The Scared Stiff

by Donald E. Westlake

  Oh, no. The cousins again? I didn’t want to go back in that miserable river, this time with all my clothes on. Crouched over, I ran to the front window and looked out and saw Arturo just climbing out of his Impala.

  Arturo! I’d forgotten all about him. I’d asked Luz to phone him, so this morning she must have, because here he was.

  I forgot lunch. I hadn’t actually been hungry anyway. I went to the door and opened it and said, “Hey, Arturo, how you doing?”

  “Better than you,” he said, and gave me a grim smile, and shook his head as he came in. “I hear you had a rough night here.”

  “You bet.”

  He shook his head again. “Those bufóns from Tapitepe.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Manfredo and Luis and the other Luis with the bad arm and José and Pedro and poco Pedro.”

  “Yeah, them. They’re stupid as shit,” Arturo said, “but they can be dangerous.”

  “I got that,” I assured him.

  “You told Luz to call me,” he said, “so she did, and I come down and had a talk with her.”

  “And?”

  “And they could come back, hermano. That story, how she’s dancin’ with a truck driver from the factory, that don’t hold up.”

  “It don’t?”

  “How come nobody around here knows this truck driver, never seen him before? Manfredo’s stupid, but he ain’t that stupid. He might ask around, Who’s this truck driver? Then he comes back.”

  “Would he hurt Luz?”

  “Not if you ain’t here. Luz can talk her way out of it, unless they got you right here like evidence.”

  “I suppose so. You got any ideas?”

  He said, “I’ll take you back to Sabanon, to begin with. You got stuff to pack?”

  “Not much.” I felt a pang at the thought of leaving. Two days ago, I’d thought the house a hellhole and Luz a dangerous tramp, and now I realized I was going to miss them both. I said, “I’d like to say so long to Luz.”

  “I said your so-longs,” he told me. “Luz says to tell you she liked having you around; you’re a funny guy. And a good dancer.”

  “She said that, huh?”

  Arturo grinned at me. “You never know, hermano,” he said. “A few more days around here, you might begin to forget Lola. Good thing I’m takin’ you away.”

  “Saved again,” I said, and went to get my stuff.

  27

  The next few days at Mamá and Papá’s house were, I suppose, restful, but also unsettling. The problem was, I now slept in the bed where Lola and I always sleep together when we visit, so the night memories got really intense.

  I preferred the days, where I now had a new persona. My name was Felicio, and I was a friend of Arturo’s from San Cristobal, and I’d had a recent terrible tragedy that nobody would talk about — a death for which I held myself responsible was hinted — as a result of which I had taken a vow of silence. This story was not broadcast all over the place but was brought out as necessary for the consumption of neighbors and friends.

  Arturo had more phone conversations with Lola, and the insurance situation continued to go along smoothly. And he’d found me some recent American magazines, to help pass the time.

  Monday afternoon, I spent an hour alone in my bedroom, reading those magazines, until I got bored, so I got up and opened the door, and in the living room were Arturo and Mamá and Papá seated with a man whose back was to me, but who was somebody I was sure I didn’t know. He wore a suit and tie, in all this heat and humidity, and he had a clipboard on his lap and a pen in his hand. He looked like an American real estate salesman, but he was speaking fluent Spanish. He was asking questions. About me?

  Arturo saw me in the doorway and did a quick urgent head-shake: Stay out of here. I stepped back, retreating into the bedroom, and quietly shut the door.

  What was this? Something to do with my death? Or something else entirely? What should I do?

  Mamá came sidling in, shutting the door behind her, putting her finger to her lips. I looked at her, full of questions, and she pointed at me and then pointed at the window.

  What? This is the second floor. She wanted me to go out the window?

  Yes. To demonstrate, she picked up my magazines and tossed them out the window. Then she came close and whispered, “The insurance!”

  “Insurance investigator?” I was appalled. Everything was supposed to be going so smoothly.

  She nodded, pointed urgently at the window again, and went over to stick my suitcase under the bed.

