“No problem. . . .”
“You look excellent,” the Mexican said, smiling.
His English was lightly accented, and Malone said, “This is Colonel Manuel Martin, Mexican National Police. He arranged the interview with the Mejia family.”
Lucas and Martin shook hands. The Mexican clearly had more Indio in his ancestry than Spanish, was six inches shorter than Mallard and a little rounder. His expression was one of weary amusement. Lucas said, “Pleased to meet you,” and Martin nodded and said, “I understand you’ve danced with Clara Rinker.”
“She’s a good dancer,” Lucas said. They were drifting toward the dining room. “What’s the story on this Mejia guy?”
Martin’s eyebrows arched a bit, and he cocked his head to the side. “I was trying to think how to explain that, and finally I came up with this: He is Mexico’s Joseph Kennedy. The father of your President Kennedy? Where the early money came from is not exactly known; it is now legitimate. But because of past associations, the entire Mejia family is very, very careful. And they have excellent connections with the less reputable . . .” He struggled for a word, and finally landed on “element.”
“They’ll talk to the cops?”
Martin shrugged. “Of course. Joseph Kennedy would speak to the police, would he not? So will Mejia. Especially where our interests are aligned.”
THE BREAKFAST WAS AMERICAN —eggs, milk, cereal, sausage, and coffee—though Martin stayed with fruit, bread with cheese, and olives, popping the olives one at a time with his fingertips, as though he were eating pecans. During the breakfast, he gave them a short history of Cancún, drew schematic maps on a paper napkin to explain the lay of the Yucatán, and the cities of Cancún and Mérida, and outlined what was known of Clara Rinker’s stay in Mexico.
“She wasn’t working for the Mejias before she came here, of that we are certain. They had no idea of who she was. If they had known, it is doubtful that Paul Mejia would have been allowed to continue the relationship. From what we can piece together, he met her at the hotel where she worked—purely accidentally, she was a bookkeeper and he was checking on a business question having to do with automobile parking costs at various beach hotels—and that she did not know about the Mejia family until another woman at the hotel told her, some time after they began seeing each other. She lived quite modestly in a rented apartment.”
“Fingerprints?” Lucas asked.
“Nothing. The room had been methodically wiped. There were personal items left behind, but nothing that you could not buy in five minutes in another city. And, of course, nobody ever took a picture of her. There was never an occasion.”
“No way to tell where she went?”
“She disappeared after an appointment at the doctor’s office,” Martin said. “She had recovered from the shooting—the checks. . . . Is that right, the medical checks?”
“Checkups,” Malone offered.
“Yes. The medical checkups were routine, and had become more a matter of physical rehabilitation. She had some damage to her stomach muscles, and they needed strengthening. Anyway, there is a large taxi stand not far from the doctor’s office, but none of the taxi drivers we’ve found remembers seeing her or taking her anywhere. That’s possibly because they take all kinds of Americans everywhere, and they simply can’t remember, or because the Mejia connection had been rumored, and nobody wanted anything to do with her.”
“So she takes a taxi and she’s gone.”
Martin shrugged again and said, “What else can I tell you? We have document checks, of course, for people coming and going, and since that time, we have no Cassandra or Cassie McLain, and of course, no Clara Rinker, entering or leaving Mexico.”
MALONE AND MALLARD questioned Martin through the breakfast—they weren’t quite rehearsed, Lucas noticed, but they were coordinated. He began watching them more closely, and began to suspect that the coordination was personal, rather than professional. But what about the Sheetrocker, he wondered?
Then, in the government GMC Suburban that Martin himself drove to Mérida, Mallard scrambled into the back with Malone, and Lucas noticed that their shoulders touched during much of the ride, and he thought, Hmmm. The two FBI agents pushed the questions even when it was obvious that they were running in circles, as though they were playing a ranking game with each other. . . .
Martin was unfailingly polite through it all. Halfway to Mérida, the FBI questions ran out, and they rode in silence for a while.
Martin eventually turned to Lucas. “If I might ask . . . where did you get your jacket? It’s very nice. Also the shirt, although it’s not my style.”
“Got it in San Francisco. One of the gay men’s boutiques—my fiancée would know the store,” Lucas said. He opened the front lapel and read it. “It’s a Gianfranco Ferre. I liked the fabric for hot weather, although it does get some pulls in it.”
“Hmm.” Martin nodded, pursing his lips. “Large people like yourself look authoritative even in casual clothing. I’m afraid my body was made for suits.”
“But that’s a great suit,” Lucas said. “I saw one like it, I think, a friend of mine had one. Ralph Lauren, the Purple Label? Though it was in blue.”
“Exactly, this is what it is,” Martin said, looking pleased, touching his necktie knot and lapel. “Some people in America think brown suits look bad, but I think, with brown people, they look not-so-bad.” And a moment later: “Have you ever looked at a suit by Kiton?”
Lucas said, “I saw some, at a show . . .”
