Dress Her in Indigo

by John D. MacDonald

  “McLeen said he’d been here since the first. So he could have arrived on the last day of July. That was a Thursday. It was the day that Rockland stayed away from the little nest on Calle las Artes all day long and part of the evening, and came back and asked for a loan of three thousand and made Bruce Bundy suspicious by not being sour about being turned down. So all of Rockland’s troops had deserted him, and he had been tossed out of the trailer park, and he was trying to hustle a sizable piece of money anywhere he could find it. So maybe he spent a lot of time that same Thursday trying to establish contact with Minda McLeen. He would know where she was, but that house is a fortress, the Vitrier house. And neither girl would be very anxious to see Rockland for any reason, I’d assume. But let’s say he did get in touch, or find out how he could get in touch later.”

  “You’re recovering nicely,” Meyer said.

  “So Rockland had written off Bruce Bundy, at least as far as any willing donation is concerned. So he decides to leave with the things that look most valuable, going on the basis that the Bundys of this world seldom blow the whistle. They would rather write off the loss than make it police business. But Bundy was too cute. And when Rockland tried to jump him, Bundy was too rough. Rockland got black-belted all to hell. It probably made him pretty sick. But he had to get out of there on Saturday to meet Minda.”

  “What would he be most worried about?” Meyer asked.

  “I guess he would realize that if Wally McLeen located his daughter, that would end any chance of selling the information and delivering the girl to him for a price.”

  “So we have a gap in the sequence. Better than twenty-four hours, and we have Bix and an American up on that mountain Sunday afternoon, parked and both out of the car and talking. Because it was Bundy’s yellow car, we can assume it was Walter Rockland with Bix. He had to have a way to get down off the mountain. He could walk it after dark. But it would be full daylight before he could get down to the valley floor.”

  “Or somebody picked him up, by arrangement.”

  “He’d run out of people,” Meyer said. “And if it was by arrangement, then there would have to be the assumption that he knew she would take off with the car and wouldn’t make it all the way down. How could he be sure she wouldn’t? What would the motive be?”

  “Then there’s the next gap until Tuesday morning, when he took the camper out of Bundy’s shed.”

  Meyer shook his head. “It doesn’t fit together. None of it. We just don’t have enough of the missing pieces to even be able to guess how many other pieces are missing. Unless Jerome Nesta is willing to talk freely, we might as well go home. And maybe even if he does talk it won’t be helpful.”

  Just then the Guadalajara sisters came clattering and squealing down upon us, laden with purchases, and there was much arrangement of girls and packages. They were still avid with the lust and fury of shopping, and they made expansive burlesques of total exhaustion, then dived into the bags and bundles to open the small ones for the reassurance of our admiration, and pluck open the corners of the big ones to show the pattern and texture of bright fabric.

  And where is Lita? Ah, there was someone here in this city she had to call, an old couple who were friends of her mother, and she had been putting it off, so at last she called and they had asked her to come to have lunch with them, and it seemed as good a time as any, so she had phoned Enelio and informed him and had gone to meet the old couple. So Enelio would not join us either.

  The sisters were both thirsty and famished, so as soon as a drink came they ordered lunch, and then went chattering on up to their little hotel suite to drop their purchases and freshen up.

  They had made crackling inquisition of the waiter, and so we had ordered what they had ordered. It was very, very good indeed, and not at all heavy.

  After lunch Margarita, the one with the best command of English, said, “Meyer, I wish to ask of you one great favor, a very selfish thing, a very dull thing for you. I am silly. You can say no, please.”

  “I say yes. Okay.”

  “Without knowing, even! You remember at the place coming into Mitla at the right side, how I saw the mos’ lovely color shawl and cried out to all to look? There is no such color in the market here. I must have, Meyer. I must go and buy it in Mitla or it will be gone forever and never, never will I see another one.”

  “So we will all go to Mitla. Right, Travis? No problem, ladies.”

