The Scared Stiff

by Donald E. Westlake

  “They should be,” I told him. “They’re real.”

  He lifted a surprised eyebrow at me, then held the birth certificate in both hands and lifted it so he could look at it with the ceiling fluorescent behind it. Then he did the same with the driver’s license. For the passport, he took a magnifying glass out of the center drawer of the desk and bent low over the first two pages. Then he put the magnifying glass back in the drawer and held up the passport to show it to me, open to the page with my picture. “But that is you,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked at the picture himself, then dropped the passport on the desk. “So you are Felicio Tobón,” he said.

  “It would seem so,” I agreed.

  “Yet you are an American.”

  I shrugged, with a sheepish little smile. These anomalies happen.

  He thought it over. He drummed his fingers on the desk. Then he doodled awhile on the yellow pad. Then he did some silent whistling as he gazed over my head at the far wall. Then he nodded, apparently agreeing with himself about something, and focused on me again. “So it’s actually a case of murder,” he said.

  I blinked. “Murder? Whose murder?”

  “Oh, come now, Mr. Emory,” he said, “or whoever you are. You are not Felicio Tobón, although your photo is in his passport and you possess all his identification. How do you happen to possess his identification?”

  “That’s my picture on the driver’s license too,” I pointed out.

  “I saw that,” he said impatiently. “I can only assume bribes were paid.”

  “No,” I said. “You know that’s not possible. Too much bureaucracy.” I felt I should be saying warm or cold, but I was damned if I would.

  He nodded; he knew I was right about the bureaucracy. Then he thought a little more, eyes inward. Then, as though talking mostly to himself, he said, “All we need is the body.”

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, Felicio Tobón’s body. Good luck, pal, I thought. If that was all he needed, I was home free. Except I wasn’t, and I knew I wasn’t.

  “Carlos Perez,” he said.

  I watched him. Now what?

  “He is the one,” Rafez decided, “who would have disposed of the body. In fact,” he said, sitting up more alertly, looking more intent, “he is related to the Tobóns!”

  I watched him.

  “There are Tobóns in Tapitepe as well,” he said. “That truck will turn out to belong to one of them, and you were in it, which is where this manure stain on your traveling bag came from. Oh, yes, Mr. Emory, I am a detective.”

  I watched him.

  “You were in Tapitepe,” he said, “dressed as Emory but with Felicio Tobón’s identification. You were in that truck, which ran out of gas. A falling out among thieves? What is your relationship with the Tobóns? First Carlos Perez in Rancio, then those scoundrels in Tapitepe. What is the link there?”

  Behind me, the driver said something, an explanation or reminder of something. Rafez listened, alert, then nodded and said, “Si, si. Gracias.” To me he said, “There was a motor vehicle accident in Tapitepe tonight, a truck and a motorcycle, involving Tobóns.”

  I said, “Was anyone hurt?”

  “I believe everyone was hurt,” he said, “but no one was killed.”

  “Good,” I said, by which I meant, bad.

  “So that is connected as well,” he told me.

  I watched him.

  I saw it come over him, like sunrise. His head lifted, and he looked at me as though I were a Christmas present. “Felicio Tobón!” he cried.

  I watched him. He leaned toward me over the desk, his voice lowering, as though this were a secret just between the two of us. “Is Lola Lee your sister?”

  “Now,” I said, “I can explain.” And I did.

  45

  He was a good listener. I left out Luz, but I told him the scheme, and about Arturo’s part in it, and Carlos and Manfredo and them from Tapitepe. I included dinner with Leon Kaplan, but I left out Carlita Carnal, saying merely that we “got” the application letter from the Bureau of Records. “And that’s all,” I finished.

  “Well, no,” he said. “That isn’t all. But it’s a great deal. You are very resourceful, Mr. Lee.”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d rather be Felicio. I’m trying to get used to it.”

  “Among all those other names.”

  “Exactly.”

  He studied me. He liked me now, I could see that, because I was a rascal now, and he could control rascals. “You have been very clever,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And at times very lucky.”

  “And at times very unlucky.”

  That made him laugh. “Am I one of your unlucky times?”

  “I think you’ll tell me,” I said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “It was intelligent of you to tell me the truth when you did. Or part of the truth.”

  “I didn’t tell you any lies,” I said.

  He said, “Are you Catholic?”

  “No. But I was married in the Church. Down in Sabanon.”

  “For Catholics,” he told me, “there are two kinds of sin.”

  “Mortal and venial. I know about that.”

  His smile was becoming edgy. “I was thinking of a different two kinds of sin.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “There are sins of commission,” he explained, “and there are sins of omission. You say you told me no lies, so there are no sins of commission. Will you say you also committed no sins of omission?”

  “Well,” I said, and shrugged, “nobody’s perfect.”

  “Which is what makes my job possible,” he assured me. “Let me congratulate you on your wife, by the way. A very attractive woman.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She told me you were attracted.”

  He shrugged, palms up. “At that time,” he pointed out, “you were dead.”

