Please Write for Details

by John D. MacDonald

  “We ought to get one of the six,” he said.

  “I don’t understand this at all,” Miles said. “Oh, here comes Alberto.”

  “We woke him up,” Billy said. Alberto was a stringy and weathered man who did not pick his feet up when he walked. He was employed as gardener and janitor and handy man. He approached the car slowly as Miles got out, and on his sleepy face was a look of utter idiocy.

  “Alberto, you are not taking the broken tiles out of the yard here as I am telling you five or six times,” Miles said.

  “First I will put beautiful flowers in the patio,” Alberto said.

  “No. First you will remove the tiles.”

  “What will I do with them, Señor Droomond?”

  “I don’t know. Throw them in the barranca.”

  “How will I carry them to the barranca?”

  “On the wheelbarrow.”

  “It is now broken.”

  Miles stared at him in helpless exasperation. “Now carry all these things to the room where I will live.”

  Alberto went to the car, picked up one small suitcase and shuffled sadly off with it. When he was fifteen feet away Miles called to him. “Where is Rosalinda?”

  “She has gone someplace to purchase a hen.”

  “And the maids?”

  “The rooms were clean so they both went home.”

  “And Pepe?”

  “He has gone to the city.”

  “Mind if I look around?” Billy said.

  “Not at all. Not at all.”

  Billy wandered off. Miles picked his largest suitcase out of the car and struggled into the hotel with it. The central patio, through the doors that opened off the shadowy lobby, looked scurfy and beaten. It contained a flagstone walk in the shape of an X, three cement benches, one sundial with the end broken off the blade, one cement birdbath and one small defunct fountain. And fifty kinds of weeds.

  After he was unpacked and settled in, and after Billy had left, without comment, Miles went into the patio and began pulling weeds.

  Gloria Garvey picked Miles up at the Hutchinson at two-thirty on Sunday afternoon in her powder-blue Jaguar sedan. Cars were Gloria’s single expensive vice. She kept her car garaged near Las Rosas, but gave it no other care. When it ceased running properly, she would order another one.

  Gloria wore her Mexico City costume, a black suit, white blouse, white gloves. But the skirt of the black suit was shiny in the seat, and the lapels of the jacket were tinged gray with cigarette ash, and the finger seams of the white gloves were split. Her careless hair had the look and texture of lion mane in thorn country.

  As Miles got in beside her, she said, “For Chrissake, Drummy, stop jittering. Gam Torrigan is absolutely nobody. What happened to your hand?”

  Miles looked down at the bandage. “I cut my fingers on some broken tile I was throwing into the barranca.”

  “You know darn well that if you potter around doing manual labor, they’ll let you do it all.”

  She yanked the Jaguar around and plunged through the gate, making it skitter sideways on the road before it leveled away and roared by the military barracks where a lone Sunday soldier, lounging on guard, caught a glimpse of long fair hair and responded with the expected whistle, a mechanical and customary courtesy.

  She pulled the Jaguar to a shivering halt at the toll gate of the autopisto, took the five-peso note from Miles and gave it to the man. She accelerated smoothly, keeping the tach just under the red until the car was climbing toward Tres Cumbres at a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour and the wind roar made conversation impossible. She saw that Miles was firmly holding his own frail knees and staring dead ahead in hypnoid alarm, and it amused her. She took pleasure in driving. She had always had a knack for it, an instinctive ability to judge distances, a sense of timing. But the finishing touches had been added one summer in Italy. It took a few seconds to reach deep into memory and pull the name out. Rufino Cellero. A very, wiry, arrogant little guy. And that great beast of a competition Mercedes that made a noise like a runaway sawmill, and when you had it up there, really up there, you lived on the dirty edge of disaster, and it was very fine. She remembered the misty morning, fighting the gear box, sliding into curves, booming down across the mountain bridges, while Rufi, beside her, yelled with joy and banged the side of the door with his brown fist. Rufi had told his manager how good she was and the manager had taken a trial ride with her and then had gotten all heated up about the idea of having her enter some of the road races coming up. And that had seemed good too. But one day she had looked at Rufi in the morning light at that inn and knew that it was finished. Rufi had wept in rage and disappointment and the look of him with his face all twisted up had made it even more finished for her. But she had kept the driving skills he had taught her.