  “Please, wissout Elena,” said Elena. She put the back of her fist in front of a gigantic yawn. “You three are going. I am sitting and then up above sleeping, I think.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Wissout McGee too, if you don’t mind.”

  They didn’t mind. They took a cab up the hill to the hotel after I told Meyer to look for the Falcon keys on my bureau. We watched the people, few and slow-moving in the time of siesta.

  “Asking one favor too? Okay?”

  “Sure, Elena.”

  “Maybe one little swimming in the so beautiful pool as before we were?”

  I agreed. She went up and came down quickly with a little blue airline bag. We strolled over to the cab row on the post-office street and took a cab up to the hotel. She changed first in our cottage named Alicia, and came out in a narrow bikini that was a froth of rows of crisp horizontal white ruffles, and by the time I got up to the pool she was swimming, wearing a swim cap covered with vivid plastic daisies. People were baking in the sun, and except for some children in the shallow end, we had the pool to ourselves. She was an unskilled and earnest swimmer, rolling and thrashing too much, expending too much effort and trying to hold her head too high. I told her a few things that would help, and swam beside her. She learned quickly and was very pleased with herself and kept at it until she was winded and gasping. We climbed out and she pulled the cap off and said, “Now enough I think. Okay?”

  We walked back down to Alicia, among the cottages below and beyond the pool, and I unlocked the door for her and sat on the porch while she went in to change. I heard the clatter as she closed the blinds.

  “Tuh … rrrravis? Por favor, ayudarme? Thees dombo theeng is es-stock.”

  So if something is es-stock, one must go in and un-es-stock it for the lady. She was between beds and bath, back toward me, still in bikini, and she looked over her shoulder and indicated the snap or fastening or whatever at the back of the bikini top was es-stock.

  So I went to her. She pulled her long dark hair forward and stood with head bowed. She held the bikini top against her breasts with her hands. There were two snaps hidden by ruffles. I put a thumbnail under one and it popped. I put a thumbnail under the other and it popped and the two straps fell, dangling down the side of her rib cage. She stood without moving. It was a lithe and lovely back. Droplets of water stood on her back and shoulders. Crease down the soft brown back. Pale down, paler than her skin, heaviest near the vertical furrow. The bikini bottom came around her just a little above the widest part of her hips, leaving bare that lovely duplicated tender concavity of the girl-waist, leaving bare two dimples in the sun-honeyed brown, half a handspan apart, below the base of her spine.

  So the response is an acceptance, a dedication, a tenderness expressed by very slowly, very precisely, very carefully placing the male hands upon the slenderest part of the waist, thumbs resting against the back, aimed upward, parallel to the center division of the back, edges of the hands resting against that soft shelf where the hips begin to bloom. She shivered at the touch, then lifted her head and leaned back against me. I bent and kissed the top of her shoulder, close to her throat, felt the dampness of some tendrils of hair which the swim cap had not completely protected. She was breathing very steadily, audibly, deeply, and her eyes were heavy and almost closed when I turned her around and kissed her on the mouth.

  “But … they might come back here,” I said.

  She gave a little shake of her head and spoke through soft blurred lips. “No, no. She will taking Meyer to the Marqués to see dresses she boug
ht. She trying them on for him, no hurry. Ah, she bought one hell of a lot of dresses, that sister mine.”

  So you go over and bolt the door, and the room is golden with the sun through the tiny cracks of the closed slats. She wants to be looked at, yet is at the same time shy. She is avid and timorous. She is experienced to a small degree, yet unsure. There is a musky-sweet, pungent scent of herself in her heat, distinctively her own. She has a secret inward smile when the pleasure is good for her. She has a long strong belly and rubbery-powerful hips and thighs, yet there are no feats of astonishing muscle control, no researched ancient trickeries, and that is a sweet and simple relief. Approaching climax her body heats and her breasts swell and her mouth sags. She deepens her strong and heavy beat and her eyes roll wild in the dim room, as if in panic, and she rolls her head from side to side and has the look of listening, and of being afraid of what is rolling up out of the depths of her, and then she is into all of it, making a very small and very sweet whimpering, and holding tight, like a child on a high scary place.

