Dog in the Manger: An Eli Paxton Mystery

by Mike Resnick

  “Has he got any favorite hangouts in Monterrey?”

  “We’re checking on it,” said Pratt. “It’s a little harder getting information out of Mexico, though I do have a contact in Monterrey for you, an Officer Juan Vallero. I’ve already told him that you’ll be coming in the next day or two, and he’s promised to get you past any red tape.”

  “Thanks,” I said, scribbling the name down on the back of the photo.

  “When are you planning to leave?”

  “As soon as I can,” I said, slipping on my shoulder holster. “Why give them a chance to catch up with me?”

  “Will you fly down?”

  I shook my head. “I’d be too easy to spot. I’ll rent another car and drive down. What’s the quickest route?”

  “Probably Interstate 10,” he said, “but you’ve got a couple of problems with it.”

  “Oh?”

  “First, you’ll have to pass through Casa Grande, and you might be spotted.”

  “And second?”

  “According to the radio, we’ve got about a dozen cases of plague in the southeastern part of the state, and Interstate 10 goes right through it once it gets south of Tucson. My understanding of plague is that it’s not catching the way a virus is—it gets passed by flea bites—but they’ve set up a bunch of road blocks to make sure no one is trying to get out of the area with a live animal that might be a carrier, much the way they checked cars and trucks leaving the Medfly-infested areas of California a few years back. They’ll let you through after they inspect you, of course, but hell, if we know that Fuentes is our only lead, the bad guys must know it, so they’ll be watching the major routes to Monterrey and the inspection would make you a sitting duck.”

  “So what do you suggest?” I asked him.

  “It’ll take an extra day,” he said, “but if I were you, I’d drive due west of Phoenix for eighty or a hundred miles, and then head south along the Mexican coast. Get a couple of hundred miles south of Monterrey, and then cross over and approach it from the south. It seems to me that if they’re watching for you, they’ll be expecting you to fly in or else drive straight down from the north.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “I opt for security every time.”

  “It’s a pleasant drive.”

  “Right about now, any drive where I don’t get shot at looks pretty pleasant to me,” I assured him.

  “Well,” he said, walking to the door, “I’d better be getting back. You’ll keep in touch?”

  “I promise.”

  He left, and I locked and chained the door behind him and called Jim Simmons in Cincinnati.

  “Just checking in,” I told him when his secretary had hunted him up. “I’ll be out of touch for a couple of days, but Mike Pratt of the Casa Grande Police knows where I’ll be.”

  “Okay,” he said. “By the way, we checked out your two bodies. The guy was too messed up to do anything with, but our coroner says that the girl could have gotten the marks on her head before the car went over.” He paused. “On the other hand, she could also have smashed into the window after she hit the water. Evidently there’s no way to tell, and if you don’t have anything further I’m going to start getting pressure to call it an accident and close the book on it.”

  “It was murder, Jim,” I said firmly. “Tell me: If I can come up with proof of it, will you have any trouble taking it to court if you call it an accident for the time being?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You won’t have to exhume the body?”

  “No,” he said. “We went over it pretty thoroughly. I’ve got two different medical reports on it, plus more photos than you can shake a stick at.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got one more thing for you to do, if you would—and I promise you won’t have to leave your office or look at another corpse.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Find out what kind of law you’d be breaking if you forged an airplane cargo manifest.”

  “I’ll hunt it up. Any reason?”

  “Because if I can’t prove a murder, I’m at least going to start harassing the hell out of someone,” I answered. “Thanks, Jim. I’ll be checking back in a couple of days.”

  “Take care of yourself, Eli,” he said, and hung up the receiver at his end.

  Next I called Lantz, who got hot as hell when he recognized my voice.

  “Where the hell have you been, Paxton?” he demanded.

  “Casa Grande,” I said.

  “For two goddamned days?” he yelled. “How long does it take you to look at a kennel of goddamned Weimaraners?”

