Cinnamon Skin (20 page)

"I think I would like that very much. It doesn't have to be a case of turning the clock back. Somebody to hang onto in the long long dark night, somebody warm, somebody breathing warmth against my flesh. Somebody giving a damn. Even just a little damn."

I bent clumsily through the window and kissed her mouth. When I straightened I thumped my head on the top of the opening. She laughed. I told her doctors should have more sympathy, and she laughed again and backed out and drove away.

Meyer arrived at a quarter past one, as I was getting ready for bed. "Who stays open this late?" I asked him. "Barbers or clothing stores?"

"Was I supposed to report?"

"Don't get stuffy. I just thought you might be here while I was out to dinner, to take any call that might come from Sigiera."

"I came back and dropped off the clothes I bought. And then I went back to that Rawson again. The old lady had me stay and eat with her. And we've been talking. Her name is Margaret Howey, and she is really a hell of a woman."

"Going to buy it?"

"What? The boat? Yes, of course. It's a good buy, and it's roomier than the Keynes was. The insurance will cover most of it."

"What are you going to call it?"

"Times have changed. Perceptions change. Fashions change. Also, a boat has to fit its name. I thought first it might be the Adam Smith. But Margaret and I decided that the Tharstein Veblen would be nice."

"The who?"

"Veblen died in 1929 at the age of seventy-two. He was an economist, and some of his theories became clouded by his sociological theories. His book The Theory of the Leisure Class, with its ideas about conspicuous consumption, had a vogue for a time. I have never been a Veblenian myself. But Margaret thinks it makes a neat name for a boat."

"Whatever Margaret thinks."

"It will be utterly meaningless to everyone who graduated from high school in the past twenty years. That's the nice part of it."

"What will you call it for short?"

"For short? The Thorstein Ueblen is quite short enough."

When he is in that mood, there is nothing reasonable that you can say to him. He told me Margaret would move north in two weeks, and he could have possession on August sixteenth, and on that day he would move it to the berth where The John Maynard Keynes had always squatted, with its meager freeboard making it look underprivileged.

There was a sheen of oil on the boat basin. Compressors chugged, cooling stale air belowdecks. Brown girls lay stunned on open decks, sweat rolling off them. A ship's cat lay in the shade of a tarp aboard a nearby motor sailer, sleeping on its back with all four feet in the air.

Sigiera phoned at one fifteen.

"McGee? This here is your smart Texican law officer speaking."

"Glad to hear from you."

"Thought you might be. I didn't go bulling into this thing. What I did, I tried to think of the angles. I tried to add up everything I'd ever heard about the Chappel family, and I didn't move in on Mrs. Chappel until I had a real good angle to play. This is my angle. A bunch of good old boys are going to try to put Sid Chappel in the state legislature next chance. He's willing. God knows he's willing. He's taken to shaking hands with people on the street he doesn't hardly know.

"So I got out there this morning about ten, and Miz Clara was in the pool, and the maid took me out and left me. I can tell you, it's hard to believe she's got to be forty-seven if a day. Pretty little thing, built like a schoolgirl. I just come back from there."

"And?"

"Don't try to rush me along. In some cases it's smart to kind of hem and haw and beat around until they finally ask. And she did. She said she would sure like to know what I had on my mind. That's when you kind of blurt it out, like you just hated to say it. So I said I'd come to do her a favor. I said some political enemies of her husband had me checking out the old Cody Pittler file, because they had the idea of using it against him when he would up and run for office. She asked me what that could possibly mean to her. She said I should talk to Sid. And I told her I was talking to her because she was the one who kept in touch with Cody, as a favor to Helen June. I tell you, McGee, she came up out of that pool water like a porpoise. One minute she's in the water, and the next minute she's standing in front of me, sopping wet. She asked me where I'd heard a damn fool thing like that, and I said Helen June tended to talk when she had more than three, and she said some words about Helen June that I didn't think a lady like that would know. She knew lots of them, and how to hang them together in chunks."

"And so?"

