I said deliberately, “So you got back at him by preserving your expensive bridal finery to use in a phony wedding instead of burning it. You didn’t let him know you were onto him; instead you got hold of the proper authorities and set him up. Or did they get hold of you?”
“They got hold of me, of course.” She shook her head ruefully. “I never suspected a thing, and I wouldn’t have known where to go if I had. I’m sure the police would just have treated me as a hysterical girl with the bridal jitters. After all, Horace is a wealthy and respected citizen. I didn’t believe it myself when Mr. Somerset first told me, and I thought his proposition was downright wild. It wasn’t until he proved to me what Uncle Buffy was planning… After that, I had no choice but to cooperate, did I? I had to go through with the wedding so Mr. Somerset could make this crazy bridegroom switch, although I still don’t understand what it’s supposed to accomplish.”
I said, “Well, it’s supposed to lead us to the arms somehow, but don’t ask me exactly how. Presumably we’ll know more after we’ve made contact with this character Cody arranged to meet in Cananea.” After a moment, I went on: “So you’d known him all your life? Cody?”
She nodded. “Yes. He was always there, off and on, as far back as I can remember, good old beanpole Uncle Buffy, seven feet tall in his cowboy boots—well, almost—and so skinny he used to say he had to stand twice in the same place to cast a shadow. A real Gary Cooper type. He’s a little more substantial nowadays, but not much. Well, you saw him. He used to bring me lollipops and ice cream cones when I was a little girl. He never forgot Christmas or my birthday; he’d always send me something wonderful even when he couldn’t bring it himself, like when I was going to school in the East.”
I glanced at her. “So that’s where the accent went,” I said. “I wondered. I haven’t heard you cut loose with a single Texas you-all, not one.”
She grimaced. “Yes, they did a pretty good job of beating it out of me, those eastern bitches. I don’t know why they had to pick on me. Some of those honey-chile southern belles in the school talked pretty funny, too. But Papa said I’d better play along…” She drew a long breath. “You know that my father was murdered here in Mexico?”
I nodded, preoccupied with the immediate traffic situation. I gauged my distances, pulled around a slow-moving semi, and ducked back into the right-hand lane in time to miss an oncoming bus. You can take a bus anywhere in Mexico a car can go and some places you’d think it can’t.
I said, “I gather that after your daddy died, down here in Mexico, strange things started happening to you in El Paso. Peculiar enough that you finally took your troubles to good ole Buff Cody, your late parent’s friend and business partner.”
She drew a long breath. “Yes, stupid me, but how could I guess… It seemed like the natural thing to do, at the time. I went to his office, and… and I was so scared and confused, with Papa dead like that and all those weird things going on, that I broke into tears telling him about it. He gave me his hanky to blow my nose on, just like when I fell off my pony when I was a kid; and he asked me some questions. Then he told me to run along and he’d put some of his people to work on finding out the score. He told me to be real careful until he got it all taken care of; and he turned me around and shoved me toward the door, whacking me affectionately across the rear of my smart tailored slacks just like he used to slap the seat of my dirty jeans when I was a little girl… Only I wasn’t a little girl anymore and suddenly, when he touched me like that, we both knew it.”
“He’d never made a pass at you when you were little?”
She shook her head. “Oh, I always used to kiss him hello and good-bye, the way you kiss family. He was family, Uncle Buffy, and I’d sit on his lap sometimes, but he never… No, no passes, although just the other day he told me that he’d surely had a hard time keeping his hands off me all those years, I was such a purty li’l thang.” She smiled grimly. “But kids don’t know. God, he was Papa’s friend, he was Papa’s age; and it never occurred to me to think of him that way. Until that day. But we didn’t say anything that day.”
I asked, “How did the subject of matrimony finally come up between you and Uncle Buffy?”
