"What are you talking about?" I asked him.
"There is a very wise British astronomer, Raymond Lyttleton, who has said that one must regard any hypothesis as though it were a bead which you can slide along a piece of wire. One end of the wire is marked 'zero,' for falsehood, and the other end is marked 'one,' for truth. One must never let the bead get to the absolute end of the wire, to either end, or it will fall off into irrationality. Move the bead along the wire this way and that, in accordance with inductive and deductive reasoning."
"Okay, where is your bead, Meyer?"
"One position of the bead is where Cody Pittler got out of bed and got his father's target pistol and shot Coralita in the back of the skull and waited to ambush his father. Then the struggle and the flight. That presupposes a murderous mind from the beginning, well concealed, awaiting any outlet. Another position adds an additional person to the mix, a young male friend of Cody's caught servicing the insatiable Coralita. Another position of the bead has the father coming home and getting into bed with Coralita, and having something she says confirm his suspicions about her and his son. So he gets up and dresses and gets the gun and kills her just as Cody comes home. I am saying that the people of Eagle Pass invented the circumstances of the murder which seemed to them to fit the situation. We know neither the truth nor the falsehood."
She jumped up and faced Meyer. "Why are you talking about all this? What difference does it make to anyone?" Her voice was loud and angry. "Don't you know what we are going to talk about now? We are going to talk about how to kill him."
"Barbara," I said, in what could have been construed as a patronizing tone.
She spun and bent to stare down at me. "Isn't that what we do? We kill him. We end his life."
I tried to look into her eyes, but there was no penetration in my stare. It bounced off shiny black polished gemstones.
"Young woman," Meyer said. "I am not going to be a party to killing that man unless and until I can communicate with him."
"What about? His movie collection? Which airline he likes?"
"About several hypotheses we have made about him. Before one shoots a fox in a henhouse, it is interesting to find out how many henhouses have been on his nightly route. I have more than an average curiosity about what makes the human animal react as he does. I do not think there have been many people who have adjusted so cleverly and carefully to a life of murder. I want to hear his views about himself."
She turned and dropped into the couch beside me. "And I do not care what he thinks about himself. Ask a cesspool why it makes bubbles! What I care about is how to kill him in such a way there will be no involvement of the police. None! There are two ways to do that. If he should disappear forever without any trace, it will be thought that perhaps he went on another trip and something happened to him there. If there is a body, then it should clearly be an accident."
"Going to his house is no good in either case."
"So," said Meyer, "it has to be when he goes to fish or to hunt. Or one waits until he travels."
"I will not wait for travel. I do not like the idea of the sea. It is all too open," she said.
"So how do we tell when and where he will go hunting?" I asked.
"He will hear of a great cat, a big one. The Maya guides sometimes make pad marks in the mud to play jokes on each other. They do it so well even the most expert are fooled."
"Where will this cat be?" I asked her.
She frowned, chin on fist, then brightened. "I think it will be near some cenotes. There is a trail off to the right before one gets to Playa Xelha. You cannot see it from the road. It is always marked with bits of red yarn or ribbon tied high to the trees on the other side of the road. It goes in for more than a mile and then it comes to the old Maya trail from Coba to Chichen. One turns right there on the Maya trail and goes perhaps three miles, then one leaves the Maya trail and goes west perhaps a half mile. There are big cenotes there, perhaps three or four. It is a good place for cat. It is wild there. Very thick. Very bad walking."
"Yes, but what are cenotes?" Meyer asked.
'I'm sorry, Mr. Meyer," she said. "This peninsula is all limestone, with a very thin coating of soil on top. In the heavy rains there are underground rivers, not very far down, which run to the sea. Long ago in many places the earth and limestone above the rivers collapsed in big potholes, fell into the rivers, and were washed away. What this leaves is a cenote. It is a deep round hole with sheer sides, or undercut sides. It would be usually a hundred or a hundred and fifty meters across and ten to thirty meters deep. In the dry season, there is no water at the bottom, or just a little. Where the river goes through at either side of this deep hole, there is a big cave, usually with a stagnant pool of water in the bottom. Drippings have made stalactites coming down from the roof. There are almost always bats, and bat dirt afloat on the pools. In the heavy rains the rivers swell and water rushes through. Some cenotes have a crumbled side so one can climb down easily and go into the cave if one wishes. Cats go down to drink from those where there are little streams. At Chichen there is a big deep cenote where the guides will tell you they threw virgins. What they threw in there were small children. They would throw one in at nightfall, and if he was still floating and living in the morning, hanging onto a steep side, they would bring him out, and from then on he could predict the weather in the next growing season."
I saw Meyer swallow. He cleared his throat and said, "Hoffmann would have guides."
"Yes. And they would know he was going in and not coming back out. They would not even need to be told why. They could go in and prepare the paw marks of a very big cat, then lead him to them and then track the imaginary cat over to the area of the cenotes. One of them is a sacred place. There is an old altar on the side near the cave, too high for water to wash it away."
"How soon would we do this?" I asked.
