Dog in the Manger: An Eli Paxton Mystery

by Mike Resnick

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said with a chuckle. “Nobody runs drugs from the States into Mexico. The traffic pattern is south to north.”

  “What kind of drugs?” I persisted.

  “Penicillin, and some measles and diphtheria vaccines.”

  “Oh, well,” I sighed. “It was worth a try.”

  “Have fun visiting the sickies and the scientists,” he said. Then, the levity gone from his voice, he added, “And watch your ass, Eli.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I promised.

  I shaved and showered, and when I emerged from the bathroom to get dressed I found a pot of coffee sitting on a tray on the dresser. Some protection Vallero was giving me.

  I was just about to call him to give him a piece of my mind when the phone rang and I found myself speaking to him.

  “We identified the man you killed,” he told me. “His name is Jesus Bora. He’s a Guatemalan with two manslaughter arrests in Mexico.”

  “I told you so,” I said smugly.

  “I know,” he said. He paused, and I could tell he was building up to something else. Finally he spoke again. “Somebody put four bullets into him at five o’clock this morning.”

  “You didn’t catch them?”

  “I am mortified to say we did not.”

  “At least you know I was right about a pretty efficient organization being involved.”

  “I know more than that, my friend,” he said grimly. “I know that now that Bora is out of the picture, you are probably back at the top of their hit list.”

  I knew it, too, and the knowledge didn’t make my coffee taste any better. Then I thought about the waiter walking unhindered into my room while I was in the shower, and suddenly my coffee tasted absolutely lousy.

  8.

  I knew it wouldn’t be safe to return to the Ancira once I had gone out for the day, but I decided to keep the room rented anyway. After all, it had worked for me in Casa Grande, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t work again—except that I had a feeling, deep down in my gut, that these people didn’t make the same mistakes twice.

  They had made a major mistake, though—and, unlike Binder’s death, it was a mistake that they had had ample time to avoid. They could have faked another accident, but instead they chose to hire some thug to impersonate Fuentes and feed me a batch of phony answers. Why?

  Why not just pile up Fuentes’s car, like they had done with their first three victims? Why not rig his plane to crash? Why not pay him a bundle and send him on an extended holiday to Paraguay or South Africa or somewhere else where I’d never be able to find him?

  There had to be a reason, and the more I thought about it, the more I decided that I was getting close to discovering something that would blow the whole operation sky-high. I didn’t know what it was, but it had to be right here in Monterrey. Why else would they try to deceive me into thinking Bora was Fuentes, except to make me think I’d hit another dead end? If Fuentes had been pulled out of the twisted wreckage of some car, I’d keep sniffing around until I interested the cops, and for some reason they didn’t want the local police getting involved in this. That’s why they had tried to kill me in Casa Grande, but had kept their hands off once they knew I was in Monterrey. They knew the Casa Grande police couldn’t turn anything up no matter how hard they looked, but the same thing didn’t hold true here.

  That had to be the answer, and suddenly I knew that I was probably safe until I actually found what I wasn’t supposed to find. As long as I was still looking for it, they weren’t going to kill me and chance having Vallero’s department talk to Pratt and Nettles and Lantz and maybe figure out what it was I was after.

  I called Pratt again and told him my theory. He agreed that it seemed logical, but warned me that they had only known of my presence in Monterrey for something like twelve hours, and maybe they just hadn’t been able to mobilize that quickly.

  “That doesn’t wash,” I told him. “They got to Binder in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, Eli,” he said. “It makes sense—but just because a conclusion makes sense doesn’t automatically mean that it’s correct. That’s very likely the reason they haven’t gone after you yet, but there are probably two dozen other reasons, all equally valid, that could explain their actions. Don’t let your guard down.”

  For the second time in half an hour I assured him that I would take care of myself. Then I hung up the phone, packed my suitcase, pulled out a directory and hunted up the addresses of Monterrey Data and San Benedicto Memorial Hospital, marked their locations on my map, and started down to the garage. I got so many fish-eyes from the maids and bellhops when they saw my suitcase that I stopped by the desk and paid for an extra three nights, after which all of them seemed to breath a collective sigh of relief.

