“You heard me. You vote Republican or Democrat? And don’t tell me what you think I want to hear.”
“Republican.”
“That saves you one whack,” Leonard said.
“But it makes me want to hit you,” I said. “Both of you.”
“Look,” Billy said. “I’m through with all this. I’ll give her father the money, be on my way.”
“I don’t trust you to give anyone anything,” I said. “And I think we should walk over to where Beatrice is, try that knock again.”
We spent a little while cleaning Billy up. We even let him take off his shirt and rinse the blood out. We decided he could have his gun back. Without the ammunition.
Leonard said, “Don’t let me see you pull that again, even if it’s just to scratch your ass. You hear?”
“I hear,” Billy said.
We walked over to the hotel where Beatrice was staying. It was a pretty good walk, took about thirty minutes.
We tried the phone in the lobby, but she didn’t answer. The elevator was broken. We walked upstairs and Billy showed us the room. He knocked.
No answer.
I knocked and called her name.
No answer.
I beat on the door.
Still no answer.
Billy took a turn hammering on the door. “Wake up, you cunt,” he said.
I touched his arm gently. “Don’t say that.”
“I was kind of expecting a guy to answer in his drawers,” Leonard said. “I figured she got rid of both you bastards and got someone else.”
“A guy in his drawers, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Or, if your luck was in, without them.”
“Don’t tease me, Hap.”
“Are you…?” Billy said to Leonard.
“Careful,” Leonard said.
“But you beat me up.”
“And quite handily, I thought.”
Billy dropped his head. It hadn’t been his last two days. Lost his girl. Lost his fish. Got his ass beat by a queer. Several times.
I went downstairs, told the man in charge I couldn’t wake the lady. He understood enough English to get the idea I wanted him to unlock her door, but he wouldn’t do it. I offered him twenty-five dollars to check and see she was all right, but he wouldn’t do that either. So much for Mexican corruption.
I went back upstairs and knocked again. I looked at Leonard. He said, “Enough of this using our brains and politeness. I suggest we resort to good old East Texas brawn and assholism. Stand back.”
He jumped at the door.
He hit it solid and hard. So hard it knocked him backward on his ass. He got up, said, “Let’s do it together.”
“She could already be at the dock,” I said.
“Good thought,” Leonard said. “Glad you came up with that. Maybe a minute or two earlier would have been better.”
“You’re supposed to go out again,” I said. “Right, Billy Boy?”
“Well, yeah. But I told her I wasn’t going out today. Not after last night. I told her that when she threw me out.”
“Maybe she just left and went home,” I said.
“Fuck it,” Leonard said.
“What the hell,” I said.
We hit the door with our shoulders, splintered it at the frame. We hit it two more times before it fell in. Even though it was morning, the curtains were drawn and it was dark in there. I switched on the light. There was a hallway, a bathroom on the left, and at the end of the hallway, on the left, was the bed.
Beatrice was on it. Her mouth was stuffed with something and her bikini top had been used to strap whatever was in her mouth firmly in place. Her throat was cut, wide and deep. Her head hung off the bed. Blood had dripped into her hair and some of it hung in ropy strings across the sheets where it had dried. Her face had been cut on. Someone had taken an axe or a machete to her as well. Her hands and feet were chopped off. The nubs of bone were clean, so the blade had been sharp and the blows had been swift.
There was a chair by the desk in the room, and there were four deep slashes in the seat of it; it had been used to prop up Beatrice’s hands and feet for chopping. There were sprays of blood on the chair and on the wall near it. I didn’t see her hands or feet lying around anywhere.
On the floor by the bed were a couple of knotted rubbers. They might have belonged to her tormentors or to Billy. Right then it didn’t seem to matter.
“One goddamned thing,” Billy said. “It wasn’t suicide.”
I turned to hit him, but Leonard was too quick. There was a sound like someone cracking a stick over their knee, and Billy flew back against the wall, hit his head against it hard enough to dent the sheetrock. His ragdoll body nodded to the left, collapsed to the floor.