  “Nettles is clean. Your friend Joan Linwood says Baroness isn’t there.”

  “Then get on the next flight to Cincinnati—and don’t expect me to pay you for the extra day.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’ve got to go to . . .” I decided not to tell him, just in case someone was bugging his end of the phone. “I’ve got to go somewhere else first.”

  “Not at my expense, you don’t,” snapped Lantz. “I want you to get your ass back here on the double, and write up your findings so I can show them to the AKC.”

  “I haven’t got Baroness yet,” I said as patiently as I could.

  “I don’t give a damn about that! You’ve proven that she got on the plane, and that’s all I care about.”

  “I haven’t proven anything,” I said. “I don’t have a single thing that would stand up in a court of law.”

  “The American Kennel Club isn’t a court of law,” said Lantz. “I told you at the outset: I hired you to get me off the hook. If that entailed finding Baroness, fine; but if not, that’s fine, too. I think you’ve got enough.”

  “And I don’t.”

  “You refuse to come back today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can consider yourself terminated as of this minute,” he said. “And if I don’t get a written report of your investigation within a week, I’ll have your goddamned license pulled.”

  “You can try,” I said, getting a little hot under the collar myself.

  “I’m not without friends in this city.”

  “Save your breath, Mr. Lantz. I’ve been threatened by experts.” Recently, I added mentally.

  I slammed the phone down, counted to twenty, then called Nettles and asked him if his offer still held.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Did Lantz fire you?”

  “We fired each other,” I replied.

  “If you think you might have trouble collecting what he owes you, I can withhold it from his handling bill.”

  “I’m a little ahead of him at the moment,” I said. “Am I working for you now?”

  “You are.”

  “Wherever it may lead?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I have to warn you, in all honesty, that it could get dangerous.”

  “For you?” he asked .

  “For everyone involved,” I said.

  He paused for a moment. “I want my dog back, Mr. Paxton,” he said at last. “If she’s alive, I will spare no expense to get her; and if she’s dead, I will spare no expense to bring retribution to the person or persons responsible. Is that plain enough?”

  I told him it was, and he asked me where I’d be going next. I felt there was a reasonably good chance that his phone might be tapped, so I lied and told him there were a few loose ends I had to take care of back in Cincinnati. He gave me the numbers and expiration dates of his American Express and Diner’s Club cards, told me to use them for airfare and anything else I needed, and asked me to check in with him again in a couple of days. I promised to do so and hung up the phone.

  I packed my bag, paid the hotel bill in cash and kept the receipt, got into the rental car, returned it to Avis, and took a cab to a nearby National—I figured if no. 2 was good, no. 3 was even better for my purposes—where I rented a light blue Honda Accord. Then I headed west of Phoenix until I came to Highway 80, turned south, kept on it until I hit t
he tiny town of Gila Bend, and then continued south to Mexico on Highway 85. It was another typically hot Arizona day, and the heavy traffic didn’t make it any more comfortable. Still, Mike had been true to his word: no one stopped me at the border checkpoint.

  Northwestern Mexico bore an uncanny resemblance to Southwestern Arizona, except for the fact that it was even hotter. As traffic finally thinned out I drove through such world-famous municipalities as Quitovac and Tajito before I hit the first town I had heard of, Santa Ana, which, Burt Lancaster movies to the contrary, couldn’t have held six thousand people. It was in Santa Ana that I picked up Highway 15, which I took down the coast for the next day, stopping only to eat and sleep in an impoverished little town called Empalme. The scenery began to get a little more interesting, and the heat became less oppressive, but the mountains were as brown and ugly as the ones in California and Nevada, and the ocean looked more green than blue. Given a choice, I’d have much rather been driving through the Smokies or the Ozarks—but then, given a choice, I’d much rather have been sitting in a box at Riverfront Stadium, watching the Reds wallop the Dodgers, than driving through any mountains at all. Choices are for the wealthy and the indolent; detectives just follow leads.

