Cinnamon Skin (23 page)

"We have a photograph of him back at the hotel," I said.

"Good. Because how he looked is not very clear in my memory. He had… a nice ordinary look. Just one more, pleasant person who smiled a great deal and said agreeable things. Are you sure?"

"Almost positive."

She pursed her lips in thought and then asked, "Why would such a man want to marry that woman, your niece, and then kill her?"

Meyer told her Cody Pittler's story. She understood at once. "Aha!" she said. "He is killing Coralita over and over and over. He is punishing them and himself for being evil. But that does not include killing my Willy."

"I would guess that-"

"We will find out," she said. "We will find out soon."

On the way back we stopped at the ranch on the west side of the road. She walked from the driveway to the ranch house and was gone for about ten minutes. She came back and said, "He was not there, but I left a note. He will get word to me. I told him it is urgent."

As she held the door open and we walked in, once again I was aware of the physical impact of her. She had all the presence of one of the great actresses, along with such vitality you could almost feel the electricity. It was like walking under the power lines that march across a countryside. In the field under the lines you can feel the hair lift on the nape of your neck and the backs of your hands.

She wore white shorts and a red blouse, no jewelry at all. She was barefoot. I had noticed before that her hands and feet did not fit with the slenderness of the rest of her. They had a broad, sturdy look of strength and competence.

She clasped her hand around my wrist. Her hand was quite cold and damp. She tugged me toward the couch. I sat beside her, and Meyer sat in the nearest chair.

"I know about him!" she said. "Many many things. I showed Ramуn the photograph you let me take, and it is the same, but with a mustache now, and the hair much darker."

"Who is Ramуn?"

"Oh, a nice shy little man, very broad and strong, very polite. He is Maya. One of the jefe's employees drove him in in a truck to tell me about the man he works for, Senor Hoffmann. He has worked for Senor Hoffmann for, he thinks, eight years. He went to work for him shortly after the big house was built, one year or maybe two afterwards. Remember I pointed out the road to Playa del Carmen, where we can go to Cozumel by passenger ferry or small airplane? To find Mr. Hoffmann, you go down almost to the water and turn left, to head back toward this direction. It is a public road and it goes for maybe a mile. At the end of it there is a big iron gate and a warning not to enter. Once you are through the gate, the driveway winds through some gardens and then comes to the house. It is a big house, with a beach in front of it and a lagoon beyond it, with a boathouse and garages and servants' rooms. Mr. Hoffmann is very rich, Ramуn says. But compared to Ramуn almost anybody would seem rich. I asked what kind of work Mr. Hoffmann does. Ramуn said that he often goes on business trips and stays for a long time. Many months. He is a residente. He has the proper documents. He speaks Spanish as good as any Mexican, and better than most Maya. There are six servants, including Ramуn. He has no woman, this Hoffmann. He does not have friends who visit him. He does not give parties. The only time he leaves his house and grounds is when he goes out in his boat to fish or into the jungle to hunt tigers. Or goes away on a trip. He has a big shortwave radio receiver and a big aerial. He listens to it a lot. Now he has a television set. Of course there is no station he can hear, but when he came back from the United States last year he brought American movies and a machine to play them over his television. Sometimes he lets the servants watch one. Oh, and he has an exercise room, with machines in it."

"Did you say tigers?" Meyer asked.

"Tigers? Oh, yes. They are big tawny jungle cats. Wildcats or panthers. Do you know that men used to gather chicle in the jungle to make chewing gum? They tapped trees. The men who gathered the chicle were called chicleros. They shot the panthers. Then it became possible to make the juice in a laboratory. No more chicleros. The chicle trails are overgrown. The panthers are returning. They used to say the panther is the second most dangerous creature you can meet in the jungle. The most dangerous, of course, was the chiclero. They were wild rough men. So he fishes and hunts and stays by himself."

"What about William Doyle?" I asked.

