“It tastes like one of the residents of Jenlock Haciendas just tried to flush his toilet.”
“Hell, you probably don’t have the money, anyway. That’s a cheap suit you’re wearing.”
“J. C. Penney’s.”
“You got to think bigger than J. C. Penney’s, laddie. With a well-tailored suit you could make a pretty good appearance, sort of the ambitious but honest type.”
“Thanks. I’ll try it someday.”
“Nothing too extreme, remember. People distrust extremities. One of my own weaknesses was Hawaiian shirts. I should have known better. Who’s going to trust a man in a Hawaiian shirt with anything but a ukulele concession? Nobody. Not even B. J.”
“Would you like another beer?”
“I better be moseying along to the Domino Club or El Alegre. This is the best time of night for new contacts.”
“Suckers.”
Jenkins shrugged. “Same difference. I got to live, don’t I? And if the tourists didn’t have money to spare they wouldn’t be here, so it’s not like robbing orphans and widows . . . Oh hell, let the suckers wait. One more beer would be nice considering how we’re down to brass tacks, you and me. I don’t often get to the brass-tacks stage with people. I hope it doesn’t become a habit.”
“I don’t think you have to worry.”
The third beer increased Jenkins’ spirit of camaraderie. “Laddie me lad, what do you want to know? Name it. What’s mine is yours—for a small stipend, of course.”
“So you think B. J. died in jail.”
“He was a sick man, I told you. Cried a lot, couldn’t eat, shriveled up like a prune. The guards kept him pretty well doped so he’d be quiet and wouldn’t bother anyone.”
“Suppose he didn’t die but simply served his time and was released. Where would he be likely to go?”
“If he didn’t have a habit, back to Bahía de Ballenas, maybe. Only he had a habit, a big one. You can’t feed a habit by holing up in a little Mexican village. You got to get out and fight, hustle, beg, steal. Poor B. J. He was soft as a marshmallow; none of that would come natural to him.”
“Perhaps he had someone who’d do it for him.”
“You mean Tula?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“Oh, she could do it, all right. She was hustling a couple of weeks after she hit town. But I doubt that a nickel of the money she picked up went to B. J. She was a taker, not a giver.”
“Why do you say was?”
“I don’t know whether she is or not. So to me she’s was until I find out for sure.”
“Can you find out?”
“Maybe. I never tried. Me and Tula weren’t real buddy-buddy. Know what she used to call me? Uncle Harry. Me, half a dozen years younger than her husband and still in the prime, so to speak.”
“What was her attitude toward B. J.?”
“As long as the money held out, she put on a show of affection. She even came to see him in jail a few times for what they call in polite society ‘connubial privileges.’ That’s probably where she got the idea of taking up the work professionally. On visiting days the hustlers flock around the jail like starlings. Tula just naturally followed the flock. There wasn’t much else she was prepared to do, she couldn’t read or write. I used to see her once in a while, all gussied up hanging around the cheap bars. She pretended not to recognize me. Good old Uncle Harry found himself de-uncled.”
“You don’t think she might have paid B. J.’s fine, or put up bail or bribe money?”
“Not in a million years would be my guess. But what’s that worth? Women are not reasonable creatures, so how can a reasonable man like me tell what they’re going to do?”
“Let’s assume,” Aragon said, “that Tula is still in town and you have the right connections for finding her.”
“Consider it assumed. And then?”
“I’d like to ask her some questions. Given enough time, I might be able to find her myself. But I don’t know the city, what name she’s using, where her hangouts are, or even what she looks like.”
“So how much is it worth to you if I ask around?”
“Two hundred dollars.”
Jenkins ran an expert eye up and down the J. C. Penney suit, the Sears, Roebuck shirt and the orange birthday tie from his cousin Sandoval, who was color-blind.
“You can’t afford that kind of money, laddie, unless the job is real important. Two hundred is pretty small potatoes for something real important. Let’s raise the ante to three hundred, fifty in advance.”
The deal was settled at $250. Gilly might squawk, but Aragon had the feeling that if she and Jenkins ever met, at the Domino Club or El Alegre, they would understand each other immediately.
Jenkins put the bills Aragon gave him in his coat pocket. “I could walk out of here with this fifty and you might never see me again. Did that occur to you?”
“Certainly. You won’t do it, though. You need the rest of the money to help you get out of town. There’s Emilia and the turnip mashing, remember?”
“Hell, how could I forget. One of those relatives of hers is probably standing right outside the hotel this very minute waiting for me to come out. It’s not fair. Me, I don’t have a relative in the world unless it’s a kid some place where I got careless . . . Did you know B. J. and Tula had a kid?”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“Crazy as a coot. Makes funny noises.”
“We all make funny noises. Some may be just a little funnier.”
“Is that philosophy or bullshit, laddie?”
“A little of both.”
“No matter. I try to avoid stepping in either.” Jenkins stood up. He was unsteady on his feet, and small round patches of red had appeared at the tip of his nose and on both cheekbones like the make-up of a circus clown. “I’d better start to work. That two fifty ought to set me up in Mexicali. Mexicali’s full of tourists, it’ll be a gold mine.”
“Stay out of real estate.”
