Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  She got up suddenly and walked to the end of the porch. She stood by the railing with her back to us, then turned around and snuffled and knuckled her eyes.

  “It fits too good,” she said tearfully.

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  She walked slowly back toward us and sat down. “Four years ago we had a rain here you wouldn’t believe. A hurricane came in off the Gulf and must have dropped sixteen inches here on Webb County. There’s a creek over there—you can’t see it from here—it runs down into the Nueces and it’s sometimes a trickle and sometimes dry. It was a river all by itself when that rain came, and it carved out new banks, and afterward one of my eldest sister’s kids, she came running to the house talking about bones sticking out of the gravel bank. I went and looked and called the authorities. The experts dug it out. It had been buried near the creek about two or three feet down. They estimated it had been there ten to twenty years. The leg bones and one arm was gone, and so they couldn’t tell how tall it had been. The experts from the state said it was a female from twelve to twenty years old. They found a couple of scraps of fabric. The trouble was that Izzy had never had any cavities that had to be filled, and she’d broken just one bone in her life, and that was a bone in her leg, and nobody ever found the leg bones. They had washed on down into the Nueces and washed away. The skull was stove in in the back kind of like she’d been hit with the flat of a shovel. We sisters all got together and talked it over. Nobody could prove that the remains were Isobelle, and nobody could prove they weren’t. And there was, of course, the note she left Papa. Something like, Please forgive us, we’re in love, we’re running off to get married, wish us happiness. We could understand running off, because every one of the rest of us couldn’t hardly wait to get out of this house and away from him. We talked it over, and it just didn’t seem natural he’d kill her before they even got started. Three of us out of six had met and talked to Larry Joe, and we all liked him. What we decided, there’s a track where you can drive down and park in a grove by the creek, and couples sneak in there. So probably it was somebody else, we said. But we hadn’t heard from her, not once in eighteen years, and we all loved her and she loved us all. And from what you tell me about him …”

  She buried her face in her hands. She cried silently, shoulders shaking. Meyer hitched his rocker closer and patted her shoulder. He is a good patter. He isn’t awkward about it. And, like the veterinarian who can quiet jumpy animals with his touch, Meyer has good hands for patting and comforting.

  She turned a streaming face toward him. “I think I knew it all along. I think I knew it even before the time it rained so hard.” She hopped up and ran into the house, saying in a smothered voice, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  It was closer to ten. The geese went by again, looking us over with beady suspicion. A kitten crawled over the side of the basket and sprawled mewling on the porch floor. Meyer put it back where it belonged, and the mother cat seemed to smile at him.

  The children came racing by, all yelling, the dogs in tongue-lolling pursuit. After the sound died, I could hear a meadowlark in the distance, an improbable sweetness.

  She came out smiling and embarrassed. “It was a long time ago. I didn’t expect it to break me up like that.”

  “We understand,” Meyer said. “Can you tell us anything at all about the man which would help us look for him?”

  “Like what kind of thing?”

  “His likes, dislikes, skills, habits.”

  “Let me think. I saw him like three times, altogether it wouldn’t be an hour. Papa said he was a real good shot with a rifle. I don’t know how Papa found that out. Oh, and he spoke good Mexican. All of us down here in south Texas have some, but he had a lot more than most. I get along, but he went too fast for me. There’s another thing, but I don’t know as it means anything. We’ve always had dogs, and Izzy told me the dogs didn’t like Larry Joe at all. The hair on their backs would stand right up. Izzy said it made him mad the dogs didn’t like him. She said he liked to have everybody like him, everybody and everything.”

  She decided to show us the lanterns, and she walked out back to the sheds. We followed. She opened the third one and peered in and beckoned to us. When my eyes were used to the dim light inside the shed, I could see the dozen or so lanterns clumped close together in the corner, standing there like little stone dwarfs in conical hats. They were a murky green-brown, and the vines had grown in through the breaks and splits in the old boards and wound around them, in and out of the oval holes where the light would shine out of them at night.

  “That’s all there is left. He certainly sold one hell of a lot of stone lanterns. I didn’t think anybody could sell that many. I thought it was another one of Papa’s crazy ideas. You want a lantern?”

  “No thanks,” Meyer said hastily. “Nice of you to offer.”

  As she walked us to the car, she said, “If you should find him, could you let us know, me and my sisters? You write me and I’ll tell them. My oldest sister named her youngest Isobelle. She’s thirteen now, and she looks so much like Izzy used to, it breaks my heart to look at her.”

  As we went down the long drive I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her back there, hands on her hips, a small plump figure in a wide rural land, encircled by kids and dogs.

  “Eagle Pass?” I asked, glancing over at Meyer. He nodded agreement and sat there, arms folded, behind a wall of silence. When I came to a suitable place, I pulled over and looked at the map. Big Wells, Brundage, Crystal City. Maybe a hundred miles. A hundred miles of silence. A hundred years of solitude.

  But it was only about thirty miles of silence. “Could you have believed this about him the night the four of us had dinner?”

  “It would have taken some convincing,” I replied.

  “Yet now you believe he killed Izzy?”

  “Of course. And Doris Eagle and Norma and maybe a few we haven’t come across. Or more than a few.”