"And so I asked her if she'd heard from Helen June lately, and she said she'd gotten a call yesterday in the afternoon, and she had written down what Helen June told her, and she had planned on driving the fifty-five miles up to Del Rio, like she usually did with messages for him, and mailing it from there. So I told her that what she could do would be give it to me quiet like, and if it ever came up, I would swear that she had been intercepting messages and turning them over to me, and it would turn back on whoever was after Sid's hide. And if she didn't want to-right here I slapped my pocket-I'd just have to hand her this here warrant that I didn't have-and search the house. So she called me some of the names she called Helen June, and she was so darn cute, I was willing to forget the seventeen years she's got to have on me and tote her right over onto one of those big sun cots they got. And she knew what I had in mind and liked stirring me up that way, and pretty soon we both started to laughing. She went and got the letter, and I got it right here. The note inside was typed. It didn't say dear anything, and there was no name at the end. I'll read it to you."

"That would be nice."

" `Two men came here with your recent picture, claiming you have been killing women for their money and using other names. One was a professor named Meyer and he is a very nice man. He said you blew up his niece named Norma in a boat with two other people. He said you killed somebody named Doris and somebody named Isabel and maybe more. They made me believe you really did. It makes me feel sick. If you are doing things like this, terrible things, then the police should stop you. The other man is a lot taller and he has sort of a mean look sometimes. And he can fight. Be careful. I tried not to tell them anything. They got my address from Boomer: I think you would remember him.'

"So I asked her if those were the exact words and she said they weren't. She said she had taken notes and then put it down in a better way than Helen June had told it. She said Helen June had cussed a lot. I suppose you want the address to where she was sending it."

"It would be nice."

"It was going to Senor Roberto Hoffmann, Apartado Postal Number seven one oh, Canciin, Cluintana Roo, Mexico. Did you get that?"

"I wrote it down," I said, and read it back.

"Now what will you do?" he asked.

"We'll go down there and show the picture."

"Well, did I do good?"

"You were practically perfect."

"I hope you two know you are dealing with a flake, a weirdo."

"We know that. We plan to be very careful."

"Let me tell you something about old Mexico. If he's been down there a long time, with money to spend, then he is dug in, and he'll have some good Mexican connections. You try to put local law on him and you will be the ones on the inside, rattling the bars."

"What's to keep her from writing the same thing over again and mailing it?"

"She and me, we reached an understanding. I told her if she did that, I would go to Sid and tell him how she has been screwing around writing notes to a guy that is still wanted for killing his own father. And I would tell him she had been doing it behind his back. I took a chance there. Maybe she told Sid. But she hadn't, and it scared hell out of her. He is known as a hitter. Besides, she feels like Helen June betrayed her. They swore never to tell anybody. She looked like she'd like to kill Helen June. There's another thing too."

"Such as?"

"It was sort of play pretend for her. It took her back to when she was twenty and Cody was fifteen and she wished he was older, back to when she and Helen June were real close. She'd bought Helen June's idea of how it happened, Bryce Pittler trying to kill himself and finally shooting himself when they struggled for the gun. And all the trouble was on account of Bryce marrying that trashy little second wife, who got what she deserved. All she ever had to send before was addresses, and a note saying she and Helen June hoped he was okay. He had phoned her a couple of times, making sure she never told Helen June his address. But then all this comes up, the idea he could have been killing people. Little old Clara, she doesn't want any part of that kind of going on. That could be some kind of trouble that would hurt her husband and her and spoil the life they've built up. And Helen June had been kind of hysterical over the phone. That took the fun out of it too. Okay, I did good, but it was ready to come apart anyway. You two did even better up there. He kept his two lives fastened together with a very thin thread, McGee, and it took hard work and luck to even find out it existed."

"Thank you."

"There's an official file here needs closing. So you could let me know."

"Could you get an assignment to go down there with us?"

"You've got to be out of your mind! The budget we got, we're down three men here already, and it could be more. We stay on our side of the river and they stay on theirs. Sometimes they'll bring somebody to the middle of the bridge for us, and we do the same for them. But it doesn't happen often. When you go down there, walk easy. Get yourself a local and pay him good."

Meyer got back at two o'clock, and I told him the conversation I'd had with Paul Sigiera. He sat, utterly quiet, sorting it out after I'd finished.

"One thing we know," he said. "He couldn't be Roberto Hoffmann in Cancun and be Evan Lawrence in Cancun. There must be endless thousands of American tourists flowing through that place, but the Americans in permanent or semipermanent, residence must be well known to each other and to the resident Mexicans. So we start with Evan Lawrence's friend Willy, who sells time shares in condominium apartments, and this Willy might know a local who will help us."

