“I don’t know exactly what to think. I just feel sort of depressed about it.”
“Do you love her?”
“What can I say? I feel very good being with her. I like to look at her. I like to listen to her talk. We have a lot of dumb little private personal games we play. When I’m away from her I miss her.”
“How does she feel about you?”
“Sort of the same. But she says it has never been enough. She says she has never been able to really let go completely with me because I keep a certain distance from her. Perhaps I do. If so, maybe it’s a flaw in my character. She says we’re a convenience to each other, a handy shack job without complications or obligations, and she says that it is not a very noble preoccupation for either of us. She says that at first she thought it was going to be everything, because each time we were together, we got further and further into each other, into knowing and understanding. But it went only so far and then stopped. I did not stop anything on purpose. The accusation makes me feel … sort of puzzled and inadequate.”
“Does she really want the job?”
“As badly, she says, as she ever wanted anything in her life.”
“Why don’t you follow her out there?”
“I belong right here.”
“With all anchors set, all lines made fast?”
“I guess so.”
“Want to marry her?”
“I don’t want to marry anybody.”
She smiled, hitched closer, took my hand in both of hers. “Hey, can you remember back eleven years?”
“Of course.”
“We had the same problem, my dear, in a different degree. I really wanted to fall in love with you. I thought it would be good for me. Turned out we could love each other in a physical sense, but we couldn’t fall in love. We fell into like, not love. And that isn’t ever quite enough. Bawdy as we got at times, we were still, in an unfortunate sense, brother and sister. So we knocked it off. Without rancor. And I confess to a little sense of relief when it ended. I could stop pretending to be in love. Got a feeling of relief about her? Are you tucking it away, as an unworthy emotion? Is that making you a little ashamed of yourself, and is that why you feel depressed?”
“Doctor, you are too damned smart.”
“Just be awfully awfully glad you and she had a good run at it. That’s all. And be glad for her if she’s getting what she wants. And for heaven’s sake, don’t try to punish her as she leaves, like a little kid who’s losing all his candy.”
“Am I like that?”
“You poor dummy, everybody is like that!”
So we kissed and I walked the doctor to her car, held the door open, and gave her a proprietary pat on the behind.
When I closed the door, she ran the window down and leaned to look up at me. “I don’t want to make you angry.”
“Then don’t.”
“Please, Travis. Don’t obstruct. What I want to say, which may make the whole situation easier for you to understand, is that maybe your hotel executive friend has more capacity for genuine maturity than you have.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“It need not be an insult, if you don’t take it as one. You have been living your life on your own terms. You need make only those concessions which please you. There are always funny friends, parties, beach girls, and the occasional dragon to go after. I don’t pretend to know any of the circumstances that shaped you. I would guess that at some time during your formative years there was an incident that gave you a distaste for most kinds of permanence. None of us decide arbitrarily to be what we are. We just are what we are, through environment, heredity, and the quality of our mind and our emotions. Are you ashamed of what you are?”
“No, but …”
“And that, dear heart, has to be everybody’s answer: No, but.… And I can finish your sentence. No, but I wish I were a better person.”
“You too?”
She rested her hand on mine. “I’ve got your disease, Travis. That’s why I chickened out on marriage. I didn’t think I could handle the role. I know I couldn’t. But I do get so awful damn lonely sometimes.” Her hand tightened on mine.
“And they tell me it can get even lonelier.”
“I know.”
“So, Doctor Laura, after my bird has flown, maybe you could offer some physical comfort, and accept some.”
“I think I would like that very much. It doesn’t have to be a case of turning the clock back. Somebody to hang on to in the long, long dark night, somebody warm, somebody breathing warmth against my flesh. Somebody giving a damn. Even just a little damn.”
I bent clumsily through the window and kissed her mouth. When I straightened I thumped my head on the top of the opening. She laughed. I told her doctors should have more sympathy, and she laughed again and backed out and drove away.
Meyer arrived at a quarter past one, as I was getting ready for bed. “Who stays open this late?” I asked him. “Barbers or clothing stores?”
“Was I supposed to report?”
“Don’t get stuffy. I just thought you might be here while I was out to dinner, to take any call that might come from Sigiera.”
“I came back and dropped off the clothes I bought. And then I went back to that Rawson again. The old lady had me stay and eat with her. And we’ve been talking. Her name is Margaret Howey, and she is really a hell of a woman.”
“Going to buy it?”
“What? The boat? Yes, of course. It’s a good buy, and it’s roomier than the Keynes was. The insurance will cover most of it.”
“What are you going to call it?”
“Times have changed. Perceptions change. Fashions change. Also, a boat has to fit its name. I thought first it might be the Adam Smith. But Margaret and I decided that the Thorstein Veblen would be nice.”
“The who?”
“Veblen died in 1929 at the age of seventy-two. He was an economist, and some of his theories became clouded by his sociological theories. His book The Theory of the Leisure Class, with its ideas about conspicuous consumption, had a vogue for a time. I have never been a Veblenian myself. But Margaret thinks it makes a neat name for a boat.”
