Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  FOUR

  So it was that I flew down to Mazatlán with a crocodile bag and a matching skin wallet filled with Pacific Mutual cash, ten days before Carnival. In that same bag I had packed my slightly quaint devices—a small radio transmitter with bugging devices, a pair of opera glasses, and a subminiature Minox camera. The opera glasses I always took with me on jobs because they proved inconspicuous to bystanders while observing people from afar. I also carried the cane that has been my constant servant since I broke a foot in 1977, and inside which slept a Japanese blade that a master smith had custom made for me in Tokyo. A shikomizue inspired by all the Zatoichi films I had watched in the ’60s. For Zatoichi, a weapon for the blind; for me, the weapon of old age, of impotent slyness.

  In the town, the streets were already filled with yellow balloons and piñatas, with music and little girls, and there was a small box of superior cigars in the cantinas. I found a hotel among the ruined houses that had been bombed during the Revolution and never repaired, went up with my single bag and my flask, and pulled open the shutters.

  One last fling of the dice, I was thinking, and there wasn’t a better place in which to sink or swim. To me it was “the old country,” the last magical place on earth, the world’s navel.

  I had already researched the car I would rent, the restaurants I would hit, the bars I would soak up. My weight would go up, and the gods who determine mortal beauty would laugh into their hands. But Mazatlán was smiling on the Tropic of Cancer.

  Along the Malecón, the hustlers were in a good mood, and from the same viewpoint I could see karsts green as jade and shaped like stalactites. A new world, bathed in the light of the past. But as I’d driven in from the airport I’d noticed the walls covered with a repetitive and grave graffiti: Fuera los corruptos! Yet they would never be thrown out, the corruptibles.

  Although it hadn’t been a long flight from San Diego, I took a bath and went through the numbers I had obtained for Donald’s cronies at the Marlin Sports Club. After Bonhoeffer’s leads dried up, I called up some of my old real estate friends in California and they delivered the goods. Donaldo’s friends were all Americans, with a few rich Mexicans thrown in for good luck. Some of these fine upstanding citizens had known him for many years, and prior investigations by the company had revealed two or three that might prove to be more useful than the others. Such a person, for example, was Edward Delahanty.

  Delahanty owned a hotel in town called the Rubio, a bustling and slippery place at night, and it was there I went to meet him when the sun had come down over the Malecón and the mood had altered for the night.

  He was the same age as Donald, and he liked to sit at his bar at all hours keeping an eye on the transactions. I took his coif for a wig at once, but it turned out not to be so. He had it spun finely like gossamer at a salon in town and then dyed to the color of an eggplant after a fair amount of stir frying. You could tell that to his own eye it was a vast improvement over nature, whereas of course the opposite was true. It was eight o’clock and he was in a palm-motif shirt with silver bangles on his wrists and a bauble watch. Profits turned nicely on the Tropic. Many of the deep-sea sportfishermen stayed there and played out their Hemingway twilight days among shakers and girls in perilous heels, overwhelmed by back hair and bellies but happy in their cups.

  I had called Delahanty two days before and he was expecting me, though my appearance didn’t seem to impress him for all the glory of my vintage tie.

  “You look like a spook,” he said at once, glancing at my cane, and shook my hand without getting up. “Do people still wear ties down here?”

  “Mexicans do.”

  “Let’s have a drink. I recommend the Rubicon. It’s our house cocktail. Get it, Rubi-con?”

  “Is it red, too?”

  “It’s grapefruit juice with mescal and some sugary stuff. Rosa, dos Rubicones!”

  I said, as men do in such situations, “Quite a place you have here.”

  But he made a face.

  “It’s a shadow of its former glory. Mazatlán has gone downhill these days—it’s become friendly to families.”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “Were you here twenty years ago?”

  “Make it thirty. Yes, I remember all right.”

  “Ah, a dinosaur—the best kind! Donald and I used to go to the Camino Real Hotel and eat at the Chiquita Banana. It was his favorite place.”

