Ride The Pink Horse

by Dorothy B. Hughes

  She wouldn’t stay there all evening nursing the Sen. She wasn’t in love with the Sen. He’d hypnotized her some way, like he’d hypnotized others. But you didn’t stay that way. You caught on after a while. You found out the Sen was cold as steel, you found out he was using you. Even a lug like Sailor caught on after a while. She’d be going to dress pretty soon. To dress for dinner and the big Baile. Going with a young fellow. Because the Sen was sick. All Sailor had to do was wait. Wait till she and the young fellow came downstairs. Then he’d go upstairs. Easy as that.

  He strolled out of the crowd, to the back portal. There wasn’t a place to sit down. The Mexican orchestra in their satins and velvets were playing the dressed-up crowd into the New Mexican room. A crimson velvet rope held off the crowd, like it was the Pump Room. If it was the Pump Room Sailor could go up to the rope and there’d be a reservation. He was one of the Sen’s fellows.

  The patio outside was filled too. The fountain splashed and the swings creaked lazily. The bar boys’ white coats were luminous under the blue floodlight, the geraniums were dark and scented. Laughter spilled over the fountain, the laughter of those who were young and protected by the best families and beautiful homes with green lawns, who were born right. Who didn’t have business here, nothing to do but dance out the Fiesta.

  He stood there leaning against the door between the patio and the portal. He wasn’t surprised that Mac joined him.

  Mac said, “How about dinner?”

  ”Too early.”

  “I have a table in the dining room,” Mac said. He went on along. But he left hunger behind him.

  Sailor didn’t have to stand here and wait. He could take an hour off to eat. Kill time, eat and sleep. Get off his feet. No other way to get off them during Fiesta. It would take her that long to get dressed. The New Mexican room had a better smell than a greasy joint. He could get away from Mac easy enough later.

  He didn’t think about it any more. He followed the way Mac had gone. It wasn’t the New Mexican room; it was the main dining room. Another rope, another crowd, but he edged through it. “Mr. McIntyre’s table.”

  He hoped Mac had done something about letting the tall girl on the door know a friend might be along. Mac had. He looked up amused when she brought Sailor to the table.

  “Not too early now?”

  Sailor took it. “Time sure passes quick during Fiesta.” Just as if time hadn’t been dragging her heels these days.

  Mac held the menu. “Have a cocktail? Forgot, you don’t drink.” He caught the eye of a nice looking Spanish-American fellow in a dark business suit. “Could I get a martini?”

  “I think so.” The fellow smiled. He didn’t have any accent. “And you, sir?”

  Sailor nodded. “I’ll celebrate with you, Mac. Make it two.” The fellow made him feel at home. Two city-looking fellows in a roomful of gaudy costumes. Even the waitresses in costume. The fellow was polite too, not like the old hag at the desk. She could use a dose of Spanish blood.

  “Going to the Baile?” Sailor asked Mac.

  “I don’t think so. Are you?”

  Mac would keep close guard on the Sen tonight. Sailor smiled inside. It wouldn’t be close enough. Mac didn’t know what room the Sen was in.

  “I might,” Sailor told him. Just as if he had a girl somewhere that he was going to take care of. A lovely silver girl, not an Indian kid, or a skinny little slut with frizzy hair, or a slattern with sultry eyes and a dirty neck.

  The nice looking Spanish-American in the business suit was directing a dumb kid in shapeless whites to their table. The kid had an Indian face. He handled the martini tray as if he were certain he was going to spill it. But he made it, set the cocktails down. Just slopping them a little.

  Mac lifted his glass. “Viva las Fiestas!”

  “Viva las Fiestas,” Sailor echoed.

  The martini was cold and dry and right. When he got to Mexico City he’d start having a cocktail before dinner. It gave you a feeling of luxury to be sipping a cocktail in a gay dining room. He’d laid off liquor long enough for the Sen’s business.

  He could do as he damn pleased from now on. He’d be his own boss tomorrow. Mariana.

  He said, “They got you doing it, too.”

  “Doing what?” Mac was writing the order.

  “Talking Spanish. Viva las Fiestas. Mariana. Mi amigo. Who’d have thought we’d ever be talking Spanish together?”

