by Ron Goulart
Gladys Waugh dropped her cigar butt to the bare floor and crushed it with a gigantic foot. “Oh, this is a humanitarian good work sort of thing, is it? That’s different. Fifty dollars.”
After watching the warped window make rainbow patterns on the fat woman’s great white face, Easy said, “Okay, here’s another fifty.”
“May Astaroth look kindly on you,” laughed Gladys Waugh, engulfing the five $10 bills in her great hand. “Give my best to Joanna when you see her, Mr. Easy.”
The Mustang was still yawning open out in the weeds. The black Ram was not there.
Sitting in his VW Easy wrote, “Expenses: Bribe to Gladys Waugh—$150,” on a file card. Then he started the car and headed south for Mexico.
XV
EASY WAS SITTING ON the California side of the border. The air-conditioning system blew a chill wind through the small plastic restaurant, fluttering the paper napkin beneath the silverware and even causing the red plastic placemat to now and then make a clacking flap. From two lopsided loudspeakers perched on the beams of the pseudoarbor above the booths came distant-sounding bullfight music.
The frail Mexican waiter, in a faintly blue white suit, said, “We’re all out of quesadillas, señor. How about arroz con higaditos de polio? That’s rice with …”
Easy shook his head. “I’ll take the chile rellenos.”
“I can go look and see if we have any left,” said the sad frail man. “If you take the chicken livers, though, I can give you a special price.”
“Nope,” said Easy.
“I’ll go see what the kitchen says.”
While the frail white-suited man walked sadly away and through the kitchen doorway, which was shielded by a curtain of bright plastic beads, Easy got up and crossed to the wall phone. Green plastic grape leaves twined down from the pseudoarbor and fluttered against the side of the black instrument. Easy dropped in a dime, then made a credit-card call to Los Angeles.
“Hello,” answered Jill.
“Hi,” said Easy. From here he could see a small portion of hot late afternoon street through the high narrow window of the restaurant. “I’m about to leave the country and lead a simple idyllic life. So I thought I ought to let you know.”
“Oh, so?” said Jill. “Where are you?”
“Calexico.”
“Is Joanna there?”
“She should be down in Mexico,” answered Easy. “About five hundred miles from where I am now.”
“Where exactly? Jim’ll want to know.”
The thin waiter appeared at Easy’s side, shaking his head sadly, saying softly, “No more rellenos, señor.”
“Bring me a beer and I’ll think of something else.” To Jill he said, “I don’t want Benning to know anything specific yet. After I find his wife I can tell him where she was. I think too many people are looking for her.”
The girl said, “About that car last night, John.”
“The one that followed Benning over to your house. What about it?”
“It was a dark Camaro, didn’t you say?”
“Yeah, have you seen it again?”
“I think maybe so,” said Jill. “Early this afternoon when I came back from shopping down in Beverly Hills. I’m pretty certain it went by after I pulled into the drive. It went on by and stopped down the block quite awhile before it left.”
“Has it been back since?”
“I don’t think so, but then I haven’t kept an eye to the peephole.”
“Okay, look,” Easy told her, “call Nan at my office and tell her to get one of the guys we use sometimes. I want him to watch you until I get back.”
“I’m not that fragile,” said Jill. “I don’t need a guard just because I maybe saw a car that drove by here before. I didn’t mean to unsettle you.”
“Do it,” said Easy.
After a few seconds Jill, said, “All right. I’ll phone Nan. I really don’t think I’m involved in this too much. Do you?”
Easy said, “Anything else happening?”
“Jim’s called a few times. I get the impression he thinks my high opinion of you has a carnal basis. You sure you don’t want me to let him know you’re close to finding Joanna?”
“I’m sure. Don’t.”
“I saw Hagopian in Martindale’s. He was buying a copy of a book on how to improve your tennis. He said to tell you he’s got another fender back. Is his Jaguar missing again?”
“All but two fenders.”
“We don’t have anymore Carta Blanca,” said the sad waiter. “Would you settle for Budweiser, señor?”
“Sure,” answered Easy.
