Hot Ticket

by Janice Weber

  “Who’s Tuna trying to dispose of?”

  “Who cares? Some sleazeball who’s undercutting him. Try to think of Louis’s work as humanitarian.”

  “He should have been busting his ass on your case, not Tuna’s.

  “Louis is capable of working on two things at once.”

  I glanced irritatedly at the cave. “When’s he going to have your medicine ready?”

  Fausto brought my hand to his mouth. Even now, the slow, exhausted touch of his lips quickened me. “It’s a long shot. You know that. God, I love you.”

  I leaned over his mosquito-nibbled ear. “Cecil tells me you thought I killed Polly.”

  “I did at first. Then I realized you were looking for her murderer.” Large frown. “When did Cecil speak to you?”

  “He stayed in Washington to wrap up a few loose ends. Like me. Calm down, he’s on my payroll now.”

  Fausto drifted off for a while. Then he said, “I knew you were more than a Gypsy fiddler the minute you took Polly’s seat at Ford’s Theatre. When Cecil saw you hanging off her balcony and half the town started breathing up your thigh, I knew you were slightly illegal. A girl after my own heart. Then I heard you play and it was all over.” His fingers crawled over mine. “I kept seeing your eyes. Diamonds and ashes.”

  Great line. I hoped it wasn’t another joke. “Brought you something.”

  Fausto admired his wedding band in the greenish light. “You came all the way through the jungle to give me a ring?”

  “No, a bloody nose.” I looked impatiently toward the cave. “What the hell’s he doing in there?”

  “Let him be. I’m ridiculously happy just talking with you.” Fausto coughed weakly. “Could you get me a little water, sweet?”

  I went into the cave. Barnard’s dried flowers still hung on the wall. Louis and Ek were boiling crud in a beaker. The place reeked of guano, herbs, unwashed human. “Step on it,” I said. “He’s fading.”

  When I returned to the tent, Fausto was hemorrhaging water. He drank more and fell asleep. Nothing I could do but fan the flies away and watch massive shudders overtake him every few minutes. The creatures of the forest cawed louder as the temperature rose twenty degrees. Suddenly the sky turned to coal and a typhoon pounded the tent. Just as swiftly, like life, it passed.

  Fausto woke with a start. He didn’t immediately recognize his surroundings or me. “What day is it?”

  I had to think about that. “Thursday.”

  “No, the date.”

  “October second.”

  “Hmm. I don’t think I’m going to make my fifty-first birthday.”

  Great talons of fear crunched my ribs. I took his hand: distract him with mind games. “Don’t say that. Who do you think killed Polly?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on whose dreams she was closest to destroying. And everyone dreams in Washington.”

  I sighed: lousy answer. Correct but lousy. “Is Louis right about Jojo’s dengue?”

  “Yes. But we can’t figure out how Jojo got infected in the first place.”

  “What were you doing at the conference?”

  “My God! Who’s tattling on me?”

  “Gretchen. She loved her plane ride home with you and the monkey.”

  “I was keeping an eye on Polly. Louis didn’t know what to make of her.”

  “Was she in love with him?”

  “Love isn’t always physical, you know. Not completely.” Fausto drifted off again. Then, “Did you sleep with Bobby?”

  “Almost.”

  “I’m sorry to have to set you up like that. I needed the ultimate seductress to divert him while the double went to Lorton. You may have saved my life. Well, prolonged it, in any event.” He kissed my hand. “I’m sorry I never got to fuck you properly, Leslie. Serves me right. I should have taken better care of myself. I just didn’t care to live until the night I saw you in that little blue dress at Ford’s Theatre. By then it was just too late.”

  Beyond the valley, thunder. Maybe it was the waterfall. “We’ll get out of here and throw a huge party. Then I’ll tie you to the bedposts and feed you nothing but oysters until you lose a hundred pounds. Then we’ll have ten kids. They’ll all play instruments and we’ll tour the country like the von Trapps. Your dreams of world domination will dissolve in a mountain of dirty diapers.”

  “Keep talking,” Fausto whispered. “I love this.”