  I stuck the suitcase in the back of the Honda, then headed off for the computer company. It was a neat, prosperous-looking little place on Aramberri Street, and seemed to deal exclusively in hardware and software for small offices. I asked the manager if he had received a shipment of chips from Cincinnati within the last week or two, and he told me that he had. I asked what they were, and he pulled out a batch of boxes, each with a label saying it had been created by Univax Computers in Cincinnati.

  I thanked him for his time, returned to the Honda, and began driving west on Washington Boulevard. The hospital was on the outskirts of town, and once I was a few miles from the business section the street petered out and I found myself driving up a series of twisting mountain roads, each in worse repair than the last.

  Finally I came to a large brick building with an ornate tile roof and a wrought-iron fence completely surrounding the neatly manicured grounds. I drove up to the main gate, told the attendant that I had come to visit a patient, and was passed through with no difficulty.

  I parked on a small blacktopped strip reserved for visitors, walked to the front door, and entered a tiled foyer that had a couple of long-bladed fans spinning lazily overhead. A crisply dressed nurse with even crisper manners looked up from whatever she had been reading behind the registration desk and said something in Spanish. I replied in English, she shook her head, and pressed a buzzer. A moment later a dark young intern, about my size but no more than half my age, entered the foyer and approached me.

  “May I help you?” he asked in a cordial, thickly accented voice.

  “I hope so,” I said, pulling out my wallet and flashing my license at him. “I’m a private investigator, and I have some questions about a shipment of drugs you received from Cincinnati about a week ago.”

  “Doctor Greco handles all our ordering,” replied the intern. “If you will follow me, I will take you to him.”

  He turned and started walking down a long, white-washed corridor, and I fell into step behind him. We turned a couple of times, then came to an office with the name JORGE GRECO, MD painted on the door. The intern knocked twice, a gruff voice muttered something in Spanish, and we entered the room.

  “Doctor Greco is not very fluent in English,” said the intern, accompanying me, “so I will act as interpreter.”

  He introduced us, seemed to be explaining who I was to Greco, and then, after a quick exchange of questions, turned back to me.

  “Doctor Greco asks if there is anyone on the Monterrey police force who can authenticate your credentials.”

  I gave him Vallero’s name and number, Greco dialed the number, spoke briefly on the phone, and then turned back to me and nodded.

  “Ask him if he received a shipment of drugs from Amalgamated Laboratories in Cincinnati,” I said.

  He put the question to Greco, got an answer, and turned to me again. “Doctor Greco says that we receive shipments from Amalgamated Laboratories three or four times per week.”

  “I’m particularly interested in a shipment that was sent on Federated Flight 308 a week ago last Sunday.”

  Greco listened intently, then pulled out a file folder from a desk drawer and thumbed through it. At last he looked up
and spoke to the intern.

  “Doctor Greco says that the shipment arrived as scheduled.”

  “What did it contain?”

  I waited for the translation and was told that it was a shipment of penicillin.

  “That’s all?”

  He put the question to the doctor.

  “He says we also received some diphtheria and measles vaccine.”

  “Anything else?”

  Another wait.

  “No.”

  “Did everything arrive in good condition?”

  “Yes. Everything was as it was supposed to be.”

  I thanked Greco for his time and trouble, and had the intern escort me back to the foyer.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said as we rounded a corner.

  “Thank you. We are very proud of it.”

  We walked by three ancient crones sitting in wheelchairs, and as I looked into a number of open rooms I felt like I was passing through Octogenarian Row.

  “You’ve got a lot of old people here,” I remarked.

  “We should have,” he laughed. “We’re a hospital and convalescent home for the aged.”

  “Have you been here long?”

  “Me, personally? About a year,” he replied. “I took my training at Mexico City, but I’m from Monterrey originally, and I hope to make my practice here.”

