John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 11 - Dress Her in Indigo

by Dress Her in Indigo(lit)

  "Agreed. But he is a common denominator, and so what we do is get him off the books because if we don't he'll muddy up the logic of the situation. And we get to throw two stones at one bird, because maybe he knows something useful, without knowing how useful it is."

  "But we will have to listen to the communication lecture again."

  "And admire the progress of the chin whiskers." Meyer remembered the room number and went and checked and came back and said the key was in the box, so Wally McLeen was out. I took a stroll down the porch and couldn't spot him. I put a note in his box to call me at the Victoria. By then it was five minutes past the time we had all agreed to meet on the veranda. And the sisters appeared, newly and too elegantly coiffed, high heels, gloves, evening bags, dresses more suited to the night life of Guadalajara or Mexico City than to a September night in Oaxaca.

  Their festive smiles and dancing eyes dimmed when they saw that Meyer and I were still in the rough dusty clothes of the expedition to the burned land, and they exchanged a meaningful sisterly glance. They came to the table and were seated. I said that I was sorry that we had not yet had time to change. I said that it had been an evil day, and they would have to forgive us if we seemed solemn and tired. I said that Enelio Fuentes was also tired, and that he and Lita had decided not to join us.

  Any affront Elena may have felt was erased immediately by the concern in her eyes as she searched my face. She moved her chair closer, laid her hand on my wrist. In a little while I noticed that Meyer and Margarita were gone. I had not seen them leave. I told Elena, in our special clumsy mixture of English and Spanish, that I was sorry she had taken such care to dress for a dinner party. She said she had dressed to please me, and asked me if she did please me. I said there could be no question of that. She said that whatever I wished-cualquier tu quieres-that would be the evening that would please her. I said that I wished to go up the hill with her, to have a quiet drink with her, to have food together, and then to have love. She said she had planned on love in any case.

  The last angle of the sun before it slipped over the mountains found her face with a single shaft of orange light. She looked at me, her eyes moving back and forth, focusing on each of my eyes in turn, and she wore a small, questioning sensuous frown. Black pupils set in deepest brown, whites of her eyes blue-white with superb health, long fringe of wiry. black lashes, long oval face, matte golden skin, microscopic beads of moisture in the down of her upper lip above the broad solid mouth. Then suddenly her eyes looked heavy and her mouth loosened, and her head bowed slightly. She took a deep and shuddering breath and exhaled slowly. Her nostrils flared and the enameled nails bit into my wrist. She smiled and said, "Why we are sitting here so long time, querido?"

  I could have reported to Enelio-but I knew I would not-that a back can be effectively scrubbed in a tiled shower stall, and that there is no real need for a special brush and special soap. Also gin over ice is cold and pleasant and goes with a hot shower in a very Sybaritic way. I could have reported that soon I came to believe that I would live forever, and even sang a little.

  Good steaks came down the hill from the hotel, and when we were done we put the cart outside at the end of the porch, turned off the lights and sat comfortably and quietly and had coffee and looked at the stars. Wally had the grace to phone at that time, and I went in and took it in the dark, sitting on the turned-down bed.

  "Trav? This is Wally. I just found your note in the box a little while ago. What's it about? Have you... have you heard something about Minda?"

  "I wish I had, Wally. No. This is something else."

  "Well, what is it?"

  "Meyer and I would like to have a chat with you when it's convenient, Wally."

  "What about?"

  "We think it's a good idea to pool everything we've all learned up to this point. What do you think?"

  "Well... I guess it couldn't do any harm."

  "When would be a good time? Now?"

  "Oh, not now. I'm going with a bunch of the kids up to Monte Alban to see the ruins by moonlight again. Say, how about tomorrow morning? Have you ever seen the ruins at Yagul? It's only about ten miles down the Mitla Road, and there's a sign where you turn off to it."

  "I saw the sign the last time we were out that way."

  "I'm getting turned on pretty good by these ruins. I mean they are sort of timeless, and your own troubles don't seem to mean so much. They don't really know much about Yagul. It's so quiet there, you can sit and... contemplate things. I was planning to go out early. I'll be there all morning. Why don't you and Meyer come out any time tomorrow morning? It will be a good place to talk. I think a place that is very, very old and peaceful and dead is a good place for really talking, don't you?"

  "Sure, Wally. We'll see you there."

  As I talked I had heard her close the door and click the night lock. I had heard a tock of heels on tile, then felt a dip of the bed as she sat on the other side. Whisk-whisper of nylons, then slap-pad of bare feet. Zipper-purr, rustle of fabric, click of snaps. Dip of bed again. I hung up. Hand on my shoulder to urge me around and pull me down to a mouth that fastened firmly and well, while a hand plucked at the tied belt of the robe I had put on after showering. Voice making a tuneless little contented ummming sound, way back in the strong round throat.

  "This you want?" she whispered. "Turn some bad day to good things?"

  "This I want."

  "This you have, Tuh-rrrravis."

  "You are fine."

  "Sank you ver' motch. You are doing some thing in Mexico... how you say?... peligroso?"

  "Dangerous? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not."