  Every bedroom I’m in, sooner or later somebody wants me to go out the window. While Mamá smoothed the ruffled bed, I went over to look down at the magazines strewn on the hard ground eight feet below me.

  Damn it to hell. All right, all right. One leg over the sill, then the other, lower myself more slowly than Mamá likes. I dangled a few seconds, then dropped and hit the packed earth, first with my feet, then my knees, then my elbows. My forehead landed on Newsweek.

  I was at the back of the house. Beside me was the enclosed part of downstairs, the fuchsia-colored vertical slats behind which were the freezer, the hot-water heater, some guns and fishing poles, and Madonna, the brood sow.

  And me, until the insurance investigator went away. Rising, I became aware of a whole lot of new pains in my body, including my head. When I stooped to pick up the magazines, I felt briefly dizzy. Carrying the magazines under my left arm, I went around the corner and under the house, into the open part with the concrete blocks and old truck parts and vertical plumbing pipes. The door to the enclosed section was under here, and that’s where I headed.

  As I went, my mind was full of questions. What had gone wrong? In her last two phone calls, Lola had thought this was almost over, that everything was going along exactly according to plan. Was this somehow just a formality, down here in Guerrera? Wouldn’t that be awfully expensive, to send a man all this way? We’d been counting on it being too expensive.

  Could it be that the insurance company keeps a man in South America to run a simple check on cases like this? Or maybe a bunch of insurance companies share the expense of keeping the guy, to cut down on fraud? Exactly the kind of fraud that comes out of little countries with less than first-rate record-keeping.

  But that’s why we’d been so thorough. How could there be any question of fraud in this case? There were all those eyewitnesses, there was the death certificate, there was the funeral, the grave, the undertaker’s bill. For God’s sake, there was videotape of the funeral, this whole huge family all in mourning. What more could they possibly want?

  I plagued myself with all these questions while I hurried around to the door under the house that led into the enclosed area. When I opened that wood-slat door, Madonna snorted a question of her own: What’s with you, buster?

  “Pay no attention to me,” I muttered, shutting the door. “Go on with what you were doing.”

  Madonna snuffled her disdain and rooted around in her straw, pretending I wasn’t there. It was dim in here, but not dark. Two very dusty windows gave illumination, one at the side, over Madonna’s pen, and the other facing the street. While Madonna, a thousand-pound bloated white sausage almost seven feet long, grumbled about this intrusion into a lady’s boudoir while refusing to look at me or acknowledge my presence, I worked my way around all the stored (and forgotten) crap in here to the front window and looked out. Would I be able to see the inspector when he left?

  Oh, good, it was perfect. From here, looking at an angle, I could just see the bottom of the stairs down from the living room. And across the street, that white Land Rover must be his vehicle.

  There was someone in the Land Rover, at the wheel. He looked as though he was reading a photo novel. A chauffeur? He wore a white panama hat, not very chauffeurlike at all. Then he lifted his head to look over toward the house, and I flinched.

  The cop. Lola’s cop, the one she’d had to punch in the nose. Rafael Rafez.

  28

  He sta
yed upstairs for an hour, driving everybody crazy. Madonna didn’t like me down below any more than I liked the insurance investigator up above, but we both had to put up with it.

  At last I heard the clomp-clomp of descending footsteps. I’d been sitting on an old massive television set, leafing through my magazines without really absorbing — or reabsorbing — much content (or contentment), but now I stood, put the magazines atop the TV, and went over to look out the window.

  Here he came, a sour-faced, pale-skinned black-haired guy of about forty, wearing black-rimmed glasses. He had a nose like a can opener. He didn’t look satisfied.

  Rafez got out of the Land Rover as the insurance investigator reached ground level. They walked toward one another and chatted briefly in the middle of the road. It seemed to me that Rafez asked if the investigator wanted Rafez to go upstairs and kick some ass, and the investigator told him No, or Not yet, or Maybe later. They looked along the street and spoke a bit more, and then they got into the Land Rover, Rafez at the wheel. They made a U-turn and went away.

