Ask for Me Tomorrow

by Margaret Millar

  “No. Honest injun, though I’m not supposed to say that. It’s ethnic. I heard all about ethnic from a black man at church. People shouldn’t use ethnic expressions like ‘eeny meeny miney mo, catch a nigger by the toe,’ or—”

  “At these church meetings of yours, what do you talk about when it’s your turn?”

  “My life.”

  “Including the part of it that takes place here?”

  “Here it’s your life, not mine.”

  “Then you wouldn’t mention my personal affairs in front of the group?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. Because what goes on in this house is my own business and I don’t care to have any of it repeated in the name of the Lord or soul cleansing or mental health or any damn thing at all. Understand?”

  Violet Smith stood mute as marble.

  “Do you understand?”

  “I’d like to get back to my murder now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Do that.”

  “Thank you,” said Violet Smith.

  She waited until she heard Gilly go down the hall and open the door of her husband’s room. Then she picked up the phone and dialed the number she had just checked in the directory. The voice that answered was one Violet Smith greatly admired, so soft and sweet and the opposite of Gilly’s.

  “Hello?”

  “Is that Mrs. Lockwood?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Violet Smith, your friend from church.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “You said you’d like me to come over sometime for a little chat.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I think this is the time, Mrs. Lockwood.”

  It took Marco an hour to eat a meal that would hardly have nourished a sparrow.

  Sometimes Gilly sat with him in silence, feeding him his sparrow-sized bites and watching him chew so slowly and awkwardly that she felt her own teeth grinding in frustration. Sometimes she turned on the T. V., which Marco didn’t like because he had trouble seeing with only one functioning eye; and sometimes she just talked, dipping into the present or cutting up the past into small digestible pieces.

  Consciously or not, she left out a few things about her past and added a few. In the main, though, it was pretty straight talk. During the months of her husband’s illness she’d covered a great many of her fifty years, but more and more her conversation was about those she’d spent with B. J. For the past week it had been almost exclusively about B. J. She talked of falling in love with him right away, bingo, at first sight. She never believed such a thing could happen, to her of all people. He wasn’t much to look at, he had no line of fast talk, he couldn’t play games or dance very well or any of the things that might draw a woman’s attention. And he was married. Happily married, or so his wife claimed when she came to Gilly and told her to leave him alone. Leave him alone. How could she? As long as B. J. was alive in this world she could never have left him alone.

  The sick man listened. He had no way of stopping her except by going to sleep or pretending to, and he seldom did either. Gilly had such an impassioned way of talking that she could make a visit from the plumber sound like an earthshaking event. Gilly’s plumber wouldn’t be handsome or witty or charming, but he would have an indefinable irresistible something. She couldn’t bear to let him go—but at twenty bucks an hour she had to.

  “I’m giving Reed a few days off,” she said. “He’s getting restless and bossy, he needs a change. I’ve put in a call for a substitute nurse. I’ll ask for two if you think you need them.”

  The forefinger of his right hand moved. One would be enough.

  “Just one then. We can manage. I usually give you your shots, anyway. Do you need another right now or can you wait?”

  Now.

  She was very expert at it, better than Reed, who was inclined to hurry, as though he had a ward full of patients waiting for him.

  “There. That will help you chew. Let’s try the fish. It might be better tonight. I asked Violet Smith to pour a lot of booze on it . . . When Reed gets like this, you know, sort of pushy and insolent, a little holiday snaps him back . . . B. J. and I were going on a holiday when— But I’ve bored you with that story a dozen times, haven’t I?”

  Yes.

  “I went out and bought this marvelous motor home as a surprise for his birthday so the two of us could drive up to British Columbia, where my folks came from. I called it Dreamboat and I had the name printed on it as a custom touch. Well, you know what happened, don’t you? B. J. added a custom touch of his own. Tula her name was, not as pretty as Dreamboat. Neither was she. All I can really remember about her is a lot of black bushy hair and greasy skin. Oh yes, and her fingernails. She kept them painted bright-red but her hands were always grimy. How she got to B. J. I don’t know. The why was easy enough. She was hungry. She wanted to live like in the movies and there was only one way to do it. So she did it. In the end she lost him, too, not to another woman but to a con man named Harry Jenkins, can you beat it?”

  No, he couldn’t beat it, or tie it, or come close. He could only listen.

  “It’s funny when you think about it—Henry Jenkins took B. J. from Tula the way she took him from me and I took him from Ethel. We just sort of passed him along from one to another like a used car. Even Ethel, Ethel the Good, she probably took him from somebody else. There was always someone waiting, wanting to use B. J. Where did it all start? The day he was born, the day the car came off the assembly line . . . Come on, try the mashed potatoes. Violet Smith makes them with real cream.”

  He wouldn’t. She didn’t.

  “I think B. J.’s real weakness was the way he had of living completely in the present, never looking back to learn from experience, never looking ahead to see consequences. Somebody like Harry Jenkins could have picked him out of a crowd in half a minute. By the way, Aragon has found out where Jenkins is living in Rio Seco. He’ll be talking to him tonight or tomorrow. The trail’s getting really hot now. Isn’t that exciting? Aren’t you excited?”

