Twenty Centavos: A Mystery Set in San Miguel de Allende

by John Scherber

  We went through the night stands, closets and medicine cabinets but the only things of interest were two canisters of cocaine in the main bathroom. No surprise there. There were no other guns. Judging from the contents of the closets there were no other inhabitants besides John Schleicher. End of story.

  We went out the back entry. The dog had not moved. It was a lovely house, possibly the finest I had ever seen in San Miguel. Aside from the gun and the cocaine and the pictures of the unfortunate young blonde, it reminded me of the weekly house tours, only less crowded and not as nicely lit.

  We turned in the rental car and the three of us returned to Quebrada in Cody’s Escort. The pistols were hidden under the front seat. Once we got inside the house there were no signs that Schleicher had invaded in our absence; maybe he was classier than we were after all. As I looked around I also had a sense that we could pick up a few decorating tips from him.

  I made a pot of coffee; we had forgotten the brandy bottle at Cody’s. We stretched out in the loggia and I left the lights off in the garden.

  “One thing bothers me about Schleicher,” he said. “With the record he has, he ought to be good for it, but why are all the ceramics still displayed like that? If he had found out they were fakes, or at least some of them, why not get them off the shelves? Why did he still want to look at them? It would have been humiliating for him. I still think that’s what happened with the Alwyns and their half-empty cabinet.”

  “What if getting rid of them would reveal that he knew it?” I said. “Maybe keeping them in view would be a kind of cover. After all, the police have got the customer list too. They’ll be coming to call on him at a certain point, unless he’s too well positioned for them to attempt it. Or, if he didn’t kill Tobey and Ramon, then he doesn’t know they’re fakes, so of course he’s still displaying them. Either way it proves nothing.”

  Maya pushed her half full coffee cup aside. “I’m going to bed. I shouldn’t have had this coffee. That was hard work. You two will figure it out.” She kissed us both and went through the great room to the stairs.

  “I don’t want to keep you from sleeping tonight,” said Cody, “but the one thing I really don’t get is why he isn’t coming after you. There’s a time element here. The longer he waits the more likely you are to talk about him to someone. All the same, though, you better hang on to that pistol I gave you. Keep it by the bed.”

  “I left it in the car. Don’t let me forget it before you go. One thing I don’t understand is why we found only the Glock Nine. I mean, doesn’t it make sense to have weapons stashed all over the house? So let’s say for a moment that it’s not Schleicher. Then we go back to the customer list and do more interviews, hoping something will pop out. When we’ve covered the rest of the local customers, we go to Guadalajara and all the rest of the towns where customers live? This could drag on.”

  “But I always found that talking to people can stir up trouble, maybe hit a nerve,” said Cody. “Then they make mistakes. That’s what a lot of this business is. You just get in people’s faces. Mostly that’s all you can do, besides processing the physical evidence, and the police have collected all of that. I’ve never been able to read a person’s whole life from just a glance the way Sherlock Holmes did, or maybe you do when you’re painting a portrait.”

  “So where are we now? We’ve seen six people out of thirteen on the list, if you count Schleicher.”

  “If he doesn’t come after us, we’ve probably seen as much of him as we’re going to.”

  “Maybe Perry knows something about him that would help,” I said. “I have the sense that he keeps his ear to the ground. I think I’ll go see him tomorrow. If nothing else, I can get a better look at his ceramics. I had the strong feeling before that they were all from the same hand. How would you feel about staying with Maya while I do that? Just in case Schleicher tries something. Maybe you two could play whist.”

  “That needs four people, or at least three. But we’ll think of something. Go ahead and set it up. I’ve got no problem spending time with her, especially with you gone. We could do some tango dancing. My tango could use some work.”

  I had the image of Cody wearing a sash and Maya in a slit skirt with a rose stem in her teeth, sweeping across the loggia. Puede ser, as they say here, it could be.

  * * *

  On the morning after our visit to John Schleicher’s house I dialed the Watts’ number and reached Barbara. She sounded busy and thought I wanted to schedule another sitting.

  “I’m not going to be able to do it for a few days, darlin’. I’ve got to go up to Houston. I don’t know if I ever told you, but I’ve got a sister there. She married one of those engineers at the Space Center. I’m just packing now.”

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to Perry.” As I said this I couldn’t help wondering what a sister of Barbara’s might be like.

  “Perry?” Like she couldn’t quite place the name, or maybe she was just disappointed.

  “I’m still working on this Tobey Cross thing and I wanted to ask him some questions about John Schleicher.”

  “I don’t think I know him. Does he live here?”

  “Over on Cuadrante. Quite a nice house, in fact.”

  “I think I might know it. Is it a gorgeous restoration in the middle of routine stuff?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I’ll let you talk to him, then. I’ve got to finish packing. I’ll call you when I get back.” She made a kissing sound into the phone.

  I spoke to Perry briefly and we arranged a meeting for that evening at eight o’clock. He said we could certainly have a close look at the ceramics, but he didn’t know how much he could tell me about John Schleicher. It wasn’t clear from the way he said it, but I thought that what he might have meant was how much he would tell me.