  The drinks came, alarmingly iced, violently red, and served in brandy glasses.

  “Arriba, abajo, al centro,” he cried, lifting his and touching mine. “Pa dentro!”

  The mescal hit me sweetly and I rediscovered a touch of vigor for the evening.

  “So you came to ask about Donald?” Delahanty leaned back in his chair. “I heard about his death. At first I thought a shark got him. But now they say he drowned after a few drinks on the beach. I say it’s not the worst death. Not by a long shot.”

  “When was he last in Mazatlán?”

  “That same week. He always came here for a bit of fishing, then went down the coast.”

  “What did he go down the coast for?”

  “What does anyone go down there for? Girls and dope. He wasn’t a pure-at-heart surfer. The surfers go to Faro de Bucerías. Caleta is where you go for Acapulco Gold. They grow it in the hills. Plus you can anchor a yacht there.”

  “So he didn’t drive?”

  “Drive? He took a yacht there. Him and his friend Dennis Black. They always went without the wives. Black, I believe, is in Manzanillo right now. That’s where he berths in the winter.”

  “So they went down together.”

  “Probably, it was an annual tradition. I’ve heard a lot about those trips on the Black yacht. I wonder if Donald ever told his wife.”

  “I wonder if she asked.”

  “Never met her myself. Even though she’s from here. Is she pretty?”

  “Too good for the likes of us.”

  He smiled.

  “That’s what I like to hear. Glad Donald didn’t let the side down. Now I suppose she’s rich. Gringos have their uses.”

  He turned the glass in his hand and stared into the bloody ice mush.

  “It’s all fair,” I said. “We’re paying for their time, aren’t we?”

  “I guess we are at that.”

  “They wouldn’t be with us otherwise.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  It didn’t seem to bother him, however.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he went on. “You should go down to the Marlin Club and ask after Black. They’ll know where he is. You can probably find him somewhere down on the coast. He spends the whole winter there going from port to port. There’s a group of them spend the season on their yachts like that. We call them the Wild Bunch. It’s a terrific movie, have you seen it?”

  “Sure I have.”

  “They probably trade in dope with the local dealers and sell in the cities when they come back. It’s been rumored. But all I do is sit all day at my bar, which means I don’t know as much as I think I do.”

  “I think you know plenty. And I’d like to buy you ten more drinks. Or will nine do? Waiter—”

  “My kinda guy,” he bawled.

  I asked him to tell me what he thought of Donald, and he could be honest since the man was dead.

  “Donald? The most generous man in the world. He ruined himself being so generous. He loved all the parasites hanging on to him. I’ve seen him spend thousands in one night on people he’d never met before. If it’s an illness, perhaps they have a name for it?”

  “I’ll look it up later tonight.”

  “Personally, I think he wanted to die by the end. You get to be too old, that’s all, and when you get to that point you suddenly let go of all your scruples about dying and sprint to the end any way you can
.”

  “Is that what he did?”

  “Maybe. A man goes swimming in the middle of the night in a dangerous spot of sea—probably after a liter of tequila.”

  “But it sounds,” I said, “like he had a kind of second life down here. Maybe no one up north knew about it and he preferred it that way.”

  “Maybe he did.”

  He smiled a second time, and his eyes deliberately caught mine and held them for a moment: pure mirth. Every man has the idea of a second life somewhere, or a parallel one. For how many years did I not have the same idea in mind? A place where I could don a fake mustache and become Don Filippo, a place where no taxes were owed and no memories stuck to your pelt.

  “Tell me, Philip, are you treating this as a vacation? I would if I were you. You won’t find anything in Caleta de Campos. The federales down there are good old boys—you know them. Bribe them and let them talk and talk, it won’t do you any good. Donald knew what he was doing.”

  “What do you think he was doing?”

  “I think he’d had enough. What about you—have you had enough? Or would you like a girl for the night. I can arrange a favor.”