  Mac handed the order blank to the small dark girl. Her skirts rustled away, “Funny world,” Mac said.

  Sailor kept on talking. He didn’t want Mac to get back to the case. And he didn’t want Mac to start preaching. He wanted to enjoy this hour.

  “Yeah, it’s funny. When I got in here I thought they were all just a bunch of dirty spies. I didn’t have any use for any of them. But you take Pancho now.”

  “Who’s Pancho?”

  “The guy that runs Tio Vivo.” He thought Mac knew about Pancho. Then he saw that Mac did, only he didn’t know him by that name. “I call him Pancho. Pancho Villa. He’s got a long Spanish name. Don ]osé de something or other. Says he’s a descendant of a conquistador way back when Fiesta got started. He looks more like Pancho Villa to me.”

  Mac smiled, “He does.”

  “Well, you take Pancho. He’s dirty all right. I bet he doesn’t take a bath once a year. Probably never owned a tooth brush in his life. But he’s muy macho. He’d do anything for you if you’re his amigo—” He broke off. “There I go again thinking Spanish.” He took another sip. “Not because he wants something out of you but because he wants to do something for you. That’s the kind of guy Pancho is.”

  Mac nodded.

  “Maybe they’re not all kind of simple that way. But they don’t shove you around. They give you a smile. Even if you don’t talk their language they don’t shove you around. The way we shove them around when they come up to our town.”

  “I know,” Mac said. “I’ve thought sort of along that line myself. We’re the strangers and they don’t treat us as strangers. They’re tolerant. Only they’re more than tolerant. Like you say, they’re friendly. They give you a smile not scorn.”

  Sailor was thinking of Pancho. And he was talking too much, it could be the martini. “They’re poor. It isn’t good to be poor,” Sailor quoted Pancho. “But if you have to be, it’s better to be out in this country, I guess. Where nothing matters much.”

  He was somewhat startled at hearing the words come out of his mouth. If he had to stay here, this alien land would get him, just like it got everyone. He’d be a mañana man himself; he wouldn’t have any more ambition than Pancho. He’d start believing like Pancho, ambition and pride got you nothing, only to be conquered by two-bit-fifty-cent gringos. Better to forget grandeur and glory, to sing and dance and work a little, un tragito on Saturday nights, go to Mass on Sunday mornings. Better to be happy in your little life than to be important. You could hold on to your pride because it was all you had left; you wouldn’t know it was only a word you’d learned long ago.

  This was what the Indians had done to the intruder, this was how they would diminish him to non-existence. The Indians and the land were one, strong, changeless, unconquerable.

  The frozen terror he had known as a kid before a piece of sculpture was a chill in him now. For that inanimate hunk of woman had known then that his world, squalid and miserable as it was, was not the rock he thought it was. She had known the rock would disintegrate, that in time there’d be the Sen, and the Sen would run out on him and he’d be driven into this alien land. She hadn’t warned, she hadn’t pitied or gloated; she’d known. He out of all the kids in the Art Museum that day would be trapped in a land where she knew he did not exist.

  He was getting screwy. Why did he keep thinking trap? Why had he thought trap ever since he came here? A piece of land couldn’t trap a man. Even if it spread on and on like eternity all over the earth until the mountains stopped it. He wasn’t trapped. He was getting out.

 
; He didn’t know what McIntyre had been talking about. He heard only what the copper was saying now.

  “It’s good for us to see how other people live. We get awfully narrow in our own little lives. We get thinking we’re so all-fired important that nobody else counts. We forget that everyone counts, that everybody on this earth counts just as much as we do.”

  Sailor said, “Yeah. You’re right, Mac.” He grinned. “Just the same, good as these people are, I’m thankful I don’t have to live here. Give me Chicago, U.S.A.” He began to eat.

  Mac said, “This is the U.S.A.”

  “This wouldn’t be the U.S.A. in a million years. No matter what flag they fly.” Mac didn’t know the secret. “It’s a foreign land. We don’t belong here.” Mac didn’t have to worry about the secret. He was going back to Chicago. He hadn’t been exiled by the evil of a nasty old man. Sailor wasn’t going to be exiled either. He’d get out of here and set up business in Mexico but once he was a big shot with plenty of dough to oil the wheels, he would go back to Chicago. His hands were plenty clean. He’d keep them clean. He wasn’t going to use the gun on the Sen. He could collect without that.

