Ask for Me Tomorrow

by Margaret Millar

  “Yes.”

  “Finer than Los Angeles?”

  “I’ll have to consider that for a while.”

  “Take your time.” He dropped his rifle against the gatehouse door. Then he leaned against the wall with his arms crossed on his chest. “I am in no hurry. Salazar, my assistant, is in no hurry either. Are you, Salazar?”

  “No, sir,” the younger man said. “I am on duty.”

  “Where would you go if you weren’t on duty?”

  “To the jai alai games.”

  “I prefer the bullfights. You don’t have bullfights in Los Angeles, Mr. Aragon?”

  “No.”

  “Jai alai. Do you have jai alai?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “What do you do for amusement?”

  “Punch out old ladies, kick dogs, stuff like that.”

  “Ah, most uncivilized.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you must come here for amusement . . . He won’t find the magistrate very amusing today, will he, Salazar?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Certainly I’ve heard no one laughing.”

  “Neither have I, sir.”

  “Perhaps you’d better drive our American visitor up to the house to discover why no one is laughing.”

  “I’m not sure that would be wise, sir.”

  “You never do foolish things, Salazar? Then you must start by taking Mr. Aragon up to see Magistrate Hernandez.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The blacktop road that led to the house was about half a mile long. Salazar drove it as though he were practicing for the Indianapolis 500 in low gear. He stopped at the entrance to a carport on the east side of the house. There was space for four cars but only one was in it at the moment, a late-model jeep station wagon.

  “Thank you, Salazar,” Aragon said. “That was a very interesting ride.”

  “I am a fine driver, do you think?”

  “You are a very fine driver.” Like Rio Seco is a very fine city and your boss is a very fine man.

  Salazar took the keys out of the ignition and handed them to Aragon with a solemn nod of the head. “I have only driven twice before. I guess it is a natural talent.”

  The main house was a combination of mission and ranch style. Under the wide beamed overhang of the tile roof, about an acre of patio circled the house. It was furnished with dark heavy wooden benches and decorated with glazed clay pots painted in such vivid colors that the plants they contained looked drab by contrast and secondary in importance. Many of the plants were dead or dying, as if the effort of competing with the pots had been too much of a strain.

  Under the arch of the main entrance, two Cadillac limousines and a Jensen Interceptor were parked with a chauffeur behind the wheel of each. The three chauffeurs and Salazar were the only people in sight, and the only sound was Salazar’s voice: “Someday when I attain a position of importance, I will buy a big car like one of those. Meanwhile I will practice by going to the cinema and watching carefully how they are driven. The important thing is aim.”

  “Aim?”

  “Like a rifle. You aim it just so and it shoots in that direction just so.”

  Aragon hoped he wouldn’t be in the vicinity when Salazar bought his big car and aimed it just so.

  An older man came out of one of the side doors. Like Salazar and the gatekeeper, he was in uniform. Either the uniform had been too small to begin with or he’d grown fat in the wearing of it. He was stuffed into it like a sausage balancing on two toothpick legs.

  He said to Salazar, “Who is this person?”

  “An American who flew in from Los Angeles this afternoon. His name is Aragon.”

  “Does he speak Spanish?”

  “Yes, Superintendent. Very well.”

  “What does he want?”

  “To see Magistrate Hernandez.”

  “I’m sorry I barged in like this,” Aragon said. “If Mr. Hernandez is in the middle of an emergency, I can wait for a later appointment.”

  The superintendent gazed at him pensively. “Oh no. The emergency has passed.”

  “Is something the matter around here?”

  “Why do you think something is the matter?”

  “The security precautions seem excessive.”

  “Excessive for what?”

  “The house of an ordinary magistrate.”

  “Magistrates have great power in this part of the world. Where there is great power, there are many enemies.”

  “I assure you I’m not one of them.”

  “I thought not,” the superintendent said. “Enemies don’t usually appear at the front gate and give their names. Unless, of course, they’re subtle. Which you are not. I consider myself an excellent judge of character and you appear to me a heavy young man—heavy-handed, heavy-footed, heavy-minded. Is this correct?”

  “It may be a trifle too flattering.”

  “Your tone indicates that I hit a nerve. Which nerve?”

  “I ran the mile in four ten in college.”

  “That’s good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, we’ll take out the heavy-footed. The rest stays. Come inside.”

  He led the way through a long narrow room that looked like a combination of art gallery, church and library. The books were leatherbound copies of English classics translated into Spanish. The pictures, in ornate gilt frames, were of a religious nature—madonnas, crucifixions, resurrections—except for one large oil painting of a man wearing a magnificent scarlet uniform with gold epaulettes and silver scabbard and sword. A dozen or more candles burned in silver candelabra below the painting and on the altar at the far end of the room.

  The superintendent surveyed the room proudly as if it were his own and the man in the scarlet uniform were an earlier self, or at least a relative. “The galleria is most impressive, don’t you agree, Mr. Aragon?”

