Twenty Centavos: A Mystery Set in San Miguel de Allende

by John Scherber

  “They wouldn’t say even if they had. But are you suggesting that Tobey was financing his antiques business with drugs, or that it was merely a cover?”

  He looked at me for a moment. It was the same look he had given me at the party when he thought about the possibility that I might see things differently. “I’m not entirely certain what I’m suggesting, Paul. Could it be possible that the shipments of antiques going back and forth might include the means to conceal drugs? I’m just thinking out loud here. I happen to know that the house and gallery he had on Umaran cost him more than $600,000. And as you know, there are no mortgages here.”

  Very well indeed. I remembered my shock at finding out that the $90,000 I needed to buy my Quebrada house nine years before was all coming out of Grandma’s bequest money, none of it from the bank. I ended up with just $5,000 left after I redid the roof. At least real estate prices had ballooned since then.

  “I thought it would have to be something like that,” I said. “Prices were already taking off when he bought there. But his trade was focused on high end items. Isn’t it possible there was a good living in that? Plus, some of my inquiries into his background suggest he may have brought in some capital from his years in the brokerage business.”

  “I was told he left under a cloud,” Perry said, tilting the last of his drink into his mouth. He also subtly glanced at his watch at the same instant.

  “Doesn’t mean the cloud didn’t have a silver lining. Perhaps he was making too much money from his clients, rather than not enough.”

  “Another round?”

  I nodded, and Perry went back to the bar. When he poured his own drink I could see it was a small batch boutique bourbon. When he came back to the desk he pulled the chair up closer and leaned his elbows on the leather top.

  “So you don’t think it was drugs,” he said.

  “Tobey had an office away from the gallery. We found it in Dolores Hidalgo. It was the place where he received and reshipped his inventory. He kept his records there. We examined it carefully and if he had any involvement in drugs we saw no sign of it. It was nothing but antiques, and it was separated from the public part of his business here. Even his wife didn’t know it existed. If he was trafficking in narcotics, that office and warehouse would have been perfect for it.”

  “But there was no sign of it,” he repeated.

  “None. So why have two carefully concealed places? Because that’s what you would have to believe if he was dealing, and there was nothing like that in Dolores Hidalgo, believe me. And if you think that his connection with John Schleicher was a drug partnership, then you’d have to also think that Schleicher was the one running the warehouse and shipping end of things if Tobey wasn’t. And that doesn’t square well with a man trying to avoid extradition. A man who wouldn’t risk embarrassing the people in high places who are protecting him.”

  Perry leaned back in his chair and briefly drummed his fingers on the desk. “Well, I can’t figure it then. I admit you make a good case. Maybe there’s some other angle.”

  “I wish I had one. Do you mind if we look at the ceramics?

  Perry got up and crossed to the display case near the powder room door. He brought the pieces out one by one and placed them on the desk. When he finished they were in a line facing me and he sat down, pulling the chair closer to the desk.

  “The way I’ve placed these are in order of age, from your left to your right.”

  The one on the left was the squat cylinder vessel with the two small rim fractures.

  “This one,” he said, his fingers moving over the damaged edge, “was found near Landeros in southern Chiapas. It’s attributed to the first century AD, or current era, as they like to say now. The darker clay is characteristic of that area.”

  “Do you mind if I touch it?”

  “Go ahead. You’re used to handling art works.”

  I picked it up and moved my fingers over the bottom. It had three stubby legs, all with the same abraded surface on the bottom I had noticed on other vessels among the San Miguel collectors. Above, the surface was rough to the touch, and the glaze thin and uneven.

  “What would something like this have been used for?”

  “That’s rather speculative. Most experts think the vessels that were decorated and survived were used in religious ritual. Possibly it held the blood of sacrificial victims. There are always a great deal of shards on these sites and they’re mostly undecorated. People’s everyday crockery. This next piece,” he pointed to a godlike figure, “is from Bonampak, just north of Landeros, so it’s the same general area. It’s probably third century, obviously a cult figure, but just which one it is now I’ve forgotten. I’d have to look it up.” He chuckled uneasily.

