Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 (16 page)

“Just Tom.”

“Tom,” she said, and walked faster.

“Why’d these ladies hate you?”

“My hair. It’s not black. They like black hair.”

“These ladies, they eat in the gold room?”

“Oh no. They aren’t allowed. Only soldiers are, and the Devil and me.”

“Where’s the gold room, then?”

“You go up the round stairs and down the tunnel.”

“Tunnel? Like a cave? That bar down the street from Hell?”

She stopped, exasperated, shaking her head. “In the Presidente’s house.”

“Presidente? Who’s he? Cárdenas?”

“I don’t know.” She covered her face, blew out a couple shivering breaths.

He stepped so close his cheek touched her hair and he whispered, “It’s okay, doesn’t matter. Just tell me a little about the gold room.”

“It’s full of gold things, that’s all.”

“Lots of gold things?”

“Oh, so much.”

He stepped back and with his heel lined a square in the sand, drew his hand across the square, waist high. “It’d fit in a box this big?”

Wendy laughed, the first time Hickey had seen. “Silly.” She dragged one bare foot through the sand, marking a square about ten feet wide, then reached above her head, high as her fingers would go.

“Whoa. Okay, what kind of gold? Rocks? Bars?”

“Not rocks. Swords. Plates. Dollars. Coins. Many things I don’t know what they are. Candle holders. The bed is gold.”

“Even the bed,” Hickey muttered.

They stared at each other until both at once turned north and started off along the tideline again. Ever since she’d laughed, Hickey’s mood had kept brightening. Already he’d forgotten about killing the devil.

People they walked close to gazed in awe at the girl with her pretty dress fluttering as she stepped so graceful like on her toes, pressing her face against the sunlight, her back to the offshore wind. They walked with Wendy on the sea side, where the tide ran in over her feet. Out past the foamy waves, the water had turned cobalt blue.

Chapter Twenty-one

When Hickey walked into the office, a few minutes after 6
p.m.
, Leo was on the phone to the Army. That morning, after dialing information and getting chased from one number to the next three times, he’d connected with an aide to General Finnegan and told him there was something brewing down in TJ, a gang of Krauts and high-up Mex guys plotting to shoot the governor or some such. He offered names and places to start. The aide claimed he’d talk to the general and call back. Before an hour, he said when Leo pressed him. Since then, Leo had called the aide twice and left messages.

He told Hickey what was said, got out a deck of cards, and dealt a solitaire hand. After a minute he asked, “Rummy?”

“The girl says there’s a whole cache of gold, at some house that belongs to a guy they call the Presidente.”

“Presidente,” Leo muttered. “Who do you figure?”

“I got a few ideas. You hear me say there was gold?”

“Yeah, and the girl told you. Trouble is, she’s not exactly Solomon. Maybe she don’t know gold from frijoles.”

Hickey wadded the paper from his sandwich, aimed it at the trash can across the room, missed by a yard. “Maybe she does. Listen, I saw those gold chalices and placed them somewhere. Then Wendy said there was a gold room, and I remembered—the old casino at Agua Caliente. I played dances there, Leo, Madeline sang. And there was a banquet room where nobody got in except stars. Chaplin, the Pickfords, Buster Keaton. Called it Salon de Oro. You never saw that much loot. Enough to make King Midas soil his trousers.”

“Sure, I heard about it.”

“And when they shut the joint down what happened to the gold?”

“Beats me.”

“Beats everybody, pal. It disappeared. And maybe you remember who gave the order to shut down that casino.”

“Tell me.”

“Lázaro Cárdenas. The Presidente.”

“Hold it,” Leo said, and drew a bead on Hickey with his finger. “Everybody says that guy’s a square dealer. Tom, they got more presidentes than civilians down there. Municipal presidentes. Union presidentes. Old del Monte’s presidente of a slew of companies. She could be talking about the presidente of the sewer department.”

“I’ll give you that,” Hickey said.

“Anyway, it might not matter so much. To this conspiracy business, I mean. Could be, say, the Presidente’s not the top dog. Down there, real movers don’t want the heat, so they make their junior partners politicos, put them where they can make enough loot to keep up with the del Montes.”

“Yeah,” Hickey said. “Remember when we first got into this mess, you said one of the del Monte boys was an adviser to the governor?”