  Louis zipped open the tent flap. “Brought you something, Fausto.” He gave the patient a gourd filled with vile brown liquid. “It’s a strong dose. You ought to know that there may be side effects. The vagus might overreact. Instead of telling the brain to interrupt seizures, it might signal to begin them.”

  “That’s just great,” I snapped. “Seventeen years in the jungle and that’s the best you can do? No wonder you never won the Nobel Prize.”

  “Shhhh.” Fausto squeezed my hand. “What if I don’t take this?”

  “Your seizures will continue. I could always operate, of course. Remove the appropriate brain tissue. But you know the risks of that.”

  Fausto looked at me. “In a gambling mood?” I didn’t answer so he had to refer to Louis. “What are my chances?”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “Can’t argue with that.” Again he looked at me. “It would be a shame not to drink the damn stuff after all that bother. Bottoms up, doll. Thanks for letting me punch out at the top of my game.”

  Fausto drank. We waited. Nothing happened.

  “I think we’re over the hump,” the doctor finally announced. “You would have had counterindications by now.”

  “How do you feel?” I asked. “Besides hot.”

  “Fine.”

  I stood up. “Great. Let’s go back to Washington.”

  “That’s impossible,” Louis cried. “Fausto’s in no condition to go anywhere without medical supervision.”

  “Then come back with us. You’ve got a nice lab in Virginia. You can make gallons of this swill up there.”

  “You don’t understand. I’ve got to finish Tuna’s project. It was part of the deal.”

  I looked imploringly at Fausto, who merely said, “He’s right.”

  “Then I’m going to Belize City,” I said. “Back in two hours. Who’s got the keys to the chopper?” Dull stares. “Come on, boys! I haven’t got all day!”

  “What are you going to do there?” Louis asked suspiciously.

  “Figure out who assassinated your brother. I hope you don’t mind. Can you come with me, Ek?”

  A surplus Blackhawk waited on top of the hill: ah, money. Ten minutes later Ek and I were skimming over the jungle. On all sides, as far as we could see, lay green dense and dark as broccoli, occasionally parted by a slim green river. I counted five rainbows, eight clouds of smoke: deforestation already in high gear. “How have you been?” I shouted at Ek over the whop whop of rotor blades.

  “Good.”

  “You were right. Louis came back.”

  No answer so I didn’t push it. We flew in silence to Belize City. The airport was deader than Jonestown. I parked next to Fausto’s Piper and paid the landing fees. Inside the terminal I bought an expensive assortment of cheap toys. “Can you take me to Dr. Tatal’s clinic?” I asked Ek.

  We cabbed to a long building made of whatever construction materials had been available at the time that carpenters had felt like working. Now everything was peeling or rotting. The front doors didn’t close: no problem since there was no air-conditioning to conserve and bugs came and went at will through the inch-high gap at the floor. Next to the decayed front steps, perhaps to cushion falls, an overflowing bin of medical waste blistered in the sun. “They fixed it up for the environmental conference,” Ek said as we went inside.

  Down a grimy corridor to the dengue ward. The smells were indescribably unpleasant. Behind the nurse’s desk hung a picture of Paula Marvel and Dr. Tatal, who looked coolly professional in a white tunic. Couldn’t say the same for Paula’s fussy bows and
hat. Schoolgirls in pinafores clustered the two women. “The president’s wife visited us,” explained the nurse. “The girls sang.”

  “We’d like to visit Babette and Iris Auclair. We understand they came down with dengue after the conference.” Thank you, Tougaw.

  “They’re in the children’s ward.” The victims lay in a cubbyhole painted fecal yellow. Poor things looked like voodoo dolls, without the pins: bloodshot eyes, swollen joints … breakbone was the correct name for this plague, and they had only mild cases. “Hi girls,” I said cheerfully. “My name’s Cosima. This is Ek. Which of you is Babette?” The bigger one tried to sit up. I gave her a doll. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Much better.” Ah, that singsong lilt: happy people. “My sister is coming along, too.” The little one smiled with the dignity of a queen.

  “I understand you two were at the big conference here.”

  “Oh yes. We sang for the president’s wife.”

  “I bet she loved it.” Paula’s best attribute was that beatific smile she wore when bored stiff.

  “And I saw the vice president! He gave me a ball!” Babette showed me a hand-sewn mesh ball with ladybug emblems on the outside. “I’ll keep it forever.”

