposed to be?” Meyer asked. “Just tourists?”

  “What we are is refugees from the sorry real estate situation in Florida. We took a look at what was moving in Dallas and Houston, and a friend suggested we might make a connection down here, selling time-sharing in the condos.”

  “What do you know about time-sharing, Travis?”

  “Only what I learned secondhand from Cody, when he was being Evan Lawrence.

  “One of the sales arguments is that when you buy a week or two weeks’ occupancy in a registered condominium, you can subscribe to a centralized computer service and through that service trade places and dates with some other time-share owner. But essentially, what you do is buy the right to inhabit your one fiftieth or one twenty-fifth share of an apartment for a specific week or two weeks for the rest of your life.”

  “Arguments against?”

  “In a fifty-apartment building, half sold on two weeks, half on one week, you have thirty-seven hundred and fifty owners. That number of families can seriously damage the facilities available to everyone: pool, courts, beach, all common areas. The original owners, once all the time is sold, move on. It is up to the thirty-seven hundred and fifty owners to find somebody who will take charge of maintenance, rent the empties on due notice, and take care of the two weeks of close-down and refurbishing once a year. People resist any increase in assessments. People mistreat the furnishings and appliances. In theory it sounds attractive. In practice it can be extraordinarily messy.”

  “A ripoff?”

  “In most cases. If you cannot sell an apartment to one owner for a hundred thousand dollars, you sell it to fifty owners for thirty-five hundred apiece. Can you imagine being the last one in line, before the annual facelifting, and half the families in there ahead of you had small children and puppies?”

  “So we will be posing as con men.”

  “In a sense, yes. Cynicism will be more convincing than an air of earnest integrity.”

  When we were bowed out by the headwaiter, a small, dark, burly Mexican thrust a pamphlet at each of us. It was a single sheet, folded. It invited us to free drinks and snacks from four to six o’clock any day at the Azteca Royale, a brand-new apartment building designed for vacation sharing. Absolutely free, without obligation. On Fridays the freebies would include a ride in a launch around the Nichupte Lagoon. Come to the reception desk outside the public lounge near the model apartment.

  “This is what we were talking about,” Meyer said.

  “And they will know Willy No-Last-Name.”

  “If Cody Pittler was not lying, Willy was selling time shares right here in Cancún the first two months of this year.”

  Twenty-one

  The Azteca Royale was under construction f
arther out along the island chain, out beyond the turnoff to the Hotel Camino Real, almost to the shopping plaza that served the hotel district, and not far from a convention center and a native crafts center.

  In the morning we had ridden on out to the end to where a gate and a guard barred the way to the Club Mediterranee, bribed our way past the guard, bought twelve dollars’ worth of beads, and sat at an outdoor bar with a good view of the pool, drinking a brace of rum punches while we admired the pleasantly tanned mammary equipment of the younger lady guests. The bartender took three one-dollar beads for each drink, so two apiece was all our beads would buy. Bright sun, dark shade, ample drinks, and firm bobbing boobs splashing around in the blue water tended to stimulate erotic imaginings. This was what vacations are for.

  After a light lunch and a nap back at Dos Playas, we were ready for the sales pitch. The public lounge with the model apartment beyond it was at the right, or east, side of the structure that was going up. It had little brown men crawling all over the reinforced concrete beams of the basic framework, hauling up buckets of this and that on frayed ropes, their muscular brown backs clenching and shining in the afternoon sunlight.

  It was five after four. A handsome young man in an elegant linen suit sprang up from behind the reception desk, hand outstretched, smile wide. “Welcome!” he said. “Welcome! We have marvelous things to show you, gentlemen.”

  “Bet you do,” I said.

  He handed us each a batch of pamphlets and directed us into the lounge. It was large. There were little conversational islands of chairs placed on rugs at random around the large tiled floor. A maid in uniform, her eyes half closed, stood leaning against the wall behind an improvised bar, a long table covered with sheeting. Two more elegant men and two handsome young women were talking together. They all turned to stare at us, and after a murmured discussion, the taller and better-looking of the two women came striding toward us, turning to pop her fingers at the maid and jolt her out of her trance.

  “Welcome!” she said. “Welcome, gentlemans. Welcome to the luffly Azteca Royale!” She wore a white blouse with a little black string tie, and dark red slacks closely fitted. She had a fine walk and lots of eyelashes.

  “What would you like for drinking, please?”

  I had a small dull headache from the rum, and asked for a beer. She turned and said some machine-gun Spanish across the room to the maid, who delved into an ice chest and came on the run with two opened bottles of Carta Blanca and two frosty mugs. The girl asked our names and told us hers was Adela and looked down and pointed to her badge, which did indeed say Adela thereon. She guided us over to one of the little chair groups, and the maid put the beers, coasters, and paper napkins on the table. Adela said she was sorry she could not join us in a beer, but she would have a Fresca, and her steely look at the maid sent her scampering off to get it.

  “So!” said Adela. “What do you say? Here is looking on you?”

  “Looking on you,” said Meyer, and we sipped.

  “What a wonderful opportunity this is for you mens! Now we are having the preconstruction pricing. And we can offer some of the best times in the year. The Christmas and the New Year’s is gone already. But there is a nice week from the middle end of January, or two weeks if you like that. Do you like that, Mr. Mickey?”

  “McGee. Miss Adela, I think maybe we are here under false pretenses.”

  She looked blank. “What is this pretenses?”

  “My partner here, Mr. Meyer, and I, we thought we might come down here and sell some of this time-sharing to the tourists for you.”