  Chapter 20

  Valentin Guzman

  Valentin Guzman was not a happy man. The Boss had made some nasty and quite unfounded references to his mother’s employment history when he discovered that Valentin had abandoned Ramon Xoc’s sample case on the street. Valentin had been sent back under protest to find it, but there had been no trace of it on the sidewalk where he had forced Xoc into his van. He was not surprised. It was obviously a thing of value and would not have gone unnoticed. He wondered whether the Boss thought he had kept it himself. It was too late now, and the Boss had paid him the 5,000 pesos anyway. That was when he said the other disturbing thing; that there might be more work for him of the same kind. Valentin didn’t feel he could object.

  Sighing deeply, Valentin kept his mind on the next fistful of pesos as he parked near the intersection of Quebrada and Callejon Blanco. The house of the painter, where he had left the body of Ramon Xoc, was a few numbers down. Directly ahead of him was the white Chevy van the Boss had described to him.

  It was 6:30 in the evening and there were few people on the street. Darkness had fallen quickly when the sun went behind the western hills. Valentin eased his substantial frame out of his own dusty van and moved along the sidewalk to the passenger door of the Chevy. No one was within half a block of him. From his belt he extracted a flat piece of metal about three inches wide and eighteen inches long. The Boss had called it a Slim Jim. At the top, the edge was curled over to form a grip, and at the bottom the profile of a hook had been cut into the metal.

  The Boss had explained in detail how to slide the hooked edge downward into the door between the glass and the rubber gasket and then to move it back and forth until he caught the lever of the lock and it slipped open. He made Valentin Guzman practice on his own van until he could do it in less than 30 seconds. The Boss wouldn’t let him try it on his car.

  The lock on the Chevy was somewhat different, but he was still able to get the door open in under 30 seconds. He slid inside and felt for the small silvery gun in his pocket. He didn’t like to touch it, even less now that he had used it on Ramon Xoc. He locked the door again and moved awkwardly between the seats. Unlike his own van
, the Chevy had windows all the way back, but of course, being a Méxican van, they were all darkened. He settled onto the bench seat behind the driver’s and stretched out, his knees in the air. There was no reason to watch for the painter because Valentin had no plans to move until Zacher was in the van and had put the keys in the ignition. At that point he would place the gun to the back of the painter’s head and order him to drive out of town. Somewhere out in the country he would fire a bullet into his head, dump the body out in a secluded spot, and then return the van to Quebrada and switch to his own van. He examined the radium dial of his nearly gold watch and waited, thinking mainly of the next new inflow into his family budget. Maybe he could now afford a new rooftop water tank, a tinaco. The current one had a slow leak that he couldn’t find and his family ran out of water frequently. The time was 7:15.

  Up the street in front of Casa Zacher, the artmobile pulled up and parked, easing into a space better suited to a smaller vehicle. Maya got out of the driver’s side and Cody Williams joined her on the sidewalk. They went inside and the door closed behind them. From his prone position on the middle seat of a different Chevy, Valentin had seen none of this.

  It would be soon, now, he thought, his heart beating too fast.

  At 7:28 he heard voices near the van and pulled his knees down. A key was inserted into the passenger door and when it opened a hand lifted the lock tab and Valentin heard all the locks on the van open. The sliding door at his feet suddenly opened as well and a small form slid into the space between him and the front seat, and then another. Suddenly he was surrounded by the piercing screams of little girls as they trampled each other, struggling to back out of the van. A woman’s face appeared in the door opening and she began to scream as well.

  Valentin had only six bullets, and his instructions did not include gunning down half a dozen shrieking eight year- old girls, as well as several of their mothers. Improvisation was not his best skill. He struggled to his feet, not bothering to reach for the gun, and wrestled the street side door open and landed unsteadily on his feet. Losing his balance on the cobblestones he stumbled backward into the path of a pizza delivery motorbike. The impact threw him against the van where he slammed his head into the door frame and fell unconscious into the street. The motorbike threw its driver and careened across the narrow street and up onto the opposite sidewalk, where it tipped over and spilled three pizzas to the pavement from the fractured box over the rear wheel. But for Valentin’s rash interference, the pizzas would have been on time.

  Chapter 21

  Maya had taken the artmobile to run some errands around five-thirty. She thought she could pick up Cody so he could stay with her and still be back in plenty of time for me to head up the hill to meet with Perry. They came in at about 7:15.

  “Where’s the tango outfit?” I asked.

  “It’s at the dry cleaner.”

  “Tango?” said Maya, her eyebrows going up.

  “I thought you could give Cody a tango lesson while I’m gone.”

  “It’s been a long time, but I do know some good slow dances.”

  She moved off through the dining room with her hips swaying and one hand in the air as if on someone’s shoulder.

  “Any special questions for Perry?” I asked Cody.

  “Get any background he has on the ceramics. Even if it’s some baloney from Tobey, I’d like to have a sense of whether he has any misgivings about them.”

  “He may not be that easy to read. He’s probably played a fair amount of poker in his time, in one form or another.”

  “And when you ask him in detail about Schleicher, remember our conversation about lying. Watch his grooming.”

  “He’s always well groomed. It may not tell us anything.” Hearing myself, I realized I wasn’t expecting much from this meeting.

