She had then decided, later on in the day, hearing that the body could not be identified, that if she made an appearance and made the identification and then said that the last she had seen of the girl was when she had driven off with Rockland on Saturday, it would help insulate her against any future accusation.
“But when I saw how … the terrible condition of the body, I knew that one could identify it as almost anyone. There was the chain, of course, that Minda wore about her ankle. But who could say that Bix did not wear one and it was not that one? Or could say those were not Bix’s red shoes? I had the personal papers and personal things of both of them. My mind raced. I stood holding the perfumed handkerchief against my nose. I saw how it could be. If it was Bix who died, she would be mine without question. So I identified her and the police came to my house and I gave them Bix’s things. I brought Minda’s papers here, and I arranged to have the permit renewed under Minda’s name without Bix having to appear. I sent all the servants out that night. I opened the gate for Mr. McLeen. I helped him get Rockland down and into the trunk of an American sedan Mr. McLeen had rented. Mr. McLeen was very strange. He whistled and he walked on his toes, and he said that everything was splendid, that Minda was going to come back to Oaxaca and he would wait around for her until she returned. Rockland was very groggy. When he was curled up in the trunk compartment on his side, Mr. McLeen gave him little pats on the back and called him son and said everything would be arranged properly. I thought I was all right. I thought I was not feeling much of anything. But when I had shut the gate again, all of a sudden without warning, I vomited. Afterward, I felt so faint it took me a long time to finish packing the last few things. I flew from Oaxaca Tuesday on the early schedule. Bix was happy to see me, happy as a Christmas child.”
She was watching my face carefully.
Bix came out of the bathroom again. “Please?”
“All right, dear girl. Sit over there on the couch and be quiet. Mr. McGee, does she look abused? Surely you must have the right to make choices in your work. I am fond of her. I cherish her. I will take her to lovely secluded places. Look how splendid that color is for her. It makes those deep blue eyes look almost deep violet. I will dress her in indigo, and in the good blues and greens and grays. Cool tones suit her kind of beauty. I can control her … need for escape into drugs. She will not be sick, or lonely, or institutionalized. Can anyone else in the world promise that? Can her own people promise that? What do you return to them if you do your nasty little job, Mr. McGee? A young girl with a drug-retarded mind. A committed and incurable addictive personality. A committed and incurable lesbian. A person the police of your country will be watching closely, as they promised. You will be taking back heartbreak. Isn’t it kinder, by far, to let her stay dead?”
“Dead?” asked Bix.
“The kid asks a good question, French lady. So do you.”
“Think about it carefully, please.”
So I sat and thought about it. It was nice and easy, her way. Let the dead stay dead. Tell a happy story to good old Harlan Bowie. Feed Meyer the story Eva had fed me through the chained door. Go back and romp away the final few days of Elena’s vacation. Mission accomplished. But should the father have the chance to undo the damage that he had started and others had finished? He had a lot of money, enough to buy penance, good clinics, sleep therapy.
“I have a wall safe here,” she said. “In that closet. I think there is the equivalent of about forty thousand American dollars. I can give you that now, and I can have an additional hundred and sixty thousand here by the day after tomorrow.”
“You buy the girl for two hundred thou?”
“That is a clumsy way to put it. I buy her happiness, and mine. I can afford it.”
“I know. You earned it. The hard way.”
I walked over toward her. She stood up and looked up at me, and I saw the hard mocking confidence in the back of her eyes. She was wearing the small smile of the winner. So I smiled too, and I sighed, and I wondered if it was getting to be too attractive a habit as I steadied her with one hand, chopped the side of that long muscular throat with the other, caught her as she dropped, and slung her onto the bed.
Bix had stood up. “Now what are you doing?”
“I am going to take you for a nice little ride in a nice murderous taxi, sweetie.”
“To the movies?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you go put some clothes on? Where are they?”
“In there. In that other room in the closet and all over.”
“Go get dressed.”
“Sure.”
She went into the next room. I wanted to fix French lady so she would stay put for a nice long time, but not too long, in case nobody dared unlock the suite unless asked. I yanked the sheets out from under her and took them in and dropped them in the tub and got them sopping wet. I took them out and spread them out on the rug, took her out of her gray robe, put her down at one end of the soaked sheets, and rolled her up in them like a window shade. I put her back on the bed with the last wet end tucked neatly under her. As long as they stayed wet, she stayed still. When they dried out, she would wiggle loose.
I pried her jaw down and found that in spite of the plump little meaty mouth, there was room in there for a hell of a lot of Kleenex, if you packed it carefully. I knotted a nylon stocking in place, webbing it between her teeth and against the Kleenex so she couldn’t tongue it out of the way and start yelling.
Then I went in to see how Bixie was progressing. She had lost ground, because she had shed the robe and added one lacy pale-green bra. So I told her I expected her to shape up better than that, which at the moment was the wrong expression, and I started digging around trying to find what you put on a naked young girl to take her to the Embassy in the middle of the night.
