A Deadly Shade of Gold (21 page)

I bounded up, feeling as cold as if I'd handled snakes. From the instant he bounded at me until he fell to the ground at the base of the wall, the total elapsed time was perhaps less than two full seconds. I wiped my hands on my thighs and waited for him. It is possible to age a year in two seconds. Animals that come at you in the night is one of the horror dreams of childhood. You never really get over them.

I moved to him carefully, screened the small pen beam with my body and took a two second look. He was about eighty pounds of sinew, black hair and fangs-and he was quite dead.

It put an unknown limit on the time I could spend there. I had no way of knowing when they would call him. Perhaps they pulled in the human guard at nightfall and let the dog roam the grounds all night. He was too near my escape line. I waited until my eyes had readjusted to the night, then with a squeamish hesitation, took him by the hind paw and dragged him a dozen yards into a thickness of shrubbery covered with fragrant white blooms. Some variety of jasmine. Suddenly I wondered if they had a pair of dogs, and the thought nearly sent me hustling toward my escape line. I couldn't expect that much luck twice. Few men have ever given me as much instant fright as that dog gave me. And it was an unpleasant clue to the Garcia attitude about visitors. Uninvited visitors. Watchdogs trained to bark are a lot more common, and more civilized.

As I moved carefully toward the house, avoiding open patches of moonlight, listening for the slightest sound of a charging dog, I took note of direction and landmarks. I wanted to be able to leave at a headlong run, if need be, with a certainty of hitting the wall at the right place. When I had an unimpeded view of the big pink house, I stopped in the shadows and moved to one side and leaned against the trunk of a tree and hooked my thumbs in my belt and stared at it. By assuming one of the postures of relaxation you can trick your body into thinking things are perfectly under control. I was still shaky from the extra adrenaline the black dog had stimulated.

I looked at the roof shape against the sky. There weren't many windows lighted. It was a big house, at least double the size of the Boody place. The complex of smaller buildings behind it was more elaborate, and there were lights showing there, too, and a faint sound of music from there.

I selected the next spot. There was a shallow patio with a low broad stone wall, the patio next to a wing of the house, parallel to it and up against it. Two sets of glass doors and two windows were encircled by the patio wall. The doors and window to the right were lighted. The light seemed to come through opaque white draperies. The doors and window to the left were dark.

Once you decide, it is it strategic error to wait too long. Then it becomes like jumping off a roof. The longer you wait, the higher it looks. I had to cross a moonlit area. I bent double and moved swiftly, angling toward the dark end of the shallow patio. I went over the wall, moved close to the side of the house and lay on rough flagstones close against a low line of plantings. I listened. Now the fact of the dog was in my favor. Nobody was going to stay terribly alert, not with a monster like that cruising the grounds. When they've killed you, they stand and bay until somebody comes to congratulate them.

I wormed on over to the lighted doors, and found a place at the bottom corner I could look
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through. I was looking into a big bedroom with a sitting room area at one end of it, the end nearest the doors. A wall mirror showed me the reflection of the end of an elaborately canopied bed. A man sat on a grey chaise, turned away from me, so that all I could see of his face was a shelf of brow, curve of cheek. He wore shorts. One leg was outstretched, one propped up. They were pale legs, thick and powerful, fuzzed with a pelt of springy black hair. He was reading a book. His left side was toward me. Gold wrist watch and gold strap were half submerged in the curl of black hair on forearm and wrist.

I saw a movement in the mirror and then a girl came into view. She was walking slowly, barefoot, fastening the side of a green knit skirt, her head angled down so that a heavy sheaf of shining blonde hair obscured her face. She wore a white bra covering small breasts. Her upper torso was golden tan, with the narrow and supple look of youth. She fixed the skirt as she reached the foot of the chaise. She threw her hair back with a toss of her head, and stood and looked at the man with a cool, unpleasant expression. It was a very lovely face. I could guess that her earliest memories were of being told how pretty she was. It was a cool and sensuous face.