“I was just made to hit that motherfucker,” Leonard said.
I went quickly into the bathroom and splashed my face with water. I felt Leonard’s arm on my shoulders.
“Easy, man,” he said.
I raised up, moved away from the sink, then Leonard was splashing water on his face. “Goddamn,” he said.
I looked where he was looking. The tub. In it were Beatrice’s hands and feet.
The manager, having heard all the racket, arrived about then. He saw the shattered door, Billy on the floor, said something in Spanish. When he came forward, saw what was on the bed, he screamed and darted out of there.
Leonard and I got hold of Billy, dragged him into the hall. He didn’t wake up. Or if he did he was smart enough to not let us know.
I reached back inside the room, cut off the light, waited for the policia.
19
The cops came and got us, thought we might have done it. It didn’t help that Billy had a gun on him, even if it didn’t have bullets. The police thought we were all buddies.
We were shoved into a Mexican jail with cockroaches big enough to work in an iron foundry, rats that reminded me of a roadside attraction. The guard, a tall, mustached man with a slight belly, looked like he’d nail our balls to a log and give us a knife to free ourselves.
Something about him, and the jail, didn’t give me great confidence in the Mexican judicial system. I tried to tell them about Juan Miguel, and how I thought he might have done it or had it done. They listened to me, but said nothing. I might as well have been talking to those monoliths on Easter Island.
He did manage to ask in English where the knife was.
I realized then they were looking for the murder weapon. Obviously, we hadn’t beat Beatrice to death with Billy’s revolver, nor had we used it to cut her up.
Not finding the weapon seemed in our favor. We certainly hadn’t flushed it down the commode or hid it in our ass.
I reconciled myself with that. No murder weapon. What didn’t reconcile me was that jail and those goddamn rats.
Christ, they were big.
Once, many years ago, I stopped at a little trailer parked beside the road that was painted up with exciting pictures of behemoth rats, and above the painting was a sign that read: SEE THE GIANT RATS OF SUMATRA. I couldn’t resist. I paid my money, went inside, found them to be shaved possums. I said as much to the lady who owned the exhibit. She said, “Yeah, you’re right.” No embarrassment at all.
I said, “Everyone in East Texas knows a danged possum when they see it, shaved or not.”
“I know,” she said. And that was the end of that. She didn’t offer to give my money back. She didn’t care I knew they were shaved possums. It’s like the world’s largest gopher I heard about. You pay and go in and it’s the world’s largest all right, only it’s a stone statue of a gopher and they’ve already got your money.
The rats in the jail were near as big as those possums, only they were very much card-carrying rats. They came through a hole in the wall big enough to put your fist through – up to your elbow. They came at night, scampered and sniffed and nibbled about. I assumed they’d bite. I kept both feet on my bunk, watched them in the dark.
Rats. The dark.
It brought me back to thinking about Beatrice. I didn’t want to think about her, but I did. Thought about what human rats had done to her by lamplight. Slowly, methodically.
But why?
The money her father owed?
Wouldn’t they let her pay it back after the fishing trip?
Why would anyone want money that bad?
Who in the hell had her father been in dutch with anyway?
Who was Juan Miguel?
What would be the point in killing her?
Break a finger maybe. I could see that.
But she’s dead, how do they get their dough back? What’s the advantage of dead over a living person you could hound for dollars?
Did it become a matter of pride over commerce?
She had to have let them in. The door was sound. But why would she? Did she think she could reason with them? Perhaps she had part of the money. Maybe she thought she’d have it all, that Billy would cool and she would talk him into doing what she wanted. She was probably used to that. Talking men into doing what she wanted.
No answers. Just questions.
So here we were, in a Mexican jail. Me, Leonard, and an asshole. It was a horrible place. Small and tight, all three of us in a damp cell with all those rats and one horribly stained shitter between us.