“Where are you, a saloon?” asked Jill.
“A restaurant. I’m having, possibly, an early dinner.”
“Well, I’ll miss you tonight,” said Jill. “I’ve started thinking of you as a permanent fixture.”
“Interior decorators keep telling me the same thing,” said Easy. “Okay, now hang up and call Nan.”
“I love you,” said Jill. “I don’t suppose you’re in a position where you can say that.”
“Sure, I love you,” said Easy, grinning into the phone. “I’ll see you in a day or so. Good-bye.”
“Bye.”
“They found a couple of rellenos, señor. The last two. Do you still wish them?”
Easy hung up the phone. He agreed to the rellenos. A half-hour later he was in Mexico.
XVI
THERE WAS A CLEAR dry quietness on the early morning street. The moderate-size town of Choza ended just beyond the small house on Calle Descenso which Gabe Hickey was renting. A few hundred yards away, across a flat black two-lane roadway, stretched fields of dry cornstalks. Hickey’s house was a small three or four-room adobe set back from the narrow street. The earthen brick house was painted a thin yellow and had a slanting tile roof, dusty and brittle-looking. Small square tiles of a pale sea color had long ago been set into roughly circular patterns on the front face of the building. Most of these ocean-hued tiles were fallen away and the meaning of the complex design was lost. At the edge of the small house’s dusty lot a fat dog, about the same shade as the pale yellow adobe, was squatting in defecation.
Easy moved on by the yellow dog, walking beneath tall shrubby walnut trees. Scattered across Hickey’s dusty yard were a dozen cocoa-colored doves. They ticked across the soft dirt, pecking at it. Waist-high prickly weeds grew in sparse clumps. A few of the doves fluttered a foot or two into the air and resettled when Easy passed by. He glanced down at them.
Easy noticed a series of odd tracks crosshatching the soft dirt of the yard. They looked something like the trail left by a bicycle, except they seemed to run in parallel sets. Two narrow wheel ruts a foot and a half apart. They were all over the path and in parts of the yard, some nearly wiped away by time, others fresh and clear. He followed a fresh set up to the whitewashed door and knocked.
“Yo!” called a voice inside the yellow adobe. “There in a minute.”
Easy unbuttoned his coat and absently flexed his right arm.
The door was set flush with the ground. There were no steps up. It swung inward now to show a smiling handsome young man. “Good morning,” he said. He was wiping at his tan face with a white terry towel which had Hospital Property stenciled across it in faded blue. “Just getting myself ready for another day. Would you be a lost tourist?”
“I’m John Easy. I’m down from Los Angeles. You’re Gabe Hickey?”
“That’s me,” grinned the lean handsome young man, resting the towel around his neck like a casual muffler. “The famous unknown painter.”
After a second Easy said, “I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for Gerry Santos.”
The handsome young man’s grin dropped away. He took hold of each end of the clean white towel. “Hey, listen. I’m glad you’re here, sir. I’ve been quite worried about Ger. Come on in and maybe we can put our heads together on this.” A little of his grin returned as he opened the door wider.
The odo
rs of the small living room-dining room came out at Easy. A faint scent of turpentine, a less faint scent of corn oil used for frying and, overriding the others, a strong smell of pine.
Easy went into the room suddenly. He drove the wood door into the handsome young man and slammed him hard against the whitewashed inside wall. He followed the door, pulled it off the tan boy and grabbed him by the wrist. Twisting one slender arm up behind the boy’s back, Easy spun him so the boy shielded him from the room’s only other door.
“Holy Christ!” said the young man. “What’s eating on you?”
“Where’s Gabe Hickey?”
“Shit, man, I’m Gabe Hickey. Like I told you.”
“Your neighbors haven’t heard about the miracle yet.” Easy put more pressure on the bent arm.
“What the fuck are you babbling about, man?”
“I stopped at the bodega a block from here to make sure where Gabe Hickey’s house was,” said Easy. “The guy there used the word lisiado in referring to him, which means crippled, I’d guess Hickey is a paraplegic. The wheelchair tracks outside point to that.” Easy jerked the .32 revolver out of the handsome young man’s waistband, where it had been resting in the curve of his back. “And Rudy ought to cut down on that pine-tree aftershave.”
