Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 (10 page)

With steps as slow as a wedding march she crossed in front of the window, her head bowed. You couldn’t see her features from where Hickey stood, only the ivory skin. She wore a shiny scarlet-and-rose-colored dressing gown.

Hickey’s gun dropped to his side and the girl passed out of sight. A few seconds later she stepped behind the table, moved in front of the cross, slowly reached up to the crystal pitcher. She took it in both hands and stood a moment facing the cross. Then she turned toward the body on the table.

She poured a little of the red stuff on his chest. The body quivered. She replaced the pitcher on the high table, and turned once more to the body. Lightly, with her fingertips, she traced the red stuff into lines on the German stiff’s belly. He quivered again, shuddering harder this time as if he’d start having a fit. Wendy stepped back out of sight. A few seconds later she passed the window, head down, walking slowly back the way she’d come.

Soon a big man in purple robes, his rear to the window, came and threw a white robe over the blond stiff, who slowly quit shaking, got up, and left the scene, led by the big man. Zarp.

Hickey watched a few more minutes, but nothing passed, and the chanting stopped. The arm at his side began trembling, as if the gun had grown ten times heavier. He shoved it into the holster. He squatted and looked at the sky. Stars pulsed yellow and red. Soon he got a passion to run through the front door of Hell, charge up the stairs, burst in, and commence shooting.

He laughed, quietly, fiercely. Then he crept back along the roof, hoisted himself down, and walked through the stinking crud. He looked out for the doorman, slipped from the passway back to the sidewalk of Calle Siete. He stepped up the hill slapping dirt, cobwebs, and the smell of wet soot off his clothes.

Hickey told the cabbie to drive lights-out back to the Playas. What he needed now was a tangle with Luz, to get that black mass off his mind. Then a little mescal, and sleep. Maybe he’d get the dream of Elizabeth. Something innocent, to help him lose this picture of Wendy Rose smearing blood on that quivering German stiff.

***

When they pulled up in front of Las Brisas, the bar of a small, rundown beachfront hotel, it was almost 12:30, and Leo’s Packard Phaeton waited out front, looking like a beached whale. There was no red-and-pink limo.

The bar was a huge cabaña tacked to the side of the old stucco hotel. Some of the patrons were Mexican, but most were refugees who looked bitter, confounded. A couple of them stared longingly out to sea. Hickey stepped into the cabaña, drifted across the floor, whiffing the scents of coconut, pineapple, whiskey, and rum. Luz called to him from a table overlooking the beach. He went and sat down between her and Leo, and warmly kissed her hand.

“You shoot that cabrón?” she whispered.

He shook his head and turned to Leo. “I found the girl.”

Leo rolled his hand, asking for more. Luz clutched her man’s arm, and he said, “Upstairs in Hell. Playing witch.”

Hickey ordered a round, then told them what he saw. The mass and the same slick German who drove the red Chevy, naked on the table, like a corpse bound for hell with its prick aloft. His mouth kept tasting more foul. When the drinks came he swished his mescal around and took a mouthful of the gin and grenadine mess Luz was slurping. She petted and kissed Hickey’s arm. Leo wadded bits of paper and tossed them three feet, into a mug. He told Hickey about the Casa de Oro, a mansion big and rich enough for Napoleon, at the crest of Las Lomas. A private club with the valet and doormen armed and costumed like soldiers. They’d turned Leo away at the door. But earlier he’d phoned Ruiz, his contact with the Federales, and gotten some background on Zarp.

“Some crackpot. Part German. Other parts might be Hungarian, Gypsy, who knows? His family’s been around awhile. Coffee planters down by Guatemala. Sells dope, big time, and Ruiz says the nut thinks he’s a witch—a
brujo
. I got a name on that other Kraut—the naked joker. Franz Metzger. Could be a Nazi agent.”

“Metzger,” Hickey muttered.

The moon, the wind beginning to rise, the waiting for Tito, and Luz’s worried eyes were dragging Hickey down, sapping his courage. He checked his watch. “Where’s Tito?”

They all looked toward the front for a minute.

“You phone the kid?”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Couple hours ago. He’s okay. Didn’t hear from the cabbie, though.”

Hickey stared out to sea. The foamy waves glowed darkly. Leo ordered a round. Luz put her head on Hickey’s shoulder and rested, while he sipped mescal and Leo drank coffee with Scotch and kept one eye out front, the other on Luz’s knockers.

They spent a few minutes talking over plans. Then at 3:00, Leo got up to leave. He said he’d return in twelve hours.