You had to sit right out there in the open and take a crap. Somehow I found that the most humiliating part of it. Me working out turds that, because of the food, came out like bricks, and Billy watching.
I don’t know why he watched. Maybe he had nothing else to do. Maybe he liked to watch people shit. He certainly seemed to be watching me as I folded the thick toilet paper so I could do my duty.
After about midday of the second day, me shitting, Billy watching, I wiped my ass and rubbed the paper in Billy’s face. He tried to fight back, but he was just big and strong and had no skills. I kneed him inside his thigh and dropped him. I got hold of his hair while he was on his knees and gave him a couple of shots with a swinging elbow.
I regretted that. Got shit on my elbow. Had to wash it in the sink with a pumice soap that nearly took the skin off.
Billy lay down on the floor then, shit on his face, whining. I felt like a bully, but not so much that an hour later, when he was showing signs of recovery, I did it again.
Hit him with an elbow I mean.
Had to use the soap again. Got it off his face and on my elbow. That was starting to irritate me as well. It was like washing up with lathered gravel.
Why couldn’t he have washed his face?
That way, I hit him it would have been clean skin.
I know I wouldn’t go around with doo-doo on my face. No sir.
“Isn’t he fun to hit?” Leonard said. “I’m thinking about giving up sex just to save energy to hit him.”
“In here you’ve given up sex,” I said.
“So I can hit him lots.”
I made a vow that I’d check my watch every hour, and on the hour I was going to kick Billy’s ass. But I’d try and keep my elbow, hands, and feet off the shit on his face. That crack he had made about Beatrice’s death not being suicide was still rubbing me raw. For that matter, I didn’t know for a fact he didn’t do it. I doubted he had. Somehow it didn’t strike me as his style. He was abusive, but I doubted he was a murderer. He might kill by accident he got mad enough, bitch-slap her to death, but I doubted he’d plan anything like that. Torture. Amputation. Then bringing us over to see his handiwork. Nope. Billy wasn’t that calculating.
But he did deserve an hourly ass whipping.
However, the meanness went out of me. Billy eventually felt better, washed his face with the bad soap and stayed in the corner away from us.
Leonard, who heard me make the vow to whip his ass on the hour every hour, was a little disappointed in my caving in. He thought it was the liberal in me. But we decided, liberal or not, it was the best thing all around.
Later on, I felt a little ashamed of myself for doing what I did.
Caving in like that.
After a couple days had gone by – because in Mexico nobody gets in a hurry – they began to seriously suspect we might not have done it. The authorities allowed me to send word back to the States in the form of a phone call. I got hold of Charlie. Told him to come see what he could do, and to bring any kind of help he could bring. The Army might be a good idea.
While we sat and waited, Leonard said, “I don’t know how you do it, Hap. You’ve just got the knack.”
“What?”
“Trouble. You step in it the way kids step in mud puddles. You just can’t go around it, and when you try to jump over it, you fall in it. It’s a knack, brother.”
“Poor Beatrice,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “Poor Beatrice. And poor Ferdinand. I wonder about him.”
We had warned the Mexican authorities that Ferdinand’s life might be in danger as well, but again they gave us the Easter Island treatment. It was the same when we told them about Billy’s friends. That was about as exciting to them as egg salad.
“If Ferdinand is alive,” I said, “you don’t think he thinks we did it, do you?”
“Naw. Hey, Billy Boy.”
Billy, who was sitting against the wall with his head hung, looked up.
“Go over there and put your goddamn nose in the corner. I’m sick of looking at you “
Billy went, stood with his nose in the corner like a child.
“When I judge fifteen minutes, I’ll let you out of the corner,” Leonard said, “but don’t you fuckin’ look at me, you hear?”
“Yeah,” Billy said.
“Change that to Yes sir, Mr. Pine, sir, or you ain’t even imagined the beating you’ll take, you piece of shit.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Pine, sir.”
“Now you’re cookin’ with gas.”