  Far ahead on the divided toll road she saw two trucks about two hundred feet apart, grinding up the slope. An American tourist car was starting the process of passing both trucks. Gloria’s eyes narrowed as she judged speed and distances. She tramped the gas pedal down and rocketed toward the group of vehicles. She came up on the tourist car just as it had passed the first truck. She swung right between the rear of the tourist car and the front of the second truck, then cut back to the left lane, passing narrowly between the rear of the lead truck and the front of the tourist car. She glanced at Miles. He still clutched his knees. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving. She chuckled against the sound of the wind.

  It would be fun to give Gambel Torrigan a gutsy ride back across the mountain. He would probably respond by pretending to go to sleep.

  It was odd how when the idea of Drummy running a summer art school had occurred to her, she had immediately thought of Gam Torrigan. She knew other artists, and better ones. And some of the better ones would probably have jumped at the idea of two months in Mexico on a free ride. But she wrote to somebody in New York who kept track of such things and found out that Gam was teaching at something called the Peninsular Art School and Foundation in Englewood, Florida, and wrote him there, suspecting that, as in Posketnob, Maine, Gam would be close to wearing out his Englewood welcome.

  That had been a crazy month in Maine. Which one had it been? Garvey, of course. And near the beginning of the end. Gussy Garvey, with a forlorn idea of mending marital rifts already well past repair, had leased that sullen dog of a schooner with its tiresome crew of three and they had gone a-journeying up the New England coast, stopping off to party here and there with friends, and with friends of friends.

  They tied up for the longest day in the Posketnob Yacht Basin. Gussy had dear old friends there, a limp old pal from Choate days who had a hell of a big house and a neurotic pretentious wife. It was the wife, Coralee something, who brought her art teacher, Gam Torrigan, down for cocktails on the schooner. After the first fifteen minutes of idle yak Gloria had acquired all the tactical information she needed. Gam was having a thing with Coralee. He was bored with the whole deal. He was being pointedly charming toward Gloria. And, quite obviously, he was a big, arrogant, selfish, ignorant, picturesque phony. Who suited her completely. During their affair they got carelessly drunk one afternoon and Coralee made an unfortunate entrance. After an attack of screaming hysterics, Coralee went home and cut her wrists with great care, cut them just enough to get about ten drops of blood from each one, and then made a tragic confession to the item from Choate, including what she had interrupted. The shaken Choate type passed it along to Gussy, as a sort of friendly gesture. And so that was the end of the marriage, right there, and the schooner was sent on home without passengers. And Gam’s teaching contract was terminated without notice—a sort of local substitute for tar and feathers.

  Gloria realized that her recent correspondence with Gam might be open to misinterpretation on his part. He might think she wanted a continuance of the so abruptly severed relationship back in Posketnob. She did not think she did. When she thought of him, there was no answering visceral tremor. But if it occurred once
she saw him in person, then let him believe what he wished. But if it was still dead, he would have to be abruptly educated. Perhaps he preened himself on being the cause of divorce. If so, he would have to have the word on that.

  The flight came in at four-thirty, just ten minutes late. At the international section of the Mexico City airport, those meeting passengers stand in an open-air area behind a fence and watch the incoming passengers walk along a long shed arrangement that leads to the glass-walled customs room.

  “Which one?” Miles asked nervously.

  “That one. Right there,” Gloria said, pointing.

  “That one!” Miles said, staring at a very big man who strolled along with the manner of a man who owns the airline and is making a check flight to study passenger service. But in that manner there was an undercurrent of the con man, hunting a victim to whom he can sell the airline. He was big—thick through the chest, heavy in the arms and legs. He combined a bristling black brush cut with a bushy beard, tinged with gray. Nestling in the beard was a wide and petulant red-lipped mouth, a nose pink with tiny broken veins. His cheekbones were high and brown and solid, the pale eyes set in Mongol tilt. He wore an obviously ancient, rust-colored corduroy shirt, the collar open, a yellow silk ascot at his throat, faded baggy khaki pants, and the kind of black pseudo-cowboy boots that A.T.C. personnel used to buy in Brazil in the early forties. He wore a bulging and ratty musette bag slung over his shoulder, and carried a large painter’s portfolio.