  How unlike you, I thought. Was he distancing himself now from these pieces? This figure had no incised drawings on it, but the feel of it when I picked it up seemed subtly similar to the first one. Maybe it was just the same thickness of the sides.

  The next was a deep plate, crowded with figures and with more coloring in the glaze than the others. The figures were the typical loopy style. I realized it would have been a big help to have seen Ramon Xoc’s signature at some point. I could imagine the same loops in his Os and the top of his Rs.

  “This one is from near Yaxchilan, but over on the Guatemala side of the border. Probably an offering bowl for maize or other foods. Same period as the second one. I think it’s my favorite.”

  “A very handsome piece.”

  “Now this one is from Zac Pol in the Yucatan.” It was a deeper bowl, with human figures inside and out. Again the three blunt feet with smooth bottoms. “This town was just on the coast opposite Jaina Island. It’s Campeche State there.”

  “The great burial island.”

  “You know a little about this?”

  “Just a few things Maya has told me. I’ve also seen some of their human figures in another collection.”

  “I know Tobey had some of those, but I didn’t like them as well as the vessels.”

  “And these two?” I asked, indicating another bowl with animal figures and a tall cylinder vessel.

  “From Sayil and Labna, respectively, neighboring towns in Yucatan state, down in the southwestern corner. Fifth or sixth century, both of them. Toward the end of the great period of Mayan culture. Still very collectable, though. I myself don’t see any deterioration in skills. If I had, I would have passed on them. It’s possible that as the tradition deteriorated, some individual artisans still maintained a higher standard.”

  I didn’t see any deterioration either. Ramon was always good, no matter what period he worked in. “Have these been published?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t it customary when high quality items come to light that they get some journal attention?”

  “Now it is, but not always from the older collections. Digging was less supervised years ago and Tobey said that all of these had come from holdings that were originally dispersed in the sixties and seventies. He had never seen any publication data on them, and he said he had all the journals. It’s even possible, I suppose, that some of these were found in the nineteenth century. There would have been no supervision at all then. It was a free-for-all for anyone with a shovel.”

  I didn’t comment on this. I knew I hadn’t seen any scholarly journals in Galeria Cruz or in the Dolores Hidalgo office.

  I surveyed the group for a while as Perry searched for an elusive speck of lint on his sleeve. The coherence of these six had nothing to do with being at the heart of Mayan culture and ritual for the 600 years they purported to represent. The coherence was entirely in coming from the hand of Ramon Xoc, I had not the slightest doubt. I compared them with my visual memory from the party and I was pleased at how accurate my recollection was. That’s a skill you never want to let go of. My eyes ranged back and forth over the group, and settled finally on the Rolodex next to the newest bowl. It was a discordant note, and not just because it was late twentieth century and not Mayan.

>   I immediately recalled the desk top as it had appeared at the party. There had been the leather-covered notepad, the impressive fountain pen, the silver framed picture of the newlywed couple. I thought of how Barbara’s hair had been up the day of their wedding, her “sophisticated” look she had called it. Then there was the phone with buttons for three lines. Other than the phone, none of these items were present today from that grouping, except the Rolodex. I had flipped through it. It was the tray form, not the ferris wheel, with a semitransparent top and an opaque brown tray below. What I was looking at now was a black tray below. I was not mistaken. When I see colors I often automatically mix them in my mind. It’s an exercise. I remembered thinking that the base of the Rolodex would be mostly burnt umber, with a touch of cadmium red, and then maybe a dash of ultramarine to dull it down. Not anyone’s recipe for black.

