Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

by Lawrence Osborne

  They said they would call down to the police station in the town along the coast, Lázaro Cárdenas, and that I could talk to someone the following morning if I so desired. I did so desire. Someone would come up in the morning and I could talk it over with him. Any drowning victim would be taken to the morgue in Lázaro, and it was the authorities there who would have processed the case. They were mild mannered and gracious, perhaps because of the festivities nearby and the quietness of the road that night, and they assured me they would keep an eye over me during my stay in Caleta. That night, after the fiesta had died down, I heard seabirds screaming above the cliffs and the sound of music coming from the palapas. And as I sat by the window I heard women shouting out of sight. It was a sound of joy and disorder and alcohol seething in human bodies. In the middle of the bay, quietly unannounced, a large yacht had swung into view with all its lights on.

  SEVEN

  I was too tired to go down that night, and instead I slept early and got up likewise. As I was taking a pot of café de olla on the porch of the hotel, the promised policeman appeared on foot, in civilian dress and coolly elegant in an open white shirt. His name was Homeros Nervos, a fifty-something detective from Lázaro, a man of smooth cheeks and faint aromas (some brut I didn’t recognize even after years of acquainting myself with scents) and sober alligator shoes that didn’t seem inappropriate on a detective at the beginning of a working day. He simply walked up to the porch and asked if I was the Mr. Marlowe who had asked to see a detective the previous evening. I asked him if he’d like something to eat. He spoke in English, and he spoke it as well as I spoke his language, so we settled on that.

  “No, I’m all right. I might take a coffee with you, though.”

  He joined me at the table and we found ourselves close together in that wonderful early-morning shade, with the wind fresh off the sea.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky that day.

  “You’ve come a long way,” he began.

  I explained everything to him without altering any of the details. It was best to be honest.

  “I see,” he said.

  “I just wanted to verify the story, as it were. It says on the certificate that Zinn drowned in the bay.”

  “That’s correct. We did the autopsy in Lázaro.”

  His eyes were level and the color of freshly turned earth.

  “What were the circumstances?”

  “As far as we could see, he came in from a yacht moored in the bay. It must have been in the middle of the night, but the body wasn’t discovered until the early morning. It had washed up on the beach.”

  I asked him what Zinn had been wearing. Nervos smiled at this and it was not just at the trivial memory of Zinn’s costume in death.

  “It’s funny you should ask. He was in shorts and a linen shirt. It’s possible he just fell off the boat in the night and drowned. He had been drinking heavily—there was a lot of alcohol in his blood, anyway.”

  “Why does everyone say he was swimming?”

  “Who says so?”

  But now that I thought of it, it was merely an assumption.

  So he maybe wasn’t swimming, I thought.

  “How much alcohol did he have in his system?”

  “More than enough to knock him out. You’re going to ask what the people on the yacht said. But when we got here in the morning there was no yacht. It had slipped away the same night.”

  It was half-true, and the smile held steady for a few moments and then melted away. There is an art to the mask, and he had practiced it long and hard until it was perfect. I asked him what the yacht’s name had been, and he admitted that no one knew or could remember. It had flown a Mexican flag, but no one had known the people on it. Had the passengers, I asked, come onto the beach for dinner? He said that the palapa owners claimed that they had not.

  He went on: “But unknown boats show up here all the time. I wouldn’t say it was unusual.”

  “And you couldn’t trace the yacht the following day?”

  Wearisome, the persistent foreigner: Nervos stretched a little.

  “We put out a search, but it came up with nothing. As you can see,” he motioned with his hand toward the road, “we’re busy with other matters. So we never found it. We have no idea who was on it at the time or who it belonged to.”

  “But Señor Zinn must have known them.”

  “Indeed he must have. But it’s too late to find them now. I had a feeling—well, let’s say that I had the feeling that the locals here knew them. But they’re too frightened to tell us anything. They knew Señor Zinn quite well, but his circle of people—they’d rather not get involved.”

  “I had a feeling that would be the case. Do you think Señor Zinn was dealing drugs with the men in the hills?”

  “Probably not. But I couldn’t say. I think myself he was just a good-time boy who fell off a boat and died. The owners panicked and vanished. You can see it from their point of view.”

  “They ran from the scene of an accident. I can understand it. But then, they were not friends of his, were they?”

  “I suppose not.”

  He turned his mild eyes on me and there was a great distance in them, as if we had walked away in opposite directions from one moment to the next.

  “I also have to say,” I went on, “that it was curious that the authorities here decided to cremate the body on the spot. Didn’t you contact his wife and ask her what she wanted to do?”

  “Who says we didn’t? Of course we contacted her. She said the best thing would be to cremate him in Lázaro. It’s a huge expense to fly a body to the United States. We confirmed the identity ourselves and sent the papers to the embassy.”

  It was extraordinary, but I said nothing—not even my eyelids moved.

  “So she was all right with it? She didn’t fly down to identify the body?”