  When he was opposite them, ten feet away, Gloria said, “Gam!”

  He stopped and turned, and a big slow smile spread the red lips wide, and he said, in a rich and resonant bass-baritone, “Gloria, love! You look edible, darling. Ravishing. What a foul thing this air age is. I’ll be with you as soon as I permit a horde of officious little men to paw over my poor belongings.” And he strolled on.

  “Good heavens!” Miles Drummond said.

  They went inside and watched him through the gates as he went through customs. He had one enormous black metal suitcase which he apparently kept closed with a complicated arrangement of khaki straps and buckles. When he came out into the terminal building, carrying his suitcase, they met him. Gloria made the introduction. Miles felt his hand give slightly under the hard engulfing pressure. Torrigan had put the big suitcase down. Miles decided it would be polite to carry it out to the parking lot. He picked it up. His eyes bulged. He raised it several inches off the floor before it clunked back down.

  Torrigan picked it up without effort, and they went out to the car. Miles and the suitcase and the portfolio and the musette bag shared the back seat. Torrigan seemed to talk constantly in that rich black voice of his. Miles, in a rare flight of imagery, thought it sounded like hot tar being poured out of a golden jug. He wished Gloria had told him more about what Gambel Torrigan was like. He had imagined many things, but not this.

  Gloria, for her part, had detected no visceral quiver. Gam was merely ludicrous, mannered, and slightly boring.

  Miles Drummond was the only witness to the first meeting between Gambel Torrigan and Agnes Partridge Keeley. He had stayed up late on Sunday night after they got back to the Hutchinson, stayed up with Gam and Gloria, listening to a bewildering conversation. Gam had showed him the paintings in the portfolio. They did not look like anything Miles had ever seen before. They were blobs and whorls and swoops of pure color. They had such titles as “Illusionary Number Eleven” and “Transcendant in Ochre” and “Majorcan Melody.”

  He said to Gloria, “You can see from this recent stuff, darling, that I’ve gone beyond my Dynamic Impressionism period. I was in stasis. There was no longer enough there to satisfy me. But the mood was germinating, even when I was most discouraged. Now I’m into what I like to call my period of Reversive Romanticism. I’m dealing entirely in the balance of tensions through luminosity and focal levels. Some of my critics seem to think I’m betraying my purposes with a retrogressive step, but I say that sometimes it is time to go back to your beginnings to find the source of your strength. I feel that these have a lot of verity and I find them enormously exciting. Don’t you, Gloria?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Gloria. “Can you scrounge up any more ice, Drummy?”

  Miles went off and made certain there was no more ice. Though Torrigan awed him and the paintings confused him, he was grateful that Torrigan had not complained about the hotel or the accommodations. In fact, Torrigan seemed almost oblivious to his surroundings.

  As he came back toward his apartment he heard Gloria’s voice, sharp with irritation, and then he heard Gambel Torrigan give an explosive yap of anguish. When Miles went in they were standing six feet apart. Gloria was lighting a cigarette. Torrigan stood in peculiar fashion, bent forward at the waist. He straightened himself with effort, grimaced and said, “That was a hell of a thing to do!”

  “You weren’t getting my message, doll.”

  “I’ve got it now,” he said with dignity, and picked up his portfolio and said, “Good night, Gloria. Good night, Mr. Drummond. I am going to bed.” He marched out.

  “What happened?”

  Gloria gave him an odd smile. “I applied a little Reversive Romanticism, Drummy. No ice? Hell. Fix me a warm one then.”

  After her drink, he walked her out to her car where it sat pale in the moonlight. “Gloria, those paintings. I don’t know. I mean I want to preserve an open mind. But … are they any good?”

