“I found them,” I said. “But Dr. Beckman doesn’t trust you very much, amigo, and she’s the one who’ll be mostly looking after you while I’m gone, so I think I’d better keep your guns for the time being. As I said, there’ll be some people watching out for you. They’ll have enough guns.”
He turned his head painfully to look at Jo. “I suppose a lot of folks, including your brother, been telling you what a wicked old man I am, ma’am.”
“Not to mention my mother,” Jo said.
Cody smiled thinly. “Didn’t get on with Will’s lady at all, and that’s a fact.”
“She told us, if anything happened to her or Will down here, you’d be to blame, Mr. Cody.”
“Hating women do say the damndest things; and your ma purely did dislike me, young lady. Maybe because I’d seen Will make a fool of himself about women like that before, and I tried to warn him against her.” He grimaced. “You’d think an old man like me would have learned better, wouldn’t you? Should have known I’d just make Will stubborn mad and the lady a bad enemy.”
Jo hesitated. “Why… why would you want to warn your partner against my mother, Mr. Cody?”
The man in the bed shook his head minutely. “No profit in my talking against your ma, girl. I think you know the kind of woman she was. Maybe the boy don’t or don’t want to admit it—boys get funny ideas about their moms—but you’re a smart young lady and you know. No need for me to badmouth her to you.”
Jo licked her lips, and said stiffly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My mother was… was a fine person and you’re just trying to… You haven’t really explained why you came here. You must know lots of people who’d be willing to help you, at least for a consideration, yet you came crawling to a man you didn’t even know…”
“A man who owed me,” Cody whispered. “Ask him, he’ll tell you. He stood by while they arrested me; watched them put the handcuffs on me. He drove off with my car. He took my young wife. He even took my name. Waiting in that place they held me, I figured to look him up some day and get back some of what he took, out of his hide maybe. Then I heard them talking about the way they’d tried to kill him a couple times and he’d got away from them and even got one or two of them doing it. So maybe he wasn’t such a bad feller after all; leastways he was tough and on the same side as me, against them. Figured if I could find him, a man who was in my debt like that, a man with the same interests you might say, we could work something out. Like we’re doing.”
Jo gave an exasperated little sigh. “They ought to give special courses in male psychology. No woman would think like that.” She frowned. “This Arturo you’re sending him to, is he old and blind or something?”
“I’m told he’s a middle-aged gent; don’t know about his eyesight… You’re wondering how your man’s going to fool him? I never met Arturo, ma’am. All I know of him is what I hear from… well, let’s say from folks who had business dealings with him.”
“Drug dealings?”
The old man moved his shoulders in a minute shrug. “I figure it’s my job to make one gent named Cody do what I think is right. It’s not my job to make the whole world do what I think is right. Or not do what I think is wrong. Too many folks minding other folks’ business these days, ma’am.”
The air was getting pretty thick with philosophy. I said, “To get back to business, what you’re saying is that you don’t really know this Arturo. And he doesn’t know you. So even assuming that I can deceive him into believing I’m you, what have I gained? What lever can I use to make him talk…?” I stopped, listening.
“You forget, you’re in Mexico,” Cody said. “Money’ll get you damn near anything in Mexico. Well, it’s the same back home, but they ain’t so blasted hypocritical around here… Something wrong, son?”
“Easy now,” I said softly. “We’re about to have visitors. Take it very easy, Mr. Cody, don’t make them nervous.”
Jo said quickly, “But if it’s Antonia, she’s coming in here to kill Mr. Cody. Are you going to let her? You can’t let her!”
The old man said dryly, “I surely do appreciate your friendly concern, ma’am, but it seems a mite inconsistent.”