  This was the way a man ought to eat. Service. No hurry. Clean people around you. This was the way he was going to live from now on. Free. Not just on sufferance as a gentleman with the Sen paying the bills. Nobody was going to look down a nose at him any more.

  They both lit up. Comfortable. Waiting for their ice cream. Lulled.

  “How long has the senator known Iris Towers?”

  Mac knew when you were lulled. He was never off his single track even when he pretended to be. He was trying to add up two and two; trying to make the murder, the getting rid of an old wife to make room for a young one. As if there were need for any more motive than a fifty-grand insurance policy. Mac didn’t need to add it up to five; four was good enough.

  Sailor said, “I didn’t know he knew her. Until he took this trip.”

  “She’s a pretty girl.”

  She was lovely as a dream; she was the only lovely thing in this strange dream.

  “The Sen tell you he was going to marry the Towers girl?”

  Sailor snapped it short. “He didn’t tell me a thing. He never mentioned her to me.” He didn’t want to talk about this. Maybe Mac was trying to needle him. Maybe Mac knew how he felt about this girl being mixed up with the Sen. “It’s always been strictly business between me and the Sen.” He didn’t know how to get off the subject. “Ever since he hired me that day down at the pool hall. Remember the old pool hall, Mac? I was pretty good at pool till I moved up with the Sen.” He was moving away nicely. He grinned. “Then I learned bridge and gin.”

  Mac wasn’t moving so fast. “You took care of the business records.”

  “That was Zigler’s job.” Mac was probably going to impound the records. If he hadn’t already. They wouldn’t be pretty. Real estate covered too much in the Sen’s books.

  “You could probably explain them pretty well. A confidential secretary.”

  The ice cream arrived. And the coffee.

  Sailor tried the coffee first. “What you after, Mac? A political stink?”

  “I’m after the murderer of Senator Douglass’ wife,” Mac said calmly.

  “But you don’t mind if you break the organization wide open.” It was his tum to heckle. “The Sen shouldn’t have opposed you in the elections.”

  “The Sen offered me his support. Through an emissary. I turned it down.” Mac lifted an eyebrow. “You knew that?”

  He hadn’t known. The Sen didn’t talk about his failures. All he’d known, all the gang had known, was that the organization was out to beat Mac’s bunch. And they hadn’t. Because the Sen’s mind even then was on Iris Towers?

  “I don’t like men who corrupt and destroy. I don’t like crooks who get rich off the poor. I just don’t like them. The senator offered me a job when I was a young cop, Sailor. I turned it down.” His mouth was set. “Ask me why, Sailor? I’ll tell you without asking. I’d just fished one of his confidential secretaries out of the lake. After that he picked fellows like you. Those who already had a record. Those who could stomach it.”

  “Why did he act like he didn’t know you today?”

  “Maybe he’s forgotten. Maybe he prefers not to know me. I’ve stayed out of his way. But I knew that long ago that he wouldn’t let anything stand in his way. What were you doing at his house that night?”

  Sailor said stubbornly, “Let me see him and I’ll tell you.” Mac picked up the check. Sailor reached out his hand. “It’s on me.”

  “Not tonight. I invited you.”

  It would help; he was low enough after his handouts. He’d buy Mac a better dinner in Mexico City. He said, “I won’t argue. My turn next.” He could excuse himself now but he’d be polite, wait Mac for the change.

  Mac put a bill on the tray. His face was solemn. “You’re still determined to take the chance?”

  “There’s no chance, Mac,” Sailor insisted. “Only I got to see him before I talk. I owe him that much.”

  “You don’t owe him a damn thing, Sailor.”

  He didn’t. Nothing good. But he owed the Sen plenty for these three days of bunking on the ground. Plenty for that slit under his shoulder. Plenty for making him wait for his just pay.

  He urged, “Let me see him.” As if Mac could. As if Mac had the Sen shut up incommunicado. No Zigler to bust him loose with a habeas corpus.

