A Deadly Shade of Gold

by John D. MacDonald

  As I moved along the side of the house I heard a woman's voice. I passed more dark windows and came to three lighted ones in a row. They were open. As I crept closer I heard that she was speaking Spanish. And as it went on and on, I realized from the cadence of her voice that she was reading aloud. The accent seemed expert, as far as I could tell, the voice young and clear, nicely modulated. But she stumbled over words from time to time. She seemed too close to the first window for me to take a chance, so I wormed on along to the last of the three lighted windows. I straightened up beyond it, and took a careful look. I saw a fat brown woman in a white uniform sitting on a couch sewing, her fingers swift and her face impassive. And off to the right, near the first window, I could see the blonde girl in the green knit suit, sitting on a straight chair beside a bed, her back to me, bending over the book she held in her lap. I could not see who was in the bed.

  I waited there. She read on and on. Mosquitoes found my neck and I rubbed them off. I settled into the stupor of waiting. She could not read forever. Something had to change. And then I might learn something. At last she closed the book with an audible thump, and in a lazy loving tone she said, "That's really all I can manage tonight, darling. My eyes are beginning to give out. I hope you don't mind too much."

  There was no answer. She put the book aside and stood up and bent over whoever was in the bed. All I could see of her was the rounded girlrump under the stretch of knitted green. The fat woman had stopped sewing and she was watching the girl, her eyes narrowed.

  The girl made the murmurous sound of a woman giving her affection and then straightened. "Carlos, darling," she said, "I'm going to ask you to try to write your name again. Do you understand, dear? One blink for yes. Good."

  She went out of my range and came back with a pad and pencil. She apparently sat beside him on the bed. I could see her slim ankles. "Here, darling. That's it. Hold it as tightly as you can. Now write your name, dear."

  There was a silence. Suddenly the girl sprang up, and made a violent motion and there was the sound of an open palm against flesh. "You filth!" she shouted. "You dirty bastard!" The pad and pencil fell to the floor. The fat woman started up off the couch, hesitated, settled back and picked up her sewing.

  The girl stood back from the bed, her body rigid, her fists on her hips. "I suppose that's your idea of a joke, writing a dirty word like that. God damn you, you understand me. I know you do. Try to get this through your head, Carlos. The pesos in the household account are down to damned near nothing. If you expect me to stay here and care for you and protect you, you are going to have to write your name clearly and legibly on a power of attorney so I can go to the bank in Mexico City and get more money. You have to trust me. It's the only chance you have, brother. And you better realize it. When the money stops, these people of yours are going to melt away like the morning dew, and you'll die and rot right here. Oh brother, I know how your mind works. You think I'm going to grab it all and run. If I did, you wouldn't be any worse off, would you? And what the hell good is money going to do you from now on? Listen, because I probably owe you something, Carlos, I swear I'll go and get the money and come back here and take care of you. I'll keep them from killing you. Don't you realize those men must have told somebody else before they came here to fix you? You think it over, my friend. You're not going to get too many more chances. I'm getting sick of this whole situation. Gabe and I may leave at any time. Who have you got left who could go for the money? Your wife, maybe? Your kook wife? We'll put wheels on her rocking chair. Jesus Christ, you make me sore, Carlos. Do me a personal favor. Have lousy dreams tonight. Okay."

  She whirled and went out. She was a door banger.

  I went back to the first window and took a look. The bed was directly under the window. Carlos Menterez was propped up on a mound of pillows. They'd dressed him in a heavy silk robe. With his bald head and his shrunken face, he looked like the skeleton of a monkey. The left eye was drooped almost shut, and the left side of his mouth and face fell slack, in grey folds. The look of severe stroke. But the right eye was round and dark and alert. In my interest, I had gotten a little too close to the screen. The good eye turned toward me, and suddenly became wider. His mouth opened on the good side, pulling the slack side open. He made a horrid cawing, gobbling sound, and lifted his right hand, a claw hand, as though to ward off a blow. I ducked down and heard the fat woman hurry to him. She made comforting sounds, patting and adjusting, fixing his pillows. Carlos made plaintive gobblings, wet sounds of despair. She worked over him for quite a while, and then she turned several lights out.

  I went around the front of the house, completing the circuit. There was a light over the gate, but no guard. I could see that a heavy chain was looped through the bars of the gate. I wanted to get around and see what the blonde and Gabe were doing. I wondered how I could make myself a chance to hear what they were saying. It would be too much to expect that he might have opened the window. He hadn't. But as I lowered myself to look through the same place as before, I heard him bellow, "For Chrissake, Alma!" She was sitting huddled on the foot of the chaise. He was pacing back and forth, making gestures. He had a hard handsome face, glossy black hair worn too long.

  Then behind me I heard a shrill whistle. A man yelled, "Brujo! Eh, perro! Brujo!" He whistled again. But Brujo had retired from the dog business. I went from the patio into the moon shade of the trees. I heard two men talking loudly, arguing. I saw lights moving beyond the leaves.

  They both called the dog. And I made a wide furtive circle behind them as they moved, angling toward my escape line. I could sense that they were getting too close to where I'd left the dead dog.