“Hot dog, a regular Sherlock Holmes.”
“Where’s Hickey?”
“Why don’t you use your fucking bloodhound nose to sniff him out?”
Easy half-turned the boy and slapped him twice across the face with his big hand. “I want him now.”
“Shit, man,” said the handsome young man. “He’s okay. We stuck him in his bedroom after Rudy and Domingues got through with him.”
“Is Domingues the one with the crewcut?”
“That’s him.”
“Meaning you must be the one who used the blackjack on me the other night.”
“Not me, I never saw you before this morning,” the boy insisted. “If I’d cold-cocked you you wouldn’t be walking around today, man.”
“Let’s walk over to the bedroom door,” said Easy. He kicked out a foot and got the front door slammed shut.
“You don’t have to make a Bogart movie out of it. Rudy and Domingues are long gone. They left me here to greet you.”
“Even so.” Easy pushed him in front of him.
They passed a cheap easel with a large painting of the corn fields when everything was first ripening. “He’s not much of an artist,” observed the young man.
“Reach out and pull the door open.”
“I tell you, man, there’s nobody in there but that cripple spade.”
“Open it.”
Giving a disgusted sigh, the handsome young man took hold of the wrought-iron doorlatch and pushed the door inward.
Against the bed was a chrome wheelchair. A young Negro was tied in the chair with clear plastic surgical tape. Another wide strip masked his mouth. He was slumped slightly to the right, but his eyes were open and watching Easy and the handsome young man. The sleeves of his blue striped pajamas were rolled up. Small raw burns spotted his black arms.
“I suppose you didn’t do this either?” said Easy.
“No, man. Domingues is the one who’s big with a hot cigarette.”
Easy looked around the small shadowy bedroom. No one else was here. The roll of surgical tape had been dropped next to a raw wood bookstand, directly below a rosewood crucifix. Easy tripped the handsome young man. Keeping one foot on his back, he reached over for the tape. He taped the boy’s hands together behind his back, then pulled his feet up together and wound them in with the trussed-up hands.
When he finished he said to Gabe Hickey, “I’m John Easy. I’m a private investigator from Los Angeles.”
“Shit, I wouldn’t trust him, man,” said the boy on the wood-plank floor.
Easy stepped over him and yanked the tape off Hickey’s face.
The black young man shook his head and spit blood. “This is getting to be just like LA around here,” he said. “What angle are you playing?”
“I’m trying to keep them from killing the girl and Santos,” said Easy. “Do they have them?”
“No.” Hickey licked more blood from his lips. “Gerry and Joanna left here two days ago, had a chance to lease a house over in Segado. That’s thirty miles from here, a little harbor town.”
Easy said, “I saw a doctor’s shingle two blocks back. Is he somebody who can treat those burns?”
“Dr. Palma? Sure, he can treat anything and keep quiet afterward.”
“I’ll get you there,” said Easy as he unwound the tape from around Hickey’s wrists. “Then you can tell me exactly where Santos and the girl are.”
“Why not?” Hickey spit more blood. “I’ve been telling everybody. You know, I had to tell those other two mothers.”
“I figured that.” Easy stepped behind the wheelchair and was about to push it.
Hickey told him, “Don’t do that.” He caught the wheels and rolled himself around the fallen young man and out of the room.
“Are you going to leave me here with the cockroaches, man?”
Easy said nothing further to the handsome young man.
XVII
THE FIVE WHITE HOUSES looked like giant steps leading down the terraced hillside to the sea. The house closest to the beach was the one Easy wanted. He stood in the shade of a cluster of palms near the topmost house in the spill of five. To his right the land dropped away, zigzagging down to the waters of the gulf, thick with spikey brush and a few huge red flowers. The gulls in these parts looked clean and white as they skimmed the horizon. They reflected the bright high morning sun like fragments of mirror glass.