  Mac said flatly, “He doesn’t want to see you.”

  “He tell you that?”

  Mac smiled, “Let’s stop the dodging, Sailor. Give me a name, the name of a murderer, and I’ll get you to Senator Douglass quick. If you can’t see it any other way, take it your usual way. The way that’ll pay you off.”

  But not in greenbacks. They left the dining room, wading through the crowd still hungering against the velvet rope. Sailor knew how to get away. “Let me think it over. You’ll be around?”

  “I’ll be around.”

  5

  He went out of the hotel, into the cold night warmed by the excitement of Fiesta. He turned his back on it, walked away up the brief street. The dark bulk of the cathedral loomed there, implacable as Judgment Day. It didn’t bother him any. A long time till Judgment Day. He turned past it and circled the block. There could be a back door to the hotel.

  If there was he didn’t see it. Walls and then the balconies of La Fonda tiering up to the high flat roof. He could climb to a balcony but it wasn’t a good idea. Not if someone were inside the room he tackled, someone who’d start yelling for a cop. He went on up the street passing under the canopy of the side door, and again he was smack against Fiesta.

  You couldn’t escape it tonight. He walked right into it through it, drenched with it to the opposite street, to the museum. The Indians were no longer under the portal; their absence was somehow more frightening than the black, silent, watching eyes had been. The Indians knew these days must end. They had never believed in the dream. They had never been of it.

  He boosted himself up to the ledge as soon as there was space and he sat there, marking time until nine o’clock. Just sitting and watching Fiesta dance by, listening to the musicians overplaying each other from the bandstand and the platform down below where the Mariachi sang and the scrape of Tio Vivo and the strolling guitarists. It would be too bad if a fellow’s life wasn’t any more than a merry-go-round, somebody cranking you up to whirl around in style, then letting you peter out into where you started from. That might have been the way it would be for him if he hadn’t got what he did on the Sen. Because the Sen was ending the organization; the Sen wasn’t carrying it with him into the world of Iris Towers and her wealth and influence. If Sailor hadn’t waited around that night, he’d be whistling for his supper. The way Humpty and Lew would be if they ever went back to Chi. Luck had been on his side and he was keeping it there. He’d be just as careful of the Sen as Mac would be. He wanted to deliver the Sen in a neat package to Ma
c as bad as Mac wanted him delivered. To pay the Sen not only for what he’d done but for what he would have done if he could have married Iris Towers.

  He waited until nine and then he started back to the hotel. By now she’d be gone for sure, she and the rest of the Sen’s party. Off to dinner and the Baile. The only thing was to avoid Mac. He’d figured it out earlier. At the side door. He didn’t even have to enter the lobby.

  Through the side door, pass the entrance to the Indian shop on the left; on the right, pass the steps leading down to the barber shop. Then the small flight of steps leading up to a corridor, Woman’s Rest Room, Beauty Shop, hotel rooms. The corridor ran parallel to the right-hand portal, you came out of it down another small flight of steps and you were by the elevator. You never went into the crowd in the lobby. It was that easy.

  The elevator was deserted as usual. “Four,” Sailor said. The fourth-floor corridor was as deserted, a ghost walk. No sounds from any of the closed doors. Past the Sen’s closed door, past three more closed doors and this was the number of Iris Towers’ room. The room she’d originally had.

  There wasn’t a sound inside. Empty of sound as the corridor where Sailor stood. He knocked, knocked again, kept knocking. The silence within deepened, the echoes of his left-hand knuckles on the door wavered in the emptiness. He couldn’t shout in to the Sen; he mustn’t attract attention. It could be someone was in a neighboring room. The overhead transom was dark, the Sen could be asleep. He could be lying there in the dark, scarcely breathing, knowing who was outside.

  There was only one thing to do now. Go inside. The key was on his ring, the key that opened locked doors. A little present from the Sen, when the Sen needed him to open some stubborn doors. There was no risk in using it. If Iris Towers or any of the others were in there, they’d have answered his knocking.

  The door opened noiselessly. He moved with its opening to stand in protective darkness against the wall. His foot kicked the door shut. The gun was in his hand. Its dull metallic gleam would show up even in the lightless room. That much light came from the night outside the windows.