Jungle of Glass

by Gerald J. Davis

  Broadbent insisted I check into the Hotel Presidente in San Benito so the widow McInerny wouldn't know I was back in town. They dropped me off at the hotel and Broadbent said they'd pick me up in a half-hour to go to dinner.

  I checked into the Presidente and followed the bellhop up to my room. After I’d showered and changed, I called the Camino Real to get the messages that had come in while I was away.

  There were three messages. Two were from civilians answering the ad in La Prensa with information they hoped would put them on the road to riches. The other one was from Sister Angela. She left the number of a community house on the outskirts of San Salvador.

  I called Sister Angela's number. An old man answered the phone and said he would take a message for her. He must have been almost illiterate because it took him a long time to write down my name and number. He made me repeat it several times to be sure he had it right.

  Broadbent and Lightener took me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant but the food was barely edible. The dumplings were stuffed with some kind of petroleum-enriched silicone. After you've gotten used to eating in New York, the cuisine any place else is just passable, at best.

  When we'd finished dinner, they invited me to go with them to some cat house to get our pipes cleaned, but I told them I had to go back to the hotel and wash my socks.

  CHAPTER XX

  After Broadbent and Lightener dropped me off at the hotel, I gave them a decent interval to get away and then went out front and stood under the awning. There was a solitary cab waiting at the end of the driveway. The driver was leaning against the car, grabbing a smoke. I called out to him. It was way past midnight. I wanted to check out this Casa Austria without their company.

  The taxi driver took me to a middle-class neighborhood that was mostly newly-constructed houses. The lights were out in all the houses and the residents presumably tucked safely in bed. I told the driver to come back for me in an hour and paid him a handsome retainer and said there would be a lot more if he was punctual. There's nothing as uncomfortable as loitering in a good neighborhood after midnight without a valid reason for being there, except maybe for loitering in a lousy neighborhood.

  The Casa Austria was a large private home that had been converted to a guest house. It looked like a clean and comfortable place from the outside. The streets were quiet and the only noises were a couple of dogs barking in the distance and the low whistle of the neighborhood watchman signaling that all was well. There were several street lights on the block and the trees on the sidewalk cast deep shadows on the pavement.

  I walked around the block until I got back to the guest house. All the rooms were dark but there was a light over the entrance. I went up to the front door and tried it. It was locked. But it wasn't a tough lock.

  The lock opened in less than a minute of working on it. The door swung open without any noise. I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. No way of knowing how soon the sereno would be making his rounds in front of the hotel. The entranceway was small. There was a light at the end of the corridor that gave a little illumination. On the right was a stairway. A small antique desk was on the left.

  I took a small flashlight from my pocket and ran it over the top of the desk. The only thing there was a ledger size leather-bound book. I opened the book and held the light on the page. It was the guest register.

  The widow McInerny was in room 2C.

  If the mountain wouldn't come to Rogan, Rogan would go to the mountain.

  I went up the stairs slowly and made a right, because people always make a right turn. 2C was the second door on the right. The light was off under the door. There was one dim bulb in the hallway. The floors were tile so I tried to step without sounding like a herd of bull elephants. I stood against the wall at the top of the staircase. There wasn't a sound anywhere except for somebody snoring really loud from one of the rooms on the floor.

  Next, I moved to the door of 2C and stood there with my back to the wall for a couple of minutes. The bulb overhead was so dim you could barely see to the end of the hallway. It was stifling. There was no breeze. The place needed a powerful air conditioner. I was sweating like I was playing volleyball in a sauna. I opened my top shirt button and loosened the bloody tie that was strangling me.

  When I was sure that everything was secure I checked the door of 2C. It was locked but the lock was old. I worked it until it snapped open. I put my shoulder against the door and shoved but it wouldn't move. There must've been some kind of hook or catch. It took a couple of more shoves before it gave way.

  I stopped and waited. It was quiet.

  The door was open about two inches. I pushed it a little more. It moved with a loud squeak. I stopped. It was going to be better to open it all at once than get a series of loud squeaks. I waited. Everything was quiet.

  I swung the door open a foot. There was another loud squeak and then silence. I didn't move for a full minute. The snoring continued down the hall.

  It's written that a gentleman isn't supposed to be in a lady’s bedchamber after midnight, but this was a special case. This was going to save somebody's life or get somebody killed. The room was dark, except for a thin shaft of moonlight that hit the floor next to the bed. I stepped inside and closed the door. As my eyes got used to the darkness, I could barely make out the figure on the bed. It was tough to see anything else.

  I shone the flashlight around the floor, starting with my feet and then in widening circles. The bed was a meter and a half from my feet. Next to the bed was a night table.

  There was a small foot rug by the bed. A dresser stood against the wall. That was all. The room was small, maybe four meters across.

  I moved the light at waist level. There was a female form on the bed. That was all I could see. On the night table were four liquor bottles. They were bottles of Flor de Cana, the stuff that would stiffen you faster than a sack of concrete. One of them was lying on its side. There were also a bunch of pill bottles.