  “I still am,” I said. “Leon Kaplan gave up, he went back to the States. But if he finds out I’m alive, he’ll put Lola in jail. He told me so; he said it himself.”

  “You aren’t worried about what will happen to you?”

  “What have I done?” I asked him. “What crimes have I committed in Guerrera?”

  “You faked your death,” he said, surprised by my question.

  “What law did that break?” I asked him. “I made no effort to profit from that little prank, I—”

  “Prank?”

  “What else is it? If I were to dye my hair blond, I’d be faking something. Is that a crime? If I then tried to collect an inheritance that belonged to somebody who was blond, that’s a crime.”

  He didn’t like this. He didn’t like the idea that I’d been doing all this scamming and scheming without breaking a whole bunch of laws. “What about the funeral?” he demanded. “You buried someone.”

  “An indigent,” I told him, quashing my own doubts on that score. “An unknown person provided by Señor Ortiz.”

  Scornfully, he said, “Impossible. It isn’t that easy to—” And then he stopped, and blinked, and immediately became tough again. “Very unlikely. We’ll check into it.”

  Ah. I can be quick too. We will not check into it. The body Señor Ortiz provided — and the name Ortiz had struck Rafez between the eyes, I’d noticed — was actually something to do with Rafez himself, and now he knows it. He will not want that grave opened, though it would probably not be a good idea to force his hand by letting him know I know it. People who traffic in mysteriously dead bodies should not be toyed with.

  So I merely said, “It was a funeral, that’s all. Señor Ortiz provided the body, he was paid, and he hasn’t complained.”

  He cast around for something else, something to distract me from the body in my grave. “You destroyed an automobile.”

  “A terrible accident, declared so by yourself, I believe, plus all those witnesses. The car rental people are insured, and they haven’t complained.”

  �
��These forged documents,” he said, gesturing at my ID on his desk.

  “Not forged at all,” I told him. “Legitimate documents issued by your government. I have not used one of them in the commission of any crime.”

  He sat back to think about me. “So,” he said, “as far as you’re concerned, you have done nothing criminal, and there’s no reason to arrest you.”

  “Not in this country,” I said. “Not unless you decide you’re angry with me and rig something up. If Leon Kaplan finds out I’m alive, and if then I went back to the States, he might want to press charges against me as an accessory to Lola’s crime. But he’d never be able to extradite me from here on a charge like that; everybody’s got more important things to do.”

  “So you could stay here and be safe, you believe.”

  “Safe from Leon Kaplan,” I said. “I don’t know about being safe from you, or the cousins in Tapitepe, or all the curious people around who might figure out there’s something wrong with me.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “You’re right to worry about being safe from me, because now I know the one thing you don’t want generally known.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re wondering what I’m going to do about it,” he said.

  “I’m thinking of nothing else,” I assured him.

  “I’m wondering that same thing myself,” he admitted. “On the one hand, it would be satisfying and a very good mark on my record if I were to uncover this… what is the word? Old-fashioned English word.”

  “Dastardly,” I suggested.

  “Yes, exactly! I knew you’d know it. Thank you.”

  “De nada.”

  “Were I to uncover this dastardly plot,” he said, and beamed at the sound of that, “it would be a great good mark for me, which by the way I could use. It might mean a reward for me from the insurance company.”

  “Or not. I think they’re pretty miserly.”

  “Possibly,” he said. “But the sad thing, of course, would be that, even if I couldn’t find a Guerreran crime to attach to you, and possibly I could, but even if I couldn’t, your lovely wife Lola would still go to jail.”

  “I’d hate that,” I said.

  “I’m sure she would too.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Now,” he said. “What if I took a different course? What if I went along with this rather Jesuitical idea of yours that none of your sub-rosa activities have been actual crimes in terms of Guerreran law? What if I decided that it wasn’t up to me to discover an American criminal residing in America?”

  “Lola, you mean.”

  “Yes, exactly so. What if, further, I thought it would be of aid to the public peace and tranquillity if I were to take you under my wing until it is time for you — or Felicio Tobón, I mean, of course — to fly off to America? How long do you suppose that will be?”

  “Lola should get the check by the middle of the week,” I told him, “this coming week. Then she’ll fly down, I’ll get my visa, and we’re out of here.”

  “A week, then,” he said. “You would be under my protection for a week. Those oafs in Tapitepe would not bother you. No one in Guerrera would question you.”

  “Would I go back to Casa Montana Mojoca?”

  “No, no,” he said. “That’s not the best, not after you disappeared.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  “You would stay with your in-laws in Sabanon,” he decided. “No one would wonder a thing, not if I decide to protect you.”

  We looked at one another. He smiled slightly. He waited for me.

  I said, “The check Lola is to get is supposed to be six hundred thousand dollars.”

  “A fine amount of money,” he said. “And which I know to be the truth, because our friend Kaplan told me the same figure. How wise it is of you to be truthful with me.”

  “I can see that,” I said. “Tell me, do you have any thoughts? Anything that might help you decide?”

  “The term that floats in my mind,” he said, “is ten percent.”

  Sixty thousand dollars. It could have been a lot worse. “That seems very decent,” I told him.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll tell Lola to bring it with her,” I offered.

