Dress Her in Indigo

by John D. MacDonald

  After a half hour I knew he was going to get all of it, and so I went for the walk. I went up to the hotel and picked up a cold beer at the bar, which had just opened, and carried it out onto the porch overlooking all the cottages and the summer city beyond. The scent of flowers was heavy. Gardeners were working on the green lawns. Sprinkler heads were clicking their big slow circles, and birds hopped and preened in the falling mist. A lithe lass, deeply sunbrowned and wearing a vivid orange bikini, stood alone on the diving tower, using the railing to practice the standard exercises of ballet. She was moist with her efforts, smooth skin gleaming in the sun. Her hair was tucked into a plastic swim cap clustered with plastic daisies.

  The cold dark beer stopped halfway to my lips, and even before I could make the mental association—yes, that is the kind of swim cap Elena wore yesterday—there was such a violent surge of desire for the girl from Guadalajara that it startled me. Becky diminished need. Elena compounded it. Elena had, with a splendid earthiness spiced with innocent wonder, so emphatically superimposed herself on the memories of Becky, I would have to carry those memories into a bright light to see who the hell they were about. After those dedicated decades striving to become the very best, thinking she had attained it, it would have crushed her to find out a sweet Latin amateur was, in the light of memory, by far the better of the two, more stirring, more fulfilling, and far more sensuous.

  So make a note, McGee. There are some things which practice does not enhance. Thunderstorms never practice. Surf does not take graduate lessons in hydraulics. Deer and rabbits do not measure how high they have jumped and go back and try again. Violinists must work at it and study. And ballerinas. And goalies and shortstops and wingbacks and acrobats. But that business of acquiring expertise in screwing turns it into something it wasn’t meant to be.

  Beer finished, I went back to the cottage to see how Meyer was doing. I was amused at Meyer and at myself. We were very formal with each other today. Remote, thoughtful, and formal. I had bought Elena a late dinner the night before at the hotel and sent her home in a cab—at her insistence on not being a nuisance. Meyer had arrived as I was getting ready for bed. Yes, he had eaten in town. Not bad, actually. Car had run fine. Margarita had found the shawl. Sleep well. Good night.

  I looked through the window. Nesta had a hand over his eyes. Meyer waved me away.

  Back up the hill. Drifted around. Watched the happy vacationers at play. Kept out of the line of people taking happy pictures of each other. Admired shrubbery clipped into the shapes of animals. Elephant. Ostrich. Donkey. Tried to remember the name for that particular art form. Couldn’t.

  Sat on a stone bench and tried to bring back some specific memory of Bix Bowie the day Meyer brought her aboard the Flush. Couldn’t. Brain apparently failing along with everything else. Premature instant senility. But Meyer had the vivid memories of the girl. Vivid and now painful. And some more painful images to put on top of the heap.

  Finally went back. Meyer was on the porch, sitting in a kind of slack, dumpy solemnity. I looked through the window. Nesta was sprawled on Meyer’s bed, with a blanket over him.

  I sat down beside Meyer. “So?”

  “I feel sick.”

  “That bad?”

  “Bad. Yes. And … pointless. Wasteful.”

  “Did you get all of it?”

  “I don’t see how there could be anything more. He’s exhausted, physically and emotionally. And he’s not alone.”

  “How did the group get together?”

  “Bix had some friends at the University of Miami, kids she went to public school with in Miami. After her mother died, she looked them up. She met Carl Sessions at a party. They started going around together. Carl knew Jerry Nesta. Jerry was Carl’s connection for marijuana. Jerry was living with Minda McLeen. And he also made deliveries out to the Beach, to Walter Rockland, as a go-between. He and Rockland talked about some way to make a big score someday. The four of them, Carl, Bix, Jerry and Minda began running around together. Rockland found out Bix had some money from her mother’s will. Rockland talked Nesta into helping him promote the Mexico trip. Sessions had already turned Bix on to pot, and she obviously took to it all too well, as some will. Rockland claimed to have a good contact in Mexico where they could buy pure heroin at Mexican wholesale prices. The idea was to get Bix down there, talk her into financing it, smuggle it across the line and peddle it to a wholesaler in Los Angeles. So Nesta helped Rocko develop some enthusiasm among the other three to take a Mexican vacation. Bix was willing to buy the camper and the supplies and pay expenses. She did not seem to care about the money one way or another, or really care much whether she went or stayed. So when Rocko was fired, they moved the timetable up and got ready and left, and there was absolutely nothing Harl Bowie could do about stopping her.”

