Atticus (23 page)

“The cast. We're still having a little party here.”

“Oh.” My purpose, I remembered, was to tie up loose ends. “Look: I forgot where I left my car.”

“Again?” She seemed happy and tipsy and prepared to find a lot to laugh about.

“I figure it must be near the
jardín.
You've still got a key for it, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“I have something to finish in the jungle. I'm going out there on the hog. Will you try to find my car and take it back to the house?”

She held the phone so that the female voices behind her went away. She may have walked to another room. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You sound so strange.”

“Really tired, is all. Really really tired.”

“You're waiting for your spirits to catch up.”

I'd forgotten I'd told her that story.

She whispered temptingly, “Shall I come out?”

I practically fell under the irony. I felt like the butt of a joke. Everything seemed to have changed and she'd become a possibility that it was now impossible for me to have. “Don't,” I said.

My tone forced her to hesitate before she said, “It's just that you sounded like you could use a friend.”

“Give me a few days. I have a lot of work to do and I don't want to be disturbed.”

Even that she found funny. “I hate to break it to you, but you
are
disturbed, Scott.”

And then there was nothing further to do but say, “I love you,” and hang up.

I was still peering at the
parroquia.
Eduardo's term for the parish church was from the Mayan, the house of he who invents himself. Self-invention was so much what I was about that heading over there seemed to me a stroke of genius. Walking across the
jardín
in the wee-hours silence of the Old Town, I felt graced with the first clear picture of a finer life, out of harm's way, hiding out in the old church's cellar, huddling in the noontime shade with my hand held out for coins.

The front doors were locked, but a rough plank door below the great bell tower was open and I found my way inside. I touched a font and half expected a hiss from the holy water as I crossed myself. A hundred or more votive candles provided only a faint yellow light, and it was half a minute before I realized a hunched old Mexican woman was in there with me, kissing her fingertips and softly
applying them to the lips of the carpenter, San José. Easing my way down the main aisle between the black pews, I faced architecture and saints and pictures that were familiar to some sane and ancient part of me. I felt aware, wonder-filled, wise, it was far better than the best trip with peyote. I quietly sidestepped through the gate of the high altar's railing, genuflected to the tabernacle, and headed into the priest's sacristy. I knew my way, knew that there was a semicircular hallway of brick that formed the perimeter of the apse, and halfway along the hallway there would be a gray door to a stairway. I walked to that gray door and gingerly went down the stairway to a hardly lighted cellar, finding the railing with my hand, ducking under the huge floor joists, getting used to the green swamp odors of earth and human sewage.

The block walls of the first mission church were still preserved along the foundation, and the furniture of a few centuries was under the great floor of the building, a fine fur of dust on the old pews and prie-dieux, gray veils of cobwebs faintly waggling in the air, and in the haven and haze and junkyard of that basement were poor Mexicans who'd found a hard kind of sanctuary there, twenty or more of them watching me with the unsurprised gaze of the frequently desperate. A gray old man with a face peppered by skin cancer was praying the rosary in a harsh whisper as he stared at me. Without judgment. And then he pointed toward a flattened cardboard box with the name Hotpoint on it. And it was as if my place had been prepared for me. I knelt down on that mat and felt I'd found my
future. And my tremendous exhaustion so hammered me that I fell to my hands and knees and then fainted.

Woke up Thursday morning with the bleak people there staring at me. Talking in my sleep, I presumed, but their stares and curiosity flipped the paranoia switch and I was positive they were in on the conspiracy—friends or family of Carmen or Renaldo just waiting for the opportunity to grapple. No proportion to my fear. Enemies everywhere. I hunkered in a corner of that great dark basement, my head hurting with hangover, my eyes flicking toward every sound, until I'd freaked the Mexicans there so much that they hung out in a far part of the room and held their children back when the wolfman walked to a green bucket for water and, just to be grandly theatrical, tilted my head far into it and drank from it like a horse.