  “I’m out of the combat zone now,” I said, brushing his suggestion off with a wave of the hand. “But thanks anyway.”

  “Have another Rubicon, then. Rosa, dos Rubicones.”

  I thought I might as well enjoy it. As he said, I was on vacation. It was not like the philanderings of my work journeys of yore. My pilot light had long been blown out and I liked it better that way because now there was no need for it to be on all the time. My eye did not react like mercury to the sudden appearance of women; I had cooled. I looked around me in a more calculating way. This was Donald’s secret extramarital world. These little dance floors with available women swinging themselves to cumbia, to El Tropicombo tunes, drinks with paper parasols and maraschinos, smoke from other lungs. Nights in town and on the high seas with the Wild Bunch. I was beginning to become better acquainted with Donald Zinn, a man who was already dead.

  “You would have liked El Donaldo,” Delahanty went on, reading me in some way. “You’d have had a good time together. Maybe even had some people in common. You never know. He could tell good jokes.”

  In the underworld, then.

  “I haven’t been in those circles for a while,” I said. “I got my fill of it back then. I live for fishing and restaurants now.”

  “It’s a shame about Donald. Now I think about it, I remember one of his jokes. It goes like this: a tortoise goes to the police after he was mugged by a bunch of snails. The tortoise police ask him what happened. But the tortoise is confused. I can’t remember, he says, it all happened so quickly—”

  He slammed down his glass and his eyes went apoplectic before the inevitable burst of laughter.

  “La chingada!”

  “I wonder if he made it up.”

  I downed my Rubicon and it had curiously little effect on me.

  “So are you going to Caleta de Campos to follow the trail? They told me that the body was cremated down there on the spot. Is that true? I wonder how it goes when you wash up dead on the beach. Don’t they identify you and notify the embassy and then ship you home?”

  “Not always, it seems. Maybe there were reasons. It’s a small settlement, I hear—they’re a bit cut off from the outside world.”

  “He sure picked his spot, didn’t he?”

  “It looks that way,” I said.

  Delahanty glanced up at the wall for a moment, at a clock whose numerals were made of little bottles.

  “I wonder where he is now?” he smiled. It was a question that actually might have had an answer.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning I took a taxi out to the Marlin Club. It lay on the water north of the Hotel Playa toward the marina, an informal clubhouse for a private sportfishing fleet moored inside the marina and owned by an American called Ronnie Sugar. Sugar himself was there, fat and yet muscular enough at the same time to man a rod on a boat’s fighting chair. Now land bound, his monstrous form was settled into a deck chair in the sun, facing two shadowy islands that rose from the sea in front of us, and the hand that shaded his eyes was covered with Aztec rings. He wanted to know who I was, and I had to charm him into eventually admitting that he knew Mr. Black. Fortunately, my name meant nothing to him.

  “And what do you want with Dennis?”

  My shadow lay across him because he had not invited me to sit, and so there was a touch of the Diogenes about him. Would he ask me to move out of the way of his sun?

  “Delahanty suggested you might know where he is now. I’m from the insurance company, but it has nothing to do with him.”

  “So it’s about Zinn?”

  “Is he a well-known character down there?”

  “You’ll find him in minutes. He’s not the hiding kind. But if I were you I’d be careful around him. I don’t allow him on my boats these days.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He gets a little frisky with the machete. There’s a good way to kill big fish and a bad way. You know what I mean? Now, if you don’t mind—”

  “There was one more thing, though. Did you know Zinn well?”

  He took this with weary equanimity.

  “He came fishing on my boats, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t ever ban him for getting drunk. He was a bad fisherman, but he liked the social life. You’re going to ask me what I knew about him. Nothing. I think he had some real estate deals on the coast, but it was none of my business. No, his wife never came with him. He was a cokehead, but I’ve seen worse. It rubs you a little the wrong way on a guy that age. He never grew up. I called him a bastard because he once chewed out one of my boat hands in a nasty way. I don’t let anyone do that. He had a nasty side. Many of them do.”