“Oh, I can’t truly regret Jenlock Haciendas. It was a great place while it lasted.” It sounded like a fitting epitaph.
Aragon said, “Suppose you come back here tomorrow night and give me a progress report.”
“If that’s how you want it.”
“I’ll be waiting for you. Good night, Jenkins.”
“I have a nice feeling about you, laddie. You’re going to bring me luck.”
11
Twenty-four hours later Aragon was still waiting in his hotel room to hear from Harry Jenkins. It was after eleven when the phone finally rang.
“It’s me, laddie.”
“Where are you?”
“Never mind about that. Listen, I said you were going to bring me luck, and by God, you did. I met this pigeon. He came down to Mexico to scout around for investment opportunities and I happen to have one for him. Me.”
“I’ve already invested in you, fifty bucks, two hundred more coming. I’m expecting a report.”
“All in good time. This other matter is more urgent. The pigeon’s due to leave town pretty soon and I’m trying to nail him down.”
“What are you nailing him to?”
“The chicken tortilla business. He thinks it’s a winner.”
“How many drinks has he had?”
“That’s not a nice implication,” Jenkins said reproachfully. “But I won’t hold a grudge. Maybe you got something against chickens, maybe you just lack financial vision.”
“Did you find Tula?”
“I’m on her heels. By tomorrow night I’ll be able to take you straight to her.”
“Why not tonight?”
“I told you, tonight I’m involved in a new business venture.”
“Where are you?”
“Now, why do you want to know that?”
&nb
sp; “Because wherever it is, I’m coming. I want to protect my investment.”
“Oh hell, laddie, don’t do that. You’ll blow it for me. This may be my chance of a lifetime. He’s fat and juicy and ready for plucking.”
“Let’s get back to Tula.”
“Sure, sure, whatever you say. Only I’m in kind of a hurry.”
“I think you’re bulling me,” Aragon said. “You already know where the girl is, don’t you?”
“Even if I told you, you couldn’t find her. It’s not like she has an ordinary job with a real address and maybe even a telephone. Looking for customers while dodging the police, that takes moving around, see?”
“Where are you, Jenkins?”
“I asked you not to press me, laddie,” Jenkins said and hung up.
Aragon put the phone back on the hook. It was late and he was tired. He would have liked to go to bed and forget about Jenkins for the night, but the conversation had made him uneasy on two counts. The first was the possibility that if Jenkins plucked enough feathers out of his new pigeon, he wouldn’t wait around town for Gilly’s extra two hundred. He’d be in Mexicali by morning.
The second possibility was in a sense more disturbing. Rich, drunk, gullible tourists were not uncommon in Rio Seco, but the fact that Jenkins found one so quickly and easily was suspicious. Nobody was easier to con than a con man, and Jenkins would be easier than most. He seemed to have the same kind of basic innocence he’d criticized in B. J. If B. J. believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, Jenkins believed in rainbows with pots of gold. The only thing that would protect him from being taken was that he had nothing much to take, only the fifty dollars he’d received in advance for locating Tula.
Aragon was almost certain that Jenkins had found out where the girl lived and that the reason he’d refused to give more information over the phone was his fear of not being paid the extra two hundred. For someone in Jenkins’ position it was a natural enough fear. He’d probably cheated and been cheated hundreds of times. Now that he had something real to sell he would deliver it in person, for cash and in his own time. Meanwhile, some half-soused American tourist was hearing a lot about chicken tortillas.
As he put on his coat and tie Aragon thought back over the conversation. Jenkins had not, in fact, mentioned the word “American,” only a pigeon ready for plucking. The pigeon could be an Eskimo or an Algerian, but the odds were against it. Emilia had named three places as Jenkins’ favorite hangouts because they catered to American tourists, and Jenkins had referred to two of them the previous night, El Alegre and the Domino Club.
Aragon combed his hair and straightened his tie in front of the bureau mirror. “You’re going out on the town, laddie.”
El Alegre was in a new section of town that was already beginning to look old and in another few years would be just another addition to the slums. Right now business was booming. A fleet of taxicabs was double-parked outside the entrance vying with each other for the attention of the hustlers. Jenkins had compared the girls hanging around outside the jail to a flock of starlings. That was how they looked now as they gathered on the sidewalk in front of the club, like
starlings getting ready to roost for the night, twittering, fluttering, fidgeting, grumbling.
A teenager wearing a high-rise platinum wig and four-inch cork wedgies attached herself to Aragon’s coat sleeve and spoke to him in English. “Hey, gringo, you and me make fun. What kind of fun? You name it. You tiger, me pussycat, me tiger, you pussycat.”
“I’m here on business.”
“Okey-dokey, we do business.”
“No thank you.”
“No okey-dokey?”
“No okey-dokey.”
“Son a bitch cheapskate.” She returned to the flock, twitching her tail and smoothing her ruffled feathers. She was about fifteen, the age Tula had been when she’d gone to work as a maid in Gilly’s house.
Aragon looked over the girl’s companions, wondering if Tula was one of them. No, they were all too young. Tula would be twenty-three by now, young by the standards of an ordinary middle-class American, old for a prostitute in Rio Seco.
