"Thank you."
"There's an official file here needs closing. So you could let me know."
"Could you get an assignment to go down there with us?"
"You've got to be out of your mind! The budget we got, we're down three men here already, and it could be more. We stay on our side of the river and they stay on theirs. Sometimes they'll bring somebody to the middle of the bridge for us, and we do the same for them. But it doesn't happen often. When you go down there, walk easy. Get yourself a local and pay him good."
Meyer got back at two o'clock, and I told him the conversation I'd had with Paul Sigiera. He sat, utterly quiet, sorting it out after I'd finished.
"One thing we know," he said. "He couldn't be Roberto Hoffmann in Cancun and be Evan Lawrence in Cancun. There must be endless thousands of American tourists flowing through that place, but the Americans in permanent or semipermanent, residence must be well known to each other and to the resident Mexicans. So we start with Evan Lawrence's friend Willy, who sells time shares in condominium apartments, and this Willy might know a local who will help us."
"I checked with Fran at Triple A Travel, and she said the best and quickest way to get there is go to Miami and take Mexicana. I think she said it leaves at four thirty. We can get a tourist card at the airline desk. Mexicana and Aero Mexico always say all flights are full, but they leave about two thirds full, except at Christmastime, including the standby people. Hot there, she said. Very very hot. We can try to set up a rental car in the Miami airport, but she said that hardly ever works too well. No problem with hotels at this time of year, she said. When do you want to go?"
"Right now," Meyer said.
As it turned out, we weren't able to leave until the next day, the fourth, a day of hot wind and rain that lasted all the way to the parking garage.
The severe young man at the airline desk took the cash money from Meyer for round-trip tickets. My protests did not work. Return trip unreserved. We were on standby for the flight to Cancun. We went downstairs to a bus which took us to a new terminal building, where we sat in plastic chairs in a broad vista of plastic and filled out the tourist permit forms. We had tried to look tourist. Mesh shirts, seer-sucker pants, sandals, the big ranch hats we'd picked up in Texas, battered carry-on bags. Meyer had a lot of funds strapped around his waist under his shirt, in a canvas money belt. Money, he has always said, solves the unanticipated problems. It won't buy happiness, but it will rent a fair share of it.
It was a one-class flight on a 727, with no room for my knees. The flight time was two hours and a bit, and the hard-working Mexican flight attendants served a meal. There was an hour time change, so it was only a little past five fifteen when we began our long curving descent into the Cancun airport. The pilot took us over the Cancun peninsula. It was a spectacular view, lowering clouds overhead, storms out at sea, and a long slant of golden sunshine striking the column of tall hotels along the beach.
Meyer, thorough as ever, had arranged to read up on the place, and he explained it to me en route. "It is that rarity" he said, "a totally artificial community, without a history, without traditions. Less than ten years ago there were about thirty-five people living in the mainland village of Cancun. Several narrow islands stretched out into the Gulf. Mexico needed hard dollars, so they took aerial photographs of the seacoast and decided that this would make an attractive resort. Now there are over fifty thousand permanent residents. They made low interest loans to people who wanted to build hotels and resorts. They linked the islands with a causeway and bridges, built an airport, built a road down the coast to Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo, and the dollars do indeed flow in. There have been problems, of course: help for the hotels, food production, and transportation. Now they are getting small cruise ships and convoys of recreational vehicles and yachts and flocks of tour buses. It has become a popular resort for middle-class Mexicans and Americans. Lately there have been a lot of condominium developments scattered near the hotels."
I glanced at him. He had the window seat. He was staring straight ahead, expressionless. He sensed me looking at him and turned toward me.
"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-zhet. 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 Cancun. 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 timeshare 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 Cancun the first two months of this year."
Twenty-one
THE AZTECA Royale was under construction farther 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 onedollar 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 Playos, 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.
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 couldn'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."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin Page 22