  There was a sudden silence, and then excited yelling. Then a shocking and sudden bam-bam of two shots rupturing the night. I was flat on my face before I could comprehend that they had not been aimed at me, that they were warning shots, fired into the air. More lights went on. There were more voices, raised in loud query. Suddenly at least fifty decorative floodlights went on, all over the pool area, all over the grounds.

  I guess I had seen some of the lights. They hadn't registered. I was in the cone of radiance of one of them. I swiftly pulled myself into darkness, momentarily blinded. Somebody ran by me, a few feet away, shoes drumming against the earth. All I had to do was wait for them to spot the smear on the wall, investigate, find the Ihin nylon rope, then hunt me down. Already they were beginning to fan out, five or six of them, shining flashlights into the dark places. And one was moving slowly toward me. He would have a gun in one hand and the light in the other. There was an unpleasant eagerness about them, as if they were after a special bonus.

  I could not circle behind him. I would have had to cut through the revealing lights. I moved back, came up against a tree, wormed around it, stood on the far side of it and went up it almost as fast as I can run up a flight of stairs. It had sharp stubby thorns sticking out of the trunk, and I did not pay them much attention at the time. I stood a dozen feet up, balancing in the crotch of a fat branch, holding the main trunk for support. Below me, the diligent fellow came through the lights and swept his light back and forth where I had been. I looked around. The others were just about far enough away. When he moved into the relative darkness under my tree, I stepped into space and dropped onto him, feet first, landing on the backs of his shoulders, driving him down to the ground. I rolled to my knees and snatched his flashlight. It had rolled away from him. I swept the beam over, saw his hand gun and picked it up. He stirred and I hammered him down again, laying the side of the revolver against the back of his skull. I stood, sweeping the light back and forth, as though searching.

  A man thirty feet away rattled a question at me.

  "No se," I grumbled. Avoiding the lights, I worked my way away from him. A few moments later, I reached the stain on the wall. I found the line. It was firm. In that instant all the lights flickered and went out, and I knew it was midnight. The big generator had been turned off. They called to each other, swin
ging their lights around dangerously. Somebody yelled, "Chucho? Chucho?" I guessed I had his gun and light. I turned the light off, then threw it toward the house as hard as I could, arching it up over the trees. There was a satisfying crash and chime of glass. As the shouts came, as they all began moving toward the house, I went up the line, stood on the wall, freed the hooks and jumped into the darkness. I landed on uneven ground, hit my chin on my knee and jarred my teeth, rolled over onto my side. I yanked the rest of the line over the wall, and hastened across the Boody grounds, coiling it as I went, the gun a hard lump between belt and belly. I could hear more shouts, and I wondered if they'd found Chucho. I wondered if he was the wistful one, the chicken eater, the lovemaker or one of the others.

  When I rattled the first pebble into the room through the open window, she whispered, "Trav? Darling?"

  "Get away from the window."

  I tossed the hooks in. They clanked on the tile. She dug the hooks into the overlap of the wooden sill. I walked up the side of the building, caught at the edge, slid over the sill belly down, and spilled into the room. As I rolled over, she nestled down upon me, sobbing and laughing, smothering the sounds against my chest.

  "I heard shots," she said. "Far away, and I thought...."

  "There was some excitement while I was leaving."

  She let me up. I pulled the line in. We went into the bathroom to inspect damage. The only room lights on the night circuit were weak bulbs in the bathroom. Twenty-five watts. Those thorns had torn me up pretty good, puncturing and tearing the flesh on the insides of my arms and legs. Fear had been a marvelous anesthetic. I put the gun on the shelf above the sink and stripped down. It was a respectable weapon, a Smith and Wesson.38, a standard police firearm with walnut grips. It hadn't received tender loving care, but it looked deadly enough. And the damn fool had been carrying it hammer down, on the empty chamber, instead of hammer back with a fresh one in position.

  Nora made little bleatings of concern when she saw how torn up I was. She hurried off and came back with antiseptic, cotton and tape. I took a cold shower first, bloodied a towel drying myself, then stretched out in the restricted area of the bathroom on my back so she could do a patch job. She bit down on her lip as she worked. She had trouble getting out of her own shadow. I could feel the exhaustion seeping through me. I told her there was a bad dog and I had killed it. I said I had been in the house. I had seen a few things, heard a few things, and I would tell her about them later. I had had to hit a man on the head to get out of there. It had been a little closer than I cared for things to be. The closeness of it made her weep, and then I had to make jokes to prove it had not been really that close.