“Whatever Margaret thinks.”
“It will be utterly meaningless to everyone who graduated from high school in the past twenty years. That’s the nice part of it.”
“What will you call it for short?”
“For short? The Thorstein Veblen is quite short enough.”
When he is in that mood, there is nothing reasonable that you can say to him. He told me Margaret would move north in two weeks, and he could have possession on August sixteenth, and on that day he would move it to the berth where The John Maynard Keynes had always squatted, with its meager freeboard making it look underprivileged.
Twenty
Tuesday, the third of August, was one of those rare Atlantic coast days with no wind at all. Every scrap of cloth on every boat docked at Bahia Mar hung limp as rejection. The endless midday traffic droned past the marina and motel, under the pedestrian bridge over to the beach, leaving an oppressive chemical stink in the air.
There was a sheen of oil on the boat basin. Compressors chugged, cooling stale air belowdecks. Brown girls lay stunned on open decks, sweat rolling off them. A ship’s cat lay in the shade of a tarp aboard a nearby motor sailer, sleeping on its back with all four feet in the air.
Sigiera phoned at one fifteen.
“McGee? This here is your smart Texican law officer speaking.”
“Glad to hear from you.”
“Thought you might be. I didn’t go bulling into this thing. What I did, I tried to think of the angles. I tried to add up everything I’d ever heard about the Chappel family, and I didn’t move in on Mrs. Chappel until I had a real good angle to play. This is my angle. A bunch of good old boys are going to try to put Sid Chappel in the state legislature next chance. He’s willing. God knows he’s willing. He’s taken to shaking hands with people on the street he
doesn’t hardly know.
“So I got out there this morning about ten, and Miz Clara was in the pool, and the maid took me out and left me. I can tell you, it’s hard to believe she’s got to be forty-seven if a day. Pretty little thing, built like a schoolgirl. I just come back from there.”
“And?”
“Don’t try to rush me along. In some cases it’s smart to kind of hem and haw and beat around until they finally ask. And she did. She said she would sure like to know what I had on my mind. That’s when you kind of blurt it out, like you just hated to say it. So I said I’d come to do her a favor. I said some political enemies of her husband had me checking out the old Cody Pittler file, because they had the idea of using it against him when he would up and run for office. She asked me what that could possibly mean to her. She said I should talk to Sid. And I told her I was talking to her because she was the one who kept in touch with Cody, as a favor to Helen June. I tell you, McGee, she came up out of that pool water like a porpoise. One minute she’s in the water, and the next minute she’s standing in front of me, sopping wet. She asked me where I’d heard a damn fool thing like that, and I said Helen June tended to talk when she had more than three, and she said some words about Helen June that I didn’t think a lady like that would know. She knew lots of them, and how to hang them together in chunks.”
“And so?”
“And so I asked her if she’d heard from Helen June lately, and she said she’d gotten a call yesterday in the afternoon, and she had written down what Helen June told her, and she had planned on driving the fifty-five miles up to Del Rio, like she usually did with messages for him, and mailing it from there. So I told her that what she could do would be give it to me quiet like, and if it ever came up, I would swear that she had been intercepting messages and turning them over to me, and it would turn back on whoever was after Sid’s hide. And if she didn’t want to—right here I slapped my pocket—I’d just have to hand her this here warrant—that I didn’t have—and search the house. So she called me some of the names she called Helen June, and she was so darn cute, I was willing to forget the seventeen years she’s got to have on me and tote her right over onto one of those big sun cots they got. And she knew what I had in mind and liked stirring me up that way, and pretty soon we both started to laughing. She went and got the letter, and I got it right here. The note inside was typed. It didn’t say dear anything, and there was no name at the end. I’ll read it to you.”
“That would be nice.”
“ ‘Two men came here with your recent picture, claiming you have been killing women for their money and using other names. One was a professor named Meyer and he is a very nice man. He said you blew up his niece named Norma in a boat with two other people. He said you killed somebody named Doris and somebody named Isabel and maybe more. They made me believe you really did. It makes me feel sick. If you are doing things like this, terrible things, then the police should stop you. The other man is a lot taller and he has sort of a mean look sometimes. And he can fight. Be careful. I tried not to tell them anything. They got my address from Boomer. I think you would remember him.’
“So I asked her if those were the exact words and she said they weren’t. She said she had taken notes and then put it down in a better way than Helen June had told it. She said Helen June had cussed a lot. I suppose you want the address to where she was sending it.”
“It would be nice.”
“It was going to Señor Roberto Hoffmann, Apartado Postal Number seven one oh, Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Did you get that?”
“I wrote it down,” I said, and read it back.
“Now what will you do?” he asked.
“We’ll go down there and show the picture.”
“Well, did I do good?”
“You were practically perfect.”
“I hope you two know you are dealing with a flake, a weirdo.”
“We know that. We plan to be very careful.”
“Let me tell you something about old Mexico. If he’s been down there a long time, with money to spend, then he is dug in, and he’ll have some good Mexican connections. You try to put local law on him and you will be the ones on the inside, rattling the bars.”
