“You did what you could,” I said. Small consolation.
“But I feel so guilty at having left! In three months I did so little. If I didn’t have my job in Oakland to get back to, I would have stayed.”
Two straight couples came into the restaurant and sat down at the next table. They were middle-aged Americans. Georgia’s long letter to Lucy had said, “You’ll love how easy it is to meet people in San Andreas—everybody talks to everybody!”
Apparently this was true, for our neighbors had no problems breaking into our conversation, introducing themselves and telling us more than we ever wanted to know about them. The Nelsons, long-time residents of San Andreas, knew Eleanor well. “Oh yes, she’s been a real force in San Andreas.” They glanced at each other briefly and Mrs. Nelson added brightly, “Without her and Colin, El Centro Artistico never would have gotten off the ground the way it has. People come from everywhere to take classes there.”
“We’ve only been here five years, but we just think it’s the best place on earth!” she went on. “Imagine—we’ve got a maid and a gardener—we’d never be able to afford help in the States, but here we hardly have to pay anything. Bob’s got his golf and I’m a volunteer at the library. One of the things we love about San Andreas is that we hardly have to know any Spanish. We’re trying to persuade Lois and George to move here. Even with the cost of living going up here, they’ll still be able to live so much better than at home.”
“I love it,” said Lois Palmer. “I’ve been taking a ceramics class at the arts center, and a cooking class. I love Mexican food, don’t you? But George isn’t so sure.”
“Got a problem with the old ticker,” said George. “I know there are a couple of clinics, and one is for people like us, but I’m still not convinced. What if I had a heart attack on the street downtown and ended up at the Mexican clinic?”
Lucy was too disgusted to even bother replying. And even if she had, she’d have been met by shocked surprise. “But we love Mexico and the Mexicans,” they would say, puzzled. “They’re such warm people, and their culture is so fascinating.”
I jumped up with the check. “Well, we’re off to a reading tonight,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Mrs. Nelson, “Colin’s reading. Well, you’re in for a treat!”
El Centro Artistico was a small but beautiful colonial-style structure, built around a courtyard landscaped with trees and plants. We went up a marble staircase to the second floor, where the reading was being held. It surprised me how many people were packed in the little room—a good seventy-five. Almost all of them were white, and many looked retirement age, but there were also a number of younger and middle-aged people. Many of them seemed to know each other and were deep in conversations, of which we caught snatches:
“First chapter is really coming along. Couple of good paragraphs today.”
“Did you see what the Wallaces have done to their house? That incredible ceramic work. And they hardly had any trouble with the workmen.”
Several people came up to us to chat, intrigued no doubt by the fact that Lucy was Latina (“We want the local people to always feel welcome at our events!”). For the first time in many years, I felt peculiar about introducing myself and resorted to my given name, Catherine Frances.
“Are you an artist?” a woman with thick glasses and a rayon blouse printed with—yes, suitcases—asked me.
“Not even an amateur,” I replied.
“Are you here to study Spanish?”
“No,” I said reluctantly. No use telling her I made my living as a translator of Spanish literature; that could only lead to a discussion of the books I’d worked on and the revelation of my name. And I couldn’t bear the news to spread so soon around the room, that I had become a fictional character.
“Cassandra—or what had been Cassandra—was a worn-out bundle of varicose veins, needle tracks, and bunions. Her mottled face hung slackly and even under the water you could see that she had a bad dye job.”
Colin Michaels had been reading for about fifteen minutes when I decided to murder him. A short, red-faced man in his sixties, with a silky pompadour of white hair, he wore a short-sleeved Mexican shirt open in a V that showed his tan chest and white chest hair.
His character, Paul Roger, was different. Lanky, tough, laconic. You couldn’t call Colin Michaels laconic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I began to think he was never going to shut up.
Finally he finished reading and it was time for questions. In order he got: “Do you use a computer?” “How old were you when you started writing?” “How do you get an agent?” and “Have any of your books been made into films?” and then came one of those long-winded questions that isn’t really a question but more a statement—if only you could figure out about what—on the part of the questioner.
Eventually it was my turn.
“I’m curious about where you came up with the name Cassandra Reilly for your victim.”
“It’s a great name, isn’t it?” he said happily. “I have an Irish background myself so Reilly was obvious, but I think the choice of Cassandra was really quite inspired. Cassandra was the daughter of the King of Troy, who had the gift of prophecy, but not of being believed.”
“I know who the mythical Cassandra was, thank you,” I interrupted. “But did you realize that Cassandra Reilly is the real name of someone—someone I know quite well actually—yes, a very esteemed translator, the translator of Gloria de los Angeles’s magic realism novels. I’m sure the real Cassandra Reilly will be horribly upset when she hears that her name has been stolen and appended to the name of some dead go-go dancer!”
I sat down with a thump.
“Well, if I’m any judge of character,” said Colin Michaels with a genial wink, “your friend will be flattered, not offended, to have her name appear in print.”
A wave of mild laughter, meant to support Colin and dismiss me, flowed through the room, and he went on to the next question.
