Ask for Me Tomorrow

by Margaret Millar

  “So where are we?”

  “Nowhere,” he said. “I’ll be going back to Santa Felicia either tomorrow or Friday. The Dragon Lady has asked me to check the American consulate here for any record of her ex-husband. After that I’ll head for home and forget all about Jenkins and bridges and B. J. and Tula, the whole enchilada.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “How do you know I won’t?”

  “You’ve always liked enchiladas.”

  “I can take them or leave them.”

  “You’d better leave this one,” she said. “I mean that seriously, Tom. You should be in court handling a complicated tax case or somebody’s nice messy divorce.”

  “This is somebody’s messy divorce, or was at the beginning. Now it’s something even messier, something weird, crazy. I’m getting bad vibes.”

  “I speak as a doctor—there’s nothing you can do for bad vibes except walk away from their source. So start walking.”

  “Tomorrow. Friday at the latest. May I ask you one more question?”

  “You will, anyway.”

  “Is LSD readily accessible?”

  “Here in San Francisco you can practically buy it over the counter if you go to the right counter. In Mexico, the whole drug situation is pretty murky. Officially, narcotics and hallucinogens are illegal. Yet it’s well known that mescal buttons and high-grade marijuana are widely grown. Less well known is the fact that opium poppies are cultivated just as successfully as they are in Turkey. The heroin extracted from them is not white like the stuff grown in Turkey. It’s a peculiar color, that’s why they call it Mexican Brown. It’s equally strong, and a hundred times more dangerous because it’s so much easier to smuggle into the country. There are nearly two thousand miles of border, most of it unguarded . . . But I haven’t really answered your question. Maybe I was just postponing admitting that I don’t know how accessible LSD is in Rio Seco. My guess is, not very. It’s a product of labs, not fields. An American like Jenkins would be more likely than a Mexican to know about it and buy it.”

  “Good.”

  “Why good?”

  “It fits in with what I’ve thought since the beginning, that the man with Jenkins at the Domino Club was an American and the bartender’s description of him was phony. I’d better go and pay another call on Mitchell. He plays bartender, but I’m pretty sure he’s part owner of the club.”

  “It’s terribly late. And if Mitchell lied before, why shouldn’t he lie again? You can’t choke the truth out of him.”

  “He was bribed. I’ll rebribe him.”

  “Tom, I hate the idea of your mingling with people like that in a place like that.”

  “I grew up in a barrio with people like that. I didn’t even know there were any other kinds until I reached high school.”

  “Don’t give me any of that macho bull.”

  “Okay, cut out the maternal bit. Bargain?”

  “Some bargain,” she said. “You do what you want and I’m too far away to stop you.”

  “How would you stop me, fair means or foul?”

  “Diseases aren’t the only things you learn about in med school. Definitely foul.”

  “I’ll take you up on that some time.”

  “Tom, listen—”

  “Stop worrying about me. I haven’t been in a fight for ten years. Or five, anyway. I promise to be sensible, cautious, alert, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “It would have been more reassuring without all those et ceteras,” she said coolly. “And if you bring up that barrio stuff once again, I’ll scream.”

  “You can’t. You’ll scare your patients.”

  “There aren’t any patients in here. Just a couple of interns so tired they wouldn’t wake up if a bomb exploded.”

  “Anyway, thanks for the information about drugs. I truly appreciate it.”

  “How truly?”

  “I’ll bring you a present, a great big sombrero to hide all those brains of yours. Us macho men like dumb dames.”

  “Go back to your enchilada. I hope you get heartburn.”

  “I love you, too.”

  It was one o’clock, the peak of the evening in the Domino Club district. Before going inside, Aragon stopped to talk to the hustlers waiting across the street. There were about half a dozen left by this time. Most of them merely looked blank when Aragon mentioned the name. Tula Lopez. Only one, a girl about seventeen, said she used to know a Tula years ago when she first went into the racket. The Tula she knew must be very old by now, maybe twenty-five, and surely Aragon wouldn’t be interested in such a hag.

  “I just want to talk to her about a family matter. Can you put out the word?”

  “How much word?”

  “Twenty dollars. My name is Aragon and I’m staying at the Hotel Castillo.”

  “Sure, okay.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Blondie.”

  “Blondie?”

  The girl had jet-black hair reaching to her waist. “Why do you look funny? Don’t you like that name?”

  “I like it fine.”

  “So do all the other men. They laugh, it makes them feel good, I don’t know why. But they give me more money when they laugh and feel good. How about you?”

  “We agreed on a price.”

  When she opened her purse to deposit the twenty-dollar bill Aragon gave her, he saw the gleam of a knife. Blondie wasn’t taking any chances on a customer getting away without paying.

  He went inside the club. Mitchell saw him coming. He wasn’t happy about it: “I thought you left town.”

  “I stayed around to pick up some loose ends.”

  “Loose ends is what we got plenty of. Take your pick.”

  “You lied to me, Mitchell.”

  “I lie a lot,” Mitchell said. “I took a course.”

  “How much were you paid?”