They talked about suits for a while, then about shoes. Martin told Lucas that he’d paid $1,100 for a pair of semicustom oxblood loafers by an English cobbler named Barkley, only to find that every time he went through an airport metal detector, the steel shanks in the shoes set off the alarm. “So, when I go to the States, my beautiful shoes stay at home. It is the only way I can assure myself of the sanctity of my . . .” He searched again for the word, came up with “rectum,” and smiled brilliantly over his shoulder at Malone.
“Don’t like those body-cavity searches, eh?” Lucas asked.
“American security is sometimes . . . unusual,” Martin said.
When they got out of the truck in Mérida, Malone took Lucas by the elbow and stood on tiptoe, her mouth by his ear, and said, “If you talk for one more fuckin’ minute about fashion, I’ll fuckin’ shoot you.”
“Hey . . .”
RAUL MEJIA ’S HOUSE was surrounded by an off-white stucco wall, with access through what appeared to be a simple Spanish wrought-iron gate. As they were passing through, Lucas noticed that the bolt was electronic, that the wrought iron was actually steel, and that the black faux wrought-iron leaves at the top of the gate, eight or nine feet up, were essentially knives. If anyone were to scale it, he would need serious protection—like a Kevlar quilt. Without it, a climber’s fingers would be lopped off like so many link sausages.
Inside the wall was a small, neatly kept yard, grassy in the North American style, with a stepping-stone walk to the front door of the house. The house itself, from the front, seemed as modest as the outer wall, a high single-story, and was made of the same off-white stucco, pierced by tall dark windows.
Martin led the way through the gate, up the stepping-stone walk, and pushed the doorbell. A moment later, a young man opened it, smiled, and said, “Come in, come in—I’m Dominic Mejia. My father’s waiting in the library.”
The house was much larger than it appeared from the outside, Lucas realized. From the outside, there was no way to see how far back it extended—but once inside, Dominic led them through a public reception room, across a large interior courtyard, open to the sky, with a small swimming pool, into the back of the house and down another hallway to a library. The library looked as though it might be a hundred years old, all of dark wood with thick shelves set at different heights, to accommodate the books. The bottom two feet of each wall was taken up by cupboards. The books themselves were varied, and included several hundr
ed paperbacks and perhaps three thousand hardcovers. The room smelled faintly of lemon-scented furniture polish and leather soap—it smelled good.
An old man was sitting in a wheelchair at a library table, a book in front of him. He smiled when they entered, pushed back from the table, and said in English, “Colonel Martin, a pleasure, as always. Your friends, as well. Come in. Sit.” He gestured at a circle of chairs at the back of the room: two leather reading chairs, and three easy chairs that had apparently been brought in for the guests. Mejia wheeled himself over.
Lucas went along the shelving and said, “This is a good room. I’m building a house now, with a library.” He was looking at the books—they all appeared to have been read. Most were on history, culture, and economics, with a selection of Latin American and Spanish novels; all the bindings were modern. Mejia was a reader, rather than a collector.
Mallard was settling into one of the leather chairs, while Malone took the other. Mejia wheeled to get a better look at his shelves, then said, “A library. I envy you the task; the thought. The difficulty is to make the library comfortable and distinguished at once. Much thought and a good architect.” He tapped his temple as he said “Much thought.” Mejia spoke English well, but not quite as well as his son. He looked at his son: “Dominic—open the folding doors. And find Anthony.”
At the far end of the room, two large, four-panel folding doors dominated the center of the wall. Dominic opened them and revealed a built-in desk with a computer console, and an overhead shelf lined with software boxes, then went to find Anthony, whoever that was. “Internet,” Raul Mejia was saying. “A wonderful thing, even for an old man. I have this beautiful library where I can sit with my books . . . and a high-speed Internet connection behind harem screens made in Andalusia.”
Lucas took one of the fabric chairs as Mallard asked, “Have you ever put ‘Clara Rinker’ into a search engine?”
“Three thousand references now, on Google, beginning with the investigation in your Kansas and Minnesota,” Mejia said. “There is discussion of a movie or perhaps a television show.”
“You were surprised to see them all? The references?”
“I was . . .” Dominic came back into the room, trailed by a man who might have been a year or two older, but was obviously his brother. Raul Mejia looked at his sons and said, “Asombrado?”
“Astonished. Amazed,” Anthony said. His English was as good as his brother’s. They sounded Californian.
“More than surprised,” Mejia said. He sighed. “I wish she had the baby. This is the real assassination. A baby from my son and a woman like this. This would be a baby.”
Malone jumped in: “As we understand it, you have had enemies in business, but can find no sign that these enemies made the attack on your son and Rinker. With the St. Louis connection, it seems now that the attack was aimed at Rinker and your son was killed accidentally. Does this change your . . . your . . . feeling toward Rinker?”
The old man shrugged. “Of course. But. I can also understand this attachment. Paulo was a good boy, but wild. Crazy, sometimes. This woman, Clara Rinker, there must have been a fire between them. She must also have this craziness somewhere inside. I could feel it myself when I spoke to her. So. I am angry that she did not tell us, but I understand why she did not. Now . . . what is to be done?”