The springing blonde hair, with a few tousled strands across her forehead, fell in a glossy heaviness in two wings which framed the sensitive and bad tempered face. I had seen her before, and I groped for the memory, and finally had it. She had stared very earnestly at me many times, looked deeply into my eyes, held up a little squeeze bottle and told me it would keep me dainty all day long. Despite all rumors to the contrary, these huckster blondes were not interchangeable. I knew this one because her eyes were set strangely, one more tilted than the other.

She said something to the man. The curl of her mouth looked unpleasant. He lowered the book, said something, lifted it again. She shrugged and turned away and walked out of my field of vision. I lay in controlled schizophrenia, split between my interest in the lighted room, and my alertness for any sound behind me in the night. When she appeared again she was fastening the top half of the green knit two piece suit and she wore shoes. She had that contrived walk of the model, like Nora's walk but more so-the business of putting each foot down in direct line with the previous step, toeing outward slightly, to impart a graceful sway to the body from the waist down. She was not tall. Perhaps five-four. She made herself look tall.

She stopped at the right side of the chaise and perched one hip on it, facing the man. She spoke to him. I could hear the very faint cadence of her voice. She was intent, persuasive, half-smiling.

It was like a commercial with the volume turned down. As she talked, he put two cigarettes between his lips, lit them, handed one to her. She stopped talking and looked expectantly at him.

He reached and caught her wrist. She sprang up and wrenched her wrist away, her face ugly with sudden fury. She called him a ten letter word, loud enough for me to hear it through the doors.

She was no lady. She strode out of range in the opposite direction, and I heard a door slam.

She left with the look of somebody who was not coming back immediately. There was no profit in watching a hairy man read a book. I eased back and crouched in the moon shadows and stood up slowly. From what I had seen of the Boody house and what I could observe of this one, the dark doors and window would open onto another bedroom unit. They were sliding doors, in an aluminum track. I tried the outside handle. Locked. It would turn down about an inch, and then it stopped. I stood close to it; got a good grip on it, then began to exert an ever-increasing pressure. Just as my muscles began to creak and protest, some part of the inner mechanism snapped with a sharp metallic sound. I waited and listened. I tried the door. It slid open with a muted rumble. I crouched, tensed up, ready to go. Burglar alarms seemed like a logical accessory to a killer dog. It didn't have to be a clanging. It could be a muted buzz at a guard
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station, inaudible to me. So I counted off six hundred seconds before I slipped through the eighteen inch opening, brushing the draperies aside. I stood in the darkness in total concentration.

We are given certain atavistic faculties which can be trained through use. You can stand in a dark room and after a time be absolutely certain there is no other person there. When I was quite certain, I used the pencil light, pinching the beam smaller between thumb and finger. It was a big bedroom-sitting room, less luxurious than the one I had looked into. There were no coverings on the two three-quarter beds.

I went back and closed the door I had broken, and checked the three other doors. One opened into a roomy dressing room. One opened into a tiled bath, where an astonished cockroach sped into the darkness. The third opened onto a broad and dimly lighted hallway. There was a window at the blind end. The other end opened out into a big room as weakly lighted as the hallway. I could see the dark shapes of heavy furniture.

Four doors opened onto the hallway. Two on each side. Four guest bedroom units, I assumed.

The resident quarters would be in the other wing. I could hear no sound. I debated trying iny luck with a quick and silent run into the living room at the end of the corridor, taking a chance on finding a dark pocket behind some of that heavy Iurniture. But there was too much chance of being cut off. I locked the bedroom door on the inside, and went back out through the glass doors, listened for a time, then left the patio and moved along the side of the house and around to the back, feeling more confident.

That is the familiar trap of course, the one that catches the cat burglars. They begin to feel invulnerable, and they push it a little further and a little further, until one day in their carelessness they wake up the wrong person-and then kill or are killed.

I sped through an area of moonlight, and crouched beyond the swimming pool, a layout almost identical to the Boody construction, near the building where the servants would be housed.