  “What for? Who by?”

  “The American with Jenkins last night. How much did he pay you to forget he was here?”

  “Nobody has to pay me to forget. I took a course in that, too. It’s called Elementary Survival. I recommend it to you.”

  “Maybe I could hire you as a tutor. What do you charge?”

  “Don’t waste your money. You’d flunk the first lesson, how not to ask questions. The second lesson’s even harder—how to spot a rat fink, get rid of him and stay in business. Adios, amigo, nice knowing you. Don’t hurry back.”

  15

  The American consulate was located in one of the older sections of the city, the Colonia Maciza. The formidable stone building reminded Aragon of the Quarry and he soon discovered another similarity. The consul and the assistant consul, like the warden and his assistant, believed in long weekends. They had, he was told by a receptionist, gone on a deep-sea fishing trip and wouldn’t return until Monday afternoon. Possibly Tuesday. If there was a storm at sea, Wednesday. If the boat sank, never.

  The consul’s executive secretary sat behind a large mahogany desk with a name plate identifying her as Miss Eckert. She was fat as a robin, and she held her head on one side as if she were listening for a worm. Aragon did his best to provide a substitute by giving her his card, Tomás Aragon, Attorney-at-Law, Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, McFee and Powell.

  Miss Eckert put on a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, glanced at the card and then dropped it quickly into the wastebasket as though she’d detected a lethal fungus somewhere between Smedler and Powell.

  “Is this a confidential matter, Mr. Aragon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then close the door. A man has been hanging around the corridor all week. I suspect he may be CIA. You’re not by any chance CIA?”

  “Now, would I tell you if I were?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never asked anyone before.”

>   “The answer is no. But I may be lying.”

  Miss Eckert was not amused. She leaned back in her chair with a little sigh. “I gather your business concerns an American citizen in Baja.”

  “He came to Baja eight years ago. I’m not certain he’s still here or if he’s still alive. His family would like to find out.”

  “Name, please?”

  “Byron James Lockwood.”

  “Last reported address?”

  “The Quarry.”

  “The Quarry. That’s the penitentiary.”

  “Lockwood was arrested on a charge of fraud involving some real estate in Bahía de Ballenas. I wasn’t allowed access to the files at the Quarry. I was assured, however, that they contain no record of Lockwood’s arrest or release.”

  “Are you sure he was taken there?”

  “Positive. His partner in the fraud, Harry Jenkins, served time with him. I talked to Jenkins on Monday and again on Tuesday. On Wednesday I attended his funeral.”

  “Was he sick?—I refer to Monday and Tuesday, of course.”

  “No.”

  “This is beginning to sound,” Miss Eckert said carefully, “like the kind of thing I would rather not hear.”

  “Better listen anyway. Jenkins told me—and this was confirmed by someone still in the jail—that Lockwood was ill and frequently disturbed and the guards used drugs to keep him from making trouble. Maybe in the beginning they gave him something like paregoric or laudanum to quiet him, but he eventually became drug dependent. He was wearing quite a bit of expensive jewelry when he left Bahía de Ballenas. He probably used it to purchase narcotics from, or through, the guards at the jail.”

  “Narcotics?” The word brought Miss Eckert’s chair upright with a squawk of dismay. “What kind of narcotics?”

  “I’m not certain.”

  “Oh, I knew, I knew this was going to be a rotten day. My horoscope said, stay home and attend to family affairs. I thought it couldn’t apply to me because I don’t have a family. I should have taken the advice. It meant me, all right—me.”

  “What’s your sign?”

  “Scorpio.”

  “That’s the sign of a person who always copes, no matter how difficult the situation.”

  “I thought Scorpios were supposed to be creative.”

  “When they’re not coping, they’re creative.”

  “If you’re trying to be funny,” Miss Eckert said, “I may as well warn you that I have a very poor sense of humor. Especially when certain subjects are brought up. Poppies. Back home in Bakersfield I used to love poppies. Here it’s a dirty word, and of course, a different kind of poppy, or Papaver somniferum.”

  “Why? I mean, why is it a dirty word?”

  “We—meaning all the U.S. government employees in this country—are in quite a delicate position right now. There are diplomatic negotiations going on between the two governments. Our government is well aware that illegal poppy fields are sprouting up all over the Sierra Madre, particularly the slopes on the Pacific side. It wants them destroyed. The Mexican government has pledged its cooperation and has actually burned off a few of the fields. But we’re asking for more widespread and more complete destruction, such as Army helicopters spraying the fields with herbicides. Certainly we know that something must be done quickly. The last samplings of heroin picked up in L. A. showed that all of it, one hundred percent, came from Mexico. And the last New York samplings were eighty-five percent Mexican. The stuff which is grown in Turkey and processed in Marseilles has been drawing everyone’s attention, while the Mexican stuff has been taking over the market. It’s processed in mobile labs around Culiacan, north of Mazatlan. Law enforcement officials refer to Culiacan as the new Marseilles. You see the problem?”

  “Clearly.”