  “Where did he give this to you?”

  “Here in the hotel. Iris and I had to wait a long time to get up to the banquet room because only one elevator was working. Then the vice president came out.” Babette hugged herself. “I think he’s very handsome.”

  Not anymore, kid. “Did you get a ball, too?” I asked little sister.

  “Yes. But the lady took it away. She tried to take Babette’s ball too, but Babette wouldn’t give it to her.”

  Something odd here. Vice presidents didn’t distribute toys to children only to have grown women snatch them back. “That’s not very nice,” I said. “Who was this lady?”

  “I don’t know. She said the balls belonged to her daughter.”

  Oh God. I passed out the toys to everyone in the room. “Does anyone remember a girl playing the violin here?”

  Silence. Maybe they had erased the memory. Or maybe they had all been sleeping, as Gretchen said. Ek and I returned to the nurse, who was sharing a sandwich with two huge flies. “Did a girl visit the hospital a while back? Play the violin?”

  “Very short concert,” the nurse informed me. “Thank the Lord.”

  “Could you tell me where?”

  “In the room at the end of the hall.”

  Ek and I walked down an airless corridor. Too quiet here: death was an exhausting opponent. In every room lay two or three demicorpses, mouths open, all exhaling that horrible stench. The gurneys looked like seconds from the Battle of the Somme. I had yet to see one latex glove. Pulled Ek into the last room, which had more windows but no more cross-ventilation than did the hallway. For a moment we stared at the occupants of a dozen beds. Too hot for sheets so their bodies, both wasted and grotesquely swollen, lay in full view. They were all weeping blood from the eyes, nose, ears, fingernails … everywhere. The fresh red glowed like nail polish; the old red looked like meat loaf gravy. Humans? Oozing protoplasm. Bendix had Gretchen play here?

  A doctor entered. He seemed in no particular rush, but none of his patients were going anywhere. “I guess this is the hemorrhagic dengue ward,” I said stupidly.

  “That’s correct. Are you visiting someone?”

  Just ghosts. “I think a girl played the violin here recently.”

  “Just for a few minutes. She and her teacher brought some toys.” The doctor indicated a few more mesh balls on a bed table. “The patients were not well enough to appreciate a concert. I told the girl to play for the children instead. But she was not—agreeable to that.”

  On the way out, I asked the nurse if Dr. Tanqueray Tougaw worked there. “I have never heard that name,” she answered.

  I could only smile in defeat and leave. Quiet in the streets: sun had driven everyone inside. “Hungry?” I asked Ek.

  We went to a café bigger but not tidier than Koko’s. Maybe detergents just didn’t work in the tropics. Hell, maybe people up north were just too clean. “Glad to see Louis again?” I asked Ek.

  His face barely moved as he ate. “I did not know he was working on a poison.”

  “He was also working on a cure for Fausto. The world needs both.”

  Ek swallowed a lot of beans before speaking again. “Are you sorry you killed Simon?”

  Crap, not Simon again! Then I remembered that Ek wasn’t as civilized as the rest of us. “Do you think he was sorry to be killing me? Sorry he succeeded in killing Dr. Tatal? We were just jobs. He was paid for his work.”

  “What you are saying is someone else is also responsible for killing Dr. Tatal.”

  “That’s right.”

  Ek put twenty dollars on the table. “Would you kill that person for me? That’s all the money I have now but I will earn however much you want.”

  Ah, damn. “I don’t think you understand,” I sighed. “There’s a big difference between Simon and me.” Simon got paid more.

  “But what about the person who killed Dr. Tatal? There is no punishment?”

  In this life? Forget it. “I’ll find who did it. Whether or not I can even the score is beyond my control.”

  We finished eating in silence. “Why were you asking about Dr. Tougaw?” Ek asked as we were leaving the café.

  “You know him?”

  “He sells medicines. He has a shop by the wharf.”

  Ek took me there. Not even the fish were moving in that section of town. Tougaw’s place was shut tight. “What are you doing?” Ek whispered, looking around anxiously.