She said, “Well, the first time I was almost killed after… after Papa died, I naturally assumed it was an accident. This crazy man in a pickup cut in and ran me into the ditch, but I was lucky, it was a shallow ditch. I was just bounced around a bit, and it didn’t even hurt my little Mercedes. I didn’t even need a wrecker; a couple of nice men stopped and got behind and shoved when I stepped on the gas, and she came right up to the road. I was mad, of course, drivers like that shouldn’t be allowed loose, but it didn’t occur to me, when it happened, that it might have been deliberate. But that night I got a phone call: ‘You were lucky, lady, but we’ll get you next time just like we got your daddy.’”
She stopped and was silent for a moment, clearly reliving the experience.
I asked, “What kind of a voice, male or female?”
“I thought male, but it was really just a hoarse whisper.”
“Did you get in touch with the police?”
“Yes, but they didn’t seem to take it very seriously. I wasn’t hurt, my car wasn’t damaged, and it was just another crank call, a dime a dozen. And then, a few days later, I was getting ready to get into the car after breakfast. It was a cold, mean morning and there had been some rain and sleet during the night. At the last moment, after unlocking the Mercedes, I leaned over to make sure the windshield wiper blades hadn’t frozen to the windshield. There was a funny, slapping noise and a distant report; and the car jerked a little. When I looked, there was a bullet hole, right about where I’d been standing when I reached for the windshield wiper. I was petrified for a moment; then I ran back into the house and called the police again.”
“Did you get their attention this time?” I asked.
She laughed shortly. “Oh, yes. Car crashes and nut calls just bore them, but a firearm seems to wake them up a bit. They came out and figured angles and trajectories and decided that the shot had come from the overgrown vacant lot a little ways up the street on the other side, but it was pretty tangled in there, and they didn’t find any cartridge cases.”
“What about the bullet?”
“It went right through the car from left to right. I had to have both doors fixed and it cost me quite a lot. But it missed the corner of the garage and went rambling on over the little ridge we’re on. No dead people have been reported, so it didn’t hit anybody, wherever it came down. The police said the holes looked as if they were .22 caliber, but they had a big argument as to whether it was the rimfire .22 or the centerfire .22. They decided that it had to be the centerfire because it was powerful enough to penetrate both doors. I hope that makes sense to you. It doesn’t to me.”
I said, “The rimfire is the little one all ranch kids used to grow up with including me. It’ll kill a man, or a woman, but you wouldn’t normally pick it for that. There are several centerfires to choose from, but the most likely is the .223, or 5.56mm, used in the Army M-16 assault rifle. It’s certainly a killing round, although if I were doing it myself I’d pick a larger caliber to make sure.” I glanced at her. “In case you’re curious, the little one has its priming compound around the inside of the rim of the cartridge case, rimfire. The big ones have their primers in the center of the case head, centerfire. Now you know.”
“Thank you. I don’t know how I’ve managed to live so long without that information,” she said dryly. She gave me a sideways look. “You sound as if you really know something about it.”
“I’ve been there. On both the giving and the receiving ends.”
She licked her lips. “Then you know what it’s like walking down the street after you’ve been shot at, feeling as if every window has a gun in it aimed straight at you! It took me hours to get up nerve enough to leave the house and I thought I’d faint every time somebody slammed a car door. It was an awful day; and tha
t night there was another phone call: ‘You can’t be lucky all the time, lady. Your daddy wasn’t.’ This time the voice was definitely masculine. I didn’t even call the police again, what was the use? I just took a sleeping pill to knock myself out; and the next morning I went to Uncle Buffy, as I told you, and cried on his shoulder.”
“And he patted you on the head—well, fanny—and told you to be careful, big help.”
She made a face. “Yes, that’s right. And that night I tried to kill myself.”
5
Among U.S. tourists you’ll hear a lot of horror stories about crazy Mexican drivers, but you won’t hear them from me. It’s simply a conflict between two automotive philosophies: defensive vs. aggressive driving. The American driver gets into a car to be safe; progress is a secondary consideration. The Mexican driver gets into a car to get somewhere; survival is in the hands of the gods. Since I wouldn’t be in the line of work I’m in if I were obsessed with safety, I find this kind of uninhibited motoring quite enjoyable; and we made good time—well, good time for that twisty little road.