I heard some kind of disturbance, but by then I had found where the skirts and blouses and sweaters were. So I took time to match them up reasonably well. Bix had gone back into the first bedroom. I heard a lovely gasping delighted giggling, and I heard some kind of muffled grunting and thrashing.
When I hurried in I saw that Bix was bending over the bed, and she had grasped Eva Vitrier firmly with thumb and first two fingers, right by the Nefertiti nose, thus cutting off all air except what the woman might try to suck through all that Kleenex. French lady’s face had turned very, very dark. Her eyes were bulging and blind, and she was spasming and grunting and flapping, looking very much like an oversized, dying whitefish in the bottom of a skiff. And, believe me, she did not have very far to go. Like twenty seconds more, possibly. I snatched Bix’s playful fingers off lovergirl’s nose, and Eva subsided, breath whistling as she hyperventilated through that noble beak. She opened her eyes and looked up at me, in combination loathing and appeal. Her effort had burst a blood vessel in one eye, and half the white had turned bright crimson.
I tucked her wet sheet firmly under her, patted her on the cheek, took Bixie in, and crowded her into her clothes. She passed inspection. In the elevator on the way down she said, “Wasn’t Eva funny? Wasn’t she funny, though?”
“She was a scream, kid.”
“I wish you hadn’t made me stop.”
“So do I, sort of.”
So we taxied to the Embassy, not far down Reforma, and stood on the wide sidewalk as the cab went away. She yawned.
“Is this the movies?”
“Bixie baby, things can get very, very, very rough for you. I don’t even know if you can understand how rough they have been, or will get. I would feel a lot better if I thought maybe you could cut it.”
“Oh hell yes,” she said. “Let’s go in.”
Nineteen
Meyer was at the Oaxaca airport to meet me when I came back from Florida via Mexico City five days later.
He looked fit and smug and amused, and he wore a straw hat from the market and a blue shirt covered with zippers with metal rings in them.
I peeled out of the inbound line and said, “Relapse? What th
e hell kind of a relapse are you having?”
“It’s no worse than a bad cold.”
“Then you could have all by yourself gotten on a plane and all by yourself flown home, right?”
“But I don’t like to travel alone. Anyway, are you paying for the extra trip?”
“No. But this isn’t the happiest place in the world to come back to, for me. I guess you know that.”
“Oh, I guess I do. But I don’t have to get depressed just because you do. That wasn’t such a great phone connection. How did Harl take it?”
“How the hell did you expect him to take it? He’s bursting with joy and hope and all that, in a good effort to hide the fact that what we took back there to him might be, in his code of values, better off dead. She started coming apart. She was very, very raggedy by the time the reunion happened.”
“Nothing out of the Vitrier woman?”
“What could she do? Why should she try to do anything? And they had to buy my story. I saw the girl wandering around near Sanborne’s. I was sure I recognized her as Beatrice Bowie, who was supposed to have died. In fact, I was in Mexico at her father’s request, finding out how she died. Here you are, Embassy. Straighten things out. They would rather have had me hand them some armed infernal device. They hated it. They kept looking very Princeton and sighing and hunting for new forms to fill out. Meyer, goddamit, pack! I want to be home. I want to be on the Flush. I want to go to some island no developer has ever found yet, where no beer can has yet washed ashore.”
“Enjoy beautiful Oaxaca.”
And she hit me at a dead run, grabbing and laughing and saying if we were going to stand out here all day, she, Elena, could not wait for the surprise.
I told her she was supposed to be back at work.
She told me she wanted a little more vacation, and so did Margarita, and so they took a little more.
“But can they just do that?” I asked Meyer.
“When Enelio Fuentes owns that much of the insurance company they can, buddy.”
So we had drinks and dinner at the Victoria, abundant and long and I tried to be festive, but it kept slipping on me. I kept worrying the whole thing. Picking at it. Meyer said impatiently, “Will you kindly get off that tiresome point of no return, McGee? Please? For me? And for these Guadalajara girls, and for your own sake? A grown-up man must make a lousy decision from time to time, knowing it is lousy, because the only other choice is lousy in another dimension, and no matter which way he jumps, he will not like it. So he accepts the fact that the fates dealt him two low cards, and he goes on from there. Or better, why don’t you two go on from here. I seem to have been moved into another cottage, and only this insurance friend of mine seems able to find it after dark.”
But it still kept nibbling and chewing at me. It kept me just a little apart from all the joy of Elena. And it woke me near dawn, thinking again of that look in Harlan Bowie’s eyes, and wondering if the son of a bitch would clap her away somewhere forever, for her own good, of course.
Dawn-thoughts are the bleak ones. And these took me back to T. Harlan Bowie’s arena—Garden Suite Number Five in that quietest part of Coral Gables. As a medical precaution they had put him on a tranquilizer and then told him I was on the way, bringing back his only chick, alive. I left Bix with his nurse-therapist, Mrs. Kreiger, while I tried to prepare him for her.