  As I stuffed a small notebook in my pocket and left, Maya was sorting through some CDs and holding them up to Cody for his approval. I hoped she’d stay away from Ravel’s Bolero, which someone had given us as a joke after seeing the movie 10.

  Out on the street, down closer to the corner, there were two ambulances and a police pickup, all with flashing lights. Six or seven little girls, all dressed in the same kind of uniform, were running through the gathered crowd shouting at each other. A police officer was speaking with a woman who leaned against a white Chevy van even older than mine. The other adults were merely chatting, many with their arms folded. It looked like the situation was under control so I got in the artmobile and headed up the hill to Los Balcones.

  As I drove up through the arches on Santo Domingo I was remembering the ceramics, mainly the incised tooling on the figures. When I first saw them at the Watts’ gathering right after Tobey’s death, the clear similarity didn’t have nearly the significance that it had now, after I had seen so many others. There was no traffic to speak of and I pulled into their drive at two minutes before eight. Oddly the floodlights directed over the facade were not lit, only the pair of carriage lamps flanking the door. Maybe the grand lighting was only for parties.

  I rang the bell and waited. Nothing happened for a moment and then the door opened and Perry appeared with a startled look that quickly changed to one of welcome.

  “Perry, did you forget about our meeting? I don’t think I’m early, am I?”

  “No, no, Paul, please come in. I guess I did forget about it. I’ve been working on some business things upstairs. That’s mainly what I do when Barbara’s gone. Come on up, we can take a look at the ceramics and have a chat. Join me for a drink?”

  The lights downstairs were all off except for the ceiling fixture in the foyer that also lit the stairs.

  “I’ll take a cognac if you have it.”

  “Of course.”

  At the small bar in the corner of the room he pulled down an ancient looking bottle and poured an inch or so into a snifter.

  “You won’t want any ice with this,” he said, gesturing to one of the wing chairs near his desk as he handed me the glass. “Have a seat.”

  There was a glass already on the desk, centered on a gold-stamped leather coaster. There was nothing else but a telephone and a Rolodex. I didn’t see any business. It reminded me of my visit to Galeria Cruz on the evening of Tobey’s death. Business could be elusive here, but somehow I doubted that Perry also had a little office hideaway in Dolores Hidalgo.

  He seemed edgy, although he made an elaborate show of settling into the desk chair and crossing one leg over the other, adjusting the crease of his pants on his knee.

  “So you’ve been talking to John Schleicher,” he said, taking a sip from his glass.

  “Trying to is more accurate.” I shrugged. “He wouldn’t say more than a few words to me, and only that on the phone. He denied being a collector of anything, said he didn’t know Tobey Cross and that Tobey’s records showing recent purchases were an error. He’s a man of few words. I thought you might be able to give me more information about him. What am I drinking, by the way? It’s phenomenal.”

  “It’s just a blend of old cognacs, most of them over a hundred years old. Glad you enjoy it. As for John Schleicher, I’ve been debating how much I should say about him, since not much of it is good. But I can tell you a few items. For one thing, what he said about not being a collector is bunk. He approached me last year about buying some of his collection. He seemed to know I had an interest in Mayan ceramics and said he had--I can’t remember the exact number--maybe a dozen or so pieces. I asked him to fax me a list with the prices and he did that. I’ve never had much contact with him here and I ran a few checks on him with some people I know in Houston and the word came back that he’s a pretty iffy character. Had some legal problems back east and my sources in Guanajuato say he has a protected status here. The authorities back home don’t seem to be able to break him loose.”

  “I take it you didn’t go any further with the antiques.” I looked around the room as we talked, trying to see whether anything was different since the party.
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  “I sent him a note saying there was nothing on his list that I thought would greatly enhance my holdings. I thanked him for thinking of me and that was it. It never went any further. But I assume some of it, at least, came from Tobey. Maybe all of it. No question that he was the best source for ceramics in this part of México.”

  “I wonder why Schleicher didn’t offer it back to Tobey?’

  “He may have thought he’d get a better price from me, since I’m a collector too, rather than a dealer.”

  “This information you came up with on him, particularly the legal issues, is it widely known here?”

  “No, definitely not. He keeps a low profile, donates to the right causes. Some people profess to have a lot of respect for him, although no one admits to knowing him very well. It’s crossed my mind that he might be worth a hard look in this Tobey thing. What with his background, you know? You look like this might not be new information to you. Am I right?” He took a long sip from his glass, holding it in his mouth before he swallowed it.

  “We came up with some things, but they were mostly drug-related. And one morals charge.”

  “I saw that too. The morals thing resulted in a conviction, as I recall. Can’t imagine why you’d want to mess around with kids. But as for the other thing with Tobey Cross, you do come across murder fairly often in the drug trade. Texas being a border state, we see it all the time up there. I’ve been thinking about this since you called this morning. My first reaction was to dismiss Schleicher and I was hesitant to pass on to you the background information I’d received. But what if drugs are somehow linked to Tobey’s death? I don’t know whether the police have looked at that. Maybe they haven’t looked at much. They haven’t called me, and I’m sure I was his biggest customer.”