  She stared at us and then shook her head slowly from side to side. “Oh, no! This is a most bad season for selling. More people selling than buying. You have no papers to work here?”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “It is very hard to get them. Very long time. You have to have a … how you say, abogado?”

  “Lawyer,” Meyer said.

  “Yes, and is much, how you say, bite for you to get papers.” She rubbed her thumb and two fingers together in the time-honored gesture which means bribery.

  I smiled at her. “Now suppose I went right out and sold three weeks for you and came back with the people and you signed them up. Wouldn’t you give me a little gift?”

  She chewed at her underlip. “But I could cheat you, no?”

  “A nice woman like you wouldn’t cheat us.”

  “I am not the jefe here. I wouldn’t say. You have experience?”

  “Mucho!” I said. “Millions. But maybe we ought to get in touch with a fellow I know down here who’s in this line of work. Willy. I can’t remember his last name.”

  “Willy?”

  “Another friend named Evan Lawrence was working with him, and Evan didn’t have any papers either.”

  “Oh, what you mean is Weelliam Doyle, from Yooston.”

  “That’s who I mean.”

  “Oh, he is gone a long time, that one. Many weeks. Too damn bad. My fren’ thinks he comes back. I don’t think so. She’s a very high-class lady even if she’s Indio. She’s still living in his place, waiting for Weelliam.”

  “Would she know where Evan Lawrence is?”

  “Who can say? I do not see him any more either.”

  “Where can I find this woman? What’s her name?”

  “Barbara. Barbara Castillo. The place, it is down that way, toward the land. You will see it on the right hand. La Vista del Caribe. Apartments. His is ground floor on the front, no view. Ring the bell on Doyle.” She looked at her watch. “But Barbara is not coming there yet from work. She is running a reservation computer at Hotel Camino Real every day. And waiting. Maybe after six, a little bit after.”

  “Thanks. Sorry we weren’t in the market to buy.”

  She gave a shrug, made a funny little gesture with her hand. “So if it looked like you could buy, the other girl would be here, no? She is working longer than me.”

  • • •

  We got to La Vista del Caribe shortly after six. It was already almost dark. I would never, by choice, live just over a time line, on the west side of the line. All year long, your days are too short.

  There was no one at the desk. Little kids were racing up and down the corridors. We looked around the ground floor until we found the right place: number 103. He had cut down an engraved calling card to fit the name slot. William Devlin Doyle, Jr.

  The bell was underneath the name slot. I pushed it three times without result. As we were discussing what to do next, the door suddenly opened. She was tall and slender. She wore a robe and held it closed around her with her left hand. Her smile of greeting disappeared abruptly. She wore a black shower cap. There were droplets of water on her face.

  “I was … who are you?”

  “We’re from Houston, Miss Castillo. We’re looking for Willy. My name is McGee and this is Meyer.”

  I was trying to look my ingratiating, foot-scuffing, aw-shucks best as she looked us over. “Come in, then. Please.” She led us into the living room. It was a small room, the furniture spare and gleaming, two unusual primitive paintings on the white wall, a bookshelf with books, small pieces of sculpture, two masks.

  “Please be seated. I will be with you in a few moments.” She went down a short corridor off to the right. Ahead I could see through a pass-through arch into a white shiny kitchen.

  I slowly let my breath out and said to Meyer, “Is that the most unusually beautiful woman you have ever seen?”

  “Very unusual,” he said.

  When she finally came back out, I hopped up. She wore a long toga affair in a crude rough weave, in an oatmeal color, sleeveless, tied at the waist with a thick gold cord. She wore gold sandals. Her gleaming black hair was brushed long. She had a suggestion of a look I had seen on drawings of old Mayan carvings, the slant of forehead, imperial nose, firm lips, the very slightly recessive chin, the neck as long as the ancient Egyptians’. Her eyes were a large almond slant, the color of oiled anthracite. Her hair was
long, coarse, black, and lustrous.

  “Please be seated, Mr. McGee. May I get you gentlemen a drink?”

  I said a beer would be fine if she had one. I didn’t really want it. I just wanted to watch her move around. She seemed to glide. It was the color and texture of her skin that was so unusual, and so complimentary to the rest of her, to her features, her slenderness, her polite dignity. It was a flat dusky tan, all the same even shade, not a suntan but a natural tone, without flaw, with the look of silk.

  She brought the beer to us in mugs, on a tray. She said she was having her third glass of iced tea. The air conditioning had broken in the offices of the Camino Real, and she was dehydrated. All she could think of, riding the bus home, was a long cool shower.

  “You are from Canada?” Meyer asked.

  She smiled at him. “You are very good with accents, I think. I was educated in Canada, Mr. Meyer. But I was born in a little village to the south of here called Noh-Bec. It’s a Mayan village.”

  “So you are Mayan?” Meyer said.

  “I suppose. If there are any true Mayans left. The Mayans were a quiet peace-loving people. Long ago the Toltecs, war-like Indians, came over from Mexico and conquered the Mayans and interbred with them. I would suppose there would be some Spanish blood as well. That is the rumor in my family.”

  “It’s a long way from Noh-Bec to Canada,” Meyer said.

  She smiled again. “A leading comment? Why not. My father and mother went down to Chetumal when I was three. They worked in the home of a man named McKenzie. The McKenzie daughter and I became inseparable. We were the same age. When we were eight years old, with my father’s permission, Mr. McKenzie sent the two of us up to Toronto to live with his aunt and go to school there. Eliza McKenzie is still my best friend. She’s married and lives in Toronto and has two children.”

  “I lectured in Toronto in June,” Meyer said, ignoring my glance of warning.

  “How nice. Is it still beautiful?”

  “Very.”