  I’m not sure what my face was showing, but when I looked up Perry was regarding me with that same careful look. I decided to say nothing. Maybe he owned 12 Rolodexes and rotated them monthly on his desktop. It was an uncomfortable moment, for reasons that were not obvious. He rose and began replacing the figures in the cabinet. His motions seemed a little unsteady; I didn’t know how many whiskeys he’d had before I came. I finished my cognac. It was nearly nine o’clock.

  “I appreciate your taking the time to show me these,” I said.

  “Any time, Paul. I know you’re a connoisseur yourself in many ways. By the way, what’s Marisol Cross going to do with the gallery? Have you heard?”

  “She told Maya she’s going to close it and liquidate everything. She doesn’t have the expertise or the time to run it herself. It sounded like she’s going to move the furniture out of the great room and collect everything there on display and hold an auction. There’d still be enough room for seating for bidders. Imagine folding chairs in Galeria Cruz! Tobey would split.”

  As he turned back to me his mouth was rather slack, and his face unreadable. Maybe he did play poker. I hadn’t detected any dishonesty in his statements, and he didn’t seem terribly surprised about the auction. I set the brandy snifter on the bar and we went downstairs. Something unspoken seemed to hang in the air between us at the door.

  “Good night,” he said. “I hope to see you soon.” He did not offer to shake hands. I wondered now if he had held back something about Schleicher.

  As I drove back through the arches and down to centro, I tried to sort things out. I wasn’t sure whether I had something, or just more antiques road show. I had sounded to Perry more certain than I really felt about his drug theory and John Schleicher, and I suspected that Cody might be prepared to take it up. For cops, a record like Schleicher’s is irresistible proof of guilt. Cody didn’t lack imagination, but he still tended to think as he had always thought as a cop because it had served him well--he had solved a lot of cases and he was still alive.

  Back on Quebrada the crowd had cleared and the street was quiet. The moon was cheerfully hanging over the lit spire of the Parroquia, but I felt deflated. I had hoped that Perry, as the biggest customer of Tobey’s gallery, would be able to provide more helpful information.

  Inside, instead of wild dancing and merriment I found Cody alone reading in the loggia. On the table beside him was a bottle of wine with two glasses. The one farthest from him was still half full, as was the bottle.

  “Did you wear her out?”

  “Actually we had just gotten started when Marisol called and said she was ready to start packing up Tobey’s clothes and would Maya come over and help her. She left about 20 minutes after you did. She didn’t feel like she could refuse.”

  “Poor you. So Marisol’s moving on. The clothes part is probably the hardest thing to do. I’m glad Maya’s helping her. Do you feel like some coffee, or do you want to stay with the wine?”

  “Coffee sounds good.”

  I didn’t really feel like drinking anything more either so I put on a pot of coffee and sat down with him. Cody had apparently taken off his gun for the dancing, because now it lay on the seat of a bench against the kitchen wall.

  “So what do we know now?” he asked.

  “It just confirmed my original impressions, Perry’s ceramics were all by the same person, most likely Ramon Xoc.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t feel like I could ask him. He gave me the history of each one, the dating and so on, with a straight face. It didn’t seem to bother him that none of them had ever been published in the journals.”

  “And there are how many?” asked Cody.

  “Six.” Something occurred to me. “Just a minute. I want to check our files.”

  I went into the dining room and pulled out the box of printouts from Tobey’s office computer disks. On the pages of sales records I found what I wanted and took it out to the loggia, and set it down between us.

  “Look at this. Perry bought seven pieces from Tobey. One is missing.”

  “Maybe,” said Cody. “Remember how the Alwyns had four Jaina figures and the sales records for them said three? How many were there at his party?”

  “Just the six. So it’s not the first discrepancy. Perhaps the Alwyns bought one somewhere else. They may not have been Xoc’s work. And remember, the quantity we found at Schleicher’s was way off.”

  “This doesn’t really prove anything,” said Cody. I poured us both a cup of coffee. “Was he friendly?”

  “Basically, but I think he’d a had couple drinks before I got there. He claimed he was working on some business things, but I didn’t see anything.”