A high stucco and adobe brick wall ran alongside the five harbor town, houses. Its jogs paralleled those of the terraced hillside. Easy patted his shoulder holster, and jumped to grab the red brick topping of the wall. He boosted himself to the wall top and went walking down its narrow width tightrope fashion.
A plump fifty-year-old Mexican in black trunks and black-lens glasses sat up on a rubber raft floating in the pool in the first vast yard Easy passed. “Que pasa?” he called in a mild voice.
“Nada,” Easy replied. “Nada.”
He encountered no one else on his descent toward the house Joanna and Gerry Santos were supposed to be renting. When he came to the next to the last house in the row he leaped and caught the railing of a wrought-iron side balcony. He went from the black balcony up onto the tile roof, to the half which tilted gently seaward.
The roof ended four feet from that of Joanna’s. Easy jumped again, sailing over bright green foliage, and caught hold of a tan stucco chimney. He went up the tiles gingerly, hesitated at the peak of the roof and then let himself over onto the down-slanting side.
Looking down between his feet he could see the walled patio below. There was a pool here, too. Half Olympic size, lined with turquoise tiles and bordered with wide tiles of a brownish gold.
As Easy watched a dark-haired young man in a white shirt, tan chinos and desert boots came running into view. He dodged around a row of huge potted cactus. A silenced gun made two metallic puffing sounds. The running boy suddenly seemed to be crucified against the bright day. For an instant. Then he crumpled in on himself, falling into a fat white-needled cactus. The cactus’ bright orange pot cracked, exploding dry mud and shards of pottery into the clear blue pool. The young man shrank further in on himself, then jerked out full-length.
Rudy, the curly-haired man Easy had encountered in San Ignacio, came out into the intense sunlight. He was in his shirt sleeves and for a moment he didn’t seem to know what to do with the gun in his hand. He walked once around the dead boy, his glistening shoes crunching on jagged pieces of the cactus pot. Rudy nodded once to himself and kicked a lump of dry dirt over the lip of the pool into the water. He shifted the gun to his left hand before going back out of sight.
From down inside the two-story house came the sound of a girl screaming and sobbing at the s
ame time.
Easy let himself continue down the slope of the tile roof. There was a balcony under the second-floor window. He landed on the red tile flooring of the balcony, facing the bedroom and with his .38 revolver in his big right hand.
The room was empty. Easy went in. This was an extra bedroom, with a dry dusty unused smell. Large mural-like framed paintings of revolutionary Mexicans struggling with symbolic evils splotched the white walls.
“I was going to cooperate,” said the girl who had cried out.
“But he wasn’t,” said Rudy.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” said the girl. “You shouldn’t have done that, killed him.”
“We should have let him keep running,” said Domingues.
They sounded to be directly below this bedroom, probably in the living room. Easy moved silently across the Indian throw rugs. The room’s polished wood door was a quarter-open.
“My god,” said the girl. “Phil and now Gerry.”
“You shouldn’t sleep with so many of them,” said Rudy. “It would save us time.”
“Speaking of that,” said Domingues. “You think we have time to knock off a little ourselves?”
Rudy said, “I don’t see why not. We got here ahead of schedule almost.”
“And ahead of that bastard Easy,” Domingues said, laughing.
“So I’d say we can afford to take our time.”
“Well, you know what I’d like to have her do first,” said Domingues.
“You know what I’d like to have you do?” Easy was at the head of the stairs, where he could see the three of them clearly.
Domingues, the man with the short-cropped hair, was to the left of Joanna. He had one hand tangled in the girl’s dark hair. His other hand was empty.
Rudy was on the other side of the straightback chair the girl was tied to, his gun still in his left hand.
Easy said, “Rudy, let the gun fall.” He started down the stairs.
Rudy threw himself behind the chair Joanna was tied to. His gun made a woofing sound and a piece of wall behind Easy shattered into little nuggets of plaster.
Easy leaped over the iron-stair rail and landed in the living room next to Domingues. Getting his arm around the crewcut man’s neck, he spun him to face Rudy’s gun.