“You could help us catch her,” Mallard said. “You have commercial connections everywhere in Mexico. She needs money and shelter, and she will go places that the police may not see.”
“We would also like to know from you . . . this man who was murdered at the airfield—what is his connection with these criminals in St. Louis? He is a Mafia?”
“He has connections with St. Louis organized crime,” Mallard said.
“You think some Italians from St. Louis came to Cancún and shot my boy,” Mejia said. “By mistake.”
“Not so many Italians anymore, but that’s basically what we think, yes,” Mallard agreed.
“You will tell us their names?”
Now Mallard showed a little nervousness. “We can’t do that. But as the investigation progresses, I’m sure you will . . . learn a few of them. We wouldn’t want you to take, ummm, any active role in the, ummm, investigation.”
“But, perhaps, through my family commercial connections—I have connections with hotels, motels, friends in the States . . . perhaps I could find information for you. If I had the names.”
“We really can’t bring in civilians.”
“He’s afraid you would send gunmen to St. Louis to kill the names,” Lucas said to Mejia. “He might not mind if they did that, if it would help catch Rinker. But he couldn’t tell you the names, because that might turn out to be technically criminal and he would be purged.”
“That’s not exactly accurate,” Mallard said irritably.
“Besides, you don’t need him to tell you,” Lucas said, still talking to Mejia. “Watch your computer. The FBI leaks like crazy and the names will appear. If Rinker starts shooting, there will be lists in the newspapers. In your search engine, put in ‘organized crime,’ ‘St. Louis,’ and the word ‘shot.’ ”
“Goddamnit, Lucas,” Mallard said.
Mejia looked at Lucas for a long five seconds, then turned to Mallard. “So, then, from me, you need clues to Clara Rinker.”
Mallard nodded. “Yes.”
Mejia nodded back. “We will look. If you will give us a telephone number, we will call when we find anything.”
Mallard took a card from his pocket, scribbled a number on it, and handed it over. Mejia glanced at it and held it out to Anthony, who, like his brother, was leaning against the library table. “That’s my secure cell phone,” Mallard said. “I sleep with it. You can call me twenty-four hours a day.”
“You’re not married,” Mejia said.
“Not anymore,” Mallard said. “The job was more interesting.”
THEY TALKED FOR another ten minutes, but not much came of it. Mejia and his sons gave them impressions of Rinker. She was a happy woman, they said, and had made Paulo happy. Although she said she was younger than Paulo, they thought she might have been a couple of years older. Would they have married? Perhaps.
Mejia seemed to lack any real information about the crime, which wasn’t surprising, since the FBI and the Mexican National Police had the same problem. As they left, Lucas and Mejia talked a few minutes about library shelves, and how to prevent unsightly sagging, and the arrangement of books, which the old man called an enjoyable but impossible task. On the way out of Mérida, Malone said, “Nice old man. For a ganglord.”
Martin’s eyes flashed up to the rearview mirror to catch hers, and he said, “Maybe not so much ganglord talk outside the car. And I do not think many people would agree that he is a nice old man.”
“Do you think he’ll help us trail Rinker?” Mallard asked.
“If he sees some benefit in it,” Martin said. “Benefit for him. He will analyze, analyze, analyze, and if finally he is sure of the benefit, he will help. Realpolitik.”
Lucas smiled at the word. “You speak really good English, you know?”
WITH MARTIN AS a guide, they returned to Cancún and toured the restaurant where Paulo Mejia and Rinker had been shot, interviewed the restaurant owner, and climbed into the loft of the church to see the shooting position taken by the assassin.
“Had to have local help to find this,” Lucas said, as Martin explained how the shooter had probably fired once, then retreated down the stairs and out the back door to a waiting car.
“There would have to be a driver,” Martin said. “You couldn’t park a car back there—it would block the entire street and bring attention.”
“You know the driver?” Mallard asked.
“We are looking for a man. . . . He is unaccountably absent. Normally, he would go to relatives to be hidden, but they do not know where he is. They knew where he was three days ago, but then he went away.”
“Running,” Malone suggested. �
�Maybe he felt you coming.”
“He went to a business meeting, his mother says. He didn’t come back.”
“Mmm.”
The loft was hot as a kiln, and smelled like hay, like a midwestern barn loft in summer. A wasp the size of Lucas’s little finger bumped along the seam of the ceiling and wall. They looked out on the hot street for another minute, then trooped back to the restaurant for a light lunch. The service was wonderful, which Martin seemed to take for granted. Lucas again noticed the body language between Mallard and Malone, an offering from Mallard, equivocation from Malone. He smiled to himself and went back to the pasta salad.
From the restaurant, they went to the hotel where Rinker had worked as a bookkeeper. She’d worked off the books, illegally, but nobody was being coy about it. With both the Mejia family and the national cops involved, the hotel manager simply opened up and told everybody everything: He’d hired her because she had the bookkeeping skills—she knew Excel backward and forward—and was willing to work whenever she was needed, for as long or as little as she was needed, and there were no benefits or taxes to pay.
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