I reviewed what Mr. Somerset had told me about the girl’s recent bereavement. William Walter Pierce, 62, Will to his friends, husband of Henrietta Barstow Pierce, who’d died of cancer eight years ago, and father of Gloria Henrietta Pierce, had been murdered the previous month along with a female companion, Millicent Charles, widow, 48. The crime had been committed along the highway leading from Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico, to Durango, Durango, Mexico. Mazatlán is on the west coast, at sea level. Durango is about two hundred miles inland and six thousand feet up. Or three hundred and twenty kilometers and two thousand meters, if you prefer the local units of measurement.
I remembered the road in question, although it had been a long time since I’d driven it. Some six hundred miles south of us, it was the next major east-west highway crossing the mountains that form the backbone of Mexico. By major highway I mean that it was paved all the way and could be negotiated by an ordinary car or truck if the driver was possessed of reasonable skill and patience. However, unless it had changed greatly since the last time I’d seen it, and the map showed no signs of that, it was no more a superhighway than the roller-coaster track we were on.
Will Pierce’s Lincoln had been spotted by one of the green rescue trucks that cruise all Mexico’s main roads—you see few if any speed cops but plenty of these angels of mercy, which seem like a nice twist. Actually, the zopilotes had been first on the scene. The Green Angels, as the rescue units are called, soon determined that the big scavenger birds really had no interest in the car, although it had been badly vandalized; their attention was focused on the bodies of Pierce and Mrs. Charles lying nearby. His wallet and her purse had been robbed of all money and tossed aside. His watch and her watch and jewelry were missing. Their luggage had been hauled out of the trunk of the car and thoroughly trashed. He had apparently tried to resist; a machete had almost severed one arm before it split his skull. She had been stripped and sexually abused before another machete stroke had almost beheaded her as she knelt before her tormentors.
The authorities had conceded that perhaps there were a few antisocial elements hiding out in the Sierra Madre Occidental but promised that the criminals would soon be brought to justice. The same authorities had stated that this tragic incident was deeply regretted, but potential tourists should note that such crimes were extremely rare and that violence was no more likely to be encountered along a Mexican highway than on a New York street. Which, to anyone acquainted with New York streets, wasn’t quite as reassuring as it was meant to be.
Even at the time of my hasty briefing, I’d had some doubts about those roadside bandidos. Now, after hearing Gloria’s story, I found it hard to sell myself on a bunch of primitive Mexican desperados who first hacked the daddy and his lady friend to death with machetes down in Durango, Mexico, and then came charging up to Texas, U.S.A., to harry the daughter with pickup trucks and sniper rifles. On the other hand, I couldn’t quite swallow the notion that the attacks on two members of the same family within a few weeks had been perpetrated by two groups of criminals operating quite independently of each other.
“Well?” said my companion sharply.
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
“Ask what?”
“If I really tried to kill myself.”
“Did you really try to kill yourself, Mrs. Cody?”
She made a face at me. “Do I look like the suicidal type?”
“What happened?”
She said, “I’d gone to bed early. I was alone in the house. We… I don’t have any live-in help, just a yardman, Aurelio, who works as much as needed to keep the grounds in shape, and a… well, I guess you’d call her a housekeeper, Teresa, who comes in time to make lunch and leaves when she’s cleaned up after dinner. I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing noises the way you do when it’s dark and there’s nobody else in the house. After a while I just had to get up and look around.”
“Unarmed?”
She glanced at me irritably. “I’ve told you how I feel about guns! Anyway, Papa’s are all locked up in a steel cabinet he had built into the wall of his study. Even if I’d been able to put my hands on the key in a hurry, I wouldn’t have known how to get the bullets into them, and I’d probably have wound up shooting my foot off. Or my head.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I went all through the house and didn’t find anything. Anybody. I came back to my bedroom and took off my slippers and dressing gown and started into the bathroom to… well, to pee. There’s a kind of little dressing room I have to go through, with all my dresses hanging along one wall. Just as I reached into the bathroom and turned on the light, I heard something rustle among the clothes behind me. He must have slipped into my room from the rear of the house while I was looking around in front where I’d heard the noise.”