  For sure? Leaving the disgruntled Madonna behind, and my magazines as well, I crept out of the enclosed area and along its outside wall under the house until I could see down the street, just in time to watch the white Land Rover turn left onto La Carretera, headed out of town.

  Oh, boy. I raced up the stairs and into the living room; everybody in there was extremely upset. Mamá paced back and forth, rubbing her hands together, and Papá was so overwrought his beer bottle kept clicking against his teeth. Arturo had a beer bottle in each hand. He gave one to me and said, “We gotta talk.” He was very solemn and serious, much more than I’d ever seen him before.

  I said, “Arturo, I don’t get it. What’s going on with that guy?”

  “He’s suspicious,” he said. “He don’t know what he’s suspicious about; all he knows is, he’s suspicious.”

  “His driver,” I said, “is the cop that investigated my death, the one Lola socked.”

  Mamá and Papá both wailed at that news, and Arturo’s brows lowered so far it was a miracle he could still see. He said, “Rafez?”

  “That’s the one.” I drank beer like Papá, then began to pace like Mamá. “What’s wrong here? What’s the problem? Everything we did was perfect.”

  “Maybe too perfect,” Arturo said. “Maybe that’s what got them suspicious, they never seen such a perfect case before.”

  “No,” I said, “it doesn’t work that way. If they don’t see something wrong, they don’t follow through. So what the hell do they see wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just so they don’t see you. You can’t stay here no more.”

  “Hell and damnation,” I said. “Where can I go next, Arturo? I’ve been all over the country.”

  “Well, you can’t be here,” he told me. “They’re sniffin’ around, and so’s Manfredo and them from Tapitepe. They’ll be hearing about a deaf mute up in Rancio and a guy with a vow of silence been livin’ here, and if the insurance guy don’t show up, Manfredo and them will.”

  “So where can I go?”

  “I’m rackin’ my brain,” he said. “The problem is, you can’t go to nobody else in the family, because everybody that’s lookin’ for you is gonna go to the same people. I don’t know what we do, because you can’t go to nobody we know.”

  “That doesn’t leave much,” I said.

  We all paced for a while, except Papá, who found walking a distraction when he was drinking beer. Then, dubiously, Arturo said, “Maybe…”

  We all looked at him. I said, “Yes?”

  Arturo looked at Mamá and said, “Ifigenia?”

  Mamá, whose name is Lucia, briskly shook her head and said a lot of words very fast, some of which I caught; it was the Spanish equivalent of Are you out of your mind? Arturo said it was worth a try. Mamma told him it was on his head, not hers. Arturo said what the hell. Then he turned to me. “What the hell, it’s worth a try.

  “What is, Arturo?” I asked him.

  “Everybody knows,” he explained, “me and my wife Ifigenia is estranged. I go there every once in a while, we make a baby, have a fight, I come back here for a couple years. In the family, anybody that knows about what you’re doin’ knows Ifigenia never liked Lola, never had any use for her, and didn’t want me to do nothing about this anyway. I had to ‘splain to her, over and over, that even if it all went to hell, I wasn’t doin’ any crimes and nothin’ bad could happen to me, but she still don’t want nothin’ to do with it and don’t want me to have nothin’ to do with it. So who would expect you to hide out at her house?”

  “Nobody,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “Including me,” I said. “If she’s that against the whole idea, she won’t let me stay there. Or she’ll turn me in.”

  “It’s worth a try,” he repeated. “I can’t think of nothin’ else, so what the hell. Lemme at least call her on the phone.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Any port in a storm.”

  He looked interested. “Yeah? That’s nice. You just make that up?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re pretty good,” Arturo told me, and crossed over to the telephone to make his call.

  Well, I could see him regretting that one right away. He got a few sentences into the conversation, saying, “Ifigenia,” in honeyed tones two or three times, and then the squawks started out of the earpiece. Not in her house. How dare he make such a suggestion, doesn’t he ever think about his children? How long is she supposed to put up with a lowlife? When is he gonna fix that stair he promised to fix last September?