  “But she didn’t know the real reason.”

  “Not until later. And by then I guess you could say it was too late for her to do anything about it. You see, Rockland was the only one of the five who was not a user of anything at all. In fact, not even liquor except very rarely and then too much. No cigarettes. A physical culture type. But he had a couple of mimeographed sheets he’d paid five dollars for in Miami. They give the trade and generic name of a list of pharmaceuticals available in the states on prescription only, but available over the counter in Mexico. Opposite each was the Spanish name and the phonetic pronunciation. They bought good strong pot the minute they were over the border, and at Monterrey they loaded up with items off the list. Rockland was in charge, ostensibly to keep people from taking too much when they were too stoned to know what they were taking. He kept the drugs locked in the tool compartment of the truck, but the pot was available at any time. Rocko set a slow pace across Mexico. It was the cold season. He and Nesta shared the driving. When they found a good place to camp, they would stay two or three days. They went from Monterrey to Torreón to Durango to Mazatlán. Nesta doesn’t know how long it took. He said it could have been a year or a week. He said it was all pretty blurred. Rockland would dole them out a mixed bag of opiates and stimulants, barbiturates and mescaline, and he said you didn’t know what kind of a high you were going into until you were there, and some of them were bad.”

  “It’s a wonder he didn’t kill somebody.”

  “I know. In the beginning Bix was paired off with Carl Sessions, and Minda McLeen with Jerry Nesta. Those relationships fragmented. It didn’t turn into some kind of orgy, even though repeating what he told me makes it sound that way. Apparently the first deviation was when Rocko made love to Bix. Carl was angry and upset about it at first, but he got over it when Minda slept with him because she felt sorry for him. Then Jerry Nesta fought with Minda, and then got even with her by sleeping with Bix. Except for the tension in the beginning, it seemed to all iron out into a kind of casual and, except for Rocko, infrequent thing. Nesta told me that Bix was totally placid and submissive. It didn’t matter to her which of the three had her. She seemed to accept and endure, with no evidence of either pleasure or displeasure. Once when Carl was still reasonably lucid Nesta asked him if Bix had ever been passionate with him, and Carl said no. By then Minda was taking care of Bix. Unless prodded and helped she wouldn’t wash, brush her teeth, blow her nose, change her clothing. It was a process of disintegration for all of them. Except Rocko. Each was hooked in his or her own way. Rocko was the ground control. Sessions apparently became ever more hopelessly addicted to methadone, moving in a fumbling, stumbling, hazy dream, losing all sexual drive. Nesta was on pot and mescaline. Minda McLeen was on stimulants, amphetamine and dexedrine compounds, getting ever more shaky and thin and nervous, and becoming ever more physically dependent on Rockland. Do you see the pattern, Travis?”

  “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And a five way split is a lot of ways to split it.”

  “But Nesta apparently didn’t suspect. As they neared Culiacán, Rocko took Bix’s indispensible pot away from her, and so she behaved exac
tly as directed, sent for the money, cashed the draft, turned the money over to Rocko, and was rewarded with a half-dozen joints and swiftly sucked her way back into her waking dream. Rockland’s contact had been reliable. They got pure heroin in full quantity. Rocko, working alone, transferred it into small sacks made of thick transparent plastic tied with nylon cord, and took an inside panel off the camper and stowed it in the shallow space between the inside and outside skin. He was nervous on the way up to Nogales. Sessions got on his nerves, playing the same chords over and over and over on the guitar, until one evening Rocko took the tin snips out of the tool box and cut the strings off. But Sessions kept playing as if nothing had happened. All they could hear were his fingernails on the frets and the box. Ten miles out of Nogales, Rocko decided that it had all been too easy. He decided to make a dry run. So he tied all the little bags up in a raincoat and buried it in the dirt near a flowering bush. He took Bix with him to the border, taking her off pot for a full day first. He left the three others with the supply of pills and pot in a cheap motel, with orders to wait until they crossed back in. They came back four days later. He had new papers on the truck and camper, and new tourist cards for himself and Bix. But Rocko was savagely angry. The sellers had apparently tipped the customs people. The total search took fifteen hours, and they had to reassemble the truck and camper when it was over. The border people knew the names of the five of them, said they knew they had made a large buy, and said that no matter how they tried to bring it back across, they would be nailed, all together, or one at a time.”

