“What else do you want to know?” he asked.
“Why do you go by different names?”
She couldn’t see him, but she knew he was frowning, and she felt the way he took a deep breath.
“Daisy must not know I’ve told you, all right? She’ll be pissed if she knows I’ve told you.”
“I won’t speak to her.”
“Remember how I said I Daisy and I had business investments? It’s not what you might call a traditional business.”
“Go on.”
“It’s… people are greedy. And that old saying, there’s one born every minute? Damn right. You tell someone you’ll double, triple their money, they listen. Even if it’s a bit too outrageous and it doesn’t make that much sense when you add it all up.”
“You’re a thief?”
“Let’s say…some of our business ventures worked and others not so much, and when they didn’t it was time to move on.”
“A grifter.”
He spun her around and settled his hands on her waist, casually, and smiled and shrugged—she figured he used that little shrug and that sly smile often. Because it worked.
“Look, if I told you I could sell you the Mona Lisa for $20,000 you wouldn’t believe me would you?”
“That was your game, then? Selling art?”
“No. It’s an example.”
She looked at him in silence. Gregory didn’t like silences, she’d figured as much hanging out with him these past few weeks and sure enough he started talking after an uncomfortable pause.
“Daisy has an uncanny ability to spot people with money. Give her two minutes, she’ll wind up at the right of the richest guy in the room, chatting with him like they’re old friends. And a fool and his money will soon part ways. There were other things we did, too. Insurance claims. Daisy’s property has an uncanny knack for going up in flames, literally.”
“Do you douse the houses in gasoline or does Daisy do that?”
He chuckled and gave her another shrug.
“Truth is Daisy is the brains. I’m backup and yes, I get to drag the stupid cans of gasoline.”
“What about Ambrose? Did you kill him?”
“God, point blank, eh?” he replied, although he didn’t look too startled by her words. It was a pretty big elephant in the damn room.
“No,” he said, sullenly. “I thought Ambrose was going to keep us fed for a while. He was generous to his ex-wives. He had five of them. I thought we were headed to lucky number six and he’d ditch us somewhere in Mexico, where we could have cocktails by the pool.”
“Did he push Daisy down the stairs? Did he cause her to lose her baby?”
“No. He couldn’t have kids. That’s why the nephew was such a big deal to him.”
So that was the truth. She was standing next to a run-of-the-mill con-artist, no better than the men at the cheap bar where the fishermen gathered, men who tried to wheedle fools and encourage them to bet their cash on the weekends. Gregory dressed better, but he was no better.
She sighed.
“Hey,” he said, grasping her chin, tilting it up, “hey, you asked. It’s the truth.”
“Are you really twenty-nine?”
“Yes. A Libra. My birthday is not far on the horizon,” he said and rubbed his cheek, thoughtful. “We’ve all got shelf-lives, Viridiana. Daisy and I can’t keep this up forever. And I, for one, am serious about calling it quits.”
“Sure,” she said looking down at the floor.
“I’m from a shit town in Kansas. That’s why I know what you are feeling. Goldfish will grow as big as their bowl, and bowls like this don’t allow you to grow an inch. Am I wrong?”
She wanted to grow, yes. She wanted to float to sea and turn into a shark. A huge beast, fierce, with rows of teeth and sleek skin. Nobody thought her capable of anything. Her mother considered her a failure and Viridiana suspected half the town thought her stupid for wanting to leave, and everyone was betting she would end her days unmarried, behind her mother’s counter, slowly opening and closing the cash register.
Her father, after all, had accomplished very little, and when they spoke on the phone it was all about how busy he was, how he never made quite enough money, and a complaint or two regarding his new wife.
“I get it. I do,” Gregory said.
He looked sincere as he spoke. Kansas was real, she thought. He pressed a palm against her cheek and she could feel beneath his skin the truth of it. Shitty little town with shitty little people. She could picture Daisy, firstborn, bolder than Gregory, making her way out of there fast. And then Gregory reuniting with her, in a big city. By then she’d learnt a few tricks, she was the brains, and convinced Gregory that it was easier conning people when you do it in twos.
She could picture the whole bit, like the first reel of a movie. The film spooled before her eyes.
“You won’t take me with you,” she said. “There’s some other girl for you, a girl stashed back in the States.”
Lillian, she thought. Although she couldn’t say that, but the name burned on her tongue. She swallowed.
“I had a girl. But that’s been over for a while. There’s no one waiting back for me there, and nothing at all back in that country. No friends, no lovers, no pets. I’m here now.”
He sat down on the bed and sat her down on his lap.
“We’ll have money, all right? A little bit of patience and we’ll have a wad of cash. Ask me for something. Ask me for anything. A string of pearls, a diamond ring, I’ll deliver.”
“Please,” she muttered.
“We’re going to run away together. You’re going to run away with a highwayman, with a brigand. With the man with the blackest of hearts, and his heart is for you. Isn’t that exciting? Like the movies you tell me about.”
He was in high spirits and it was hard to remain morose when that happened. But she glanced down at her hands, at her nails.