“What’s to keep her from writing the same thing over again and mailing it?”
“She and me, we reached an understanding. I told her if she did that, I would go to Sid and tell him how she has been screwing around writing notes to a guy that is still wanted for killing his own father. And I would tell him she had been doing it behind his back. I took a chance there. Maybe she told Sid. But she hadn’t, and it scared hell out of her. He is known as a hitter. Besides, she feels like Helen June betrayed her. They swore never to tell anybody. She looked like she’d like to kill Helen June. There’s another thing too.”
“Such as?”
“It was sort of play pretend for her. It took her back to when she was twenty and Cody was fifteen and she wished he was older, back to when she and Helen June were real close. She’d bought Helen June’s idea of how it happened, Bryce Pittler trying to kill himself and finally shooting himself when they struggled for the gun. And all the trouble was on account of Bryce marrying that trashy little second wife, who got what she deserved. All she ever had to send before was addresses, and a note saying she and Helen June hoped he was okay. He had phoned her a couple of times, making sure she never told Helen June his address. But then all this comes up, the idea he could have been killing people. Little old Clara, she doesn’t want any part of that kind of going on. That could be some kind of trouble that would hurt her husband and her and spoil the life they’ve built up. And Helen June had been kind of hysterical over the phone. That took the fun out of it too. Okay, I did good, but it was ready to come apart anyway. You two did even better up there. He kept his two lives fastened together with a very thin thread, McGee, and it took hard work and luck to even find out it existed.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s an official file here needs closing. So you could let me know.”
“Could you get an assignment to go down there with us?”
“You’ve got to be out of your mind! The budget we got, we’re down three men here already, and it could be more. We stay on our side of the river and they stay on theirs. Sometimes they’ll bring somebody to the middle of the bridge for us, and we do the same for them. But it doesn’t happen often. When you go down there, walk easy. Get yourself a local and pay him good.”
Meyer got back at two o’clock, and I told him the conversation I’d had with Paul Sigiera. He sat, utterly quiet, sorting it out after I’d finished.
“One thing we know,” he said. “He couldn’t be Roberto Hoffmann in Cancún and be Evan Lawrence in Cancún. There must be endless thousands of American tourists flowing through that place, but the Americans in permanent or semipermanent residence must be well known to each other and to the resident Mexicans. So we start with Evan Lawrence’s friend Willy, who sells time shares in condominium apartments, and this Willy might know a local who will help us.”
“I checked with Fran at Triple A Travel, and she said the best and quickest way to get there is go to Miami and take Mexicana. I think she said it leaves at four thirty. We can get a tourist card at the airline desk. Mexicana and Aero Mexico always say all flights are full, but they leave about two thirds full, except at Christmastime, including the standby people. Hot there, she said. Very very hot. We can try to set up a rental car in the Miami airport, but she said that hardly ever works too well. No problem with hotels at this time of year, she said. When do you want to go?”
“Right now,” Meyer said.
As it turned out, we weren’t able to leave until the next day, the fourth, a day of hot wind and rain that lasted all the way to the parking garage.
The severe young man at the airline desk took the cash money from Meyer for round-trip tickets. My protests did not work. Return trip unreserved. We were on standby for the flight to Cancún. We went do
wnstairs to a bus which took us to a new terminal building, where we sat in plastic chairs in a broad vista of plastic and filled out the tourist permit forms. We had tried to look tourist. Mesh shirts, seer-sucker pants, sandals, the big ranch hats we’d picked up in Texas, battered carry-on bags. Meyer had a lot of funds strapped around his waist under his shirt, in a canvas money belt. Money, he has always said, solves the unanticipated problems. It won’t buy happiness, but it will rent a fair share of it.
It was a one-class flight on a 727, with no room for my knees. The flight time was two hours and a bit, and the hardworking Mexican flight attendants served a meal. There was an hour time change, so it was only a little past five fifteen when we began our long curving descent into the Cancún airport. The pilot took us over the Cancún peninsula. It was a spectacular view, lowering clouds overhead, storms out at sea, and a long slant of golden sunshine striking the column of tall hotels along the beach.
Meyer, thorough as ever, had arranged to read up on the place, and he explained it to me en route. “It is that rarity,” he said, “a totally artificial community, without a history, without traditions. Less than ten years ago there were about thirty-five people living in the mainland village of Cancún. Several narrow islands stretched out into the Gulf. Mexico needed hard dollars, so they took aerial photographs of the seacoast and decided that this would make an attractive resort. Now there are over fifty thousand permanent residents. They made low-interest loans to people who wanted to build hotels and resorts. They linked the islands with a causeway and bridges, built an airport, built a road down the coast to Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo, and the dollars do indeed flow in. There have been problems, of course: help for the hotels, food production, and transportation. Now they are getting small cruise ships and convoys of recreational vehicles and yachts and flocks of tour buses. It has become a popular resort for middle-class Mexicans and Americans. Lately there have been a lot of condominium developments scattered near the hotels.”
I glanced at him. He had the window seat. He was staring straight ahead, expressionless. He sensed me looking at him and turned toward me.
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