  “Very thorough.”

  “They went back down Route Fifteen and recovered the heroin. Rocko concealed it in the camper. They made camp well off the road by a dry stream bed another ten or twenty miles down the road. Rocko was in a foul mood. Minda, humming and burning with energy, was doing the cooking, washing, laundry, mending, housekeeping, and taking care of Bix, her hair and her person. During the second day at that place, she began complaining to Rocko that they were nearly out of cooking gas, that the gauge was way down. When would he get it filled? She was sick of having to make fires with sticks when they were out of gas. He paid no attention. And then she said that at least the border people hadn’t let the gas out of the tank, and she should be grateful for that much. He jumped up and ran and examined the tank. The fill valve and the outlet valve were part of the brass assembly that was fastened onto the top of the tank. They drove south and at Hermosillo he bought two small pipe wrenches and got the whole assembly off. The orifice was just large enough so that by rolling the plastic bags between his palms he could make them small enough to drop into the tank. He put one in the tank and had it refilled at Hermosillo. Three days later he let the gas escape and, with some difficulty apparently, got the bag out. It looked and tasted fresh and unharmed, so he loaded the bags into the tank and got it filled again. Nesta thought he would start for the border right away. But Rocko was unexpectedly relaxed and unhurried. There was a pretty good piece of Bix’s money left. They might as well see the country. He became very charming.”

  “Life of the party.”

  “Sure. He even had a special little treat for Carl Sessions. On the way south in Ciudad Obregon he picked up a hypo and some distilled water, some cotton swabs and some alcohol, and he fixed his good friend Sessions a nice little pop and injected it under the skin on the underside of his forearm. Sessions got very sick from it. But Rocko kept helping him out until finally Carl could inject himself and feel very good. Then when he had worked up to injecting it directly into the blood stream and felt very, very good, Rocko talked him into sharing his new talent with Bix.”

  “I know why you said you feel sick.”

  “That Walter Rockland is a real charmer. All heart. So our little caravan came wandering through the mountains on down here to Oaxaca. And the flavor changed, or, I might say, the alignment. Minda got sick. Nesta was appointed by Rocko to look after Bix. When he refused, Rocko beat the hell out of him. He said he got to sort of like it after a while, scrubbing her and washing her hair. But he’d lost any physical desire for her. She and Carl Sessions had gone off into some country of their own, nodding and popping. Minda, scared by being sick, was stubbornly taking herself off the stimulants. I suppose as they are habituating rather than addicting, a person with enough will could do it. And she apparently, as if compensating, became ever more infatuated with Rocko in a purely physical way. After they were here a while, Rocko started to cut off the supply to Carl and Bix. He would let them get sick before he would dole out a very small amount. One day Nesta took Bix off somewhere on some errand. He had wanted to get out of Rocko’s way because Rocko was on one of his rare drunks, when he was inclined to get violent and nasty. When he came back, Carl wasn’t there. Rocko was asleep, snoring loudly. Minda was in some kind of shock. For a long time Nesta couldn’t find out what happened. Then he learned that Carl had come pleading and begging to Rocko. Rocko, in Minda’s presence, had asked Carl if he would do anything in the world for a fix. Carl said he would. And after he had stripped down, as Rocko asked, Rocko boosted him up into the double bed over the cab and climbed up in there with him, and Minda went running out. She heard Carl crying. That apparently finished it for Minda. A few days later she left and took Bix with her. Nesta said Rocko seemed perfectly content to have them gone for good, all three of them. Nesta stayed on. But he began to have the feeling that Rocko was watching him and planning how to kill him. It could have been an induced paranoid hallucination. But he took off, by then in very bad shape, and gradually came out of it in Mitla, with the woman Luz taking care of him just the way he had taken care of Bix.”