"I checked with Fran at Triple A Travel, and she said the best and quickest way to get there is go to Miami and take Mexicana. I think she said it leaves at four thirty. We can get a tourist card at the airline desk. Mexicana and Aero Mexico always say all flights are full, but they leave about two thirds full, except at Christmastime, including the standby people. Hot there, she said. Very very hot. We can try to set up a rental car in the Miami airport, but she said that hardly ever works too well. No problem with hotels at this time of year, she said. When do you want to go?"

"Right now," Meyer said.

As it turned out, we weren't able to leave until the next day, the fourth, a day of hot wind and rain that lasted all the way to the parking garage.

The severe young man at the airline desk took the cash money from Meyer for round-trip tickets. My protests did not work. Return trip unreserved. We were on standby for the flight to Cancun. We went downstairs to a bus which took us to a new terminal building, where we sat in plastic chairs in a broad vista of plastic and filled out the tourist permit forms. We had tried to look tourist. Mesh shirts, seer-sucker pants, sandals, the big ranch hats we'd picked up in Texas, battered carry-on bags. Meyer had a lot of funds strapped around his waist under his shirt, in a canvas money belt. Money, he has always said, solves the unanticipated problems. It won't buy happiness, but it will rent a fair share of it.

It was a one-class flight on a 727, with no room for my knees. The flight time was two hours and a bit, and the hard-working Mexican flight attendants served a meal. There was an hour time change, so it was only a little past five fifteen when we began our long curving descent into the Cancun airport. The pilot took us over the Cancun peninsula. It was a spectacular view, lowering clouds overhead, storms out at sea, and a long slant of golden sunshine striking the column of tall hotels along the beach.

Meyer, thorough as ever, had arranged to read up on the place, and he explained it to me en route. "It is that rarity" he said, "a totally artificial community, without a history, without traditions. Less than ten years ago there were about thirty-five people living in the mainland village of Cancun. Several narrow islands stretched out into the Gulf. Mexico needed hard dollars, so they took aerial photographs of the seacoast and decided that this would make an attractive resort. Now there are over fifty thousand permanent residents. They made low interest loans to people who wanted to build hotels and resorts. They linked the islands with a causeway and bridges, built an airport, built a road down the coast to Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo, and the dollars do indeed flow in. There have been problems, of course: help for the hotels, food production, and transportation. Now they are getting small cruise ships and convoys of recreational vehicles and yachts and flocks of tour buses. It has become a popular resort for middle-class Mexicans and Americans. Lately there have been a lot of condominium developments scattered near the hotels."

I glanced at him. He had the window seat. He was staring straight ahead, expressionless. He sensed me looking at him and turned toward me.

"What are we doing, Travis? Just what in the name of hell are we trying to do?"

"We're trying to find the man who killed Norma. And we might even succeed."

"Then what?"

"There are no pamphlets about what to do. No instructions. He's one kind of hunter, I'm another. We can do a little diving around the reefs, maybe a little fishing, call it a day, and head for the barn. Maybe it's enough to know where he is."

There was an unexpectedly steely look in his small blue eyes. "Surely you jest, my friend. We owe something to his next ten years of victims, be they two, four, or twenty. We will find him. We will find a way to…" He hesitated. "All I can think of is a phrase I hear on television. A way to terminate him with prejudice."

The plane squealed its tires on the runway, taxied back to the small modern terminal building, and we climbed down the rolling stairs into twilight, sweat, far-off thunder, and the smell of something frying.

We all stood in line at tall narrow desks where immigration officers checked our passports, then stamped our signed permits and slid them back to us. There was a lot of bright fluorescence in the airport building, and large clocks which did not work. The passengers stood waiting by the stationary conveyor belt which would start up and bring their luggage out of the holes in the wall. Tour guides were herding their customers into small groups, shouting at them about which bus to take. "We all going to Hotel Presidente. You say that, eh? All now. Presidente!"

"Presidente!" they cried in ragged unison. "Good! That where you going. Boos numero saventy-one!"

There was a guard by the glass doors. Nobody seemed to be going out into the main part of the terminal. I walked smiling toward him, Meyer behind me. I nodded and pushed the door open and he hesitated and backed out of the way. So much for bringing things into Mexico.

We came out into the rental car area. Some of the stations were closed. Hertz, Avis, Dollar, and Budget were open. We nailed down a three-year-old Plymouth at Budget, pronounced Bood-zhet. It had fifty-two thousand kilometers on it and had recently been painted a curious pink. The air conditioning made conversation impossible. When we had to confer, we turned it off.