  When I got to Mazatlan, which was a pretty fair-sized little town, I stopped for dinner at what claimed to be an American restaurant, and got the shock of my life when I found out that a cup of coffee cost six dollars and a hamburger was twenty. I started making a fuss and the manager came out to explain that obviously I was a newcomer to Mexico and didn’t realize that the dollar sign down here meant pesos and not American dollars. I wolfed down my food as quickly as I could and made a hasty exit, walked straight to a local bookstore, and picked up a couple of tourist guides before returning to my car.

  The drive from Mazatlan to Monterrey took a few hours longer than I had anticipated, partly because of the terrain and partly due to my weariness, but eventually I made it. The city was a lot bigger than I had thought—the sign at the city limits gave the population at something in excess of a million and a half, and it looked old and rusty—and I promptly got lost.

  I found myself going east on something known as Avenue Constitucion, which paralleled a broad dry river bed, and when I hit a huge curved boulevard circling the Plaza Zaragoza I started picking up traffic. I was feeling paranoid enough not to want to ask a local cop for directions, so I just fell into line behind a few hundred other cars, most of them ten or more years old and exported from the States, and after another half hour I began passing Monterrey’s equivalent of Hotel Row.

  I drove right by the Hotel Ambassador, which looked like it had to charge a lot of money to feed its army of costumed doormen, and finally chose the Gran Hotel Ancira, which wasn’t really all that gran but seemed a little closer to my price range. I knew that I could use Nettles’s credit card numbers, but my paranoia started raising its head again and I decided against it. I was probably going to be a big enough target without announcing my presence in that way, and the Ancira looked like about as good a place as I could afford with the cash I had on me.

  I parked in the hotel’s garage, took my suitcase out of the trunk, and registered at the desk. The Ancira was an old hotel that belonged to a slower, more gracious age. Unfortunately, so did the paint and the fixtures. Still, they only charged three hundred pesos a night, a little under fifty dollars, and my room made up in space what it lacked in convenience. I called Jim Simmons back in Cincinnati to tell him I’d arrived and asked him to pass the word along to Pratt and Nettles so their names and numbers wouldn’t show up on the hotel’s switchboard or billing system. Then I took a long hot bath in a tub that would have been far more accessible if they had provided me with a ladder, shaved, and lay down on the bed. I don’t even remember climbing under the covers, but that’s where I found myself fifteen hours later.

  I got up, found that I needed another shave, and went down to the hotel’s equivalent of a coffee shop for breakfast. It was two in the afternoon, and they had replaced their morning eggs with afternoon tamales and spices, so I left without ordering and wandered over to the Ambassador, where I managed to get coffee and a roll, though they looked uncomprehendingly at me when I tried to order some orange juice.

  I picked up a map of the city at a local gift shop, then returned to my room and pulled the file on Fuentes out of my suitcase. He was living in an apartment on Carranza Street, which my map told me wasn’t too far from the Plaza Hidalgo, a former bullfight arena that was now being used for outdoor concerts. I toyed with calling him on the phone, but again decided that I didn’t want the number showing up on my hotel bill, so I walked down to the garage, got the Honda, and began driving south. The tone of the city began changing from tourist to slum, though I never lost sight of the mountains, and then upgraded slightly as I neared his address.

  I stopped a couple of blocks short of my destination, parked and locked the car, and walked the rest of the distance through the surprisingly cool air. Fuentes’s building was square and ugly, an aging structure that had been built of stone, repaired with concrete and mortar, and finally covered by stucco from which the whitewash job was flaking off. Still, I’d just passed by worse structures, and I assumed that this was Monterrey’s equivalent of a middle-class inner-city neighborhood. At least it felt safer than a lot of places I had walked through, like Chicago’s West Side or damned near any street in Manhattan, and I didn’t even worry overmuch about the Honda still being there when I returned.