“What was it? How did it go? ‘I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you. I guess maybe I’ve even loved you before I saw you,’” he quipped.
She looked at him.
He didn’t sound exactly like Montgomery Clift, but close enough, and the way he was tilting his head and the way the light reflected on his hair, you would have thought he was being professionally photographed. He really looked wonderful, even if he was worth as much as a tattered romance novel, but then that had its appeal. Like he’d said. Brigand. Blackguard. Rogue.
Not Clift, who seemed a tad too sweet, but an alluring wickedness all his own.
“Yes,” Viridiana whispered.
“I love you. We’ll have money. We’ll go away,” he promised and he didn’t smile at that, he didn’t joke.
He lay on the bed, but this time there was no sex play. He held her tight, his head on her chest, quietly. Viridiana ran a hand through his hair and she bit her lower lip and she thought about moving him away, but she didn’t.
She wanted to lie like that with him for a very long time. She tried to picture them alone, in the middle of the desert, under the starry skies. In the places where time ceases to run as it should. Or in the ocean, deep beneath the waves. Nothing would matter there, whoever he’d been before. It could all be washed away. Who said it hadn’t been washed away already? He wanted to begin anew, after all.
“Let’s go down to the beach, you and me, tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take photos. You can bring the Polaroid, too. What do you think?”
He looked up at her and Viridiana nodded.
“We can pretend the world has ended and it’s the two of us down there, collecting sea shells,” she said, softly. She’d fallen half-asleep in his embrace and her thoughts were fantastical, bloated by dreams.
“The apocalypse?”
“The world wouldn’t end, not really. It’s always a cycle.”
“Says who?”
“The Mayans. The Aztecs. This is the fifth sun, but there were four sun
s before them.”
“Were they any fun?”
“Jaguars ate everyone during one of the suns. And during another fire rained from the sky and turned the world to ashes. And now during the fifth sun we must offer blood and sacrifices, or the sun will go black and the world will end.”
“That’s morbid,” he said, but she could feel him grinning. “You’re a morbid girl, Viridiana.”
“Probably.”
“I don’t mind, if you don’t mind my faults.”
“I don’t even know what to call you,” she said as he shifted his position, depositing a kiss on her neck.
“Don’t call me Bartholomew. I do hate that fucking name. I suppose you like your name. Viri-diana. There must be a saint with that name, no? Everyone is named after a saint here and your names are so terribly long.”
“Yes, there is a Saint Viridiana.”
“Did she do anything interesting, Saint Viridiana?”
“She was a hermit and spent more than thirty years alone in a small cell. Two snakes came into that cell one day.”
“Did they bite her?”
“No, she lived with them.”
He kissed her again and pulled her closer and it was her turn to rest her head against his chest. Under her fingers she felt his heart, heard him breathe gently.
I can hold you next to me, she thought. Life couldn’t be a movie, she knew that. Yet it seemed close now, the possibility of the glitz and the glamour and the excitement and him. Him most of all.
Chapter 16
The water lapped at her feet, the stench of the dead sharks was pungent enough to make her eyes water. She raised her hands, rubbing her eyes. Viridiana thought about bezoars again. She had been thinking about them since she was a little kid, those little lumps of flesh that looked like stones. They made her wonder, what is the true nature of a thing?
This question assailed her constantly. It was, perhaps, the query from which all her issues stemmed. Had she not wondered so much about her true nature, she might have accepted life as it was. She might have smiled like the other kids her age smiled, done as her family wanted, lived and died happily in Desengaño. But she thought a lot about hidden things, she spent too many days peering at the mounds of shark flesh on the beach. Watching the men strip the carcasses of their glossy skin and revealed the pale meat beneath, pale as ivory under the blazing sun.
So that day there she was again at the beach, thinking of bezoars, secrets written in the flesh.
She was restless and the sea seemed to mimic her emotions, the wind tossing her hair against her face. She had been fine that morning, but that changed, dread steadily building in her belly. Once the sun began to dip and she approached the doctor’s house, she bit her lip and thought of turning back.
She did not want to speak to Lawrence. But she had ridden there, and he’d be waiting for her. Wouldn’t it look worse if she didn’t show up? What exactly did he want? What if the doctor said something that incriminated Viridiana? What, what, what.
Lawrence was by the doctor’s house already when she arrived and she needed to stop fretting because he’d notice and then it would be worse. She attempted a smile. It came out wrong, too timid.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
“Sure.”
“Let’s go in, then.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Alejandro?” she asked.
“I fired him,” he said simply.
“You did? Why?”
“You said he was a bad translator.”
“I didn’t say that,” Viridiana corrected quickly.
“But you are the better choice, aren’t you?”
She did not reply and rang the bell instead.
Doctor Navarro let them into his attendance room. He had the charts and posters she imagined all physicians owned, framed diploma behind his desk, jars filled with Q-tips and wooden tongue depressors, and in a corner, dusty and forgotten, a stuffed armadillo that he had bought from an ambulant seller of taxidermied animals when he first moved to Baja California, for Navarro had been a capitalino, sophisticated and aloof like Viridiana’s father, before he too had ambled onto the distant peninsula. But unlike Viridiana’s father they didn’t think him an uppity, fucking chilango. Her father had an annoying face, he spoke out of turn, and despite his natural charm he eventually rubbed everyone the wrong way.