  “What about Schleicher? Did you talk about him?”

  “Well, that’s an interesting part. Perry thinks that Tobey and Schleicher may have been involved in a drug deal, or more than one. He mostly has the same information we have on Schleicher, and he thinks that the antiques traveling in and out of Tobey’s hands may have provided a way to conceal drugs. I was thinking about that on the way back. What if you could make plastic peanuts for packing, but it was really puffed heroin, or something like that?”

  “Wouldn’t the drug dogs still be able to smell it? Even puffed?” He gave me a skeptical look. “I don’t think that flies, but even so I keep going back and forth on this in my own mind, and I just can’t let go of his record. No, we did not find the murder gun. But we did find a gun. And we found cocaine, a fair amount of it, and he has a lot of money, as well as his Mayan pots.”

  “But we know there’s also family money,” I said. “Here’s something else, and I’ve been struggling with how much weight to give this. When I was at the party and taking a private look at Perry’s study, I made one of those visual records for myself of the ceramics and the desk.”

  “As if you were going to paint them later from memory?”

  “Pretty much. You’ll probably think this is nothing, but the Rolodex on the desk top is different from the one that was there during the party.” He looked at me as if to say, “So?”

  “Wait, hear me out,” I went on. “That one had a brown base and tonight’s Rolodex had a black base. I looked casually through the earlier one and there was no listing for Galeria Cruz or Tobey Cross. Yet Perry acknowledges buying six pieces, the record says seven, from Tobey. Also, the listing for Maya said, ‘Maria Sanchez,’ which is not what Perry and Barbara call her. Do you see what this means?”

  “I think I know where you’re going,” said Cody.

  “I wasn’t able to scan the black Rolodex tonight with Perry sitting across the desk from me. But there’s only one reason I can think of why the brown Rolodex didn’t have a listing for Tobey, and that’s that you don’t put your own name and number in your own Rolodex. Also, the Crosses would know Maya as Maria because Maya and Marisol go way back, but Perry and Barbara never did because I was already calling her Maya when we met them. I think that it’s possible Perry took Tobey’s Rolodex when he killed him and two days later at the party, he was still scanning it to get a feel for the gallery’s bus
iness. It would look completely harmless on his desk, wouldn’t it? I’m thinking out loud here.”

  “I just don’t know. They could have heard the name Maria a long time back. You’ve known them a couple of years. Maybe she was still Maria occasionally then?” He sighed and rubbed his hands together. “I think this might be worth looking at, but that basically it’s thin. It’s the kind of thinking you fall back on when all the good leads peter out and you have to go back to your notes, wondering what each little thing means. What if Perry just decided not to buy anything more from Tobey and pulled his card out of the Rolodex? Or maybe they had a falling out, who knows? He could have just torn it up because Tobey was dead. He doesn’t sound like the kind who would call Marisol and offer condolences. If you could get back in there and check the black Rolodex, that’s the only way we could settle this. You said Barbara has gone back to Houston now, but what about when she gets back?”

  “OK,” I said, “there’s probably a way to do that. I did think that Perry looked at me strangely when he saw I was studying the Rolodex.”

  “But he’d had a few drinks, you said. And you probably had a couple too, right? Maybe that wasn’t the only strange look of the evening. Alcohol can not only make you miss a few details, it can also cause you to make up a few that aren’t really there. This is why cops don’t drink on duty. If that’s what it’s coming down too, there’s not much more we can do until Barbara gets back. But I still think it’s thin. A man like Schleicher would commit murder far more quickly than Perry Watt. This is just based on my experience and my knowledge of human nature. There’s something we’re still missing here.”

  “Maybe we would have seen it if Schleicher had been willing to talk face to face, but I can’t think how to force him to do it without police authority.”

  “Any way to persuade Licenciado Rodriguez to pull him in, since Delgado is off the case now?”

  “That would never happen. His dream is that we just go away.”