“Maybe he had a partner making a noise to draw you away,” I said.
She said, “I wasn’t thinking about any partners; the man himself was scary enough. The big bathroom mirror faces the door. I could see him in the glass, a big dark man who needed a shave, stepping out from among my dresses to grab me. I tried to get into the bathroom and close the door, but he grabbed my hair and yanked me back. He put some kind of a weird hold on my neck. When he squeezed hard, not choking me, just digging into the side of my neck, I blacked out. When I woke up I was in a hospital bed.”
We live in different worlds. I couldn’t imagine myself at any age, after having a parent murdered and surviving two attempts on my own life, not locating the key to Pop’s gun cabinet and figuring out how to use one of the weapons inside—assuming I didn’t already know how—and then packing it everywhere, even into the john. But I keep discovering that most other people, particularly female people, don’t think that way, which I suppose is why I’m in the business I’m in and they aren’t.
I said, “And they told you you’d tried to commit suicide?”
She nodded. “They had it all figured out, damn them. They’d decided that I’d been brooding about the terrible thing that had happened to Papa and Millie Charles… I suppose you’ve been told all about that.”
“Yes.”
“Well, in my depressive mood, a minor car accident and a kid letting off a little .22 carelessly seemed to have given me the silly idea that somebody was trying to murder me, too. Perfectly ridiculous, of course, but you know how we paranoiacs are.” Her voice was dry. “I suppose you’ve heard the old joke: Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t trying to kill me!”
“I’ve heard it.”
She went on: “It was all supposed to have been just too much for me, I’m such a tender bud, you understand. I’d led a nice, sheltered, happy, comfortable life and first my mother had died in that horrible way, and then my father had been killed even more dreadfully, and now people were trying to murder me, too, and I just couldn’t stand this scary world I found myself in an
y longer. So I’d rounded up all the sleeping pills in the house and gulped them down and got into bed to die. Only, Uncle Buffy tried to call me about something and got worried when I didn’t answer the phone. He drove over and saw my car in the drive so he knew I was home; but I didn’t respond when he rang the bell and even banged hard on the front door. He remembered that I’d been in a state when I talked to him in his office that morning. He broke in and found me lying unconscious in bed and called 911; and wasn’t I glad I wasn’t dead the way I’d tried to make myself, silly me?”
I glanced at her profile as I drove. “Did you try to set them straight?”
“Yes, of course. The psychiatrist they sicced on me thought it was a healthy sign. The fact that I refused to accept the indisputable fact that I’d tried to kill myself indicated that I rejected my hasty action and wasn’t likely to try again. However, there was, he said, not the slightest evidence of intruders or of a struggle; and didn’t I think it was kind of a ridiculous story anyway, people hiding in my closet and cramming barbiturates down my throat?”
We were climbing now, and the narrow blacktop pavement was getting pretty bad, even more broken and patched than it had been. We’d already passed a couple of highway crews shoveling tarry gravel into the worst holes; about as effective as sticking a Band-Aid on a fatal wound.
Gloria said, “After that little encounter I gave up trying to convince the hospital people. They wouldn’t listen; they just hushed me like an unreasonable child. But when Uncle Buffy came around and gave me the same maddening routine… Well, he was sweet, he’d brought me some flowers and a suitcase of clothes from home; but he was acting the same idiot way as everybody else. You know, as if I was pretty young and not very bright and couldn’t help doing fool things sometimes, but he hoped it wouldn’t get to be a habit. As if he was really pretty disappointed in me although he was trying hard not to show it. And he wouldn’t sit down and talk to me sensibly, either. He said we could talk later; right now I wasn’t supposed to upset myself… The old bastard really put on a convincing act, considering that he was the one who’d arranged for me to attempt ‘suicide’ in the first place so that he could ‘save’ me! But of course I didn’t have the slightest suspicion of that at the time.”
The Frighteners Page 4