  Then we went to bed. She was dubious about my obvious intentions, but she was very very glad to have me back. And we had grown to know each other. It was no longer the mysterious business of strangers being too curious about the reaction to this or that, holding themselves in a kind of tentative reserve. Now I knew the arrangements of her, the strictures and the willingnesses, the fashioning of her for her needs and takings, so that I could lose myself in all that and become one striving thing with her, both of us all of one familiar flesh. There are anesthetics more wondrous than fear. In that time when past and future fade, when they are eclipsed by the reiterant now, I caught a receding glimpse of the man and the skinny woman under the bright bulb glare, felt an ironic aftertaste, then knew that all the differences which mean anything are subjective. In the drinking of a fine wine or a deadly poison, the mechanical functioning of elbow and wrist are identical. Whether the eye sees blood or roses, little sub-electrical impulses in the brain identify the color as red. I could fault us only on the grounds our coupling had a symbiotic tinge, a union keyed to survival of two discordant species. She had the wisdom to keep us from trying to explain that to each other. Her wisdom gave us the power to accept completely, using in place of value judgments the deep, ancient, rhythmic affirmations of the flesh.

  Thirteen

  AFTER BREAKFAST I sat in umbrellaed shade while Nora swam, shirt and slacks covering the thorn wounds, my curled hand concealing the random stigmata, the girl-bite bandage also hidden under the long sleeves of the white shirt. I had some sore and creaking muscles, and a couple of bruises which felt as if they went all the way down into the bone marrow.

  The revolver, sealed by a rubber band fastening into a plastic shoe bag, rested in the bottom of her toilet tank. The improvised grapnel was buried in the soft black dirt under a bush. I had rinsed the smeared stains of blood from my hand off the thin nylon rope, coiled it and stowed it in a bureau drawer. The ruined slacks and shirt were a minor problem. Nora had them stowed in her beach bag, tightly rolled. We could bury them at the beach.

  She came out of the pool and returned to our table. She wore a sheath suit, vertical red and white stripes. She had explained the artifice of it to me. She said it was a suit for the underprivileged girl. The stripes were designed to be further apart at hip and breast, closer together at the waist, thus creating the illusion of more abundance than was there. She said that for some reason she could not understand, they had a most difficult time at the shop trying to keep very heavy women from buying them. I told her I hadn't noticed she was particularly underprivileged. She said a woman's ribs shouldn't resemble a xylophone, nor should hip bones be capable of inflicting a nasty bruise.

  She toweled her face and shoulders, fluffed her dark hair, moved her chair into the sun and frowned at me.

  "What's the matter?" I asked.

  "There was something between Sam and the blonde."

  "If Alma's last name is Hitchins, and if Felicia is right, yes."

  "Then she's been there a long time."

  "Maybe. Back and forth is a better guess, I'd say. The intermittent house guest. For a nice long stay every time."

  "Who is Gabe?"

  "God knows. The relationship with Alma had a. flavor of intimacy. But she seems to be in charge."

  "Do you think she wants to get the money and run?"

  "What else? Maybe Menterez was a lot of laughs before something gave way in his head. But what's there for her now? You know, she has it locked up pretty good. If anybody comes around who really wants to help him, she can keep them from getting past the gate. He is incapable of communicating with anybody. Speech is gone, but he can understand and he can write. I don't think that fat nurse understands English. I have the idea nobody gets into that room except Alma and the fat nurse. I don't think anybody else will get in there until he's ready to sign a power of attorney. I would bet the bulk of his fortune is in Switzerland, but he's likely to have a nice chunk of cash in a lock box in Mexico City. I don't think it would be on deposit. I'd lay odds it's in dollars or pounds. And he damn well knows she wants to clean him out. If she does, who can touch her? How far can he get by complaining to the Mexican authorities? I think I know what's eating her. She's afraid he'll have another one before she can soften him up. I think he's suffering the fate of all vultures. When they get sick, the others eat him."

  "Don't be so damned vivid, Trav."

  "I'd like to unravel that remark she made about some men having told somebody else where he was before they came here to fix him. They tried and they didn't make it, and evidently they didn't survive the experience. That was the inference. But if any kind of big dramatic violence went on around here, I think Felicia would have known about it and told me about it. How did Sam earn those gold figures? Who got all but one of them away from him? Honey we're up to here in questions."

  "What are you going to do about it?"

  "Pry Alma open."

  "You can't go back there!"

  "Nora dear, I wouldn't go over that wall again for a thirty dollar bill. So we got to get sweetie pie out of there somehow."

  "Is she another one of those... what did you call them?... sun bunnies?"

  "Not this one. This one is bright and cold and hard and beautiful."

  She gave a mirthless laugh. "Sam kept pretty busy."
>
  "I think this one would have gone after Sam if she thought he could do her some good. And I think if she went after him, he wouldn't stand much of a chance. And I think her nerves are good enough to carry on another intrigue right in Menterez's house. This one has the cool sexually speculative look, like the one who married the prince."

  "Or like poor little Mandy? Christine's pal?"

  "I think this one is a little more commercial than that."

  "She and that Gabe are a team?"

  "I don't know. He's a little too pretty. She'll cross him up when it comes his turn. I think he's just a stud she imported to liven the dull days of waiting. But I have the idea he knows what she's trying to do."

  "I keep thinking of that black dog."

  "Please. I keep trying not to think about him. How do we get her out of there?"

  "Darling, the mail comes to the village by bus, and they bring the mail for those houses out here to the hotel. I... I might put a little note in there for her. My handwriting is obviously feminine. So is my note paper."