Mexican radio was loud. Windows were lighted. The rooms were small and plain. I wanted a reasonable tiead count. The smell of cooking was strong. I saw a heavy woman walking to and fro in a small room, carrying a whining child, while a man sat alone at a table playing with a set of greasy cards. A screen door slapped. Somebody hawked and spat. I saw three men in a room, playing dominoes, placing them with large scowls and gestures, loud clacks of defiance. One of them was my wistful gate guard. A woman sat near them, stirring something in a large pottery bowl. A kitten mewed. The radio advertised Aye-low Shahm-boo. I looked through a gap in a sleazy curtain and saw, on a cot, under the bright glare of an unshaded bulb, in the direct blast of the music of the plastic radio, a muscular man and a very skinny woman making love, both of them shiny with sweat.

A quiet evening in the servants' quarters. I drifted away, and made my way back across to the big house, and came up to it at the rear, on the other side. I looked into a big bright white kitchen. A square-bodied, square-faced, dark-skinned woman in a black and white uniform sat on a high red stool at a counter, polishing silver. A man leaned against the counter near her. A guard type, in khaki, armed, eating a chicken leg.

I passed dark windows. I came to a lighted one. I looked in. It was a small bedroom. A thin drablooking, middle-aged woman sat there in a rocking chair without arms. She wore a very elaborate white dress, all lace and embroidery, strangely like a wedding dress. It did not look clean. Her hair was unkempt, strands of grey long and tangled. She had her arms folded across
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her chest. She was rocking violently, seeming to come close to tipping the chair over backwards each time. Her underlip sagged and her face was absolutely empty. There is only one human condition which can cause that total terrible emptiness. She rocked and rocked, looking at nothing.

As I moved along the side of the house I heard a woman's voice. I passed more dark windows and came to three lighted ones in a row. They were open. As I crept closer I heard that she was speaking Spanish. And as it went on and on, I realized from the cadence of her voice that she was reading aloud. The accent seemed expert, as far as I could tell, the voice young and clear, nicely modulated. But she stumbled over words from time to time. She seemed too close to the first window for me to take a chance, so I wormed on along to the last of the three lighted windows. I straightened up beyond it, and took a careful look. I saw a fat brown woman in a white uniform sitting on a couch sewing, her fingers swift and her face impassive. And off to the right, near the first window, I could see the blonde girl in the green knit suit, sitting on a straight chair beside a bed, her back to me, bending over the book she held in her lap. I could not see who was in the bed.

I waited there. She read on and on. Mosquitoes found my neck and I rubbed them off. I settled into the stupor of waiting. She could not read forever. Something had to change. And then I might learn something. At last she closed the book with an audible thump, and in a lazy loving tone she said, "That's really all I can manage tonight, darling. My eyes are beginning to give out. I hope you don't mind too much."

There was no answer. She put the book aside and stood up and bent over whoever was in the bed. All I could see of her was the rounded girlrump under the stretch of knitted green. The fat woman had stopped sewing and she was watching the girl, her eyes narrowed.

The girl made the murmurous sound of a woman giving her affection and then straightened.

"Carlos, darling," she said, "I'm going to ask you to try to write your name again. Do you understand, dear? One blink for yes. Good."

She went out of my range and came back with a pad and pencil. She apparently sat beside him on the bed. I could see her slim ankles. "Here, darling. That's it. Hold it as tightly as you can.

Now write your name, dear."

There was a silence. Suddenly the girl sprang up, and made a violent motion and there was the sound of an open palm against flesh. "You filth!" she shouted. "You dirty bastard!" The pad and pencil fell to the floor. The fat woman started up off the couch, hesitated, settled back and picked up her sewing.

The girl stood back from the bed, her body rigid, her fists on her hips. "I suppose that's your idea of a joke, writing a dirty word like that. God damn you, you understand me. I know you do.

Try to get this through your head, Carlos. The pesos in the household account are down to damned near nothing. If you expect me to stay here and care for you and protect you, you are going to have to write your name clearly and legibly on a power of attorney so I can go to the bank in Mexico City and get more money. You have to trust me. It's the only chance you have, brother. And you better realize it. When the money stops, these people of yours are going to melt away like the morning dew, and you'll die and rot right here. Oh brother, I know how your mind works. You think I'm going to grab it all and run. If I did, you wouldn't be any worse off, would you? And what the hell good is money going to do you from now on? Listen, because I probably owe you something, Carlos, I swear I'll go and get the money and come back here and
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