  “Motive?”

  “I think my guess would be that he is a hunter. Women are the game he specializes in. He is a loner. A rare kind of loner, a man who seems affable, agreeable, gregarious, fun to have around. That is his act. That is his camouflage suit. That’s the way he comes up on the blind side, downwind, every move calculated. Not every stalk has to end in death, Meyer. Betsy Ann was a practice stalk, no shell in the chamber. He got close enough to reach out and touch the game. The money is important to him only because it gives him the freedom to keep hunting. I have heard the same crap a couple of times from some of my delayed-development macho friends who go out and shoot things they have no intention of eating. ‘My God, Travis, I was in love with that elk. The most beautiful damn thing you ever saw in your life. Stood there in the morning light, never knowing there was a soul within a mile of him. Raised his head and I put the slug just behind the shoulder, blew his brave heart to shreds. I tell you truly, I went up to him and squatted beside him, and I stroked his hide and I had tears in my eyes, he was so noble!’

  “I think our buddy Larry Joe/Evan/Jerry must have some of the same bullshit running in his bloodstream. I think that when he mounts one of his victims-to-be, the idea that he is going to one day kill her dead gives him a bigger and better orgasm. In fact, he might be unable to make it unless he knows that’s going to happen to her, at his hand. Murmurings of love on his lips, and murder in his damn black heart.”

  “Blackbeard,” he said. “And other men down through history.”

  “Jack the Ripper?”

  “No. That’s quite a different motivation, I think. He wanted the world to know that murder had been done, that the evil women who sold their bodies had been punished by an agent of the Lord. We know of three possible victims of Larry Joe/Evan/Jerry spread over eighteen years. In no case was it labeled murder.”

  “So maybe that is part of the game.”

  “If it is, it requires that the game be played differently every time. Otherwise there is a pattern.… Hah!”
<
br />   “Hah what?”

  “Let me think a bit.”

  He thought for about twenty miles and finally said, “I thought I had an inspiration, but I can’t make it work. It struck me that maybe he had a very good reason to eliminate Evan Lawrence, the name and the identity, along with Norma. What could that reason be? That possibly, as Evan Lawrence, the hunt had not gone too well with the victim he dispatched before he met Norma. Maybe there was a trail left which someone might be shrewd enough to follow—just as we’re trying to follow him now—and if that did happen, it would end right there when The John Maynard Keynes blew up. A dead end. Justice done. But actually, it would be a convenience to him to drop an identity. I would imagine he had another one all set to slip into.”

  “He could buy identities in Miami as easy as he could buy explosives.”

  “Travis, there is one thing about him we should keep in mind. He does really look like a great many other forty-year-old men. Driving around Houston I saw at least a half dozen men who, on first glance, looked like Evan Lawrence. Average height, square face, tan, standard haircut, no distinguishing marks. A pleasant expression. Bigger hands than average, thicker through the neck and shoulders. Remember, I found a great many yearbook pictures which looked as if they could have been Evan Lawrence. I am saying that he can disappear into the people pool the way a trout can rise and gulp a bug and slide back down out of sight in the depths. Money makes the disappearance easier. Money diverts suspicion. Money can give a false impression of respectability.”

  “So what good are we going to do in Eagle Pass?”

  “Maybe he started as Cody T. W. Pittler. And if so, maybe we can find out what turned him into a hunter.”

  “There we go again, Meyer. The old argument.”

  “Which one?”

  “You start with the assumption that everybody is peachy, and then something comes along and warps them. You start with a concept of goodness, and so what we are supposed to do, as a society, is understand why they turn sour. Understand and try to heal. I start with the assumption that there is such a thing as evil which can exist without causation. The black heart which takes joy in being black. In almost every kind of herd animal, there is the phenomenon of the rogue.”

  “If he is Pittler, we’ll find something unusual about his boyhood.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Just as sure as I am that I learned some time ago what it was in your past that gives you a recurrent streak of paranoia.”

  “Now hold it!”

  “Don’t be insulted, Travis. That flaw is useful to you. It keeps you constantly suspicious. And thus it has probably kept you alive.”

  “Up till now.”

  Sixteen

  From Eagle Pass in Maverick County, across the river from Piedras Negras, the Rio Grande drops seven hundred and twenty-six feet in a few hundred miles until it flows into the Gulf below Brownsville at Brazos Island.

  There is a deceptive illusion of lushness near the riverbanks, but for the most part it is a burned land of scraggly brush, dry hills, weed, lizard, cedar, and salty creek beds that slant down from the Anacacho Mountains to the north. To the northeast is Uvalde, where John Nance Garner lived and died in a broad and pretty valley, noted in his declining years only for his brief statement about the value of the office of the Vice-President of the United States. “It’s about as much use as a pitcher of warm spit,” he said.

  Here all along the valley from Cameron and Willacy counties on the Gulf through Hidalgo, Start, Zapata, Webb, Dimmit, Zavala, and Maverick, the American citizens of Mexican ancestry have, through the exercise of their right to vote, taken control of county functions: school boards, zoning, police and fire protection, road departments, library services, county welfare, and all the other boards and commissions which spring full grown from the over-fertilized minds of the political animals. This has been a slow and inevitable process for fifty years, and it is understandable that during this time most of the Anglos have been squeezed out of participation in county government. Some of those squeezed out were doubtless of exceptional competency. But so are some of the new ones. And the world keeps turning, and just as much money finds its way into the wrong pockets as under the old regime.