“I’m writing a mystery,” a man said. “And I know I need to know about guns. I’ve read up on them, but I feel like I need to actually see one, to hold one, to fire one…”
“To murder someone…” a voice added and everyone laughed.
“Do you have a gun?” the voice persevered. “Have you used one?”
Colin gave his genial smile. “Haven’t you heard?” he said, “We mystery writers are the least violent people around. We keep it all in our heads!”
Sometime after midnight that night there was a loud banging on the outside gate. Lucy was up and ready for bad news before I’d gotten my bathrobe on. When I finally managed to get downstairs, I saw her leading two uniformed policemen into the house.
“They found Eleanor off the highway to Mexico City,” said Lucy in a flat tone. “In a motel room.”
“What do you mean, they found her?” I stumbled and sat down on a woven footstool. “You mean, she wasn’t really going to Houston at all? She was having a tryst?”
“When they found her she was dead,” said Lucy, still trying to take it in. “Someone shot her through the heart.”
The police grilled us for an hour or two, not because they believed we were particularly guilty of anything, but because we might be able to give them information about Eleanor that would explain her death.
According to the police, the motel was a cheesy but not completely down-and-out place on the outskirts of Mexico City, near the airport, about four hours away from San Andreas. Had Eleanor just gone there to rest before her flight? It seemed likely, because she’d asked the reception clerk to give her a wake-up call at 10 p.m. When she didn’t answer after several attempts, he knocked on the door, and finally, worried, let himself in. She’d been dead for several hours then. Had it been a random murder? A robbery as well? The police were inclined to think so. Her bags had been rifled through; so had the glove compartment of her car. It looked as if some jewelry might be missing. The Mexico City police were questioning all the mot
el’s employees.
We couldn’t help the police other than to let them look around Eleanor’s house and take her address book. One of them, Officer Delgado, called her son’s house in Houston. He began by speaking English but switched to Spanish in a minute.
When he put down the phone, he said that her relatives would be flying in tomorrow.
“He spoke Spanish to you,” I commented.
“No, her son was away on business,” said Delgado. “That was his wife.”
At seven the next morning, Eleanor’s housekeeper Rosario let herself in. She hadn’t heard the news yet, and had to sit down at first when we told her. “What a terrible death,” she said, making the sign of the cross. Rosario was about Eleanor’s age, perhaps a little younger. She had smooth black hair in a bun, and a sturdy, slow-moving body. We thought she would want to go home, but instead, after a glass of water, she rose and began the work of dusting and straightening, all the while murmuring, “How terrible.”
We watched for a moment, unsure whether she was mourning Eleanor the person or just reacting to the horror of the situation. “I’m not sure you need to do anything now,” Lucy told her gently.
“But people will be coming,” Rosario said. “Her son will finally come back now, and Isabella.”
“Isabella?” I asked. “Is that his wife?”
“Yes,” said Rosario, “She comes from San Andreas.”
Eleanor’s death sent a chill of fear through the expatriate community. In whispered conversations in the expensive restaurants and shops, they told each other that they weren’t surprised. The flip side of their belief that the Mexicans were warm and happy people was their conviction that the whole country seethed with thieves and murderers. That afternoon Colin Michaels called a community meeting at El Centro Artistico, and the room was packed.
“We’ve got to pressure the police to solve this murder quickly,” he said. “The Mayor of San Andreas is at the coast at the moment, but his assistant agrees—the death of one American is a horrible blow to the image of Mexican tourism.”
Colin’s face was flushed a strawberry color, and his voice was shrill. “A member of our peaceful little community has been murdered,” he said. “We could be next!”
I bumped into him on purpose after the meeting. “Oh, the friend of Cassandra Reilly’s,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name. You and your friend have been staying at Eleanor’s. How very upsetting for you.”
“You knew her well, it sounds like,” I said.
“Oh everyone knew Eleanor,” he said. “She was a fixture. An absolute fixture. We discovered San Andreas years ago, both of us. We were the early ones. We had a chance to really mold it to become the place it is now. Without Eleanor, this arts center wouldn’t exist. I can’t believe, I just can’t believe she’s gone.”
“Then you know about her son and his wife,” I said. “What was that story again?”
“I always liked the girl myself,” said Colin. “It was her mother, her whole family, that was the problem. Greedy, always taking advantage of whatever kindness Eleanor showed them. The girl herself…”
“Isabella?”
“Yes. She was so young. It was her mother who had ambitions, who made sure to leave the two young people together so that the inevitable happened.”
“Isabella’s mother is local then?”
“Why yes. You must have met her. Rosario, the woman who cleans—cleaned—for Eleanor.”
I remembered Rosario’s stunned face but deep-down lack of feeling about Eleanor’s death, how her dark eyes had looked past us to something on a table or a shelf, something terribly familiar, that was now missing. “Where are the figures?” she had asked. “Señora Harrington’s sculptures?”
“I put them away yesterday,” Lucy had admitted. “I didn’t…like to look at them.”
“Ah,” Rosario had said. “Bueno.”
When I got back to the house I found Lucy talking with the gardener. “This is Isabella’s brother, Juan,” she said. “He has a degree in English literature but hasn’t been able to find work.”