Hickey and Luz moved to a bench near the seacliff. She lay with her head on his lap. Reaching a hand beneath her blouse, rubbing gently, Hickey gazed out to sea. His eyes fogged. He heard a strange wail from the ocean, and let himself moan along with it. He felt sure Tito was dead.

Chapter Fourteen

The breeze had shifted. You could hardly smell the sea. A whirlwind crossed the east mesa and skipped downhill past the house Juan Metzger had rented, at the western foot of Las Lomas.

Metzger lay trying to sleep, but his mind reeled with worries and when those began to fade, Consuelo started groaning and tossing. Probably a nightmare about his cousin Franz, since Franz had stopped at their house that evening, drunk, boasting he’d shot a gringo and terrifying the children. When the little one cried, Franz whirled his arm and would’ve knocked their baby senseless except Consuelo ran between them and ordered the brute out of their house. With a mad laugh, Franz shoved her into a wall. He threw himself toward her, made a kiss in the air, turned and howled a laugh at Juan. Then he stomped outside. His car squealed and roared away.

Consuelo was used to Franz’s meanness, the way he’d burst in giving orders and gloating over women who loved him and whom he scorned. He’d stare at her breasts, his eyes aglow, licking his lips, and mutter obscenities. Last visit, when his cousin stepped out of the room, Franz grabbed her face in both hands and kissed her viciously. Only tonight, after the visit, had Juan learned of that. His wife hadn’t spoken before, out of fear the cousins would fight and Juan would be killed. She still believed her husband had courage.

Consuelo invited Juan to hold her. She massaged his neck and, while he mourned for Tom Hickey, if that was the gringo Franz boasted he’d killed, she rocked him to sleep in her arms. After midnight they were startled awake to a pounding out front. Consuelo followed Juan. From the closet he grabbed his shotgun. He went to the front door, stood a minute praying the noise would become footsteps walking away. At last he flung open the door.

There stood Franz wearing only trousers, his eyes and mouth gleaming hideously. Down from the neck to his belly ran thick streaks of blood. He laughed coldly, for a long time, then strolled to his Chevy and roared off. Toward the Playas.

***

Hickey and Luz humped and moaned like souls in limbo. Afterward she put him to sleep with a long massage, and he dreamed of Elizabeth. He woke up and lay reading until Luz woke and they made love again. He read a little more. Dreamed again.

The next time he woke, at 10:30, he dressed in just trousers and his undershirt, washed in cool water from a clay pot, and walked to the phone office a few blocks down on the cliff road, between the grocery and a panaderia. It was already hotter than yesterday.

He phoned Clifford and the kid shouted, “You find her?”

“Yeah. We’re gonna bust her out tonight.”

Clifford fell silent. Praying or something, Hickey figured. He got a warm feeling, like things suddenly turned right in the world. It lasted a second. “You hear from the cabbie?”

“No. Where is she?”

Hickey let out his breath and sighed. “Well, if Tito calls, tell him to meet us at Las Brisas at three and bring along a couple other guys. Tough guys. Got it.”

“Yeah.”

“Leo’s coming for you at one or so. You hungry?”

“Naw.”

“Sure you are. Call down to the Pier Five Diner. They’ll bring you anything and bill it to Leo.”

“Where’s Wendy, Pop?”

“Later.”

“Are they …”

“Hush. She’s doing great and I got business.”

Next he phoned Groceria El Portal and asked the woman to get a message up the street to Juan Metzger—“
Las Brisas a las doce y media de la tarde
.”

He paid for the calls and walked back fast, scuffing his feet through the sand and trying to convince himself the cabbie was safe, maybe on the road to Matamoros. Before he reached Luz’s, his head started aching and his legs got heavy as though he hadn’t slept at all. He crept inside, took a snort of mescal, and rested beside Luz. Soon he picked up the dream about where he’d left it.

In Hickey’s dream there lay a harbor in this place where he slept, between the Playas and the border. The people were like the ones he’d seen out walking. Farmers from Poland. German watchmakers. Chinese merchants. Gamblers. Forgers. Dealers in passports. Anarchists. Japanese spies. German spies. Good people, bandits, schemers. All of them milled around the small harbor of Hickey’s dream, like Sunday on Hollywood Boulevard.

He led his daughter through crowds that spoke weird languages, bought and sold everything, made bets on some battle around Tripoli. They walked out on a pier and looked down in the harbor at water thick as oil, mossy green and swarming with fish—fat groupers with doglike teeth. Long thin mackerel. Eel fish. Fish with golden hair like mermaids’. Then came the sharks with mouths like swinging doors and black steel teeth. They swam gracefully, and fed on everything, so the eels and mackerel got swallowed whole, the groupers ripped in half, until you couldn’t see through the bloody water.