I tried, but I don’t think he was listening closely. “Look, Mr. Bowie, she went down there with rotten people. It was a setup. She could put her hands on twenty-five thousand, and they knew it, and they conned her out of it, every dime of it. Some people, Mr. Bowie, have too much of a taste for marijuana. It takes over. They just float and they don’t give a damn.”
“My daughter isn’t that kind of person, McGee.”
“She was fogged over, believe me. In the early part of the trip the three men were all banging her, and the other girl too—the one you buried.”
“Then they were taking her by force, and I am going to see that they are prosecuted.”
“This wasn’t kid games. Two of them are dead. She’s under suspicion of conspiring to smuggle heroin across the border. She got hooked on heroin, Mr. Bowie. She was an addict, or is an addict. A woman gave her a home cure. She cycled her down through some other opiates and got her over onto something that’s not physically addicting. It was a lot of trouble. The woman wanted her.”
“Wanted her?”
“And got her, as a girlfriend, as a female homosexual partner.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m just trying to tell you that this is a different girl. She’s an addictive personality, and she isn’t going to be able to handle any part of this without getting back onto some kind of a high. And you can’t reach her because she bombed herself so long and so big, her mind is not on our wavelength anymore. I’m trying to tell you that—”
“McGee, I think I’m a little tired of you telling me things. I want to see my daughter, please.”
Bixie was down off the charas high, and was being threatened with all the hard edges of reality, and she wanted no part of it. She was mean, edgy, suspicious, and unpredictable. She was vulgar and sullen and semipsychotic. And she was not about to rush in and kiss dear old daddy and cry tears of joyous welcome, and express any sympathy for his being in a wheelchair.
She came scuffing in, glanced at him, and went over and slouched into a chair. Mrs. Kreiger saw him having problems with the wheelchair and hurried around and wheeled him over to the girl. He reached and grabbed her hand. He was weeping. “Bix. Oh, Bix, honey.”
But Bix honey looked narrow-eyed at me. “Is this the big treat, you rotten, dirty bastard? You bring me back to this silly old fart? Where’s Eva? What have you done to Eva? Look, I’ve got to have a surprise. Honest to God, I’ve got to have a surprise or I’m going to go up the walls screaming.”
“You’re home now!” he said.
“Somebody get him off me,” she said.
“I thought you were dead, honey.”
She looked at him with the coldest dark blue eyes in town. “And I wish you were, old man. I wish to hell you were.”
Mrs. Kreiger said, “Doctor Kohn wants to have a look at her. Should I … take her along now?”
“Yes. And … let me know what they suggest, please.”
When they were gone he wiped his eyes and shook his head. “It isn’t possible she could change so much. What can … be done?”
“I think maybe you’ve got to make her able to live with somebody she despises. She despises Bix Bowie, and always has, but didn’t know there was a way to escape. It will take a lot of love, a lot of patience, a lot of motivation to make her ever believe that the Bix Bowie of the real world isn’t a total failure. Excuse me, but what else have you got worth doing?”
“It … it’s a second chance?”
“And very damned slim.”
“It’s the only thing I can do.”
So maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t give it the big try. Or it might last only so long. I wondered about that look in his eye. Maybe I’d only imagined it was there. Second try, second rejection. But maybe, just maybe, he might have the guts for the job.
I heard a rooster crow a long way across the silence of the predawn morning in Oaxaca.
Near dawn, and Elena was curled into me, fists against my chest, round knees pressing against my belly. So I kissed the sleeping eye that was nearest and handiest.
She grunted and came but partway up out of sleep, far enough to begin a slow and determined worming and squirming, trying to work the undermost leg under me, under my waist. When I saw what she was trying to do, I made it easier for her. She slid the leg under, and then hooked her calf back against me. She lifted the other leg over me, the drowsy weight of it coming down across my waist. She uncurled her fists and slid her hands around my ribs, one under me, one on top, and flattened her palms against my back.
So then there was the unseen questing, and a guiding to
uch, and then a snubbed pressure increasing until—celebrated with a little snuff of sudden insuck of air through her nose—we were suddenly, sleekly, deeply coupled. She hitched herself a little higher, changed her position, moved her hands further around me, and made her small warm sound of contentment.
I slid my hands down her back until they reached and cupped the warm, smooth, solid buttocks. And like some familiar, faithful, trusty, loyal little machine, that touch and pressure was enough to start the slow, rhythmic pumping of her hips, rich and sleepy and demanding.
So with gray at the windows, and her mouth turning upward for the kiss, with the slow deep steady beat that would begin to change only when we neared climax, this became the reality, this became the life-moment, this became the avowal, the communion, the immortality. The private rhythm of our need, a small and personal and totally shared thing, was that special thing in the world and in time which changed the Rockos and Evas, the Jerrys and Wallys and Bruceys and Carls, the Bixies and Beckys to scare-masks fashioned of cardboard and spit, empty things which hang on strings from an empty tree, turning in the parching wind that blows across the empty heart.
“Ah,” said the tireless, tawny, loving engine.
Bless all the sisters, wherever they are.
Read on for an excerpt from The Long Lavender Look.
Dress Her in Indigo Page 25