With nothing to do, I got a kid to go buy me a pen and spiral notebook, and I fussed up a page or two of forlorn prose about my plight. And then I just fretted and stewed until nightfall, holding my hands out in laths of sunlight that fell through a high window exhaust fan, watching the twitches of stress in my right thumb and first finger, lifting up my khaki pants cuffs to see my calf muscles bunch and crawl as if there were furtive rodents under the skin. Was it a head case or delirium tremens? It felt like mescaline or peyote, the kind of far-out high you get where even your thoughts seem to have a sandpaper texture. I was certain that Reinhardt had been discovered, but I still wasn't sure if the police fell for my fabrication. If they didn't, if they knew
it was Reinhardt, then I would be wanted for murder and there was nothing I could do to prove that I didn't, in fact, kill him. Wasn't it my gun, in my jungle house? Didn't I have the motive and opportunity? Hadn't I tried to hide what I'd done? Were these, Your Honor, the actions of an innocent man? And if I attempted a full explanation, I'd have to mention Carmen Martinez, the hit-and-run, and I'd be just as parboiled as far as the police were concerned. And if they thought it was me out there in that green wingback chair, I was pretty sure Renaldo didn't. Even if he thought it was me on the dining room floor, he'd have heard about the blond American who shotgunned himself in the jungle and he would not have heard about my maid finding a murder in the house on Avenida del Mar, and he'd get to the truth in no time. Each heartless, intricate move I'd made Wednesday night now seemed foolish. Renaldo could murder me now and I wouldn't even be missed. You are dead, man, I thought, and both senses of that sentence applied.

A kid wandered in at six with a box of soft tacos filled with the spiced meat of iguana. My fellow inmates there failed to tell him to be afraid of me and I still looked enough like an American with money that he finally sought me out. I bought two tacos and hungrily finished one while I got out a roll of pesos and gave him thirty dollars' worth, telling the kid to find me huaraches, plastic sunglasses, a blue bandana to hide my blond hair under, and an old cowboy hat. Stuart's beggar was sitting on a pew, eating refried beans from a can, and I got him to exchange his fetid denim shirt for my fresh gray Stanford T-shirt. The kid was back inside of an
hour with foul but useful things he may have found in his father's closet. I got into my off-putting costume, and skulked down the side streets like Jack the Ripper until I found a
tienda
selling the Thursday
diario
—a hard look from the grocer at the sunglassed guy on the skids. And there it was on page four,
suicidio
in the headline and a few rough facts about Scott Cody and the
triste pérdida
of the
famoso artista de los Estados Unidos.
Cipiano's mortuary, no rosary planned, and a noontime funeral Mass at the Church of the Resurrection two days hence. Which meant Atticus would probably already be on his way down.

I found darkness wherever I could as I strolled up Avenida del Mar to number 69 and forced my way inside like Renaldo had. Even in the moonlight I could tell that María had thoroughly cleaned the house and waxed the dining room floor where the rug had been. In the night of the kitchen I got out whiskey and filled a juice glass with it, and then I went upstairs to my room and hauled out from beneath the desk the plastic wastebasket that María too often forgot to empty, sifting out of it cigar ashes and papers and the first-of-the-week
diario
with the obituary for Carmen Martínez. Went into the bathroom, tightly shut the door, and flicked on the fluorescent lights over the sink, translating the paragraph carefully this time, and finding that Carmen was survived by a father and mother and four sisters, and by a fiancé named Renaldo Cruz. I felt certain he was the one. I sliced out the obituary with a razor blade, folded the clipping in my pants pocket, stuffed the
diario
in the wastepaper basket, took a phone directory back into
the bathroom, and, as I got out of my black jeans and festering shirt, looked up the name Cruz. There were fourteen of them, and I feared my Spanish wasn't good enough to handle whatever I had to say. I took a quick shower and toweled off and then wiped down the stall to hide that I'd been there. Changed into my old Mexican clothes again, flicked off the bathroom lights, then hunted my passport and visa in my handkerchief drawer. Looked at the quartz clock by the bed—five minutes to nine—then looked through the telephone directory with a penlight and dialed the American Express travel office in town just before it closed.