  “It sounds to me like he was meshuga a bit. Was he?”

  His face clouded and he wondered if I was making fun of him.

  “You mean was he crazy?”

  “Yeah, not playing with a full deck.”

  “You could say that. Meshuga! You talk like you were still twenty-five, Marlowe. Is that Ice Age slang?”

  “Old habits and all that.”

  “No, I like it. And that’s a funky old suit you’re wearing, old sport. When did you get that made? D-day?”

  I looked down at my own duds and wondered myself. It must have been the wide chalk stripes and the high-waisted look, but at least without a hint of zoot. I always dressed conservatively. Old pieces from Hart Schaffner & Marx out of New York, but maybe he was right and I had let the years flow under my bridge without noticing.

  “If it fits, it doesn’t look bad.”

  “Still, it’s 1988, hombre.”

  “How about Zinn? Did he wear the latest stuff?”

  “He was pretty sharp. Sharper than you. But I can see you’re a nicer person.”

  “So he flipped his wig from time to time,” I said. “It’s not a capital offense. We all do that, don’t we?”

  “No, we don’t. He’s a bastard and I couldn’t care less about him. But I don’t want to have lunch with you, Mr. Marlowe. I want you to be on your way. Black is in Puerto Vallarta now, if you want to know. As you’re aware, it’s on the coast, so it’s on your way. If you find him, you don’t say I told you. Or I’ll come down there and kill you myself.”

  * * *

  —

  In the brilliant noon light I went down to the Hotel Playa and had lunch near the beach, enchiladas suizas with white sauce and a bottle of Baja white wine. This was the world in which Donald Zinn moved in his spare time, but so far there had not been any expressions of real sorrow about his passing from the earth. He seemed to have struck them as a grown-up adolescent whose true character rested in a permanent state of obscurity. Halfway through th
e bottle, I asked the hotel to call a place called the Conchas Chinas in Puerto Vallarta, an establishment named for the village where it was located, and reserve me a room for a couple of nights. It was little more than a four-hour drive in my rental car, and I wanted to get there that same evening. Instinct moved me. Black was there and I wanted to corner him before I arrived in Caleta de Campos.

  In the end, it was a longer drive.

  The heat had gotten to me and the long, straight road in its white dust played on my nerves. As always, there were the iron shacks arranged in grids where the children come racing toward the car to hunt for coins. The sesuvium that gave the slums the false color of gardens.

  But in the green and rolling hills I stopped among the usual abandoned buildings and the meadows filled with poppies and lay down for a while with heaviness in my mouth. Between milpas of maize tall, forked saguaros rose into a dark-blue atmosphere, and I slept with my silver-tipped cane beside me in the hot beaten-down grass and dreamed of the bodies I had seen a lifetime earlier. Bodies sometimes sprawled in fields a little like this one, or else slumped at bars where they had been shot in the temple. The unfortunate can die anywhere, and they often looked like children asleep, with faces that I had known when they were living.

  FIVE

  Puerto Vallarta packed a lot of nostalgia for me as I grew older and the town became younger in appearance. Its golden age was really around 1964, the time of Night of the Iguana, and many were the golden days I had spent there then. Now all the people I had once known had either died or moved on. South of the town lay the village of Conchas Chinas, where that film was shot, its old hotels sitting on top of cliffs that plunged down into a petrol-blue sea. It was in 1958, I believe, that I came here with Mona Kotzen, a girl I picked up in Los Angeles while working on the Smithson case. She must have been twenty-three at that time, a marvel I met in Whitley Heights while talking to her father, and I carried her off in my godly chariot to the rocky coves where the waves beat on the precipices all night long. What had we said to each other during those nights? They must have been important and beautiful things, but now I couldn’t remember what they had been. The words, like Mona, had melted into the ether. But the hotel and the owner, whom I had befriended years before, was still there. Danny Combes, with colorful-motif shirts and a broken nose, and the bright eyes of the ones who will never die easily.