  Siesta is sweet when the light is gold, and when the vivid young face on the pillow looks into yours, beside her, inches away, and smiles the woman-smile older than time, her exhalations warm against your mouth, as with slow fingers she traces your brows, lips, and the shape of cheek and jaw. There is nothing more es-stock. It has all been unfastened, all turned loose, with a guile that was so sweetly planned it could not be denied, even had there been any thought of denying it. Elena, you are the Mexican afternoons forever.

  Fourteen

  At eleven on Wednesday morning Enelio Fuentes brought Jerome Nesta to our cottage at the Hotel Victoria. Nesta acted sullen, uncommunicative. He wore the same clothes, but otherwise I would not have recognized him.

  Enelio said, “They gave him a choice with the big bushy beard. Take it off himself, or they’d strap him down and take it off with a dull knife. The haircut was done by a jailor with no talent, eh?”

  “Have your laughs,” Nesta mumbled. The area where the beard had been was blue-white and nicked in a half dozen places. His scalp shone pale through a half inch of black bristle. Without the beard he looked older. I remembered he was twenty-six. He looked thirty. There were deep lines bracketing his mouth. Also, without the beard he looked almost frail. His hands were big and heavily calloused from the work with the mallet.

  “One thing they forgot,” Enelio said. “Out in the open if you stay upwind from him, it’s not bad. In the car you keep the window open and stay close to it, very important. In this room, this size, he is impossible. It cannot be endured.”

  “Screw yourself,” Nesta muttered, eyes downcast.

  I went into the dressing-room closet and picked some tan slacks I’d never liked much, and the white sports shirt that had been, despite all instructions, starched, and some laundered jockey shorts and socks which had seen dutiful valiant service. I handed him the bundle and said, “Go in and scrub.”

  “Screw yourself,” he said again.

  “Enelio,” I said, “can you give this thing back to the law, or don’t they want him either?”

  “As a favor to me, they’ll give him his same cell back.”

  “Then take him along. Thanks for your trouble. I don’t need to talk to him. Not right now. Not this way. When they fly him into Miami, I’ll have him picked up there.”

  “For what?” Nesta asked.

  “We’ll think of something,” I said.

  “How about air pollution?” Meyer asked.

  “Dade County loans able-bodied prisoners to Collier County for road work,” I said. “Sheriff Doug Hendry’s people give a short course in manners and personal hygiene.”

  Nesta looked at me, then at Enelio. It was a quick, flickering glance of appraisal. Without the beard he had the con look, the loser look. He had been there before, and knew he would be back there again, and it didn’t make too much difference whether it was going to be a valid rap. He had the cronkey look, that flavor of upcoming trouble that alerts any cop anywhere. I don’t know what it is. It is a combination of facial expression, posture, gesture—and the experience of the cop who sees the stranger and sees that indefinable thing he has seen so many times before. The animal behavior experts report that something similar exists in those wild animals who have some form of community culture. Certain individuals will be run off by the others, will be killed, or will be left to roam alone.

  He picked the clean clothing off the floor and went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  Enelio said, “The shock yesterday opened him up. He talked pretty good, remember? So now he closed the doors and locked them. I don’t know if he’ll talk to you. I know damn well he won’t talk if I’m here. The chemistry is not good. I better go. You know, one funny thing. You types from the Estados Unidos, too many talk about dirty Mexicans, right? Okay. Those little huts over there on that hill. Poor people. Carry water a hell of a distance. And take a bath every day, and the women wash that long hair every day. Clean, clean, clean. So we talk about dirty heepies. There is an old dirty heepie in there, showering. But I have had the pleasure of knowing some of your little heepie crumpets, and they have been, my friend, deliciously fresh and sweet and clean. Clean and shining as the beards on some of their boyfriends. So, big conclusion. There are dirty Mexicans and dirty heepies. But it is not a characteristic, hey?”