“Sure. I follow you. The governor might be on del Monte’s payroll.”

“Anyway, the ‘Presidente’s’ the one with the gold. I make him to be a del Monte, probably Santiago. Old del Monte’s the hoarder of the gold, Metzger says. It looks like this—Santiago’s got a real home a couple miles away, but he never goes there. These days he spends all his time at the Casa de Oro. Where I’m saying the gambling and gold showed up after Cárdenas shut down Agua Caliente.”

Leo flipped his hat onto the desk, upside down, shuffled his deck of cards and began sailing them into the hat. “So, where’s the girl fit in?”

Hickey mused a while. “Leo, you ever seen a beauty like that?”

“Watch it, Tom.”

“I mean, besides she’s a swell looker, she’s blond. Blond as they come. A lot of Danish in her. Now, maybe Zarp set her up like a symbol. The backside of the Holy Virgin—you know how the Spanish crawl for that dame. I don’t know just what—maybe they were keeping her for some conjuration they learned from Indians, like an Aztec sacrifice. Wouldn’t be the first of those.”

“Now what are you talking about?”

So Hickey told what he’d gathered about how the girl got stuck down there, how this rat George had crossed the border, found Zarp to sell him heroin, but he tried to cheat the Devil and wound up stomped by El Mofeto and Franz Metzger. Then Zarp got a bunch of them stiff on peyote. And they made George the star of a snuff ritual, with Wendy on dagger and Zarp conducting. Afterward, he convinced her she needed to get punished by two years of slavery down there.

Leo glared incredulously, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and Hickey went on, “Maybe Zarp played her up like a Celtic mother-fertility goddess. You know, witchery jive the Inquisition found displeasing. I read where lots of it grew out of the same old tradition. German. Where Faust came from.”

“Huh?”

“Dr. Faustus, the one that traded his soul for knowledge, power…”

“Stop right there. I’m not buying, Tom. But if…when we snatched the girl, could be we foiled ’em by accident. Say, without the girl, without the sacrifice, they gotta change their plans.”

“Yeah, I’ll sit here a minute and try to believe that. I hope to Christ we foiled something, with four dead men.”

“Couldn’t be helped, Tom.”

“Yeah, it could. If I’d been thinking better.”

Leo blind-shot a few more cards into the hat. “It could’ve been worse.”

Hickey snarled. “I don’t imagine the kid would think so, or those dead—Mexicans.”

“Lay off the hindsight, Tom.”

“Yeah. Okay. Tell me something. Suppose we didn’t wreck ’em. And Finnegan doesn’t buy your story. And suppose there’s this Presidente sitting on a ton of gold and it keeps looking like these guys might be holding hands with the Krauts. Then what do we do?”

“You mean, ought we risk our necks trying to stop ’em?”

“Yeah.” Hickey nodded. “And ought we swipe the gold?” He filled his pipe but didn’t light it. First he noticed Leo staring hard at him. The old man took out a piece of gum and started chomping while he sneered and Hickey picked up the cards and sailed a few at the hat. Every one missed.

When the phone rang, Hickey’s pulse quickened. Still, even after two days, at every call he hoped for Tito. But this one was Vi.

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Pick us up a few sandwiches and beers.…Okay. Get her sweets or something. Keep her busy. Don’t let her out of your sight. Sure. Bye.”

“How’s Wendy?”

“She’s got weepy, Tom. Keeps asking for you. Magda’s trying to keep her busy. Gave her a shampoo and wave. Now she’s prissing up her toenails.”

Hickey got weepy too, for about a second. Then he looked at his watch. After seven. Still no word from Tito, and no general had phoned. He said they should call Finnegan’s aide back, and Leo rolled around to the phone. He dialed, waited, grinding his teeth. “Yeah, Lieutenant, this is…come back here, you louse.” He whacked the phone on the desk, waited long enough to smoke a whole cigarette and sail at least ten cards into the hat before the lieutenant returned. “Weiss.…Spell it however you want, chum. What’d the general say?…About what I told you eight hours ago. The Mexicans. A coup. Nazis. Look, pinhead, I don’t think you told him.…Been apprised, huh? So what’s he gonna do about it?…Yeah, well if it’s not my affair, how do I know they got mischief planned for day after tomorrow? By Sunday you might be eating schnitzels. Tell the man if he wants details to call Belmont four-seven-two-five, leave a message where I can reach him tonight.”