I said, “Nobody’s going to kill anybody. Just stay perfectly still and don’t startle them…”
There was a sudden ripping noise as a knife slashed away the screen at the open window. The twin barrels of a shotgun parted the worn curtains, faded green with a pattern of white in this room. For a moment I thought I’d made a serious error, perhaps a fatal one, since neither Antonia nor her weatherbeaten sidekick had carried a shotgun when last seen; and if I’d let the wrong people get the drop on us, we were in serious trouble. Then I saw Tío Ignacio’s weathered face behind the big hammers of the ancient doublegun. I’d wondered why Antonia, an impatient type, had waited so long before crashing the party; but apparently, not trusting my cooperation, she’d taken time to let Ignacio provide himself with heavier artillery, either from their car or from a friend or relative in Old Kino, probably the latter since, if they’d had a shotgun along, they’d have brought it to the house in the first place. I noted that the hammers of the antique weapon were cocked.
“Pasa adelante, guapa,” said the man at the window.
I was aware of Jo, in the doorway, stepping aside to let Antonia come in. The Mexican girl stared at me for a moment defiantly. Flinging back her serape with a dramatic gesture that freed her gun arm, she turned toward the bed, raising the little .22 I’d been wondering about. A couple of tense seconds passed, but the weapon did not fire. Instead, the Mexican girl made an odd, hissing sound and swung the gun muzzle toward me.
“Ees joke, perhaps?” She spoke through clenched teeth. “This man, he is no Cody, no more than you! You make big Yankee joke with Antonia, maybe?”
23
I’d rather tackle a vanload of armed revolutionaries than the Mexican telephone system in the middle of the night. Fortunately I managed to arouse the manager of the new motel up the beach—La Playa de Kino, playa meaning beach—and a U.S. fifty-dollar bill changed his indignation to cooperation. As Cody had said, money is very effective in Mexico; particularly, with their current rate of inflation, American money.
Señor Saiz’s efforts at the motel switchboard finally got me through to our man in El Paso, Texas, whom I didn’t know and probably never would know. The Lone Star Improvement Corporation, twenty-four-hour service. Up in Texas, three hundred and fifty miles from Kino Bay, Lone Star juggled some electronics and telephonies and finally connected me with Greer, sixty miles away in the Hotel Gandara in Hermosillo. Not the most direct route of communication; but I had to keep in mind that I expected, and even hoped, that there’d be people coming after me, and whatever price I paid the manager for his silence, they could probably outbid me.
For Horace Cody, wounded and on the lam, to call a hotel in Hermosillo, a city where he had no obvious connections—particularly that hotel—would have raised questions in their suspicious little minds. For him to call an oddball company in El Paso, his hometown, shouldn’t. He was a rich man, and they’d figure it was one of his tame corporations, perhaps a front for some kind of shady business. He could be calling for assistance, or money, or information, or political influence to be used in his behalf. They’d consider it normal fugitive behavior. I hoped…
We’d had an interesting time back at the Schonfeld house, of course, after the Mexican girl’s announcement. I’d noted that Cody himself had taken it calmly enough; but Jo had reacted with a gasp of incredulity and started to protest. However, there’d been other problems to be solved of more immediate importance than a mere question of identity, so I’d cut her off.
“Antonia, how about asking your uncle to park the artillery? That ancient escopeta makes me very nervous; I’d hate to have him pull the trigger and blow himself up.”
“No blow, very good gun.” The Mexican girl laughed shortly and made a gesture. Tío Ignacio withdrew the long shotgun barrels
and the curtains fell back into place before the window, hiding the damaged screen. Antonia looked at the little pistol in her hand, shrugged, and tucked it inside her waistband. “So. Now explain this so-funny joke, por favor.”
Jo had exploded at last: “But it’s ridiculous! This has got to be the man who married Gloria Pierce with my brother watching the chapel from across the street. Isn’t it, Matt? Isn’t he? He’s the man you traded places with, the man you’ve been impersonating, isn’t he? You can’t tell me somebody went to all the trouble to fix you up like that, complete with gray hair and beard and bald spot, just so you could impersonate a bad impersonator; that would be just too mad for words! Not that the whole thing isn’t pretty wild anyway!”
I looked at the old man in the bed with the phony bandage on his head.