  “Again, I never said she didn’t. She did indeed. She identified him in the morgue and we proceeded from there.”

  “I guess she must have been very upset.”

  “You can imagine. She stayed at the same hotel you’re staying at here. Didn’t you know that?”

  “She didn’t say anything.”

  “Ah, so you’ve met. A very pretty woman, wouldn’t you say?”

  And the distance in his eyes suddenly disappeared.

  “I would say, yes. Too pretty for Donald Zinn probably. Normally it’s dangerous having one of those.”

  “That’s what I thought at the time, too. We know how it goes. I hear he had a rather large insurance premium on his head. It almost seems a cliché—but human nature doesn’t vary much.”

  “No, Nervos, it doesn’t.”

  I wondered which room Dolores had stayed in. He said that she’d wanted to stay close to where her beloved Donald had died. But she had probably had other reasons of a more practical nature.

  “How long was she here?” I asked.

  He stretched out his legs and eyed the cluster of tanagers that had come down to investigate the churros standing in a glass jar on our table. I wondered if he knew about the hummingbird god, Huitzilopochtli, or how Aztec warriors were believed to be reincarnated as the little birds. He watched them warily in any case, even though they are the most harmless animals ever evolved to torment breakfast tables. He said she’d been there for a week while matters were wrapped up with the body, and that she had been the model of somber propriety. She had signed all the necessary papers and authorized the cremation. She had taken possession of the ID that had been found on the body—yes, he had carried it with him even in the water—and which they had used to finger his name in the first place.

  “So they found his ID on him?”

  I smiled a little too brazenly, and perhaps he was momentarily offended.

  “That’s the way it was,” he drawled. “Convenient, but
true all the same. It’s not me who decides how people fall into the water!”

  It was a scene to imagine in the morgue: Dolores standing over the bloated body of her husband trying to be cold and functional as she issued a yes to the question about his identity. Few further questions had been asked. Old white men dying on vacation or business were too common to fret about.

  And the widow? She had gone back alone to California with the ashes.

  “I felt rather bad for her,” Nervos said. “I took her to the airport in Guadalajara myself. She said almost nothing the whole time. The paperwork went on for a while and she took it well, but she never asked me any inconvenient questions. I was quite surprised by that. I thought at the time she must have been in shock and that was all there was to it.”

  “It must have been an ordeal, all right.”

  Nervos gave me a look that at first seemed understanding but which, when I lingered over it, felt like contempt. But it was not a contempt that could be overtly spoken—it hung back in the shadows formed by the corners of his handsome mouth.

  “Well,” he said then, “I suppose that wraps it up for you. Are you going to stay on for a beach holiday? You can’t find a better spot than this. Just don’t go swimming in the bay. I hear there’s a shark patrolling the waters right now. A tiger.”

  “I’ll stay on dry land. I always do.”

  He slapped his thighs and the tanagers suddenly dispersed.

  “You have a great job,” he said brightly. “I envy you. Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I’ve retired. Get paid to sit on a beach.”

  “It’s a con if you ask me. Thank you for coming up to see me. If I need anything more—”

  “Just call me. But I don’t think you will. This was one of the more straightforward cases we’ve dealt with in recent years. I just feel bad for the people of Caleta. The gossip about things like this can damage their business. I’ve noticed the place is a little quieter since Señor Zinn’s death.”

  Some men seem to materialize and dematerialize out of nowhere. Nervos was one of them. The shimmer of his lies was fine and pleasing, but beneath this surface lay all the knowledge and suspicion that he would never reveal to a man like me. So we are forced to read the puzzling codes that other men devise for us. I resented it—who wouldn’t. But then, I had expected nothing else. It was Dolores who was the greater operator. She had acted well and picked up a life-defining fortune.

  EIGHT

  It was by then only nine o’clock. With the day ahead of me, I decided to take the same walk along the harbor wall back to the palapas, where I was hoping to see old Nestor fishing. He was. Before us the bay held at its center the newly arrived yacht, a large Broward flying an American flag, and a faint music traveled across the water to us from its decks, where two white women sunned themselves in visors. Nestor stood in exactly the same spot with his bucket of bait, and as I sat down on the sea wall beside him, he asked me if I had slept badly or well.

  “I stayed up all night. I couldn’t remember the words to ‘Little Rabbit Foo Foo.’ ”

  He said it was the ghosts in all the houses. He, too, had slept badly, and so did everyone else. Many dealers had been executed in the ruins, on the headlands, on the lonely tracks going up into the hills. They were shot by other dealers or by the federales themselves, who were free to do so if no one saw them. The bodies showed up in the basements of the abandoned houses or in the long grass fully exposed to the sun. Telltale clouds of butterflies marked the spots. The whole place had a stench of casual death. Across it lay a web of gossip and fear and rumor, and the wise ones kept their peace with themselves. The only way to break into this web was by means of a quiet propina.