  I rang his bell, received no answer, and started ringing all the other bells until someone pressed a buzzer and let me in. It was an ancient, withered woman on the ground floor, who opened her door on a chain and shoved her wrinkled, peeling nose up to it. She started jabbering away in Spanish and I jabbered back in English, and it soon became apparent that we weren’t making any progress. Finally I managed to interrupt her tirade long enough to mention Fuentes’s name, and her face brightened perceptibly. With a series of hand signals and facial contortions she informed me that he lived in the apartment above her, then slammed the door while I was trying to ask where I could find him.

  I decided that as long as I was inside the building I ought to take advantage of it, so I climbed up the creaky wooden stairs to the second floor, found Fuentes’s door, and picked the lock. (One learns many useful skills on the Chicago police force.)

  The apartment was dingy but livable. There was a large living room with cheap wallpaper, an unused fireplace, a pair of well-worn couches, and windows that hadn’t been washed since World War II. The dining room had two chairs, a TV set, and no table, which implied that Fuentes ate most of his meals out. The kitchen confirmed that conclusion, since the table in there was covered by three-week-old newspapers and there was nothing in the refrigerator but some spoiled milk and three six-packs of beer. The bedroom was neat, newly painted, and moderately well-furnished with a huge double bed and a brand new dresser and nightstand. It stood to reason that the bedroom would be the best room of the lot, since he was on the road most of the time and probably used this place only to sleep.

  I began going through his dresser drawers. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but all I found were a dozen sets of underwear and socks, and a batch of white shirts that he had recently picked up from a local laundry.

  His closet contained three pilot’s outfits and a couple of snazzy if inexpensive suits, the kind that would be worn with colorful open-necked shirts and cheap gold-plated jewelry.

  I checked the inside of the nightstand, but found nothing except a trio of dirty books, one in English and two in Spanish. The bathroom, which had probably needed remodeling for the past half century, didn’t have a vanity. All of his shaving gear and half a dozen bottles of various spray colognes and mouthwashes were set out neatly atop the toilet tank, and there was an incongruous brocaded satin bathrobe hanging on the back of the door.

  I checked his kitchen drawers next, made the acquaintance of several roaches that had ta
ken up residence there, and then gave the place a last brief tour. If there was anything in that apartment that could tell me what had happened to Baroness or Binder, I sure as hell couldn’t find it.

  I walked out the front door, closed it behind me, and climbed back down the stairs. I checked the door to the stairwell, decided that I could pick it in the dark if I had to, and returned to the Honda.

  I began considering my next move, and didn’t like any of my options. I could stake out the apartment, but a gringo in this neighborhood would stick out like a sore thumb. I could check with Federated’s local office, try to find someone there who spoke English, and find out if Fuentes was in town or, if not, when he was due back, but that would inform anyone who was waiting for me that I had made it to Monterrey. I could stay in my nice safe hotel room and call Fuentes every twenty minutes, but then the switchboard would have a record of my calls—and besides, I’d feel like a crook taking Nettles’s money that way.

  Finally I decided to call Pratt’s contact with the local police, Juan Vallero, and have him do a little of my legwork for me. I went back to the Ancira, spent about twenty minutes on the phone working through a bunch of red tape and non-English-speakers until I finally connected with Vallero, and introduced myself.

  He had been expecting me to contact him, and he informed me that, within limitations, he was at my disposal.

  I told him that I had to speak to Fuentes.

  “You want us to bring him in?” he asked

  “No,” I said. “I just want to speak to him.”

  He suggested that I go to Fuentes’s apartment. I explained that I had been there and he hadn’t been home.

  He then told me to call Federated to find out if Fuentes was even in town, and after a moment’s hesitation, I decided to lay it on the line to him.

  “Federated’s probably being watched,” I said. “If I show up there, or even put through a call that can be traced, I’m a dead man.”

  “I can do it for you,” he offered.