  “Yes.” I hope this agreeing business starts getting easier. I may have to do a hell of a lot more of it. “Most impressive.”

  “But I detect a certain hesitancy in your manner. You’re not a religious man, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “Religion can be a great solace for people in trouble.”

  “Are you implying that I’m in some kind of trouble, Superintendent?”

  “What kind of trouble could you be in when you only arrived in Rio Seco this afternoon? You’ve hardly had time to go out looking for it. Perhaps I can help. Come, I’ll show you the magistrate’s office.”

  Beyond the altar was a massive, elaborately carved oak door with iron hinges which creaked a warning when the superintendent pushed the door open.

  The room inside was in sharp contrast to the galleria. Except for a picture window which offered a view of the main entrance to the house, this was strictly an office, with fluorescent lighting, a mahogany desk with a leather swivel chair, and floor-to-ceiling shelves and files. Nearly every drawer in the desk and the files was open and spilling paper, folders, cards, manila envelopes, letters. A painting hiding a small safe had been pushed aside, but the door of the safe remained closed. In one corner of the room was a small table with two wine glasses and a bottle of Beaujolais on it. The bottle was still full, but it had been uncorked. The cork was lying on the tray with the forced-air opener still stuck in it like a hypodermic needle.

  A middle-aged man sitting behind the desk rose when the superintendent and Aragon entered and immediately took Aragon’s picture with a Polaroid camera. The pictures he’d already taken were scattered on the desk in front of him. They seemed to be mainly various angles of the disarray in the room.

  The superintendent said, “I assume you don’t mind having your picture taken.”

  “That depends on what you’re going to do with it.”

 
“I may keep it in my wallet. Then again, I may not. Let’s see how it turned out . . . Not bad. Certain physiological characteristics are obscured, others are emphasized. It all balances out, wouldn’t you say?”

  The superintendent held up the picture and Aragon glanced at it. He hardly recognized himself. The young man in the picture looked confident, almost cocky. He didn’t feel either.

  “You may have deduced, Mr. Aragon, that someone paid a call on Magistrate Hernandez while he was working. He liked to catch up on his work at night whenever possible so he could spend more of the daylight hours with his children . . . Obviously the call wasn’t a friendly one, or at least it didn’t end up that way. Kindly remove your spectacles. I believe Ganso here would like another shot.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Of course not.”

  He removed his spectacles. The second picture showed a little more of the truth. He looked scared. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with all this. I told you, I just arrived in town.”

  “But you have been here before in our city?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I—well, at the beginning of the week. I left Thursday afternoon.”

  “This is only Saturday afternoon. What made you leave and come back so soon?”

  “I received word at my office that Magistrate Hernandez might have news of someone I’ve been searching for on behalf of a client. I’m a lawyer.”

  “So? The last man I arrested was a lawyer. His interpretation of the law didn’t quite coincide with mine.” The superintendent went and stood by the window with the view of the front entrance. “Presumably your client has a name.”

  “That’s privileged information.”

  “In your country, yes. In mine, no. It’s one of the basic differences in our legal systems. Now, the name of your client, please.”

  “Gilda Grace Decker.”

  “And she hired you to find someone who also has a name.”

  “Byron James Lockwood, her former husband.”

  “How does Magistrate Hernandez fit into all this?”

  “Lockwood was serving time in the Quarry for a real estate swindle and Hernandez was responsible for his release three years ago. No one has seen Lockwood since.”

  “Perhaps,” the superintendent said dryly, “Mr. Lockwood doesn’t wish to be seen.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It is, then, possible that he took steps to make sure he is not seen?”

  “What kind of steps?”

  “He may have come here to the house, for instance, to destroy some records pertaining to him. That would have been stupid enough, he being an ex-convict and the magistrate an important person. But what followed was surely the ultimate in stupidity . . . Step over here for a minute. I want you to see something.”

  Aragon went to the window. Some people were coming out of the front door, three men, a stout woman, heavily veiled, leaning on the arm of a fourth man, and half a dozen children ranging in age from five to midteens. The woman and the man escorting her got into the first limousine, and the children into the second. The rest of the group entered the Jensen and all the cars began moving slowly down the driveway.

  “See those people,” the superintendent said. “Where do you think they are going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How are they dressed?”

  “In black.”

  “Like mourners, would you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where would they be going, dressed like mourners?”

  “To a funeral,” Aragon said.

  18

  For the next three hours Aragon answered questions, many of them repetitious: What was he doing in Rio Seco? What was he actually doing? What was he really actually doing? Who was Lockwood? Had he ever met him? What kind of man was he?

  “It’s unlikely he could have committed any crime of violence,” Aragon said. “He was, by all accounts, a very gentle person.”

  “A lot of gentle persons go into the Quarry and come out not so gentle. You speak of yesterday, I must think of now and tomorrow. Lockwood could be a changed man. You agree?”

  “Yes.” I agree again. This time it’s real.