"I am not going back to my job until this is over. I have told them I have personal business. There is another girl they can use. She is not as quick as I am, but she will do. Often they hunt the jaguar, or panther, or puma, or wildcat-it has many names-by the light of the full moon. But I think that would be too dangerous. Too many things could go wrong. Sometimes the guides find a place where a big cat holes up in the daytime. Daytime would be best."
"Have you got it all figured out, Barbara?" Meyer asked.
"All but the end of it. We must go in with the guides the day before. It is very very bad walking. Believe me. We will find the right place and then they will bring him to us. Last night I dreamed he was on the ground and I slipped a knife into his belly. It went in like butter. But I could not pull it out. He was on the ground, smiling up at me, looking sleepy. I braced both feet and used both hands, but the knife would not come out. Then the handle of the knife was a snake and I jumped back and he started laughing and I woke up sweaty."
"What about weapons?" I asked.
"There will be guns for you two," she said. "I will tell the guides. We will find out which men Hoffmann has used, and the jefe will talk to them. It will all be arranged. I will leave a message and you can come here ready to go. You must have good strong shoes that come up high, to support your ankles. The trail is all loose rock as big as this."
She made a circle of thumbs and fingers big as a baseball.
"It will be steaming hot in there. You should wear clothing to absorb moisture, and maybe have a sweatband for your head and a light hat. We will need a great deal of water, so get something to carry water in. We will go in the afternoon and stay through the night. The guides will leave us there, wherever we decide. I will be the cat he has come to kill."
"Bedrolls?" Meyer asked.
"A light blanket only. Boughs can be cut. Bring a knife."
"Food?" I asked.
"I will arrange that. The guides will carry it. And a repellent for the insects. Each person should bring his own. And toilet tissue, and any medication you take.... You would know what you need for an overnight hike, the
same as when you were little boys."
"Or little soldiers," I said.
"You were military?" she asked me.
"A long time back."
She went into a long brooding silence and held up a warning hand when Meyer started to speak. "I think it will be possible to remove his rifle," she said. "If the guides could take him to a very difficult place where he had to climb up or down, one of them might take his rifle and then just melt off into the brush like magic, the way they can."
"Won't that alert him?"
"By that time, it will not matter, will it?" she asked.
Meyer was very quiet on the way back to the Dos Playas. He moved a chair onto our small balcony and sat with his feet up, braced against the railing. I opened two beers in our kitchenette and took them out. He thanked me and drank half of his before putting it down on the floor beside his chair.
"She thinks we should just blow him away." I said, turning to lean on the railing. "Did you see her eyes?"
"I did indeed. But she wants him to know why. They met. She is not a woman one would forget. If he gets a good look at her, then he'll know why. But I think she wants the satisfaction of a few words. I have a very ugly image of things to come, Travis."
"Such as?"
"I see us in a cave. Water is dripping. Cody Pittler is tied hand and foot. She is squatting beside him. She tells us to take a walk. We climb out of there and walk to where the guides are waiting. We all stand there and hear him screaming for a while, and then it stops, and she comes climbing out, looking tired but smiling."
"Was that on NBC or CBS?"
"Listen, I do not have any affection for Cody Pittler, God knows. And I am pragmatist enough to realize we can't get the law down here to do anything about him, and we can't get him back to Eagle Pass. I have just never directly killed anyone."
"This one should probably be indirect."
"Just the same," he said, picking up his beer and finishing it. "I don't know exactly how to think about it. How have you thought about it?"
"In the past? There has never been enough time to do much thinking."
"And afterward?"
"Kind of blah. Draggy. Tired and guilty and also a little bit jumpy. Takes about a week to go away. But the actual scene never really does go away. It's sort of like having a collection of color slides. Some nights the projector in your head shows them all. Meyer, just don't think about it. Let it happen. There is no little book of rules. No time outs. No offside. Just CYA. Cover your ass, because you can be certain the other guy will not feel that badly about you."
Twenty-four
WE WAITED a long time before we heard from her. We had a difficult time finding the kind of walking shoes she described. Everything else was easy. Meyer found shoes. I couldn't find a pair big enough until finally I found a pair a size and a half too big and too wide. But with two pair of heavy white orlon athletic socks, they felt snug enough, especially with the laces pulled tight. We found liter canteens in a downtown supermercado, on long straps, and bought two apiece. The Texas straws were too big for jungle walking, so we found baseball caps with Velcro bands which said Y-U-C-A-T-A-N in red across the front. Tennis shirts and tennis headbands and wristbands were available, as were long lightweight cotton trousers. Small flashlights, repellent, waterproof matches.
I debated the choice of knives for a long time and at last bought two. They both folded. One went in a leather holster with a snap fastener on my belt, and the other went in the right-hand pocket. It had no case, and when I took it out exactly right, and flicked my wrist, the five-inch blade fell out and snapped into place.
Dressed for action, we looked like tourists waiting for a party boat. I got impatient and went over to her place twice, but she wasn't there. Meyer said she was doubtless doing everything she could. But Monday, Tuesday Wednesday Thursday, and Friday went by On Saturday August fourteenth, when we went down to breakfast, there was a small sealed envelope in the box. Come here today at eleven this morning. B.