  “My God, I wouldn’t know. They may be nothing. They may be art for the ages. How can you tell? When he was in his early twenties, a couple of critics got onto him and made a big deal out of him. He had a show in a New York gallery and damn near sold it out for pretty good prices. And that’s the last good thing that happened to him. He teaches around in little schools nobody ever heard of. He sells a painting once in a while. Don’t worry about it, Drummy. He’ll do a snow job on your little people. Good night now.”

  The Jaguar plunged down toward the sleeping city, rumbling through the night. She rang the night bell on the garage until a sleepy attendant appeared to take her car. The lobby of Las Rosas was empty. When she was in her small suite she unhooked, unbuttoned, unzipped, unsnapped and let her clothes lie where they fell. She read for about fifteen minutes and then turned out the bed light. She lay in darkness on the edge of sleep and thought of Gam Torrigan, of his sudden look of shock and outrage after he had tried forcibly to embrace her. She grinned a dirty grin and scratched the mound of a soft warm hip, and rolled over into sleep.

  Agnes Partridge Keeley arrived at nine o’clock on Monday morning in a sea-gray air-conditioned Cadillac with California plates. She was a billowing, pillowy woman of fifty, all pastels and jangle of junk jewelry, full of soft cooings and velvety little cries and exclamations. She had a face like a pudding, small, bitter blue eyes, and coarse, tightly curled hair bleached a poisonous yellow-green. When she had been a miserably shy and thoroughly unattractive child, it was thought she had a pretty talent for drawing. In the past thirty years Agnes Partridge Keeley, hefty virgin, had painted and sold some 8,000 seascapes, landscapes and portraits of children and animals in the $15 to $60 price range. A shrewd and avid businesswoman, she saw to it that there were Agnes Partridge Keeleys in every retail outlet in the Pasadena area where an Indiana tourist might be tempted to buy a genuine original painting by a California artist.

  After Miles had greeted her and made arrangements to have her staggering amount of luggage transported to the room he had set aside for her, he took her on a quick tour of the hotel. “How deliciously quaint!” she kept exclaiming, but at certain areas of the tour she was seen to swallow with difficulty.

  Miles felt more at ease with her than with Torrigan. “For years and years, Mr. Drummond,” she said, “I have wanted to paint the Mexican scene. These quaint and delightful people. The grandeur of the mountains. I must confess that I could not possibly tell you how many times I stopped by the roadside to dash off a few sketches. I sketch wherever I go, you know. It is the indispe
nsable tool of the working artist. I will insist that my students this summer carry their sketch blocks everywhere. Absolutely everywhere!”

  Miles sometimes sketched with a very nice old lady named Mildred Means, a Cuernavaca resident who, when she had lived in Pasadena, had studied for seven years with Agnes Partridge Keeley. It was Mrs. Means who had recommended her and had given Miles a letter to enclose in his first contact with her.

  “Now I really must get settled, Mr. Drummond. You’re being so kind. And then I must paint this charming patio the very first thing.”

  It did not take Agnes Partridge Keeley very long to get settled. She reappeared in dusty pink slacks and a pale green blouse, carrying paintbox, easel, and folding canvas stool. She set herself up in one corner of the patio and went diligently to work. It was Miles’ curiosity about her methods that caused him to be present when his two instructors met at about ten-thirty that morning. He had asked her if she knew Gambel Torrigan, and she had apologized for her ignorance in a way that somehow conveyed the idea that nobody knew Gambel Torrigan, and why should they?

  Miles was looking rather timidly over Agnes Partridge Keeley’s plump shoulder when he was startled by a loud noise directly in back of him, rather like the snorting of an irritated horse. He turned sharply and saw Gambel Torrigan standing there looking with acute revulsion at the half-completed water color on the Keeley easel. Miles had not been entirely satisfied with the way the water color was progressing. She seemed to make the patio too pretty, putting in flowers where none had yet grown. But it certainly could not be as bad as the expression on Torrigan’s face indicated.

  “Bah!” said Gambel Torrigan and reached out a long heavy arm and took the water color and tore it in half, and tore the halves in half and scattered them on the ground and spat in their general direction. Agnes leaped up, cheeks and chins shaking in shock and anger, spluttering incoherently.