Elizabeth wrapped him in her arms and cried, “I want to go home, Daddy.”

He woke up shivering. Luz stood beside the mattress pulling on her panties. Hickey’s watch said 12:20. But he lay still, knocked in the head by that dream. He stayed there, trying to blame it on the mescal, and vowed to give the poison up, if it was going to treat him that way. Finally he rose, went to the hotplate and put some water on to heat. Luz gave him a sponge. He washed his armpits, between his legs, his feet. She loaned him her straight razor and he shaved. He combed his hair and mustache.

When he reached for his trousers, she came over and kissed him. “You have bad dreams, Tomasito. We go one more time, you forget them, okay?”

He shook his head, stepped into his shoes and laced them, strapped on his shoulder holster with the .45 and pulled his coat over it. Only telling her he had to meet somebody, he kissed her and walked out.

A block before Las Brisas, he cut down, on a footpath, to the trail that led along the cliffside from where he could see into the patio but could hardly be seen, against the sun glaring off the ocean.

Metzger had showed. At a corner table, he sat staring at a double shot of mescal next to a beer bottle. Hickey circled the place twice, looking out for Franz, El Mofeto, or cops. Then he got his own beer and joined Metzger. The man’s face looked bloated, pinker than before, with bloodshot, deeply frowning eyes.

“Cheer up,” Hickey said. “Talk to me, pal. I want to know more about your cousin Franz, the one that raised hell in Chiapas. He’s in TJ, right?” The German nodded. “You think he’s crazy?”

Metzger wouldn’t raise his eyes to talk, and he muttered lowly. “Yes. In Chiapas, I thought Franz was a little mad. But here—at times he acts like a rabid dog.”

“Why, do you think?”

Metzger shrugged. His jaw wrinkled and jutted out, as if he might weep bitterly. “I can’t tell you. Why has mankind gone mad, Mr. Hickey? Why have we all come to hate each other?”

“Some guy wants something, bad. He doesn’t get it. He blames somebody. From there it snowballs.”

The German gave a little hiss.

“Who’d Franz work for?” Hickey asked, waited. “Okay, who’s he pals with?”

Between each question he gave Metzger a minute or so. He asked what drugs Franz took, where he hung out. The German said nothing, only wagged his head and kept drinking, first the beer then the mescal. When he finally lifted his eyes from the table it was to call for another of each.

“Hey, let’s not just sit here moping,” Hickey said. “Why’d you tell me to go to hell?”

“I was drunk.”

“No kidding.”

Metzger glanced at Hickey and turned his gaze north across the border, over the brown sun-baked hills and glassy, still water. “Over there, in your country,” he asked, “do they hate Germans? Will they soon dispossess the Germans and send them to camps like the Japanese?”

“Could be.”

Metzger stared out to sea, silent and paralyzed, afraid to breathe.

Hickey saw the German had drifted. The eyes had moistened, jaw gone slack, shoulders hunched to his ears. His hands lay fisted on the table. He only broke the trance long enough to swallow liquor. Hickey tried asking the man what he knew about Zarp, Lázaro Cárdenas, del Monte, what connections those fellows might have with each other, or with Franz. But the German was gone.

***

Hickey found Luz painting her nails. When she finished she lay on the pallet, beside where Hickey rested, wishing he’d gotten anything out of Metzger that would clue him better to what they’d find in Hell tonight, to who and what the enemy was. Luz peeled his clothes off slowly, kissing him all over, and Hickey began to shiver. He shivered all the time they held each other, until he rummaged through a pile of old slips and sweaters and red skirts on the floor, gathering his uniform, and dressed. He didn’t wear the tie, coat, or black MP armband. He strapped on his side holster with the gun and checked through his duffel bag to take stock. Luz sat watching.

At 2:50 he was on the mattress beside her, with her head on his shoulder. He reached for his wallet and said, “After tonight I better stay out of TJ.”

She stiffened and bared her teeth. He put fifty dollars into her hand. She took it but her face didn’t change. Her teeth still gnashed as if she’d chomp his arm off. So he stood, mumbled adiós, picked up the duffel bag, and walked. As he stepped through the doorway she screamed, “
Cabrón que chingas las chicas
. You wanting the little girl for you,
pinche
sonabeech.”

Maybe so, he thought. Who the hell knows what I want anymore? Except to get time back, and try again. Sure—he wanted the same as everybody, another chance.

Luz was in the doorway hollering, “I gonna pray you don’ get her, goddamn Heeckey, I gonna pray you don’t get nothing.”