  “Caring for the elderly?”

  “Caring for anyone who needs help,” he replied seriously. “My term here is almost finished. I’ll be transferring to an obstetrics clinic at the south end of the city next month.”

  He left me at the foyer. I smiled at the nurse, who sniffed in return, then walked out to the Honda and drove back to the city, wondering what the hell I could do next. I cruised around for a while, looking for a hotel, and finally hit upon a dive called the Hotel Madero about half a block from the Independence Arch. They charged me eight dollars for a private room with a bath, and the second I opened the door I realized that they were gouging. The furniture was older than the patients at San Benedicto, the dust was older than the furniture, and the bathroom had been put together before the invention of enamel. I almost had room to turn around, provided that I didn’t open my suitcase, and I quickly decided that even a room with a bad view would be preferable to this windowless place that had absolutely no view at all. It also didn’t have a radio, a television, or, more importantly, a telephone.

  Still, it was as secure a place as I was likely to find, and the more I thought about its lack of windows the more I decided that it wasn’t such a bad idea. Anyone who wanted to get to me was going to have to use the door.

  I decided that my suitcase, old and worn as it was, was probably a hell of a lot newer and cleaner than the dresser drawers, so instead of unpacking I laid it on the floor next to the bed. I considered opening it and leaving it that way, but I was sure the room contained a lot of curious six-legged inhabitants who would just love to rummage through a gringo’s belongings, so I left it locked.

  I then figured it was time to address the problem of what to do next. I had wasted the morning and part of the afternoon checking out two totally normal shipments of goods, but at least anyone watching me could reasonably assume that I was acting with some purpose. After all, two shipments had arrived from Cincinnati and I had made sure that everything about them was kosher. But they had turned out to be dead ends, Bora was dead, Fuentes was missing and probably dead, and I was all out of detective-type things to do.

  Since I hadn’t turned up anything new and interesting I felt I was probably safe for the time being, but that wasn’t enough: I was still convinced there was something in Monterrey that I wasn’t supposed to find, and so far I’d been doing a damned good job of not finding it. Moreover, I had no idea as to where to begin looking.

  The room started getting stuffy, so I left it, went down to the street, and did a little window shopping while I considered my various options. The stores were interesting, not because they were different from those in the States, but because they were so similar. A number of clothing shops had national name brands, though a cut below the top, and the newsstands displayed Spanish-language editions of everything from Playboy to Spider-Man.

  I was crossing Suarez Street on Avenida Madero when a quick motion caught my eye. It was a silver Mercedes sports car, its black convertible top up, barreling down Suarez at something like eighty miles an hour. I knew there was no way the driver was going to be able to stop, and I stepped back a few paces toward the curb. When he was about a hundred yards away he veered right for me and I hurled myself toward the sidewalk. I heard the screeching of rubber behind me, but by the time I got to my feet the car was half a mile up the street and racing like a bat out of hell. I wasn’t even able to spot a license plate, let alone a number.

  A number of passers-by helped me to my feet, and one of them asked in broken English if I wanted a doctor. I thanked him, explained that I was all right, and walked into a nearby bar. I ordered a Scotch to calm my nerves, but all they had were three dozen different brands of tequila, so I had a tequila and a lemon.

  The drink burned my lips, passed over my tongue like a razor blade, then shot down to my stomach and started doing strange things there. I saw a dead worm floating in the bottle—a sign, the bartender told me, that the stuff was fresh and potent. Somehow I knew exactly how the worm must have felt during its final moments.

  Eventually the feeling passed and a pleasant glow began to spread outward from my stomach. I took another swallow and began considering what had happened.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the Mercedes had tried to run me down. I would never be able to prove it, but that didn’t make it any the less true. Which meant, in turn, that I knew something now that I hadn’t known when I left the Ancira five hours ago.

  But what?