  “That would be best,” he agreed. “You understand, between us, it could not be a check. It would have to be cash.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Not siapas,” he said.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “I’d love to see that much money in siapas,” I said.

  “I’d like to see it in dollars,” he said.

  46

  We did not shake hands. It wasn’t that kind of deal. We simply smiled at one another, and stood, and the driver stood, and we went back down to the car.

  I would now be under the protection of Rafael Rafez, which meant, of course, I would now be under the eye of Rafael Rafez, but that was all right. We were now useful to each other, so we were on an equal footing. It is true he was shaking me down, but not very badly, and in fact I would be getting something of value for my sixty thousand dollars. After three weeks of constant bobbing and weaving, constant trouble, constant worry, my final week in Guerrera would be calm and serene. I would be back in our bed in our room in Mamá and Papá’s house, waiting for Lola to join me. I could relax now, and so could Rafez, because he knew he would get his sixty thousand dollars. If he didn’t, he could easily block my departure from the country. And he could do it without having to open any ambiguous graves.

  Once again, in the car, I sat next to the driver, with Rafez enjoying the expansive solitude of the backseat. Mostly, between Marona and San Cristobal, we talked about Casa Montana Mojoca, a place he knew only from brief daytime visits on duty and about which he was naturally curious. I answered his questions and tried to give him a sense of the place, but I’m not sure I succeeded. The American lifestyle can be observed more readily than it can be described.

  At San Cristobal, we dropped Rafez off at police headquarters. “Enjoy the rest of your stay,” he said, as he got out of the car.

  “Thank you, I will,” I said.

  Now there was the final hundred miles to Sabanon. I stayed in the front seat, mostly because I was too weary to move, it having been a hectic night and it now being past four-thirty in the morning. The driver was not a garrulous type anyway, so as the lights of San Cristobal faded behind us I went to sleep, not waking up until he made the right turn onto our street in Sabanon, which caused me to fall over against him. He had to elbow me out of the way while steering around the turn, and it was the elbow in the ribs that woke me.

  Dawn. I blinked at the familiar street. Some workers were already up and out, trudging barefoot to their jobs. The driver stopped in front of our fuchsia house, and I got out, as Madonna greeted me with a snurf. I would have forgotten the vinyl bag on the floor at my feet with everything I owned in it if I hadn’t tripped over it.

  “Gracias,” I told the driver, who nodded at me with that flat look of his. I shut the car door and trudged up the outside stairs and into a living room full of empty beer bottles.

  I thought I might be hungry, but I didn’t care. Home is Felicio, the prodigal son. Home and very very sleepy.

  I went straight to bed.

  47

  The first question, of course, was how we were going to tell Lola to bring sixty thousand dollars in cash with her. Was her phone tapped? Was this one? I thought probably not, in both cases, but it’s always dangerous to assume you have privacy. We wouldn’t use e-mail for the same reason, even if we still had it. That is, Arturo was webbed up here in Guerrera, but at home on Long Island we’d lost our Internet access to insolvency months ago.

  I had finally gotten out of bed sometime after noon on Sunday. The family, back from mass, was sitting around in the living room, starting the day’s beer consumption and watching soccer on television. They hadn’t known I was in the house, so when the spare room door opened and I staggered blearily
out, a certain amount of beer was spilled.

  Once that was cleaned up and the TV switched off, I could tell them all my most recent adventures. Arturo made angry noises about the behavior of Manfredo and them from Tapitepe, while Mamá and Papá clucked and expressed horror on my behalf for all the trouble I’d gone through. Arturo, through being a cabby, knew Rafael Rafez by reputation, and the reputation was not good. “He’s a bigger crook than the crooks,” he told me.

  “He wants that money from me,” I said, “and that’s all he wants, and he’s going to get it, so there won’t be any trouble. I know he’s a crook, Arturo, that’s why he’s taking a bribe, but he has reason to stay bought, including whoever’s in my grave out there, so I believe he will stay bought. The question is, How do we tell Lola to bring the money?”

  Arturo said, “You think somebody listenin’ to her phone?”

  “Or this one.”

  He shook his head. “Not this one,” he said. “Nobody around here got stuff to do that kind of thing except they get it from the CIA, and the CIA don’t care about us.”

  “All right,” I said, “the other end. So what you do, when she calls, you say it’s a bad connection, it’s probably her phone, she should go out to the pay phone by the gas station and call you from there, because the pay phones are always better.”

  “Bullshit, man,” he said.

  “What you tell her, Arturo,” I said, “is that you remember Barry saying it one time, about the phones in the States: that the pay phones are always better.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you said that, I remember now.”

  •

  The first time the phone rang, at six-thirty, Arturo took it, and it was Dulce de Paula. When he hung up, he told me, “Keith Emory disappeared.”

  “Think of that,” I said.

  “She reported it to the police.”

  “Good.”

  The second call came a little after seven. Arturo took it again, and talked a long time, and then hung up and nodded at me and said, “Okay.”

  I said, “What took so long?”