  “Now the question is, what do we do about it? Obviously we can’t tell the Mexican government officials to spray the fields or else. We must ask. Politely. That’s called negotiating.”

  “And while these negotiations are taking place you want to avoid any international incidents.”

  “Yes.”

  “Such as might be caused by a prominent American citizen becoming a narcotics addict while confined in a Mexican jail unfairly if not illegally.”

  Miss Eckert looked grim. “That’s what we want to avoid. Exactly.”

  “So let’s you and I do a little negotiating of our own.”

  “I would rather not.”

  “The Mexican government would rather not destroy the poppy fields, and the United States government would rather they did.”

  “Which government am I supposed to be?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “Swiss.”

  “Ah, you do have a sense of humor, Miss Eckert. Swiss. Ha ha.”

  “Ha ha,” Miss Eckert said. “What are your terms?”

  “I’ll keep quiet about Lockwood, and you use some of your consular clout to find out if and when he was released from jail. Somebody must have a record of him—the state or local police, the jail officials, the immigration department, the coroner. You can open doors that are closed to me. So you open doors, I shut my mouth.” Aragon took another card from his wallet and printed on it the address of his office and the telephone number. “You can write to me here, or if you want to phone, leave a message for me any time. There’s an answering service after business hours.”

  “The consul should be here instead of out chasing fish or whatever. I can’t decide something like this alone.”

  “Scorpios usually make quick decisions.”

  “That’s what you want, is it—a quick decision? All right, here it is. I’m not going to break down doors trying to find traces of some junkie.”

  “You’re not negotiating, Miss Eckert.”

  “I don’t have to,” Miss Eckert said. “I’m Swiss.”

  He flew back to Santa Felicia that afternoon. He found his car at the airport where he’d left it, the hubcaps and radio antenna still in place, the windows and tires undamaged. Even the battery was in working order: the engine turned over after only three attempts. He took all this as a good omen.

  He picked up a quarter-pounder and fries at a McDonald’s near the airport and ate them on the way home. It was ten o’clock when he called Gilly’s house.

  Violet Smith answered. “Good evening. Praise the Lord.”

  “Praise the Lord.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Tom Aragon.”

  “Oh. Wait till I get a pencil and paper. She’s not here. I’m supposed to write down whatever you say.”

  “But I haven’t anything that important to—”

  “Okay, I’m ready. You can say something.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Where . . . is . . . she.”

  “You don’t have to write that down, for Pete’s sake. This is personal, between you and me, like ‘How are you.’ ”

  “Asked . . . regarding . . . health.”

  “Knock it off. All you have to write down is that I’m back in town and I’ll talk to her tomorrow morning. There’s nothing further to report, anyway.”

  “You didn’t find Mr. Lockwood?”

  “No.”

  “I must admit that’s a load off my mind.”

  “Why must you admit that?”

  Violet Smith made a number of small peculiar noises that sounded as though she might be wrestling with her conscience. “I just better not speak too freely over the telephone. You never know who might be listening in.”

  “Who else is there to listen in?”

  “A new nurse, for one, Mrs. Morrison. She was hired so Reed could take a couple of days off this week, and Mrs. Decker decided to keep her on for a while until Reed’s disposition improves. She’s a nasty old thing, all starch and steel, not a human bone in her body.�
��

  “If she’s listening in, she’s certainly getting an earful.”

  “It won’t come as a surprise. I made my feelings toward her quite clear, especially after they gave her the guest room. It’s the best room in the house, a view of the ocean, a Beautyrest mattress and a pink velvet chaise. Pink velvet, and her an ordinary nurse.”

  Aragon said, “Where did Mrs. Decker go?”

  “To the movies with Reed. Reed told her if she didn’t get out of this house once in a while, she’d have a nervous breakdown. I felt like saying, maybe she already has one. But I didn’t. My car’s not paid for and my left back molar needs a new crown. There are also spiritual considerations.”

  “What kind of spiritual considerations?”

  “The church needs money. Did you hear a click on the line just then?”

  “I accidentally touched the phone with my glass.”

  “Your glass. What are you drinking?”

  He lied a little. “Soda water.”

  “Reed has been drinking hard liquor lately and far too much of it. His eyes get all bleary and he talks fresh to Mrs. Decker. If I talked fresh to her with bleary eyes, I wouldn’t get away with it, no sir. She’d up and—”

  “Violet Smith.”

  “—fire me like a shot. She allows Reed to—”

  “Violet Smith, I’m tired. I want to go to bed.”

  “What time is it?”

  “A quarter after ten.”

  “Went . . . to . . . bed . . . ten fifteen.”

  16

  “Well, here he is, our wandering boy, fresh from foreign soil.” Charity Nelson pushed back her orange wig so she could get a better view of him. “You’ve only been gone a week but I detect a certain new maturity about you, Aragon. What happened?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “I thought of you a few times.”

  “I thought of you, too. Especially when the answering service woke me up at six thirty this morning to read me a night letter addressed to you.”

  “A night letter?”

  “From Rio Seco. Want me to read it to you? Better say yes, I took it down in my own version of shorthand.”