That’s what happens with certain people, they’re too much, too bright, like the sun which burns incessant in the true-blue Baja California sky, and one day you find you are sick of them. That’s probably what happened to her mother, to the whole town. One day they woke up and they discovered that the chilango Marta had brought over really didn’t amount to much despite speaking all his languages and his witty lines.
One day, they were all going to figure out Viridiana wasn’t worth a damn either. Maybe they already knew.
There’s a bezoar in my chest, she thought and then, cut it out, calm down.
“I can’t spend more than half an hour speaking to you, I have an appointment,” Navarro told them, after they’d taken a seat. “So, let’s do this. What do you need?”
Lawrence took out a notebook and a pen, and started rattling off questions. He wanted to know what the doctor had seen when he arrived at the house, the state of the body, his conclusions. Navarro was brisk and to the point. Not rude, like Homero had been, but also not terribly warm. Lawrence was an annoyance, and although Navarro wasn’t going to point that out, he also wasn’t going to waste too much time with him. After all, Ambrose was already buried, which he did literally say as he stared at Lawrence.
“An autopsy might have been performed,” Lawrence countered. She glanced at his notebook, his compact handwriting. He had written several words in Spanish, several sentences.
He was taking notes in Spanish.
Viridiana realized he could understand what the doctor was saying without any assistance. She felt a little sick, like the bezoar in her belly was expanding, but she focused on the words being said and translated mechanically. She should have known when she saw the travel guide. She had agreed to do this and if she tried to fudge the truth – if somehow Navarro gave an indication that she’d helped cover up a crime, Lawrence Landry would be able to point his finger at her.
Lawrence Landry could have her jailed.
“An autopsy? Not here,” Navarro replied and she hoped to God he stuck to those sort of answers, brief and calm. For her part, she spoke mechanically, betraying no emotion.
“But somewhere else.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“You said there was a wound, on the back of his head.”
“It might have been a number of things.”
“Hence an autopsy, you could have done an autopsy.”
“Mr. Landry,” Navarro said, shaking his head, “we can wonder about the things we might have done, but it was not performed. I’m sorry.”
“Could we do one now?”
“Would that be truly necessary?” Navarro asked with a sigh.
By then, their time was up and it was a good thing because Lawrence was very upset. He closed his notebook, tucked away his pen. Outside, Viridiana walked her bicycle and glanced at him.
“I can’t believe this bullshit,” Lawrence complained. “How long did that guy speak to us? Barely twenty minutes?”
“You’re lucky. It’s Friday.”
“So?”
“Fridays he is itching to play dominoes and have a few beers. He was being nice to you by seeing you tonight.”
“Nice to me?” Lawrence repeated.
“Of course.”
Lawrence shook his head skeptically. The explanation, if anything, had made him more irritable. Viridiana did not know what he was expecting. He was no cop, no consular authority, he was a rich young man who had stumbled into town playing detective. No one was going to take him seriously.
“My uncle could have been stabbed twe
nty times and everyone would have shrugged it away,” he muttered.
“He was not stabbed.”
“I know he wasn’t! No, ‘he fell down the stairs’, drunk. As if I’d believe it. He wouldn’t drink. He had promised he wouldn’t anymore, he’d stopped all of that.”
Lawrence stood in the middle of the street and crossed his arms. Viridiana stopped the bicycle next to him.
“He might have—,” she began, but he wouldn’t even let her complete the sentence. He raised his irate eyes at her.
“He might have what? He might have picked up the bottle again? Like Daisy claims? Bullshit. My uncle gave all his ex-wives very generous settlements, but do you know why he altered his will? Because he didn’t trust Daisy. He told me so. And he was right.”
Lawrence began walking again, faster, his hands in his pockets.
“He was good to her, he was good to her and she repaid him by either getting him drunk and shoving him down the stairs, or shoving him down when he was stone-cold sober. He was alright, he never did a single thing to deserve this, never treated her wrong and that bitch—”
“He yelled at her. He was mean.”
Viridiana didn’t want to blurt that out. Hell, Daisy wasn’t always nice to Viridiana but she wasn’t all bad either. And she’d seen Ambrose angry. She’d seen the ruckus he could make.
“What are you saying?” Lawrence asked.
“That he wasn’t a saint and maybe…maybe he wasn’t in his right mind that night.”
“How? You said he yelled at her that night?”
“Not just that one time. I saw him slap her leg once, too.”
It was not polite to speak ill of the dead. More than that, Lawrence looked a bit heartbroken, he shook his head. She wondered what she’d do if someone said bad things about her father.
The ache in her belly which had flared at the doctor’s house increased as Lawrence stared at her.
“What did you see that night? How did he die?” he asked.
“I didn’t see anything. I was in my room and I heard people arguing, and when I walked into the living room he was at the foot of the stairs. I went to get the doctor, but he was already dead.”
Untamed Shore Page 16