She put her cool hand back on my wrist and tightened her grasp. She looked down and spoke so softly Meyer leaned forward to hear her. "On that day William dropped me off, Ramуn said a man came in a small gray automobile. I showed him a picture of Willy. Ramуn said possibly it was the same man, but he could not tell, they all look so much alike to him. They went out fishing in the boat. Usually a servant named Perez went along when Hoffmann fished, but he did not go that day. When the boat came back, Hoffmann was alone. He said he had let his visitor ashore at the house of a friend, and he would come back for his car later on. And in the morning, the gray car was gone."

"I'm sorry."

She lifted her head to look at Meyer. "You were right. William must have known somehow, maybe by accident, that Hoffman and Evan Lawrence were one and the same. It was not healthy to know that. William thought he was a friend."

"Hoffman seems to have all the conveniences," I said.

"Oh, yes. Ramуn says they have a good well, which is very unusual in this part of Yucatan. And there are two big generators which came in long ago by ship, and tanks which hold many gallons of diesel fuel. Thousands, Ramуn said. But it is probably hundreds. Also there is a tank and a pump for the gasoline for the car and the boat. With our little car, all he had to do was take it out onto the highway and find a place to run it off the road into the jungle. The village people would soon take everything from it. What was left will rust away very quickly. He could walk back by night, ducking out of sight when traffic came. It is no problem for him. I loved the little car. It was like a fat friendly little dog. It tried hard but it could not run very fast."

"Does Ramуn understand he is employed by a bad man?"

"He does not want to think that. But it doesn't matter what he thinks. He will do whatever his people tell him is necessary."

"The others too?"

"If they are all Maya. And if we ask them, through the jefe."

"If he goes hunting he has guns there," I said.

"I forgot. Many many guns. And there are burglar alarms, Ramуn said. No one can approach the house at night, or come in the lagoon in a boat. A loud siren sounds. The children of the servants have set it off by accident, and they have been very frightened."

"And he is there now," Meyer said.

"Yes, of course. Ramуn thinks it will be a long time before he goes away on a trip. Perhaps not until next year, not until the spring. Then he will probably leave from Cozumel, Ramуn said. That is where he departs. Once a week Ramуn comes to Cancun to look for mail in the box. Some years there are no letters for Don Roberto. Some years one or two."

She released my wrist. We sat there with our separate thoughts. We were together, but alone in our minds.

Meyer stood up and paced and came back to stand facing us, looking down. "One aspect of this keeps bothering me," he said. "And it goes right back to the beginning, back to Coralita. We have no proof of anything that happened that night. All we have is a commonly accepted hypothesis which has never been checked out with anyone who was there at the time."

"What are you talking about?" I asked him.

"There is a very wise British astronomer, Raymond Lyttleton, who has said that one must regard any hypothesis as though it were a bead which you can slide along a piece of wire. One end of the wire is marked 'zero,' for falsehood, and the other end is marked 'one,' for truth. One must never let the bead get to the absolute end of the wire, to either end, or it will fall off into irrationality. Move the bead along the wire this way and that, in accordance with inductive and deductive reasoning."

"Okay, where is your bead, Meyer?"

"One position of the bead is where Cody Pittler got out of bed and got his father's target pistol and shot Coralita in the back of the skull and waited to ambush his father. Then the struggle and the flight. That presupposes a murderous mind from the beginning, well concealed, awaiting any outlet. Another position adds an additional person to the mix, a young male friend of Cody's caught servicing the insatiable Coralita. Another position of the bead has the father coming home and getting into bed with Coralita, and having something she says confirm his suspicions about her and his son. So he gets up and dresses and gets the gun and kills her just as Cody comes home. I am saying that the people of Eagle Pass invented the circumstances of the murder which seemed to them to fit the situation. We know neither the truth nor the falsehood."

She jumped up and faced Meyer. "Why are you talking about all this? What difference does it make to anyone?" Her voice was loud and angry. "Don't you know what we are going to talk about now? We are going to talk about how to kill him."

"Barbara," I said, in what could have been construed as a patronizing tone.

She spun and bent to stare down at me. "Isn't that what we do? We kill him. We end his life."

I tried to look into her eyes, but there was no penetration in my stare. It bounced off shiny black polished gemstones.

"Young woman," Meyer said. "I am not going to be a party to killing that man unless and until I can communicate with him."

"What about? His movie collection? Which airline he likes?"