Finally he dropped the receiver into the cradle. “Talking to the Army can wreck your whole day.”

Hickey smiled as best he could with his mind on the girl, four dead men, and a room full of gold. It stayed longest on the gold. A big suitcase full of dishes, medallions, candlesticks, was all he wanted. Plenty to cover what he’d spent and the dozen times more he might spend tomorrow, to void the sale of his bayside cottage if he wanted it back, enough to purchase a swank resort in Cuba. Buy Elizabeth diamonds, gowns, a fancy car if she wanted one in a couple of years. With a fortune left over.

“Tom, you hear me? Maybe the Army knows all about it, I said. Maybe they got it under control.”

“Sure.”

Leo rolled his chair back, hoisted his feet onto the desk. “Yeah. Maybe not’d be my guess.”

They sat quietly fidgeting, smoking, gazing around, mostly at the phone. Until Hickey leaned on the desk, looked Leo in the eye. “I’m going back down there. After the gold.”

Leo held his gaze for a minute, rolled in his chair to the window, stared at his reflection, turned, and rolled back partway. “Naw, Tom. I figure you’re only about half that crazy.”

“You got me wrong,” Hickey muttered. “I’m gonna need plenty help.”

“You bet. Who’s that gonna be?”

Hickey’s mind shot off to questions of its own. “We get Smythe to lend us credit. Then we gotta train a bunch of guys. You think two days are enough?”

With a groan, Leo sat up tall and knocked his fists together. “Hell, no. I’m still praying Finnegan calls. And even if he don’t, Tom, I’m not fighting anymore. It’d be the end of me.”

“Sure,” Hickey said. “I figure you’d help with the arrangements, though.”

“Oh you do?” Old Leo looked into a desk drawer, then shut it. “Got any poison on you?”

“Nope. And I’ll bet fifty bucks Finnegan won’t call.”

“Find your suckers elsewhere,” Leo grumbled.

“Let’s get back to the girl,” Hickey said.

Chapter Twenty-two

It was a bitch knocking himself out of bed from lying next to Wendy Rose. But he managed, about ten minutes or so after Leo rapped on the door. The girl didn’t wake up—he thought that was a good sign. Maybe she wouldn’t have nightmares.

Hickey washed, and dressed in his uniform. Lightly, he stroked the girl’s hair, threw things into a duffel bag and went out to meet Leo.

They walked down Mission Boulevard, past the tourist cafés, motor courts, alleys where bums slept, stands where you rented bikes and inner tubes. At Leo’s place, they made coffee, heated rolls. Hickey checked over the list—what Smythe would deliver for half cash, half credit. Two crates of Springfield rifles. Two thousand rounds of ammunition. A half-case of grenades. A couple of Browning or Thompson machine guns and a dozen clips. Three two-way radios.

“Maybe he’ll get us a tank.”

“Say you’re joking,” Leo grumbled. “If you get snuffed and run out on the tab, he’ll chase after me to pay it.”

“You know, we could make Smythe a partner, cut him in. Then he’d finance the whole deal.”

“Cut him in—Tom, the gold’s all in your head. All you gotta look forward to is getting outa there alive, and bankruptcy.” Leo tapped a Lucky on the table, sipped coffee. “I oughta get fined just for not lassoing you into a straitjacket. Say, I might do that any minute. Thinking you can steal a mountain of treasure out of Mexico. Acting like Ponce de Leon, that guy that went hunting for the seven cities of gold that never were.”

“Wrong guy,” Hickey said. “De Leon was after the fountain of youth.”

“Same damn thing,” Leo mumbled.

Hickey looked out at the brightening sky. He told Leo to meet him at Sally’s Café in San Ysidro at noon.

In the garage, he took a leather sack full of pistols from the Packard, carried the sack and his duffel bag out to the Jeep.