We dressed in our jungle best. I had the car gassed and the oil checked. She was waiting for us outside the entrance, sitting on a bulky blue canvas pack. She hoisted it without effort and put it in the back beside Meyer. She seemed both intent and preoccupied as she looked us over, and gave a small nod. She wore a cotton T-shirt in a pale salmon color, baggy oyster-white slacks tucked into what looked to be L. L. Bean women's hiking boots. She had her black hair tied back and a white terry band around her forehead.
"You are late!" she said.
"By almost three minutes."
"If they should think we're not coming-"
"Don't get yourself in a nervous sweat," I told her. She flashed me a black and evil look out of the side of her eye.
"Have you got everything?" Meyer asked.
"Yes, but not in that pack. They have already taken some things out to where we are going."
I turned on the air conditioning, and that ended all conversation. I kept them too busy hanging on to think of talk anyway. The tires were the best looking thing about the pink rental, so I had the satisfaction of making her yelp with alarm when I darted between an empty southbound fill truck and a full one coming the other way.
Almost an hour later she yelled to me to slow down. She leaned forward, looking high into the trees on the left. She told me where to pull as far over as I could. There was some semblance of shoulder there, gravelly and badly tilted. When we got out, three small men appeared out of the brush. She introduced them quickly. Jorge, Juan, and Miguel. They wore toe-thong sandals, dirty khaki shorts which looked too large for them, faded cotton shirts, and ragged straw hats. Jorge and Juan also wore small-caliber rifles strapped diagonally across their backs arid machetes in scabbards on belts around their waists. They were solemn and their handshakes were utterly slack. They did not inspire a lot of confidence. Miguel wanted the car keys. He got in, and when I began to object he went roaring away, turning out almost directly in front of a maddened tourist bus. It blatted around him and went fartingly on its way toward Tulum.
She caught my arm and said, "It will be brought back when this is all over. Now we follow the boys." And that was a very good trick indeed, following the boys and following her. It was a strange kind of jungle: scrub jungle. The soil could not support big trees. They ranged from sapling size to ball-bat size, and from ten feet tall to thirty feet. The cover was sparse. A lot of sun came down through the leaves. It was, as she had promised, a punishing trail. At first I tried to watch where I placed each foot, but that made the passage too slow. I finally decided to trust to the ankle support of the high shoes and let the stones underfoot roll as they pleased. Rain had washed all the soil from the trail, leaving loose rock. On either side, the terrain looked a lot better for walking, but it was a wilderness of tough vines that dropped from above, sprang up from below, and were hammocked from tree to tree. One would have to chop through them all to make a path.
It was incredibly hot in there. Though you could see off into the scrub jungle for maybe forty feet, there was no breeze at all. The air was as thick as pastry. The sweat began to pour. Jorge and Juan set a very fast pace, schlepping along in their dumb little sandals. They did not seem to sweat. I began to hate them. I wondered if Barbara was sweating. I lengthened my stride and caught up to her for a moment. Yes, she was. She was the winner of the international wet T-shirt award. But she flunked Miss Conviviality. Meyer, with shorter legs than mine and in not as good condition, had it the worst of all. He was panting and blowing and streaming. I had brought some salt tablets. I stopped, and Meyer and I took a good swig of cool water and a salt tablet each. They kept going, out of sight around a curve far ahead.
"Hold it!" I roared into the thick buggy silence of this third-rate jungle. There was no answer. So on we trudged, thrown off balance by the stones as they rolled, waving our arms to catch ourselves. Meyer said a few words I had never heard from him before. I discovered that there is a certain amount of sweat that begins below the forehead ba
nd and runs into the eyes. The wristlets took care of that for a time until they became too soggy.
I began to wonder if Cody Pittler had hired Barbara to take us into the wilderness and lose us for good.
They stood waiting for us where the trail converged with the old Mayan trail from Coba to Chichen Itza. Jorge and Juan squatted on their heels. Barbara leaned against a small tree. She took a look at me and decided that whatever she was going to say would not be appreciated.
"Now this way," she said. "Let's go."
"Can't you slow those dwarfs down?"
"Wherever there is a choice of directions, they'll wait."
"And you too?"
She gave me her obsidian stare and said, "Of course."
I had hoped that the old Mayan trail would be in better shape, but if anything it was worse. I finally settled into that hypnosis of physical effort which frees the mind to roam to better things. I stomped along until, not far ahead of me, I saw a better thing. Her baggy slacks had become as sopping wet as the T-shirt and clung to the alternate flexing and bunching of the round smooth musculature of her buttocks. Her hair was sweat-wet, flattened to her skull. I slowed and looked back. Meyer was out of sight. I stopped and saw him come around a bend. I caught up to Barbara, stopped her for a salt tablet and a slug of water. In the stillness I watched her throat work as she tilted the canteen. She exuded a warm murky scent of overheated woman. She smiled her thanks.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin Page 25