  She held me tightly and made a small growling sound in her throat. "Some person hurting you, Elena will fix. Tear out some eyes. Cut out some tongue. Breaking all bones, verdad?"

  Something came flickering in through the back door of my mind, but by then everybody had become too busy to notice, and so the thought sat patiently out there in the back entryway until somebody had time to notice it.

  I got around to noticing it when she lay purring into my throat, tickling weight of long heavy dark hair fanned across my chest. I eased the blanket up over her without awakening her. The thought that had come into the back of my mind was a memory of how the primitive warriors of history dreaded being handed over, alive, to the women of the enemy tribe. There had been a very convincing savagery in Elena's threats about what she would do to whoever harmed me.

  Rockland had gone to Eva Vitrier's estate in La Colonia, and he had managed to take Bix Bowie away in Bundy's car. Bundy had been wickedly pleased to learn that Eva could become emotionally involved, infatuated, with a girl she saw on the street and contrive to invite the girl and her friend into her home. The two girls had been her guests for a long time. It would seem plausible that they might tell Eva Vitrier some of the rancid highlights of their vacation in Mexico, the same things Nesta had told Meyer.

  So sooner or later Mrs. Vitrier would reveal, calculatingly or accidentally, her desire for the Bowie girl. In view of Bix's passivity about being used in physical ways, perhaps an actual affair had begun. Safe to assume that Minda McLeen would be opposed, and also fair to state there was very little she could do about it. So the note to Harlan Bowie about coming to get Bix may have come from Minda. Perhaps the girls quarreled over Eva's attentions to Bix, Minda demanding that Bix leave, Bix refusing. So Minda left.

  Knowing Rockland's past abuse of Bix, knowing Rockland was responsible for her addiction, knowing Rockland was responsible for her death that Sunday evening, what would happen to Rockland if he went back to the Vitrier house? She could very well have mutilated him in exactly the ways I had seen. The flaying and blinding could even be said to be a symbolic expression of her attitude toward male sexuality. And perhaps her wealth enabled her to employ muscle she could trust-muscle that could overpower him, truss him up, leave him alone for her savage attentions, and then dispose of truck, camper, and body in one package.

  So then W
ally McLeen would be a waste of time. But it was set, so we'd lose nothing by going through with it. I thought of a twelve-second system for opening him up, and knew it would draw a wide dazed blank He was one of the nice little people you meet on a Honda.

  Elena suddenly began to jerk and twitch and make muffled little yelping sounds. I woke her up, and tenderly and gently quieted her down. She said it had been a terrible, terrible dream. I had been broken into tiny bits, and if she could put them together in time I would live. But the little wet pieces kept crawling away in every direction as she tried to reconstruct me.

  Sixteen

  THURSDAY was another bright, hot, beautiful morning. I had spent the time after driving Elena to town, sitting at the desk in the room and going through Rockland's little red notebook. There were Miami and Miami Beach addresses, and addresses all over the country, presumably people who had stayed at the Sultana and who had subscribed to one of Rockland's services-in one way or another. It would be logical for him to keep such a record.

  The notes and reminders were too cryptic to be of any use. Things like "L.2 Sat aft"; "2 doz, suite 20B"; "$100 Reb in 7th." As they were chronological, I could get enough hints to figure out when notes were made. He didn't make many. There was a notation of the cost of new tires in pesos and dollars, made before they got to Oaxaca. And just a few addresses after that, Bundy, the Vitrier estate, the hotel where Bix and Minda had stayed, and one that read, "I. V. Rivereta, Fiesta D, Mex City." All the rest of the pages were completely blank. On the inside back cover was his social security number.

  At breakfast I checked out my twelve-second system with Meyer. "If I start edging up on him, he has time to adjust, assuming he's our nut, which I doubt. So I will drop it on him suddenly and from considerable altitude, and we will watch his throat and his mouth and his eyes like a pair of eagles, and no man living can make a fast enough recovery to hide every part of it, especially when I come on very amiable and kindly and understanding."

  I told him the approach. He approved. He had watched me do it before. He had seen it work and seen it fail.

  So we drove out to the turnoff to Yagul. We could see it a couple of miles north of the main road as we turned off, old stone patterns atop a rounded hill which bore faint traces of the old horizontal terracing. I drove across flats and then up the steep winding road to a wide paved parking area. There was an old sedan there with Mexican plates, and the small Honda. That was all.

  As we got out, a large Mexican family came down the worn path from the ruins and started getting into the sedan, arguing about who would sit where. We went up the path. A gnarled little man came trudging out of a shady spot to collect the small government fee and give us our handsomely printed tickets. He went back to his place in the shade, his back against raw rock. From there he could look out across the valley, with all the ruins behind him.

  The morning sky was a deep rich Kodachrome blue. A buzzard wheeled in the updraft from the hill slope, making sounds very like a pig. Tall clumps of cactus with big red blossoms grew out of the stony soil. It was indeed quiet. Two buses moved along the valley floor toward Oaxaca, stolid, silent beetles.