“Bueno,”
a young woman answered.

I asked the office clerk in Spanish if she was still holding a Lufthansa ticket for Scott Cody.

When did I order it?

Wednesday night.

“Momentito,”
she said, and then she confirmed that she did have it, but I was too late for the flight out tonight.

Was it good for any night?

Of course; it was full fare. But I'd need to make a reservation.

Would she have it delivered to 69 Avenida del Mar?

“Mañana,”
she said, and only after I hung up did I think that
mañana
was a flexible term and could mean either morning or tomorrow or sometime in the future. I tried to telephone the office again, but it was then after nine.

I foolishly put the visa and passport down somewhere in the darkness when I hunted Reinhardt's suitcase in the
walk-in closet of the guest bedroom. I couldn't remember if I'd got everything out of Reinhardt's luggage but felt around with my hand and knew that I had, and I shut the hard-sided suitcase tight with a red shock cord. And forgot about the passport and visa. My own private attention deficit disorder. Then I heard a truck halt in the street right in front of the place. I held my breath and heard singing on the truck radio and the talking of four or five men. A flashlight beam glanced through the high window of the stairway, walked along the house, and then shot into the kitchen and flooded the dining room. But that was all. Half a minute passed and I heard shoes and the chunk of a truck door and the singing gradually faded as the truck rolled down the hill. I hustled down the stairs then, and out through the pool door, and trotted along the hard wet sand of high tide to the
centro.

Printers Inc would have closed by nine, but on the off chance that Renata would still be there, I walked down the alley behind the bookstore and looked in through the window of the storage room and its green-curtained doorway. A flash of a feminine hand holding a paperback, then nothing, then a plaid skirt and the fluorescent lights fluttering off from the front of the store to the rear. I tried the door handle, dodged inside, and held myself against a high bookcase, in darkness. Renata walked into the storage room with four hardbacks that she forced into a box. I tackled her against me and whacked her mouth shut with my hand. “Don't scream,” I hissed. “It's Scott.”

I felt her shock at first, that hard stiffening of fear, and
then she changed as she got who it was, struggling fiercely, wrestling and whimpering, falling away and kicking at me, far more wrath than worry to it, and I just held her more tightly, hoarsely whispering into her hair, “Shhh. Shhh. Stop it. Are you alone?”

She relented a little and nodded.

I let Renata go and she turned and angrily flung herself at me again, her fists hitting hard at my chest and face and head for a full minute, shrieking calumnies and dirty words, shrieking how could I do that to her? put her through that? talk to her now? it was horrible. Et cetera. I accepted it all like a proper penance, and when she grew tired I held her away from me.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I hoped to keep you out of it.”

“Well you
didn't.
Creep! I had to lie to the police. And I had no
clue
about you or what the truth was. What the hell is going on? Who was he?”

“Reinhardt Schmidt. Did they buy it?”

“The police? Yes, I think so. At least, they're not investigating.” She felt her mouth. “You hurt my mouth with your hand.”

I held her face toward the office light and looked. “It's not bleeding.”

Renata twisted away and again struck my chest, but weakly now, hardly more than a pat, an emotional metaphor. “You have no idea how I've
hated
you today!” She fumed for a moment, then threw back her tangled hair and flung closed the green hanging draperies, shielding us from the front windows. “What happened?”

“I found Reinhardt dead in the dining room Wednesday night.”

“Why in your house? Who was he?”

“I have no time to go into that now.”

“Make time.”

Sighing at the fatigue of it, I said, “Reinhardt's just a guy I met who was trying to get money from me. Why he was killed and by whom is a mystery. Okay? Wednesday night, though, I thought it looked like I'd done it, so I tried to hide what had happened. I was drunk, and scared. I had a hard time figuring out what to do.”

She hotly said, “Don't you
dare
talk to me about being scared! You know what he
looked
like when I found him? You know how that
hurts?
My first thought was that it was you. And all afternoon I
wished
it was. Stuart forced me to call your father. What fun that was.” She harshly wiped both eyes with her palms.
“God,
I resent these tears!”