  I am afraid.

  He stopped chewing. He refused to swallow. He closed his eye.

  10

  About the time Aragon would be thinking of going to bed back home, Rio Seco was just opening up for the night. From the window of his hotel room he watched the street below. There were crowds of people, including whole families, in the cafés and markets and in a long line in front of the cinema. The curio and art dealers, the silversmiths and street vendors and sandal makers were starting the real business of the day.

  Except for an hour off for dinner, Aragon had spent the evening waiting to hear from Harry Jenkins. He’d written a long letter to his wife and a short note to Smedler. He read the evening paper, La Diaria, and twice he went down to the desk to ask for messages. There were none. A third time he went down for a can of insecticide to get rid of the mosquitoes. What might have been an unusual request in most hotels was taken for granted at the Castillo. The insecticide was provided by the night clerk free of charge. “We have this problem with the bugs, sir. When we kill them, they come back. When we don’t kill them, they don’t go away.”

  “I understand.”

  The clerk looked surprised. “You do?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “That’s it, then. Lawyers understand everything, even bugs, yes?”

  “Especially bugs,” Aragon said. “Good night.”

  He sprayed the room until the mosquitoes were all dead. Then he had to open the window to get rid of the fumes, and a whole new swarm of mosquitoes entered. He settled down with some beer to match them, pint for pint. For every pint they took from him, he drank a pint to replace the fluid.

  The din from the street below increased in volume. He almost missed hearing the knock on his door shortly after midnight.

  He unlocked the door. “
Mr. Jenkins?”

  “That’s me, Harry Jenkins.”

  “I’m Tom Aragon. Come in, won’t you?”

  “Don’t mind if I do, seeing as you offered some reimbursement for my time and trouble. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Jenkins closed the door behind him. He was a small thin man in his mid-forties, dressed in a dark-blue suit frayed at the cuffs and so shiny across the seat of his pants that he looked as though he’d slipped in a pool of melted wax. “So you want to talk about B. J., right?”

  “No. I want you to talk about him.”

  “Same difference, like they say. After I read your note I sat me down to do some thinking. Here’s how it came out. One of B. J.’s old big-shot friends got a pang of conscience for not helping him out before and now he, or she, wants to buy a little peace of mind.”

  “Go on.”

  “Any damn fool knows that that’s the only piece of something not for sale in the world. So I figure it has to be a she, since they don’t go by the rules of reason. The question is, ‘What she?’ ”

  “I thought the question was, ‘How much do you know and what is it worth?’ ”

  “You have yourself a point there, laddie.”

  Jenkins moved quickly and gracefully across the room, balancing on the balls of his feet like a featherweight boxer between punches. Everything about him seemed to be in motion except his eyes. They had no more life in them than patches of grey suede.

  “If you read my note this afternoon,” Aragon said, “what took you so long to get here?”

  “A place like this cramps my style. I don’t even have the clothes for it. I had to borrow the suit from a friend. It’s not much of a suit, but then, he’s not much of a friend, either.”

  “Clothes don’t matter much anymore.”

  “They do in my business.”

  “What’s your business, Mr. Jenkins?”

  “It varies. Right now things are slow, but I’m tossing a few ideas back and forth.” He smoothed his thinning hair across the bald spot on top of his head as if to protect the source of the ideas. “I can’t work at an ordinary job. Don’t have the stomach for it. Or the papers. The immigration boys are a nervous bunch. One little mistake and they jump you.”

  “Jenlock Haciendas was more than a little mistake, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’d be the first to say it. I got in over my head. My other business ventures are less ambitious.”

  “Sit down, will you?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Join me in a beer?”

  “Might as well, I guess.” Jenkins stood at the window looking down at the street. “I’d like to get out of this crappy town.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “There was a little episode in Albuquerque and maybe a couple of other places. Not everybody shares my philosophy of forgive and forget . . . How’d you track me down, anyway?”

  “Went to the Quarry and hired a shouter. One of the inmates came over to talk to me.”

  “Emilia.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d she tell you?”

  “That when she’s released she’s going to mash you like a turnip.”

  “She will, too,” Jenkins said gloomily. “Unless I get out before she does. I always had a weakness for fiery women, but now I think I’m over it.” He took a sip of beer, grimacing, as though the stuff had the bitter taste of regrets. “I have to shake this town. The cops, the immigration boys, Emilia’s relatives—I can’t walk around the block without being hassled. My only chance is meeting up with a well-heeled sucker at one of the American bars. Funny how Americans who wouldn’t give each other the time of day in Chicago or Louisville become bosom pals over a couple of drinks at the Domino Club. Well, all I need is the right bosom.” Jenkins turned and studied Aragon carefully for a moment. “It’s too bad we know each other. It cramps my style. I prefer to deal with strangers.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “Friends are murder in this business . . . I wouldn’t mind another beer if you were offering any, laddie.”

  “I’m offering.” Aragon opened another can. “How did you get mixed up in something as big as the Jenlock Haciendas project?”