  “Opening the door. Just a second.” We went inside. The place smelled of roots and herbs and mostly mildew: Tougaw hadn’t been here for a while. I turned on the lights. Behind the cash register was a huge picture of the medicine man with Paula Marvel in her Dress of One Dozen Bows. To Dr. Tougaw, the inscription read. With thanks. Paula Marvel.

  “Guess he was at the conference, too,” I said, sniffing a few bottles. Gad, was there anyone in Belize who hadn’t cashed in on the damn thing?

  “He’s not a very good doctor,” Ek said. “He does not always find the best plants. And he puts spells on people.”

  No wonder Paula had brought him to Washington. I uncorked a bottle and nearly gagged on the odor of burnt pineapple. “Let’s get back to camp.”

  We had a jagged ride through squalls and hidden thermals rippling over the hills. Fausto was in his tent reading Macbeth, borrowed from Barnard’s library in the cave. His face looked only slightly less gray than it had this morning. “She was an extraordinary woman,” he said, closing the book.

  “Lady Macbeth?”

  “No, your friend Polly. Terrific botanist. Could have given Louis a real run for his money.”

  I peeled a mango. “Did you perform any unnatural sex acts with her?”

  “No, dear. I deferred to the president. With you I wasn’t quite as generous.”

  “I have a video of her in a bathtub with Marvel.” Tiny fib: Fausto would be ripped if I told him Cecil had flouted his house arrest. “It was made at Aurilla’s country place. Bobby was given the keys so he’d have a spare bedroom out of town. The upstairs is crawling with cameras.” I dropped a piece of mango into Fausto’s mouth. “Have you seen the video?”

  “No. But it sounds lovely.”

  “Who would have watched it and then killed Polly? Aurilla and Bendix?”

  “Careful. Why should they kill Polly just because she was bathing with Marvel? On the contrary, Aurilla would love to have a tape like that. It would be a huge bargaining chip if the going ever got rough. No, whoever killed Polly was an ally of Bobby’s.”

  “Justine?” I thought a moment. “Forget it. She’s too small.”

  “Size isn’t everything, dear. Desire is what counts. Justine’s still in love with him. She’s fearless after swallowing enough pills.”

  “Why’d you work with her if
she’s so unstable?”

  “She owes me from way back. The idea of pulling a fast one on Bobby fascinated her.”

  “But you just said she loved him.”

  “Hates him in equal measure. Love’s a complicated beast. She’s been terminally confused over Bobby since the day she laid eyes on him.”

  “I still can’t figure out what she’s doing with Duncan.”

  “It began because she wanted to know about you. Then Duncan’s natural charm swept her off her feet. Relax. Duncan’s nearing the end of his shelf life. Then he’ll be all yours again.”

  “All right, forget Justine. Do you think Chickering could have killed Polly?”

  “She’s no friend of Bobby’s. She’s seen too much since boarding that first bus in Kentucky.”

  “Paula?”

  Fausto paused. “If the First Lady were snuffing Bobby’s bimbos, she’d be the worst serial killer in history. But I wouldn’t put it past her. Not if she saw a tape of Polly with her husband in a bathtub. Even if Marvel’s spin doctors managed to get him off the hook for another relapse, Polly didn’t seem the discreet type. She could cost Marvel the election.”

  Louis came in, covered with muck. He handed Fausto a gourd. “Drink.” He turned to me. “Productive trip?”

  “I went to the hospital and spoke with two little girls who also came down with dengue after the conference. They ran into Jojo near the hotel elevator.”

  “Aedes aegypti don’t breed in elevators,” Louis snorted.

  “Couldn’t a mosquito have been flying around the elevator and bitten the girls after Jojo left?”

  “That’s pushing it. Anyone else in the elevator would have been bitten as well. If only Jojo and the girls were hit, the mosquitoes would have had to be contained. Controlled. How could that have happened? Did something come into contact with Jojo and the girls alone?”

  Ah, Doctor: brilliant questions. No wonder Polly fell for him. “He gave them a ball.”

  Ek came to life. “It was made of fine mesh. Like the cage holding the fer-de-lance that killed Dr. Tatal.” He picked it up from the floor. “See, Cosima.”

  “He’s right.” I looked at Louis. “Could someone have put a few mosquitoes inside those balls?”