We were sitting close together on Leonard’s bunk, talking quietly. I said, “You don’t think Billy did it, do you?”
“No. I think he got thrown out the night before, just like he said. He didn’t get the lovin’ he thought he was gonna get, and the next mornin’ he was still mad, and when she didn’t answer the door, he thought you were casting your harpoon, so he got the gun and came to scare you.”
“But you scared him.”
“I did. But, if you had answered the door, you would have scared him. Maybe not as good as me, but good enough.”
Next afternoon Charlie arrived with Jim Bob Luke.
Charlie had gotten rid of the straw boater and had gone back to his porkpie. He was also wearing a Hawaiian shirt as usual.
Jim Bob is a private investigator and hog farmer out of Pasadena, Texas. A friend of Charlie’s. He saved my life once.
He was wearing a blue western shirt with silver snaps, jeans that looked as if they had seen a lifetime of rodeos, and a white hat, creased, the brim turned up sharply on both sides. He had a little feather in the hatband and a toothpick in his mouth. The hatband was made out of rattlesnake hide and it still had the head on it, but he probably could have done without it.
He came and peeked at us through the bars.
“Damned, if this ain’t the Ritz-Carlton, and you boys are uglier than I remember.”
“And you’re just as sweet as I remember,” Leonard said.
“Gettin’ lots of hog pussy, Jim Bob?” I said.
“Just if they get muddy,” Jim Bob said. “That’s the way I like it. They twist them little curly tails and it’s all I can do not to cream my jeans.”
“You’re a sick sumbitch, Jim Bob,” I said.
“I tell you,” Jim Bob said, “you boys got a way of gettin’ your dicks between the ground and a horse hoof, don’t you?”
“Hap does. And I suffer because of it.”
“Leonard, you’re a fuckup that’s got an excuse,” Jim Bob said. “Without Hap, you’d fuck up on your own. It’s just you boys’ nature. I know. I’m the same way. Damn, it smells like a goddamn fart in here.”
“Th
ey feed us a lot of beans,” I said.
Charlie hadn’t said a word. He took off his porkpie hat and slapped it on his thigh for some reason. His face wore the look of a very tired man or maybe just one who wished he had a better class of friends.
“I’ve got Veil in the other room talking,” he said.
“No shit,” I said.
“No shit,” he said.
Veil had helped Leonard once after he burned down a crack house. His defense was basically Leonard thought he was exterminating rats by destroying it. It worked. Leonard got away with a warning. If there was anyone who could legally get us out of this thing, it was Veil.
Veil wasn’t a big guy, average height, black hair gone gray, a slightly Mediterranean look, one good eye, the other covered with a black pirate patch. He had the demeanor of someone who could roll strikes in a bowling alley with his nuts.
“What’s Jim Bob doing here?” Leonard asked. “I mean, I’m glad you might have brought him along to hold my dick while I pee, but what else is he good for?”
“My hogs speak highly of me,” Jim Bob said. “Except for the ones I take to the packin’ plant. I reckon their opinion of me lowers dramatically about then.”
“We thought there might be trouble getting you out,” Charlie said, “so I brought Jim Bob. He kind of likes trouble.”
“Don’t say that,” Jim Bob said. “I don’t like trouble. I just know how to deal with it… All right, I sort of like it.”
“Well, I don’t,” I said. “Get us out of here.”
“What about him?” Charlie said, pointing at Billy.
“He’s on his own.”
“Friends he had with him seem to have bailed,” Leonard said.
“He guilty of anything?” Charlie asked.
“Birth,” Leonard said.
Jim Bob, Charlie, and Veil took a room at the hotel, and Veil did his thing. Arguing with the law via translator. I thought with Veil on the case we’d be out that afternoon, but we weren’t.
Billy, who was free to take his nose out of the wall, said, “You know, I didn’t mean to start it off so bad with you guys.”
“Sure you did,” I said.
“All right, but I’m sorry now.”
“I’m sorry I ever met you,” Leonard said.
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