  “As you can see”— the superintendent pointed to the table with the opened bottle of wine and the two glasses— “Hernandez was preparing to offer his visitor a drink. Which indicates that either he was a friend or he had come on a friendly mission such as bringing Hernandez something, a gift, say.”

  “Say a mordida.”

  “All right, a mordida. I don’t like the word but it is a fact of life so we’ll use it. Certainly we can assume that Hernandez was expecting someone, if not this particular person, because he left the gate open and no one is on duty in the gatehouse at night except on special occasions. So the caller arrived. Let’s call him Lockwood.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “Very well—Mr. Mordida, then. How’s that?”

  “Better.”

  “Mr. Mordida drove up to the house and Hernandez let him in. It was obviously an informal visit. Hernandez was wearing a paisley print robe over white silk pajamas. He brought Mr. Mordida here into the office and opened a bottle of wine. Up to this point the meeting was amicable. What happened to change it, I don’t know. The children and servants occupy another wing of the house and most of them were sleeping. Mrs. Hernandez heard nothing, no car driving up, no sounds of quarreling or of the office being ransacked. This isn’t surprising, since the adobe walls are a foot thick and she was in the bedroom watching television. Shortly after ten o’clock she came to say good night to her husband and found him dead and the room looking like this. She telephoned the doctor, who in turn called me. I came right out with Ganso, my photographer, and several other men. I’ve been on duty ever since, both here and at the hospital where Hernandez’s body was taken to determine the cause of death. There were no marks on him, he gave every evidence of having died naturally of a heart attack or a stroke. Except for the condition of the room, we might have left it at that. Would you like to see some of the pictures Ganso took of the body?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Ganso likes to take pictures of everything. No one ever looks at them, which is a shame because the film is expensive. Are you sure you—?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Very well, I’ll proceed. When Hernandez’s robe was removed at the hospital I noticed a very small spot of blood on the back of his pajama top. It seemed a peculiar place for a bloodstain. If it had been on the front it could have passed as the result of a shaving nick or even a dribble of red wine which, as you can see, Hernandez fancied. After I drew the doctor’s attention to the spot he examined Hernandez’s back very carefully and found, under the left shoulder blade, a puncture wound made by an extremely thin sharp instrument, something in the nature of an icepick. But I don’t believe it was an icepick. You see the forced-air opener still in the cork of the wine bottle over there? I think before it was inserted in the cork, it was inserted in Hernandez. The wound was so small that the skin closed over it almost immediately and all the bleeding, except for that one drop, took place internally. Death occurred fairly quickly, since the weapon penetrated the heart and the pressure of blood in the pericardial sac caused the heart to stop beating. I’m not a medical expert, I’m merely repeating roughly what the doctor told me. Whoever struck the blow was either very lucky or very skillful.”

  “Lockwood was neither,” Aragon said. “All his luck was bad and his only skill seems to have been attracting women.”

  “That sounds to me like good luck.”

  “Not for him.”

  “I could use such luck, call it good or bad.” The superintendent stared down at his belly as if he were wondering how it got there. “This Lockwood, he was probably thin?” />
  “No. In the only pictures I saw of him he was quite fat.”

  “Tall?”

  “No.”

  “But very handsome?”

  “No.”

  “That’s most encouraging, a small fat homely man attracting many women. Yes, I like that very much, it tempts me to view you in a much friendlier light. But such a thing would be unprofessional. I am always professional.”

  “I can see you are.”

  “It shows, then?”

  “It shows.”

  The superintendent sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk and Ganso immediately took a picture of him. There was complete silence while the film was developing. The finished product showed a small homely fat man.

  The superintendent gazed at it soberly. “I must keep reminding myself of Lockwood and all those women. Were they nice sensible women, the kind a man would choose to marry and to bear his children?”

  “I only know one of them. She’s—” He wasn’t sure that “nice” and “sensible” were the right words to describe Gilly. “She’s very interesting.”

  “Why has she not formed an attachment to some other man?”

  “She did. Or at any rate she married him.”

  “How is it, then, that she wants you to find Lockwood?”

  “Her present husband is dying. I think she is afraid of being left alone.”

  “How old is she?”

  “About fifty.”

  “I am not interested in any woman beyond childbearing age.”

  “Naturally not.” Poor Gilly will be heartbroken. “One of the other women is still young, only twenty-three.”

  “That is much better. And she likes fat homely men?”

  “Her personal preferences don’t matter. She’s a hustler here in Rio Seco. You might know her. In a professional way, of course—your profession, not hers.”

  “We have a great many hustlers in Rio Seco. Most of their customers are American tourists who drive down for the races or the bullfights, Navy men who drive by the busload from San Diego and Marines from Camp Pendleton.”

  “Her name is Tula Lopez.”

  The superintendent shook his head. “The hustlers don’t come up to me on the street and introduce themselves. If I were a private citizen and wanted to find a particular young woman, I’d put her name on the grapevine and offer a sum of money for information.”