“Hey, gringo, lotsa fun. Play games. Hot stuff.”
The Domino Club was on the other side of the bridge crossing the seasonally dry river that gave the city its name. It was October and the rainy season was late starting. The rio was seco after months of drought, just as the wells in the higher sections of the city were drying up and those nearer the sea were turning to salt.
In earlier days a narrow wooden bridge had divided the slums and squatters from the residential areas of the more prosperous merchants and professional men. With the building of the new bridge over the new concrete lining of the riverbed, the two sections of town were becoming indistinguishable. Thousands of cars and pedestrians crossed the steel arch every day. The wealthier citizens resented the intrusion and escaped to the hills and the privacy of iron gates and chain-link fences. Their deserted houses were torn down for apartments or rebuilt into stores or night clubs like the Domino.
Several coats of black paint decorated with white polka dots, a black-and-white marquee topped by a neon sign indicated that the Domino catered to a better class of clientele than El Alegre. A uniformed doorman kept the hustlers on the opposite side of the street, the taxicabs in single file and the cigarette butts swept into the gutter. Otherwise things were much the same, including the fact that Harry Jenkins wasn’t in sight.
Aragon was on the point of leaving when he noticed a small man in a blue suit slumped over the table in the end booth. He thought of Emilia at the jail talking about Jenkins: He’s not a drunk, liquor’s not one of his weaknesses.
Tonight was the exception. Jenkins reeked of whiskey as though he’d spilled it all over himself. His head lay sideways on the table at an awkward angle looking detached from the rest of his body. Though his eyes were open, they were as unfocused and unblinking as a dead man’s. One of his hands was curled around an empty bottle of beer.
“Jenkins? Hey, are you all right?”
Jenkins’ mouth moved in response to his name, but the only thing to come out of it were some bubbles of saliva that slid down his chin. Aragon took out his handkerchief and attempted to wipe off the saliva. Jenkins’ whole face, his hair, his shirt and tie, even the shoulders of his suit coat were soaking wet. Instead of merely spilling some whiskey on himself, he seemed to have been the target of a whole glass of it, as though someone had thrown it at him in a rage.
“Jenkins, can you hear me?”
He moaned.
“What happened to you? Are you sick?”
One of the bartenders came over, a young man with a moist red face like underdone beef. He spoke English with a New York accent. “This a friend of yours?”
“I know him.”
“That’s good enough. Get him out of here. I don’t want him puking up the place.”
“I think he’s sick.”
“I don’t care why he’s doing it, just let him do it some other place.”
“Help me lift him and I’ll put him in a cab.”
“I got a hernia.”
“How can you have a hernia when you’re all heart?”
“Just lucky, I guess. Use the back door.”
Aragon managed to get his hands under Jenkins’ armpits and pull him to his feet. “Come on, Jenkins, wake up. Wake up and see the birdie.”
“Chicken birdie?”
“Chicken birdie it is. Can you walk?”
“I can fly.”
“Good. Let’s fly home to roost.”
Jenkins’ eyes were coming back into focus. The pupils were so dilated that only a tiny rim of iris was left around them. He stood up, holding on to the table for support. “Who—are you?”
“I’m laddie. Remember?”
“Oh, I feel funny, laddie—help me, help
.”
“You’ll be all right. Come along.”
They walked arm in arm with a kind of awkward dignity out the back door and into a dimly lit area that had once been somebody’s walled garden. A water-boy fountain, the pitcher on his shoulder long since dry, stood in the middle of dusty dying weeds. The only living relic of the garden was a half-naked tamarisk tree.
Aragon put the sick man down on the concrete bench that circled the fountain. Jenkins’ forehead was hot and the pulse in his throat very rapid and irregular.
“Listen now, Jenkins. Wait here and I’ll go line up a taxi and come back for you. Have you got that? I’m coming back for you, so wait here. Do you understand me?”
It was apparent even in the dim light that Jenkins was incapable of understanding. His eyes had glazed over, vomit was bubbling down both sides of his mouth, and he was alternately chewing and spitting out chunks of sentences. His symptoms didn’t fit those of an ordinary drunk. He’d had a few moments of lucidity when his speech was clear and unslurred, and he recognized Aragon as a friend. Now he seemed to have slipped once again into a state of delirium.
“Big bird, fly me golden . . . help B. J., he’s sick . . . must go home . . . takeout and delivery . . . fry me to the moon, Emilia . . . bad bird boy . . . where are you, laddie? Get me a drink. Water. Water.”
“I’m right here. I’m going away for a few minutes, then I’m coming back to take you home. Are you listening, Jenkins? You stay where you are. Don’t move. I’m going for help.”
“Where’s laddie? Water. Drink.”
Jenkins reached out and clutched the marble water boy with both hands. Aragon left him like that, hanging on to the statue as if it were still pouring out the stuff of life.
Aragon returned through the bar to the front of the building. He gave one of the taxi drivers waiting at the curb five dollars to come and help him with Jenkins. The two men were just starting toward the club when Jenkins himself came staggering out through the front door, his head lowered as if he were about to charge some unseen unknown enemy.
Ask for Me Tomorrow Page 10