  We came upon the traditional ball court, a long sunken rectangle with sloping sides of carefully fitted stone, with the high place where the priests sat and watched, and the lower places for the other spectators. Tricky bounces off those side walls. Iron rings set into the stone at either end, now long rusted away. Archeologists believe that the captain of the winning team was beheaded. It was some sort of honor to strive for. It meant a permanent place in the record books. It would keep a team from running away with the league. Perhaps the same theory as the cellar team getting first draft choice.

  We looked at the front of the long temple, at the altars, at the peak of a distant knoll beyond the edge of the temple front wall, and saw, silhouetted against the sky, along with some twisted little trees, a dumpy figure semaphoring its arms at us, and a faint hail came upwind.

  We found the stone steps that would lead us up to the temple level. A lot of it was restored. When they restore, they stick pebbles in the mortar between the new courses of stone. The academic mind saying, "See? This is all fake. We stuck it on the way we think it used to be."

  Behind the temple farade there were small courtyards and unroofed stone walls forming a maze of small rooms and corridors. After we came to two dead ends, I found a toe hold and climbed up and picked out the right route toward Wally's little hill. We came out the back of the temple complex and went up a narrow and winding footpath, puffing a little in the unaccustomed altitude.

  Wally McLeen beamed upon us. "Isn't it great? See, from up here you look over into the next valley too. Pretty strategic place. These holes here, these were tombs. The big shots got buried at the highest place. They bust into every one they can find because there's gold jewelry in some of them. Now look back at the whole thing. Gold, sacrifices, underground passages, astronomy, brain surgery, it blows my mind thinking about it."

  He wore a market shirt of coarse unbleached cotton, a pale blue beret acquired from God knows where, burgundy-colored walking shorts cinched around his comfortable tummy by a belt with a lot of silver knobs affixed to the leather, and market sandals. His goatee was coming along nicely. He carried a bag woven of yellow fiber, shaped like a two-handled market bag. He had flip-up sunglasses fastened to his thick eyeglasses, and the cycle was turning his previous angry red to a red-brown, with some pink patches on forehead and nose where the early burns had peeled.

  "When Minda comes back, I want to show her all these places, Trav, on account of I know she'll flip. I remember when she was a little kid, one summer at the lake she found an arrowhead and I read to her all about the Indians, and you'd be surprised how much she remembered, a little kid like that. Just turned five years old. They can bolt another seat on that Honda and we can travel all over this part of Mexico."

  Meyer had moved around into position, so that we were both facing him.

  "But that won't work out so good, Wally," I told him.

  "Sure it will!"

  "For a while. But then sooner or later the cops are going to find that village kid that saw you dump the camper into the ravine, and find out what you did to Rocko, and start adding things up and nail you for Mike and Della and the Mexican woman, too. So you better aim that bike for the nearest border crossing, Wally."

  It is like that lousy frog routine I had to do in high school biology lab. You hook up the battery and touch the wires to the right place and that slimy dead leg makes jumping motions.

  He stared at me and he stared at Meyer. And his mouth hitched up into a weak little smile and then opened into an O. Not a big O. About twice the size of the one you use to whistle. It went through the same pattern again.

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Too long, Wally." Meyer said sadly. "You took too long finding the right way to play it. Too much was happening in your head. You froze. You had too much to add up."

  "I... I've got to wait for Minda! You can understand that. I've got to wait for her to come back here!"

  It was hard to believe it, looking at him, even though it had come through as clear as a ten page confession.

  "Wally," I said, "I can understand the thing with Rockland, sort of. You're over the edge. You found out too much. Those three-Sessions, Nesta, Rockland-they turned your little girl on, and they banged her, and they degraded her, and something went wrong then in your head, Wally. This is a hell of a long way from the weekly Kiwanis meeting and the shopping center stores. What you did to Rockland means you've been taken sick. It means you've got to go into town and tell people about it and get help, because there was Mike Barrington and there was Della Davis and there was Luz."

  "I know. That went wrong. I mean I wouldn't feel bad about it if I got Nesta too, because I thought it might have to be that way. I went in from the back, over the wall. The jeep was there when I went by, but when I came back to look for him I found it was gon
e. I should have waited for him to come back. But I got scared. I have to get him, you know. And I will. I made a vow. I've been working it all out. Mike and Luz were so close together, I got her before she could take a step, after he went down. But the nigger bitch could run like the wind. If she hadn't stumbled and fallen, she would have been out the gate and gone." His voice was small and thoughtful, the words half lost in a small warm wind that gusted and died.

  "What did they do to you... or Minda?" Meyer asked.

  The shadow of the buzzard angled across the stony earth between us. Silent, awkward tableau. Wally McLeen bent over and picked up a small triangular shard of Zapotecan pottery. He looked at it with care and flipped it aside.

  "I like the ones with designs," he said. "I like to think of them out here, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, scratching little designs in the clay to make the pots prettier. Funny thing about that. This morning, maybe an hour ago, over there down the slope of the hill, I found a piece that reminded me of an ashtray Minda made for me in the first or second grade. She made the same kind of wavy lines in the clay. I've got it here in the bag." He opened it and peered down in, reached in.