I said, “What do you say, Mr. Cody?”
He regarded me for a moment. “What do you know, son?”
I said, “I know that I came charging into a motel room where Señorita Sisneros was waiting for Horace Cody with a gun. Startled, she let go one wild shot, but she didn’t shoot again because she recognized instantly that I wasn’t him. Now, my disguise isn’t perfect, sir, but it isn’t that bad. In fact, you thought it was pretty good, didn’t you? So how the hell did a young woman under stress, catching a brief glimpse of a man in violent motion, a man carefully made up to resemble the man she wanted to shoot, manage to make the decision that he was the wrong man and hold her second shot?” I waited for him to speak; when he didn’t, I went on. “Later, Mrs. Beckman described the tall, gray-haired, gray-bearded Horace Cody her brother had been following. Antonia started to protest but decided against it. I think it would be interesting to hear her description of Cody, don’t you, sir?”
He nodded, and spoke to the Mexican girt: “Do I understand that you met Horace Cody, Señorita?”
“No meet.” The girl’s voice was sullen; clearly she wasn’t sure she wasn’t being ridiculed. “I was send away when Cody coming. But I watch across street, I see him come. My Jorge such a lovely fool, do stupid things; somebody must watch he no get in trouble.” She shook her head sadly. “When I hear what he is plan to do for Señor Cody I try to stop, but he will not stop. He say we make rich. Who wants rich and dead?”
The old man nodded. “So you got a good look at Horace Cody when he came to make a deal with your Jorge? Jorge Medina, is that right?”
“Medina, yes. And I see Cody good, when he come and when he go.”
I said, “How about describing him for us.”
She looked at me suspiciously, still wondering if she wasn’t being made the butt of some kind of a strange gringo joke; then she shrugged.
“Sí, if you wish. When the medical Señora was talk about the tall man with the barba and the cabeza pelada—the head with not much hair—I am wish to laugh. So much boolsheet I never hear. And this old one, this so-tall one here in the bed, he should be Señor Cody, hah? I see Señor Cody good. He has not much tall, never one hundred and ninety centimeters like this viejo who takes the name. Not small man, no, but eighty kilos and a hundred and seventy-five centimeters, maybe. He has no bald; the hair is much for such an age, maybe sixty years. I think maybe peluca, yes? Wig, you call? Brown, no gray. The face is shave very careful, no barba, no mostacho. Very careful the clothes, also. No big hat, no boots with the toes and heels, no cowboy thing around neck with big stone, very like the man of business, what you call conservative, hey? That is Señor Cody who come to Guaymas to send my Jorge to die. That is Señor Cody I will kill, hey?”
There was a silence in the room after she’d finished, then Jo burst out: “But that’s not Mr. Cody she’s describing. That’s Will Pierce!”
I looked at Cody, but his face was expressionless.
The Mexican girl asked sharply. “Pierce? That is not a name I hear. Who is this Señor Pierce?”
Jo ignored her, speaking to me: “Junior and I made fun of Will’s rug and his three-piece suits to Millie, and she slapped us down hard; if he wanted to look young for her, wasn’t that nice, and weren’t we as tired as she was of Texas men who dressed and talked like superannuated cowboys?” She glanced quickly at Cody, a little embarrassed. “I mean…”
The old man spoke at last: “No need to apologize, ma’am.” He grimaced and looked at me. “But she drove old Will plumb crazy, that Millie woman did. Seen it happen to other older fellers who got themselves infatuated with young girls, but Mrs. Charles was no young girl; still, she was a handsome, well-preserved female, I’ll hand her that, and he had her beat by more’n a dozen years, and it graveled him. He had to have himself a diet and a hairpiece, and even visits to a tanning parlor, as if we hadn’t had enough sun in our younger days to last us this lifetime and the next.”
I asked, “Did you know, sir?”