He drove carefully in his vehicle, which the Army and the law might have their antennas out for—down the boulevard, across the Ocean Beach bridge, then keeping to the side roads a mile east of the Navy and Marine bases, and finally to the coast highway. Before the Navy docks, he cut east behind the Santa Fe depot and Lane Field where the Pacific Coast League played baseball, then took A Street all the way up to 10th so he wouldn’t pass near the YMCA, the Greyhound depot, or Horton Plaza where the city bus lines connected. You’d always find MPs loitering around those places.

In National City by the shipyards he met the coast highway again. And, since they’d be watching for him at the border gate, just before San Ysidro he turned east and took a dirt road up onto Otay Mesa. From there he used the smuggler’s road. Dope, guns, refugees, refrigerators, hot cars, even stuff like onions when the import tariffs got raised. Both armies patrolled the line up here, but Jeeps were scarce enough so that the patrols mostly used horses, and they rode in squads. You could spot one a mile away.

Somewhere, Hickey crossed the line. Then he made a right turn down a creek bed that ran off the mesa and finally met the river a couple miles east of the shantytown. He pulled up on the outskirts, a wrecking yard and housing project of old, stripped cars, their shells made into family homes. Five small Indians could sleep under the body of a Chrysler. He parked there so the Jeep would be less conspicuous, in case there were cops around. As he jumped down, a gang of ragged, spook-eyed kids charged to surround him and stare. Hickey grabbed his luggage and walked toward the shacks. Up ahead, a green Ford sat near the riverbank, not far from the scrapwood hovel where Crispín and his Olmecs lived. Hickey ducked behind a shelter, crept around, and got close enough to see inside the Ford. Where Tito slumped at the wheel. Alive. Snoring.

Hickey dashed over, reached in, and shook the cabbie until he snapped awake and gave him a dopey smile. Tito looked pale and weak as he dragged out of the car.

“Where you been two days, boss? You taking La Rosa to Hollywood?”

Hickey wasn’t apt to hug guys. But he thought, When you’re in Mexico and somebody rises from the dead—he gave the cabbie a rib-cracking squeeze. “We figured they got you, else you would’ve phoned.”

“Hey, I been hiding. Maybe there’s a phone in TJ I can use without nobody sees me, only thing I don’t know where it is. Mostly I’m waiting here with my amigo El Mofeto. You got to come back for the gringo, no?”

Hickey backed off a step and muttered, “Who’d they kill?”

“The
mellizos
. How you say?”

“Twins?”

“Yeah. They are shot in the back while they running.” He pointed east. “Right there by the river. Somebody puts a cross there already. But Rafael and Enrique, they got away. Yesterday, they are gone already, driving like crazy. Maybe they got to Hidalgo by now.”

Hickey stared at the hills and saw the Peña twins, brave, handsome guys, about thirty, no older. Probably had kids. He leaned on the hood of the Ford, watched some Indians walking toward the river, and wondered what kind of louse he was, come down here to risk more lives. You could say life was cheap these days but he knew better. Yet he picked up his bags and led the cabbie toward the river. They sat on the bank and stared across, past Coco’s, over the border gate. Spots of light glared off a tank and a troop carrier that crawled up the gray-brown hills. The sun was low but already burning like coals on Hickey’s brow.

“I guess you oughta leave town, huh?”

“
Puta madre
, you bet,” Tito groaned. “Why do I go fighting with these del Montes? I make a hundred dollars, but my taxi’s junk and I got to go some damn place like Matamoros, pay maybe three hundred for a taxi license there and two hundred more for a cab, some jalopy. Man, I think I was a smart guy. Now I don’t be too sure. I could go with Rafael yesterday, but I think no, better wait and talk to the boss. Maybe you will be happy about La Rosa, and want to pay me what else I need.”

“So I oughta give you about four hundred bucks?”

“Five or six, I think.”

“How about seven? You give me a couple days to raise it. Or, maybe instead you’d want to go partners. Stealing gold.”

Tito lifted his sunglasses and squinted his weary red eye. “Tell me.”

“The girl says there’s a big cache of gold, somewhere. She says it’s at the house of a guy she calls the ‘Presidente.’ I think it’s del Monte, old Santiago, and the gold’s at his Casa de Oro. So tomorrow night, I’m going to snatch it.”