  A computer company had ordered some software and received it. A hospital had ordered some penicillin and vaccines and received them. That was the sum total of what I had learned during the day. What the hell was there about that that made me so dangerous that they were now willing to risk killing me and bringing the police in on it?

  I spent half an hour in the bar trying to puzzle it out and came up blank. Finally, with a shrug, I gave up pondering it, paid my bill, and walked back to my hotel. A bunch of kids were climbing all over the Honda when I arrived, and I chased them away.

  And suddenly, between the time I shouted at them and the time I turned back to the hotel, I knew why they were out to get me.

  Since there was no phone in my room, I went into the hotel’s lobby, an ugly room with red leather chairs and stars painted on the walls, and walked over to a wall phone. I put a coin in and called Vallero, but he was out of the office again and I didn’t want to leave the message with his secretary. Then, because I wanted to get the information to someone who knew what was going on before anything happened to me, I called Mike Pratt collect. There was some hassle about the station accepting the call, but then he picked up his extension and quickly agreed to pay the charges.

  “What’s up, Eli?” he asked.

  “Plenty,” I said. “One of those shipments was a phony.”

  “The computer stuff?”

  “No. The drugs.”

  “We’re running drugs to Mexico? That doesn’t make any sense!”

  “I don’t know what we’re running, but it sure as hell isn’t measles vaccine.”

  “You don’t know?” he repeated. “Didn’t you examine the shipment?”

  “No.”

  “Then what makes you so certain?”

  “Because that vaccine is for kids, and San Benedicto is a hospital for the aged! When’s the last time you heard of an eighty-year-old getting a measles vaccination?”

  “You’re sure that’s it?” he asked dubiously.

  “I’m not the only one who’s sure,” I answered. “They’re after me again.”

  “Have you told Vallero?”

  “I will as soon as I can get
hold of him. In the meantime, check out Amalgamated Laboratories for me.”

  “Will do. Where are you staying and how can I get in touch with you?”

  I was about to give him the hotel’s phone number when a huge hand took the receiver away from me and placed it down on the hook. An instant later I felt a small cylindrical object being pressed against my back.

  “Come along, Mr. Paxton,” said a gruff American voice. “We’re going to take a little ride.”

  9.

  One of the things I never ever do is argue with a guy who’s pressing a gun between my ribs. I turned away from the phone, walked through the lobby just ahead of him, smiled at the desk clerk, and climbed into a car that was parked just in front of the hotel with its back door opened.

  It was a black ’86 Caddy limousine that still ran like new. There was a surly looking overweight Mexican sitting at the wheel, dressed in a pinstriped suit, a black shirt, and a white tie that he must have borrowed from an old George Raft movie. The guy with the gun was tall, blond, and fortyish, with a cauliflower left ear and a nose that had been broken three or four times.

  “We going anyplace in particular?” I asked.

  “We are,” said the American, reaching inside my jacket and removing my gun.

  I was about to ask him where, but he told me to keep quiet and suggested that something unpleasant might happen to me even sooner than anticipated if I asked any more questions, so I shut my mouth and looked out the window and tried to figure out, if not where I was going, at least where I was at.

  We began passing through a slum, not the one I had seen on my way to Fuentes’s apartment, but an even larger and grubbier one. It extended for blocks in every direction—decaying buildings with broken windows and missing doors, rusted-out tireless husks of cars strewn on the lawns and streets, emaciated children sitting on dry-rotted stairs in varying states of dress and undress, cadaverous dogs rummaging through garbage for tidbits of food—and I began to understand why so many Hispanics made their way up north to Texas and California every year.

  It took us almost ten minutes to drive through the worst part of it, and even then it extended for another mile or so, seeming terribly out of place in the grandeur of this mountain setting. Finally we emerged into a modest suburban area and began climbing along a narrow, winding road. Fortunately the driver hadn’t been exposed to too many Burt Reynolds movies, and he slowed us down to a snail’s pace as we twisted and turned along the road, occasionally hanging out over sheer drops of half a mile or more.