Juan wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt and an earring in one ear. “My sister is always trying to get me to come to the States to live. I don’t mind visiting, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I’d rather live in my own country. Not that San Andreas always feels like Mexico.”
“Did the whole family work for Eleanor?” I asked Lucy when Juan had left for the day. “And if Rosario and Juan were her relatives as well as her employees, why would Eleanor feel she needed people to housesit for her?”
“I don’t know whether it was a question of trust, or of trying to make a few extra dollars. Do you remember how quick she snatched up our check yesterday?”
“But she has tons of money! Doesn’t she? She must just employ them as a favor to her son.”
Her son. Something that had been nagging at me all day rose to the surface. “And where was he in the middle of the night anyway? Away on business. Does anyone know where?”
Isabella and her two young daughters arrived that night after dinner and came straight to the house. Lucy and I were ready to leave, but she insisted we stay.
“No, you must stay, please,” she said. “Allen would want it.”
“But at a time like this—we’d only be in the way.”
“At least until tomorrow,” she said urgently.
I wondered if she were afraid to stay in the house by herself.
Isabella was an attractive woman of about thirty, dressed for travel in a simple dress and sandals. Her black hair was fashionably cut and she had a warm but slightly imposing air. I couldn’t imagine her putting up with any shit from Eleanor.
After she got her two girls off to bed, she came back downstairs, now wearing jeans, her eyes taking in the room as she descended.
“It hasn’t changed,” she said. “In ten years, it hasn’t really changed. Still the beautiful home I admired in my silly way when I used to come here with my mother to help her clean it. Everything so tasteful, so beautiful. So artistic, I thought. The home of an artist.” She laughed shortly. “But what happened to her sculptures, all those Indian women in serapes with their baskets full of tortillas?”
“I put them away,” said Lucy.
Isabella sat down, but her tiredness didn’t cause her to slump. “I’m embarrassed to tell you that I really liked them, that summer I was twenty. I didn’t have much consciousness about anything. Allen was just about as innocent as I was. ‘Oh, my mother will adore you,’ he kept telling me.
“My own mother told me different, but I didn’t pay any attention to her. She was right, of course, not Allen. When Eleanor came back from her vacation and found out what had been going on for two months, she threw me out. She couldn’t believe that Allen followed. She never believed it. Even when she came for her annual visit to Houston, she tried not to see me or the kids if she could avoid it.”
“Where is Allen by the way?” I put in, as casually as I could.
Isabella’s eyes shifted slightly, but her tone seemed straightforward. “He was a little hard to track down. As a matter of fact, he’s right here in Mexico. In Cancun. He’s driving up to San Andreas tonight.” She took a long breath, which made me realize she’d been holding it. “The company he works for, a hotel chain, is always sending him on the road.”
“You realize, he’s the one who did it,” I told Lucy that night when we were alone. “He must have hated his mother for what she did to his wife.”
“It takes a lot more than hatred to kill someone,” said Lucy, from the twin bed next to me. “Sure he ‘disappointed’ her by marrying a Mexican, but why would he kill his mother over it ten years later? If he really did kill her, it was for some other reason. Money, for instance. How well-off was Eleanor really, and what about Allen himself? Is he in debt? Does he have a drug habit? Would inheriting Eleanor’s money help him?” Lucy held up the Agatha Christie she was reading. “I used to read lots of these in medical scho
ol. They probably gave me a distorted view of crime—that it was all about entailed estates and hidden relatives—but at bottom they said something true—people are more likely to kill for money than for passion.”
Allen Harrington had still not arrived by the time I woke up in the morning and headed out for my morning coffee. Lucy got up at the same time and went off to the local clinic. “I’ll just have them check me out,” she said. “And then, maybe, I’ll see if they need me to volunteer at all while we’re here.”
“You just can’t keep away from work,” I teased her, but I was still worried. What if there was something really wrong with her?
As luck would have it, I discovered Colin Michaels in the cafe I’d gone to yesterday. He was drinking a large Bloody Mary and eating eggs and bacon. No wonder every capillary on his face was broken.
“Hello, friend of Cassandra Reilly,” he greeted me. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
“Tell me about Eleanor’s son,” I said, sitting down next to him and ordering café con leche. “You said you’d known her since the early days here. You must have known her son when he was growing up.”
“Oh, he didn’t grow up here,” said Colin, a little too quickly. “I mean, he came in the summers. But otherwise, he went to a boarding school in the States. Eleanor didn’t want him to go to school in San Andreas. She wanted him to have a proper education.”
“If Eleanor was around fifty and her son is around thirty,” I said, thinking aloud, “She must have been fairly young when she had him.”
“I suppose so,” said Colin, bending over his food.
“What about Mr. Harrington?” I said suddenly. “Nobody says anything about a Mr. Harrington. I always assumed that Eleanor had gotten her money from her husband, that she was a wealthy widow.”
“Believe the money came from her family,” said Colin. “Parents set her up here, wanted her out of Houston, I suppose. But myself, I’ve always believed that the past is past. We all have our reasons to have settled in San Andreas. Now, myself…”
The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Page 9