  I walked over and studied her up and down. The broad sure appeared to be a boozer. I took another step until I was next to the night table. At the back of the night table was a small black gun. It looked like a Beretta. I took a closer look. It was the same piece she'd used to try to put a few holes in me in Roderick's concubine's store. I reached over and grabbed the gun and slipped it into my pocket.

  I flashed the beam over the bed. The covers were down on the tile floor. The woman was on her back. She was wearing a T-shirt and panties. Her forearm was flung over her eyes. Her hair was blond and it was spread out all over the pillow. I moved next to the bed and put the light on her. The T-shirt had a large design on the front with the letters NPR and a picture of an old-fashioned microphone like the kind Frank Sinatra used to sing into. The panties were plain white cotton.

  I grabbed her shoulder and shook it.

  "Wake up," I said. "It's question and answer time."

  She didn't move.

  "Wake up, sister."

  Still no sign of intelligent life.

  I shook her again. This time she started to stir. She moved her arm away from her eyes. Then she slowly reached over for one of the bottles. Her eyes were still closed.

  She groaned. It wasn't a pleasant sound. It sounded like a couple of boards being pried apart. Her hand smacked the bottle and knocked it off the table. It hit the floor and shattered. What a waste of some perfectly good rotgut.

  "Rise and shine," I said.

  She shook her head without opening her eyes and moaned. She was trying to say something but the words weren't intelligible. Her head kept moving back and forth.

  "It's showtime," I said. "Time to fill in the blanks."

  She grunted and this time she tried to open her eyes. It was a major effort. First she opened one eye and then the other.

  "It's me." I smiled. I shone the light on my face and then back on hers. It must have been a real shock to her.

  "Oh," she said. It took a few long slow seconds for the image of my face to t
ravel the distance from her eyes to her brain. Then her eyes rolled back so you could see the whites and she blacked out.

  CHAPTER XXI

  It took a full five minutes to bring her back. First I tried slapping her cheeks, but that didn't work. Then I took splashes of the rotgut and put it on her cheeks and her forehead. Pretty soon she started smelling like a distillery, but it didn't help. I did that for a couple of minutes. Then I took the pillow and the covers and wadded them up and put them under her feet.

  After a while her eyelids started to flutter. I flicked on the light switch by the door. The overhead light was a single bulb but it did a good job of lighting the room. The place was simple but clean, aside from the broken glass and the spreading stain of alcohol on the floor. The whole room stunk of booze.

  By now, the widow McInerny was back with the living. She wasn't sitting up yet, but her eyes were open and they were filled with fear. Her head moved slowly from side to side as she tried to survey her situation. She probably knew it wasn't good.

  Before I could stop her, she made a quick move for the gun on the night table. She looked very unhappy when she discovered it wasn't there. She lay back down and turned to look at me.

  I gave her another smile, a reassuring one. "I didn't kill your husband," I said.

  She didn't look reassured. "What do you want?" Her voice was shaky.

  "I'm not here to hurt you," I said.

  She made an effort to sit up. "Why are you here?"

  Her voice was a little steadier.

  "I didn't kill your husband," I repeated.

  She managed to raise herself up on one elbow. "I know," she said softly. She looked down.

  "You do?"

  She nodded. "Where's my gun?" she asked.

  "You don't need that. It's going to get you in a world of trouble, especially if you don't know how to use it." I leaned a little closer to her. "Didn't your mother ever tell you it's bad manners to take potshots at a stranger in a brassiere shop?"

  She flushed. It was tough to tell her age. She must have been in her late thirties, early forties. She appeared well worn. Her skin had the tired sheen that women get when they lose that dewy look.

  "I wasn't trying to kill you," she said. She was sitting up now, but she didn't know what to do with her hands. She kept moving them nervously in her lap.

  "How do you know I didn't kill your husband?" I asked her.

  She looked over at the bottles of Flor de Cana on the night table. "I need a drink," she said. "I'm completely fucked up right now."

  "Go ahead and ruin your health."

  She slid over and grabbed the nearest bottle by the neck. It didn't matter which bottle she picked up. They were all open. She took a slug and then took one of the pill bottles and tapped out a pill and swallowed it with another slug of rotgut.

  The booze must have bolstered her courage. She squinted up at me. "How did you get into my room?" she said. "And what are you doing here?"

  "Is that one question or two?"

  She was sweating and her hair was plastered to her forehead in strands. She shook her head and then reached up and brushed back her hair with her hand. As she reached up, those 36C's strained against the microphone on her shirt.

  "I didn't mean to hurt you," she said. She must have realized the precariousness of her situation. Who knew what this tall, dark and handsome stranger in her room was capable of?

  "Relax," I said. "You don't have a thing to worry about. At least not from me. My job is getting into places I don't belong and asking a lot of questions."

  "What are you? And what are you doing here?"

  I grinned at her. "Looks like you're the one who's asking all the questions. That's my job, not yours."