  Sergeant Paul Sigiera saw us on Thursday morning at nine thirty after a twenty-minute wait in his outer office. There was room in his office for a gray steel desk, three straight-backed oak chairs without arms, and two green filing cabinets. He was in his thirties, in short-sleeved, sweat-darkened khakis. He had black bangs down almost to his eyebrows, anthracite eyes, and a desperado mustache. The small window was open and a big fan atop the file cabinets turned back and forth, back and forth, ruffling the corners of the papers on his desk and giving a recurrent illusion of comfort.

  “Friends,” he said in a Texican twang, “the goddarn compressor quit again, and it is hot as a fresh biscuit in heah. They don’t fix it quick, I’m gonna assing me out to patrol and ride around with the cold air turned on high. Now what was it you wanted?”

  “We’re from Florida,” I said. “My name is McGee and this is my friend Professor Meyer, a world-famous economist. Perhaps, Sergeant, you remember reading in the paper about Professor Meyer’s boat being blown up in the Atlantic Ocean just off Fort Lauderdale on the fifth of this month.”

  “I maybe do remember something.”

  “Three people died and no bodies were recovered. We have been trying to trace the person responsible, and there is a faint chance that he may have lived here as a young man before he went off to the University of Texas. He may have even been born here. His name is, or was, Cody T. W. Pittler.”

  He studied us. His smile was amiable. “Before I come to my senses and come back home here, I worked Vice in Beaumont, and I saw the underside of everything, and I heard every scam known to mankind. You come on very smooth and reliable-like, just like every good scam does. So you fellas just empty out all the ID out of your wallets and pockets right here in front of me. Hang on to the money and the wallets, and I’ll just poke around with the rest of it. Now if you’d just as soon not do that, you can get on up and leave and I’ll go on to the next customer.”

  He took his time. He went through Meyer’s little stack of paper and plastic first. “What were you doing in Canada, Professor?”

  “Giving a series of lectures. My boat with my niece aboard was blown up while I was up there. The Miami Herald called me to tell me about it and ask questions. I flew back as soon as I could get a reservation.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Myself. I give talks, do consulting work, write papers.”

  “What kind of address is this?”

  “I have no address actually. That’s the slip at Bahia Mar where my boat has been moored for quite a few years. I lived aboard.”

  “So your house got blown up.”

  “That’s right.”

  “When I was a little kid my gramma’s house burned up. She lost everything. For years after, she’d remember something and then start crying because she’d know it went up in flames too.”

  “It is … difficult,” Meyer said.

  “This credit card here. What’s the limit on it?”

  “Limit?”

  “How much can you charge on it?”

  “I don’t really know. I think it’s five thousand.”

  He looked at the picture on Meyer’s driving license, holding it up as he looked carefully at Meyer. He nodded, pushed the little pile back toward Meyer, and began on mine.

  He started with the license and the comparison, then read the license. “What does a salvage consultant do, McGee?”

  “Advises people about how to go about salvaging something.”

  “Underwater?”

  “Sometimes. And I do salvage work on a contingency basis, a percentage of recovery.”

  After a few more casual questions, he pushed my stack back and I stowed it away.

  “Now let’s get a couple of things straight
that bother me some,” he said. “You are coming down here into my backyard looking for somebody that killed three people.”

  “I guess you could put it that way,” Meyer said.

  “What other way is there, Professor? And so that makes you some kind of amateur detectives, don’t it?”

  “I guess we are doing what a detective would do.”

  “Why don’t you leave it up to the people who know what the hell they’re doing? You may be messing up a professional investigation. Ever think of that?”

  “There isn’t any investigation. At least, not in the way …” Meyer paused and shrugged and dug into his portfolio and took out the Xerox sheets of the clippings from the paper.

  Sigiera read the account. “So this Pittler is some kind of terrorist?”

  “We believe Pittler could be the Evan Lawrence that was reported killed in the explosion, along with his wife, who was my niece, and Captain Jenkins, my friend.”

  “No terrorists?”

  “No terrorists,” I said. “And three hundred thousand missing from the woman’s estate, cleaned out before they went to Florida.”

  “It says here they were newlyweds.”

  “And so they were.”

  “How’d you people come up with that name?”

  Meyer explained about the yearbooks, and the days of studying the pictures. He showed Sigiera the color print of Evan Lawrence.

  “Good-looking man. Doesn’t mean much, though, does it? I caught me a guide last year, pretty as a movie actor. He’d led three groups of braceros across the river up near Quemado and killed them, every one, for the poor pitiful pesos they had left after paying him. Eleven bodies we found in a ditch with stones piled on them. And that killer had eye-lashes you wouldn’t believe, and if you looked right at him, he blushed.” He pulled his wet shirt away from his chest, and said, “Question. What do you do if you find him?”

  “Hold him for the authorities,” I said.