  I made our conversation turn until Señor Zinn was its center. Then I admitted—in a hushed way that suggested that only he also knew—that I was there to find out if Señor Zinn had drowned or died another way. After all, I said, the police had been far from the first ones on the scene. Didn’t he himself come there early every morning—even at dawn?

  I pulled out a huge banknote from my wallet and curled it into my hand so that we both knew how things would now proceed. He glanced along the seawall and down to the beach and, seeing that it was empty, made a flick of the eyes that gave the assent.

  “Don’t come any closer to me,” he said. “Look away and talk in a normal voice.”

  I did exactly as I was told.

  “Were you there that day?”

  “I came down at six. The body was there, but there was someone else as well. It was a man I know. He fishes around here, but he has a house in the interior where he lives. I saw him turn the body over and go through the pockets. After that he left. He won’t be back here for a long time.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t tell you why. You’ll have to find him yourself.”

  I reached out, passed the note into his hand, and watched his face change complexion. He said the man lived in a small town called Nueva Italia on the road inland that went toward Pátzcuaro. Everyone called him Rubio Pez, but obviously it wasn’t his real name. He had a house there, and when the fishing dried up he hid out sometimes for months at a time. No one knew much about him. If I asked around I would find him, and when I did I could tell him Nestor sent me. If I paid Rubio well he might tell me what he had found and why he had gone into hiding. But I should be careful going after him. He wouldn’t know who I was and he might overreact. It was a small town in the desert and there would be no one to help me.

  “Is it really worth it?” he said at last.

  “If he was the person who found Señor Zinn, it is.”

  “I am sure it was him.”

  I turned to the yacht, swan-like in the agate bay, and I asked him who it belonged to. He shrugged.

  “Never seen that one before. They say it’s an American group from Los Angeles. Film people maybe.”

  “Did they swim ashore yet?”

  But he didn’t answer—the Yankees didn’t concern him. Their music didn’t reach into his mind. I spent the better part of an hour with Nestor and still he said nothing more. There was no reason to talk if you’d already said what you wanted to say.

  * * *

  —

  Nueva Italia lay some miles inland in a semidesert, its houses baked into submission. In the stillness of high noon my footfall was the only sound heard outside the town’s Western Union pickup, the Caseta Telefónica Luna, where I asked about Rubio Pez and was told that he came in once a week to pick up money. I hadn’t lost my touch. The woman even knew where he lived, in a shack north of town in a place called the Presa de Infiernillo. I went back out into the glare with a small hand-drawn map courtesy of a ten-dollar bill while swallows scattered around me, perfectly free in a free world, and behind their sound there was the great silence of a desert.

  On either side of the northbound road, the land opened up into plains covered with saguaros, upon which sat an army of blackbirds. The map had marked the turnoff of a dirt road that swung at right angles to the main one, and I drove along it for five miles.

  There were no shacks out there except his, and it clung like a desperate barnacle to the top of a bluff infested with the same birds. Perhaps they were waiting for the lone occupant to die. I parked the car a hundred yards from his door and took out my shikomizue sword-cane from the back seat. The wind kicked up a blinding dust as I struggled uphill to the shack. It was made of a mixture of wood, aluminum, and blue plastic. I called out his name and said in Spanish that Nestor had sent me. There was no answer, but the front door flapped open. Then I noticed something move far off out in the saguaros. Someone was standing among the giant cactus, watching me, and it was surely Rubio. I turned and went down a gully toward him, still calling his name.

  At almost the same moment a shot rang out and the air above my right shoulder shuddered and caused my reflexes to recoil d
ownward. But I kept cool and didn’t overreact. A confrontation was the last thing I wanted. I called out again.

  “I’ll meet you at the house,” I called out.

  I turned back, exposing myself to a shot, and made my way to the shack. When I got there he was right behind me, a man older even than me, white stubbled, and with a look of wild fear in his eyes. He was armed with a shotgun and was not out there to kill rabbits. An ancient mariner lost on dry land and about to snap his cap. I could see at once that he was harmless. But men filled with fear are often the least harmless. I decided to go easy on him and come over all smiles and charm.

  “You’re a terrible shot,” I said.

  “No, I never miss.”

  So he had mistaken me for the one who would someday come to kill him.

  “Shall we go inside?” I said.

  He wasn’t sure. He held the shotgun against his hip and looked me over. Finally he ushered me in through the door into his pathetic den, out of the dazzling sun.

  It was filled with tackle, buoys, dried fish on lines, and knives. I told him who I was, and how much I would pay, even though it must have occurred to him that the easiest thing to do would be to shoot me, take it anyway, and bury me later in the arroyos.

  But he was a gentle old-timer and not up for any real madness.

  “Sit down,” he said, lowered the gun, and laid it up.

  I placed the money on the table between us and was frank. I wanted to know all about the man he had found on the beach in Caleta de Campos and what he had found on him. I told him I knew he had come here to hide and that none of it was his fault after all. I admitted I was from the insurance company and therefore on the right side of the law, as he would be if he told me everything.