"About several hypotheses we have made about him. Before one shoots a fox in a henhouse, it is interesting to find out how many henhouses have been on his nightly route. I have more than an average curiosity about what makes the human animal react as he does. I do not think there have been many people who have adjusted so cleverly and carefully to a life of murder. I want to hear his views about himself."

She turned and dropped into the couch beside me. "And I do not care what he thinks about himself. Ask a cesspool why it makes bubbles! What I care about is how to kill him in such a way there will be no involvement of the police. None! There are two ways to do that. If he should disappear forever without any trace, it will be thought that perhaps he went on another trip and something happened to him there. If there is a body, then it should clearly be an accident."

"Going to his house is no good in either case."

"So," said Meyer, "it has to be when he goes to fish or to hunt. Or one waits until he travels."

"I will not wait for travel. I do not like the idea of the sea. It is all too open," she said.

"So how do we tell when and where he will go hunting?" I asked.

"He will hear of a great cat, a big one. The Maya guides sometimes make pad marks in the mud to play jokes on each other. They do it so well even the most expert are fooled."

"Where will this cat be?" I asked her.

She frowned, chin on fist, then brightened. "I think it will be near some cenotes. There is a trail off to the right before one gets to Playa Xelha. You cannot see it from the road. It is always marked with bits of red yarn or ribbon tied high to the trees on the other side of the road. It goes in for more than a mile and then it comes to the old Maya trail from Coba to Chichen. One turns right there on the Maya trail and goes perhaps three miles, then one leaves the Maya trail and goes west perhaps a half mile. There are big cenotes there, perhaps three or four. It is a good place for cat. It is wild there. Very thick. Very bad walking."

"Yes, but what are cenotes?" Meyer asked.

'I'm sorry, Mr. Meyer," she said. "This peninsula is all limestone, with a very thin coating of soil on top. In the heavy rains there are underground rivers, not very far down, which run to the sea. Long ago in many places the earth and limestone above the rivers collapsed in big potholes, fell into the rivers, and were washed away. What this leaves is a cenote. It is a deep round hole with sheer sides, or undercut sides. It would be usually a hundred or a hundred and fifty meters across and ten to thirty meters deep. In the dry season, there is no water at the bottom, or just a little. Where the river goes through at either side of this deep hole, there is a big cave, usually with a stagnant pool of water in the bottom. Drippings have made stalactites coming down from the roof. There are almost always bats, and bat dirt afloat on the pools. In the heavy rains the rivers swell and water rushes through. Some cenotes have a crumbled side so one can climb down easily and go into the cave if one wishes. Cats go down to drink from those where there are little streams. At Chichen there is a big deep cenote where the guides will tell you they threw virgins. What they threw in there were small children. They would throw one in at nightfall, and if he was still floating and living in the morning, hanging onto a steep side, they would bring him out, and from then on he could predict the weather in the next growing season."

I saw Meyer swallow. He cleared his throat and said, "Hoffmann would have guides."

"Yes. And they would know he was going in and not coming back out. They would not even need to be told why. They could go in and prepare the paw marks of a very big cat, then lead him to them and then track the imaginary cat over to the area of the cenotes. One of them is a sacred place. There is an old altar on the side near the cave, too high for water to wash it away."

"How soon would we do this?" I asked.

"I am not going back to my job until this is over. I have told them I have personal business. There is another girl they can use. She is not as quick as I am, but she will do. Often they hunt the jaguar, or panther, or puma, or wildcat-it has many names-by the light of the full moon. But I think that would be too dangerous. Too many things could go wrong. Sometimes the guides find a place where a big cat holes up in the daytime. Daytime would be best."

"Have you got it all figured out, Barbara?" Meyer asked.

"All but the end of it. We must go in with the guides the day before. It is very very bad walking. Believe me. We will find the right place and then they will bring him to us. Last night I dreamed he was on the ground and I slipped a knife into his belly. It went in like butter. But I could not pull it out. He was on the ground, smiling up at me, looking sleepy. I braced both feet and used both hands, but the knife would not come out. Then the handle of the knife was a snake and I jumped back and he started laughing and I woke up sweaty."