The cabbie put his chin on his fists, and asked to hear more. So Hickey told him: a lot of what the girl said; his own idea that plenty of the gold might’ve been swiped, say by del Monte, in the revolution when he rode with Magón, and six years ago when Cárdenas shut down the Agua Caliente Casino; how Zarp could be a Nazi agent; about Metzger and the rumors of a coup.

Tito knocked himself on the brow, folded his hands on top of his head, and stared at the dirt. “I want this gold,
de veras
. But you going to need a little army. Where you getting one?” When Hickey stood up, motioned with a hand around the shantytown, the cabbie groaned, “These
gallinas?
Man, they don’t know nothing. What they going to fight with? Machetes. They got a gun, maybe they shooting their balls off.”

“Maybe. So, in a couple days I’ll bring you seven hundred at the gate.”

“Sure boss,” the cabbie hissed. “Some trick. You going to be dead two days before then.”

“Think it’ll be a massacre?”

“You know that one. It won’t be like Hell was. They got to have guards and maybe some of the Army is there with General Cárdenas.”

“Yeah? Well, how about I give you fifty today, if you help me find some cars and send a guy to scout Las Lomas. Get all the dope we can on the place.”

“Fifty,” Tito snarled. From his green Hawaiian shirt he pulled out a Hershey bar, ripped off the paper, and chomped fiercely. “How much gold you say?”

“Millions, anyway.”

Tito pushed on his head with his hands and spun like he’d corkscrew into the ground. Then he leaned close to Hickey. “I tell you something, about I used to be
muy guapo
, and I got this limo. Women are loving me, boss. Used to be. And I tell you, of everything there is, it’s maybe only women that making me happy. Drinking, dancing,
fútbol
, I don’t care about them no more. Only women. So I’m happy, until this brother of a bitch I know, he calls me names and I call him back. I win, you know. I call him the best name. And he makes me look like this. Now, don’t nobody love me till I’m paying her. I tell you, if I had one woman, maybe three or four niños and a good taxi, I don’t go with you for ten million pesos. Even dollars. That’s because it’s too crazy and I think we going to die. But goddamn, I got nobody, so maybe anyway I going with you and steal this
pinche
gold.”

Hickey stood, lifted his bags, and turned toward the hut made of reeds from a swampy place downriver, the jacal where Crispín and his Olmecs kept the prisoners. The cabbie walked along, kicking his sharp-toed boot at the ground.

“Mofeto still alive?”

“Sure. You think I better kill him?” Tito frowned deeper and said, “I don’t know if then I feel more good or no.”

Four Olmecs stood waiting outside the jacal. Then women holding babies and a gang of dirt-caked children appeared. They watched Hickey close, waiting for money to fly out of his pockets.

Hickey saluted. The Olmecs saluted. One of them laughed and they all turned shyly away. Then Crispín stepped out of the jacal, chewing on a brown root, and Hickey asked to see the gringo. A few Olmec words got passed around. The men at the door stood aside and Hickey passed through the doorway. He had to stoop so low he strained his back.

The dark inside was striped with bars of sunlight angling through the walls of reeds. The place smelled like chiles and rot. Along each of two side walls lay a body on the dirt. On the left, El Mofeto, turned to the wall. Boyle on the right, his eyes vaguely on Hickey, his face muddy and gagged. He jerked with little tremors. Hickey squatted in the dirt, put a hand on the fink’s head—it felt like his hand would melt. By tomorrow, the fink would be dust. Making five dead men. But, Hickey thought, a dead guy buried in Mexico couldn’t accuse him of kidnapping. On the other hand, if Alvarez or Mr. Chee snitched, it’d be murder. Mr. Chee wouldn’t talk, but Alvarez might. Still, if Boyle got loose, he’d be the one to talk, and kidnapping, easy as murder, could win Hickey the noose.

So finally he said, “Bob, when you get home, tell ’em you been in the TJ jail, and I’ll dig you up a grand for the favor and the inconvenience. Or else you could tell the truth for once and start running from me for the rest of your short life.”

Boyle hardly blinked. Hickey untied his ankles and thighs and watched his legs squirm and shake until it seemed the fink could use them a little.

Then Hickey stepped outside. He asked Tito to find a cabbie who’d run the gringo to some doctor in Tecate, thirty miles east—he said promise the doctor fifty or so to keep Boyle away from the border for a couple days.