  She took another swallow of booze. "What is your job?"

  "I have one job right now. That's to find a man named James Roderick. Does that name mean anything to you?"

  She looked at me for a long time. "Why are you in my room?" she said finally.

  "I'm a private investigator. That's what I do. I go into peoples' rooms in the middle of the night and scare the hell out of them."

  "That's what you did to me, alright. You scared me shitless and I'm still scared and I'm not sure my medication is working." She took another slug of booze. "That medication is supposed to calm me down, and right now I'm not very calm. As a matter of fact, I'm very upset that you're in my room at night and you woke me up when you weren't supposed to."

  "You can go back to sleep after you give me some answers," I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. "Why should I help you?"

  That was a good question, I had to admit. It took a couple of seconds to think of an answer. "Because I can help you."

  She shook her head. "Help me? Exactly in which fucking way can you help me?"

  "Don't you want to know who killed your husband?"

  She stared at me. "Of course I do. What kind of a goddam wife would I be if I didn't."

  I gave her my most winning smile. "I can help you find the men who did it."

  She sounded skeptical. "How can you do that?"

  "Because I was lucky and he wasn't. I was with him in that firefight when he bought it. They were shooting at both of us." I neglected to tell her I didn't have any better idea now of who ambushed us than I did then, except that now I believed it wasn't a random event.

  "Why did they kill him?" she said. She let out a little sob. At least, it sounded like a sob. It could have been a hiccup.

  That was my cue to jump in. "He was one hell of a guy," I said. "You had to admire him, the way he rounded up all that information. He said he wanted to write a story about me."

  She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. "Why you?"

  I shrugged. "He said I made good copy."

  She shot another glance up at me. She was obviously having a hard time deciding if she could trust me. She didn't speak for a while. Everything was very still. The sereno's low whistle sounded on the street outside the window. He might have noticed the light on in her room.

  "How did you know I didn't kill him?" I asked her.

  "He told me," she said flatly.

  I blinked. "What?" Since when did corpses start to talk?

  "I'm going to puke," she said. She put her hand over her mouth and got up from the bed on the side without the broken glass and ran barefoot across the room and out the door. I could've stopped her, I guess, but for some reason I didn't.

  The door to the room was wide open. Down the hall in the bathroom she was retching loud enough to wake a drunken army. She kept hacking and retching until I thought she was going to cough up a lung. Then she stopped.

  Now we had arrived at what is commonly called the Moment of Truth. Was she going to walk back into a room with a stranger who might harm her or would she stroll off into the night in her T-shirt and panties or would she just start to scream her head off?

  How would you figure the odds? Three to one, one in three?

  I waited what seemed a long time, but was actually less than two minutes. Then I heard footsteps padding down the hallway. She stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. She didn't look at me, but went and sat hunched down on the edge of the bed.

  Good old solid citizen Rogan. She trusted me after all. Kind of gave a boost to my aura of professional competence.

  "Sorry about that," she said. "Usually I can hold my liquor."

  "And the pills go extremely well with the booze?"

  She looked up at me sheepishly. "Yeah, I suppose that wasn't too healthy a cocktail." She got up and crawled across the bed on her hands and knees and grabbed a pack of Marlboros from the night table. She lit up a cigarette and exhaled slowly. "It's all right. I feel better now."

  "Don't fret," I said. "I won't tell your parole officer."

  She took a couple of puffs and blew them out in rapid succession.

  "How did you know I didn't kill your husband?" I asked her again.

  She nodded. "My husband was working on a stor
y here that he hoped to freelance to some magazine. Either that or publish a book on the subject. Every couple of days he'd overnight me a disk by DHL with all the updates he'd written. On the next to the last disk, he mentioned you and that he thought you were somehow involved in the nasty business he was investigating."

  She turned and eyed the Flor de Cana on the night table. She started to grab one of the bottles, but put it down without drinking any. Instead she sucked on the cigarette a couple of times. Then she started coughing as she exhaled.

  "I received the last disk a week after he died, because he'd sent it by regular airmail," she said. "I didn't print it out until later.”

  "What did it say?"

  "It was rather involved. I didn't fully understand it. He had apparently unearthed something about a cabal of ex-military officers who were involved in some nefarious scheme to use El Salvador as a transshipment point to smuggle copious quantities of drugs."

  This babe talked like a walking thesaurus. I squinted at her. "What kind of work do you do?"

  "I'm a reporter for National Public Radio."

  I studied her face more closely. She looked like a cross between Cokie Roberts and Nina von Totenberg.

  "Oh, shit," I said.

  "What's the matter? Don't you like NPR?"

  I shook my head. "Too many long, boring, thumb-sucking pieces about agrarian reform in Central America."

  "Well, that's what I do, whether you like it or not." She folded her arms across her chest. "Anyway, on the last disk, he said he was mistaken about you and that he didn't think you were part of the scheme. He said he thought you could help him and that he had some new information. He was going to take you to meet a contact he'd located."