  Arturo said this, and he said that. His eyebrows lifted, and they lowered. He bobbed and weaved, moving from foot to foot, as though in an actual physical boxing match. Mamá gave me the evil eye — see what you’ve done to my son? — and Papá went off for more beer, bringing back four bottles. I was grateful for mine.

  Well, Arturo finally managed to get off the phone, and when he looked at me his expression was speculative, as though he were wondering if it would relieve his feelings if he kicked the crap out of his troublesome brother-in-law. I said, “Sorry, Arturo.”

  “De nada,” he said, and sighed. “I gotta do somethin’ about you, man,” he said. “It’s come down to it now. Either we find someplace safe, or I gotta get rid of you myself.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I wouldn’t give you to Manfredo and them,” he said, “they’d screw it up somehow, leave evidence; they’d get your fingerprints or somethin’, the cops would. I’d rather feed you to Madonna.”

  “Arturo,” I said, “don’t joke.”

  The look he gave me was not comical. “Barry,” he said, using the wrong name for emphasis, “don’t you know what’s goin’ on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I don’t.”

  “You think we’re goin’ through all this for you?”

  “Well, it’s mostly for Lola,” I said. “I understand that.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And everybody else that’s involved,” I went on. “None of us wants to get caught at this.”

  “Caught?” He looked at me as though I was very dumb. “Who’s gonna get caught? Doin’ what? What are you talkin’ about?”

  “Well, the family.”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t you worry about us, we’re not in trouble, we didn’t do nothin’ to break the law. And neither did you.”

  I frowned at him. “I didn’t?”

  “No,” he said. “You wanna play a joke, pretend you’re dead, go ahead, nobody can stop you. Nobody can stop us, we go along with the gag. That ain’t a crime.”

  “Busting up that car is.”

  “Big deal. They make you pay for a Beetle.”

  “Arturo, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re wrong about this. We are committing a crime.”

  “No, we ain’t,” he insisted. “Don’t you know the only one that broke the law here? That if you
get caught, she goes to jail? That’s right, man: Lola. When she put in that insurance claim that was a crime, the only crime anybody committed. They wanna go after you for conspiracy? Too much trouble. They got the one did the fraud; they throw her in jail; that’s it, next case.”

  “Arturo—”

  “I like you, Felicio,” he said, sounding as though he didn’t like me at all, “but you ain’t my sister. You ain’t even my brother. I’ll do anything for Lola, you know that, so that’s why I’m playing along with this. But I gotta tell you, it’s her I’m worried about, not you. I know she wouldn’t be happy if you got killed, so I’ll do what I can to keep you alive. But one way, you know, Manfredo and them from Tapitepe are right. If you’re dead, nobody’s in trouble. So if it comes down to you dead or Lola in jail, I’m sorry, but I’m gonna lose another brother.”

  29

  What do they call it, the law of unintended consequences? You think you’re so smart, you think you’re so clever. You scheme and scam and think you’ve got it all doped out, and there’s always some other angle you didn’t take into account.

  So what had I done this time? I thought what I was doing was scamming an insurance company, which was already scary enough, but it turns out what I actually did was put a six-hundred-thousand-dollar price on my head. And then I marooned myself in a place full of people anxious to collect, where I didn’t have any resources of my own and where, it now turned out, I didn’t even have any allies. Not when push, you know, came to shove.

  All of a sudden, I didn’t want any more beer. More beer would just muddy my head, and if we’d reached the point where Arturo contemplated feeding me to Madonna, I could not afford a muddy head.

  I put down my beer. I said, “Maybe…”

  They all looked at me. They were very interested in what I had to say. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything to say. I’d been thinking, Maybe I could get the American visa now and leave Guerrera right away, but in the first place it wouldn’t be right away, and in the second place I shouldn’t call attention to myself while insurance investigators were wandering around Sabanon. So I didn’t have anything to say after all.