“That Will was using my name down here?” He shook his head grimly. “Not for certain, not for a while, but I started hearing about places I’d been I hadn’t been and things I’d done I hadn’t done. If you know what I mean. It went against the grain to set the hound dogs sniffing after Will, after all these years; but I came to it at last and what I learned wasn’t easy to take. There was a drug deal first, going to make him millions, but it went wrong somehow, and he almost got caught. Scared him out of that business, and a good thing, too; but I reckon that was where he made the connections for this arms deal that was going to have him rolling in greenbacks… Will was always like that; anybody could sell him pie in the sky if they just said if it was blueberry or apple so it would sound like they knew what they was talking about. But he was a good partner in the field, and he saved my life at least once, which made it mutual; and he had the goddamndest nose for oil in the ground of any man I ever met. Long as he stuck to finding it and let me handle the business of cashing in on it and making the money grow, he did fine.” Cody grimaced. “Only we had that fight I told you about, about the woman, and after that he wouldn’t listen to me, not even when I told him oil was going to drop through the floor and what we should do about it. So I bought him out, Cody and Pierce is all mine now, although not many folks know it. And Will took his money and put it in all the wrong places and lost most of it when the bottom fell out, there in Texas. Real massacre, and he was one of the massacrees. And with that woman egging him on, I reckon he got downright desperate, trying to get his stake back playing with drugs and arms like he did.”
“And using your name.” I looked at him. “Is that why you came down here, to set the record straight?”
“What record?” The old man looked me straight in the eye. “Nothing on any record, son. A few people, including maybe some government people in a couple of governments, kinda think now that Buff Cody’s even a worse bastard than they thought before, if you’ll excuse it, ma’am; but there isn’t a damn thing they can prove, and I’m not about to smear Will’s name to whitewash mine, particularly now he’s dead. In most places I do business, having a crooked reputation is an advantage, and I never cared much what folks thought of me anyway.”
Jo asked, “Then what did you come down here for, Mr. Cody?”
“Hell, some fellers done killed my partner, ma’am—or leastways the man who was my partner for forty years, even if we did break up at the end over a woman.”
She looked baffled. “You mean that after what he did to you, you still feel obliged to… to avenge him?”
Cody drew a long, painful breath. “Man’s a damn fool to criticize a friend’s woman; no better way to end a friendship. Maybe if I’d kept my mouth shut about her we wouldn’t have broke up the team, and I could have kept him from throwing his money away, and he wouldn’t have felt obliged to try the fool ventures he did in order to recoup his losses. And to sign my name to them out of anger.” The old man drew a long, painful breath. “Anyway, my reputation can stand being called a drug dealer and an arms dealer; it can’t stand being called the kind of man who does nothing when his partner of forty years has been chopped down by a bunch of machete-swingi
ng hooligans. Soon’s I grow back a little of the blood I’m missing, I’ll take care of those big-hat insurgentes. I figure if I can find those weapons they want so bad, or you can, and blow them up with dynamite or give them to the government, that’ll put a spoke in their wheel and make them wish they’d never heard of Will Pierce. After that I’ll go after a political gent named Mondragon I’m told bosses this revolutionary gang who did the killing and may have taken a swing or two at Will and his lady himself…”
Driving away from there I’d had a lot to think about; but what bothered me most was a discrepancy: apparently, contrary to what I’d been told, Buff Cody had not lost much if any of his money; he’d had no need for a rich wife’s fortune to bail him out. Yet there seemed to be clear evidence, still unrefuted, to show that he was the one who’d sent his frighteners to drive Gloria into a panic. I could see no way the blame for that could be switched to Will Pierce; and it seemed unlikely that Gloria had made up all those things that had happened to her: the accident, the gunshot, the almost-suicide. As I’d told Jo, I couldn’t believe now, having met him, that the old man really had eventual murder in mind, but everything indicated that he had given the girl a very bad time, and it seemed completely out of character for him. However, the conference had used up most of his remaining strength, and I couldn’t afford to hang around until he recovered enough to satisfy my curiosity
The Frighteners Page 22