  “So now we know,” I said, “why Rocko reacted the way he did to having somebody pry that little door open and take that tank of gas. He knew it had to be taken by somebody who knew what was hidden in it. The first guess would be Sessions. So he would go looking for him.”

  Meyer nodded. “Let’s say he didn’t find him. Sessions was found dead on the morning of the seventh. He could have stolen it, emptied it, hidden the stuff away, and died of an overdose.”

  “Or once he found him, maybe he was satisfied Carl knew nothing about it. And it would be fair to assume Rocko had enough left on hand to stick much too much into Sessions.”

  Meyer thought that over. Then he shook his head. “I can’t buy that, Travis. I can’t buy the idea that Rocko would kill anybody. Not then. Not at that time. Maybe now. Maybe he has been coming closer and closer. I think he gave it a lot of thought after he discovered a hiding place the border search had overlooked on the dry run. He knew that if he tried to cross with the whole group, five minutes of interrogation would crack any one of the other four, and the five of them would be busted. So they camped out, in wild areas. He knew that alone he could make it. Maybe he had plans of marketing it at ten times his cost, hiding the cash in the same place, crossing back with it, and running another batch over again, for the big final score. I think he must have thought of the obvious way out. Chunk them on the head and bury them out in the wastelands. It’s so completely efficient, he had to think about it. And if he didn’t do it, it is because he couldn’t bring himself to do it.”

  “Because he is such a nice guy.”

  “Because he decided they would destroy themselves if he nudged them in the right direction. And check his track record so far. Carl and Bix are gone. We don’t know about Minda McLeen. We know he’s batting five hundred. It could be seven fifty.”

  “So who stole the little gas tank, Meyer?”

  “You force me to guess? I would say that Carl Sessions talked about the Americano with a fortune in junk in the bottled gas tank, and I would guess that his addiction would put him into contact with some very rough local types, and it would be natural for them to check it out. And easy enough. So then Rocko would be compelled to pick up another stake, so he could go make another buy, hide it in another tank, and take it across alone. So he went cruising, and he let Bruce Bundy pick him up, but it d
idn’t work out the way he planned it. When he saw he wasn’t going to con any cash out of Bundy, he went cruising again, and came up with Minda’s father, Wally McLeen. So he would have heard by then that Bix and Minda were guests of Eva Vitrier.”

  We were both silent, trying to appraise the possibilities. I said, “Remember? The girls quarreled. Minda left for Mexico City. So Rocko couldn’t contact her. Assume that when he took the Bundy car, he went right to the Vitrier place in La Colonia. And the next thing we know, it’s Sunday afternoon and he and Bix and the yellow car are way the hell up in those mountains.”

  “It would be nice to talk to Eva Vitrier,” Meyer said.

  “It would indeed. A total recluse, using a hell of a lot of money to buy total privacy, to build big walls. And she’s gone. Try and find out where.”

  “Somebody could get into her place and look around.”

  “Like me?”

  “Well, any large, curious, agile fellow, let’s say.”

  “And I get slapped into a cell out in that Zimatlán jail.”

  Meyer shrugged. “I’ll be there every visitors’ day. Speaking of jail, what about our friend in there?”

  “You’re in the best position to decide.”

  “I just don’t know. He seems docile. I might take the risk if I had to take the blame, too. But if I make a bad guess, then Enelio is in trouble. It’s just a hunch, my friend. I sense a kind of animal wildness, a potential for unpredictability. Talking to him, even when he wept, was like sitting in a zoo. I didn’t want to make any sudden motions. I would have felt better with bars between us.”

  “So, I go with your instinct, Meyer. Your average is too good. We can get in touch with Enelio and find out if he wants us to take the package back to the store.”