  “Thanks for getting him out.”

  “Use your judgment. If there’s a chance he’ll make trouble, we better stick him back inside fast. He looks to me as if he wants to take off.”

  “The bathroom window has bars on it too.”

  “I noticed. If you decide he’s trouble, take him in yourself and give him to Sergeant Martinez, okay?”

  We thanked him and he left. Room service, as a concession to the standard issue American tourist, has hamburgers with everything all day long. I phoned up for two for Nesta, and a pot of coffee. He showered for a long time. At last he came out. My stuff was big for him, except around the waist. He had to turn the bottoms of the slacks up. He had wadded his old clothes up. Meyer told him to stuff them into the wastebasket and put the wastebasket out on the porch. Nesta looked guarded and self-conscious. Before he had come out, anticipating problems, I had told Meyer we had better go into the good-guy bad-guy routine if he seemed too uncooperative.

  “Sit down, Jerry,” I said. “I want you to start at the beginning. How did the five of you get together originally and decide to come to Mexico?”

  “Maybe we answered an ad.”

  I glanced at Meyer. We’d have to try the routine. The hotel waiter arrived with the tray, and that gave me my opening.

  “Did you order this stuff, Meyer? For him?”

  “When you walked out with Enelio. Yes.”

  “Out of the goodness of your heart? Your motherly instinct? You want gratitude from this dreary bastard?”

  “I don’t imagine he got much to eat in jail, Travis.”

  “That’s one part of the hotel bill we don’t split down the middle. That little gesture is all yours.”

  Nesta took a small, tentative bite, and then wolfed the two hamburgers down. He was taking a gulp of the coffee when I asked him the same question again.

  “Maybe we had this real great travel agent,” Nesta said.

  I waited until he set the cup down, then took a long reach and backhanded him across the chops. It was quick and substantial. It rocked his head and emptied his eyes.

  Meyer jumped up and yelled at me. “What are you trying to do? You’ve got no right to do that! Give him a little time. He’ll explain it all.”

  “I know he’ll explain it all. Because somewhere along the line the message is going to get through to him. He’s going to talk it all out or I am going to keep bending him until something breaks. And he is going to tell it straight because he doesn’t know how many ways I have to check it all out. I know this slob beat a possession indictment three years ago. I know he was inside the Bowie house at Cricket Bayou on sever
al occasions. I know they all crossed in on the tenth, from Brownsville into Matamoros, and I know exactly when the Bowie girl got the money in Culiacán, and exactly how much. And I know a lot of other things that better match with what he says, and if they don’t match, you’d better take a long walk, Meyer, because there are some things you don’t like to watch. They upset your stomach.”

  “That’s no way to talk to him!” Meyer said.

  “Look at him! Look at the expression. It’s the only way to talk to this pot head.”

  “I think you better take the walk, McGee,” Meyer said.

  “I’ll be right on the porch, because you’re going to need me, my friend.”

  I slammed the door. I sat in one of the porch chairs and put my heels up on the brick railing. Meyer would take it as far as he could, and then it would be my turn, and between the two of us we had a chance of whipsawing him.

  From the porch I could hear the tone of their voices without being able to hear the words. I heard Meyer mostly, and then I began to hear more and more of Nesta’s voice. It was the Meyer magic at work. I looked through the window. Nesta sat on the end of Meyer’s bed, leaning over on one elbow. Meyer had turned the desk chair around and he sat facing Nesta.

  They say that only a small portion of personal communication is verbal, and that the rest of it is posture, expression, gesture, those physical aspects of man which antedate his ability to speak. Meyer constructs somehow a small safe world, a place where anything can be said, anything can be understood, and all can be forgiven. We are all, every one, condemned to believe that if we could ever make another human understand everything that went into any act, we could be forgiven. The act of understanding bestows importance and meaning, encouraging confession.