  “Innocent-like. I mean, I didn’t walk into it. I just stood there and it grew up around me.”

  “Is that what you told the magistrate?”

  “I tried to. My Spanish isn’t too good. Maybe he didn’t understand me.”

  “Or maybe he did.”

  “It was true, so help me. I’d been hearing plenty of talk about how Baja was due for a big boom as soon as the new highway was finished. I borrowed some money, rented a jeep and went down to have a look-see. Well, the boom’s on now and it’s big, so I was right about that. The wrong part was the location and B. J. . . . To this day I don’t know how I managed to get lost. But I did. And that’s how I arrived at Bahía de Ballenas. Ever hear of it?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Well, there was B. J., living in a super-deluxe motor home and looking like money. A bunch of money. It went to my head. No drink ever invented could go to my head like that. It wasn’t like getting drunk alone and sleeping it off. B. J. stayed right with me. Every idea I came up with, he came up with an improvement. Then I improved on the improvement, until finally there it was, Jenlock Haciendas, bigger than both of us. I didn’t have sense enough to be scared. I was not only out of my league, I didn’t even know what game I was playing.”

  “It’s called fraud.”

  “Wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Me, Harry Jenkins, who never wrote on anything he didn’t swipe from a hotel lobby, suddenly had his name on a fancy letterhead. Me, who never had more than a couple of hundred bucks in his pocket, was suddenly throwing money around like there was no tomorrow. It was the longest drunk a man’s ever been on—and not a drop of liquor, so to speak.”

  “What sobered you up?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jenkins said. “Tomorrow came. If it was the longest drunk, it sure as hell brought the biggest hangover. I won’t be over it until I get out of this place.”

  “Where’s B. J. now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “I’m a lousy guesser. Look at my record.”

  “Try.”

  “I kind of guess he’s dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Some people make out okay in the Quarry but B. J. wasn’t the type. First off, he was the wrong nationality. He kept demanding his rights and bail and habeas corpus and a bunch of stuff they never heard of in this country and wouldn’t care if they had. Second off, he was a rich boy, spoiled rotten. He never had anything but the best all his life, and suddenly there he was with nothing but the worst. There we both were, only with me it didn’t matter so much. If sheepshead is all they give me to eat—hell, I eat it. B. J. threw up just looking at it. Oversensitive he was, and then some. Bled like a stuck pig if he got the slightest scratch. And scratch he did, laddie, scratch he did. The mosquitoes had a banquet on him every night. You could hear them flying around laughing as soon as the sun went down. Call it buzzing, humming, hissing, whatever. Down here they laugh.” He added with a touch of nostalgia, “One thing you could say about Jenlock Haciendas, we never had any mosquitoes there.”

  “Why not?”

  “No water. Tons of sea water but no drink water.”

  “You should have thought of that before you started thinking of building a bunch of haciendas.”

  “Oh, we did. B. J. said it was no problem. All we had to do was build a desalinization plant to take the salt out of the sea water. He put up the money, and I mean large money. He wanted the best. Me, I never heard of a desalinization plant before, but by God, suddenly there I was with the wherewithal, so I started building one. You know what I’d do if
I had it to do all over again, laddie?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’d take every penny and lam out of there. Nasty, you say? Not a bit of it. I would have been doing both of us a favor, like putting a plug in a sink where a heap of money was going down the drain. Down the drain, that’s how it was. Before you could say ‘desalinization,’ things began going wrong. The boom started and the price of everything doubled, tripled, quadrupled. Supplies had to come by boat, and mostly they didn’t. Work crews had to be trucked in, and so did water. Maybe one arrived, maybe the other, maybe neither. And all the time the government was making up new rules about building on the coast. Boy, I wouldn’t go through that again for a million dollars.” He added wistfully, “Which is roughly what I expected to make.”

  “That much.”

  “I told you, I was drunk, crazy drunk, without touching a drop. Well, at least I didn’t lose much except time. B. J. lost everything, shirt, pants and shoelaces. Funny about that man. He must have been over fifty then, but I swear he was like a five-year-old kid believing in everything, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy.”

  “I don’t see you as a tooth fairy, Jenkins, though you’d be pretty good at extractions.”

  Jenkins made a small sound like a mosquito’s laugh. “So I didn’t fit the role. Well, I never asked for it, either. I got sucked into somebody else’s dream. B. J. really believed in Jenlock Haciendas. In his mind’s eye the whole project was built and operating, the haciendas occupied, people playing on the golf course, swimming in the pool, sailing around the marina, even flushing their toilets. Sure, they sent both of us to jail for fraud, but with B. J. there actually was no fraud, just a big fat dumb dream . . . Well, that’s all over now and good riddance.” For the first time since he entered the room, Jenkins’ eyes brightened. “I’ve been thinking, if I could lay my hands on enough cash, I’d open up a fried chicken business here. Quality stuff only, both table and takeout service.”

  “I don’t think you have the beard for it, Jenkins.”

  “You may be missing out on a fortune. Mexicans are crazy about chicken and if we coated it with corn meal it would be sort of like a chicken tortilla. Roll that around on your tongue. Savor it. How does it taste?”