Black Money

20

Shore drive ran along the sea below the college in an area of explosive growth and feeble zoning. It was a jumble of apartment buildings, private houses, and fraternity houses with Greek letters over the door.

Behind the stucco house numbered 148 a half-dozen semidetached cottages were huddled on a small lot. A stout woman opened the door of the house before I reached it.

“I’m full up till June.”

“I don’t need lodging, thanks. Are you Mrs. Grantham?”

“I never buy door-to-door, it that’s what’s on your mind.”

“All I want is a little information.”

I told her my name and occupation. “Mr. Martin at the college gave me your name.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”

The door opened into a small, densely furnished living room. We sat down facing each other, knees almost touching. “I hope it isn’t a complaint about one of my boys. They’re like sons to me,” she said with a professionally maternal smile.

She made an expansive gesture toward the fireplace. The mantel and the wall above it were completely taken up with graduation pictures of young men.

“Not one of your recent boys, anyway. This one goes back seven years. Do you remember Feliz Cervantes?”

I showed her the picture with Martel-Cervantes in the background, Ketchel and Kitty in the foreground. She put on glasses to study it.

“I remember all three of them. The big man and the blondie, they came by and picked up his stuff when he left. The three of them rode away together.”

“Are you sure of that, Mrs. Grantham?”

“I’m sure. My late husband always said I’ve got a memory like an elephant. Even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t forget that trio. They rode away in a Rolls Royce car, and I wondered what a Mexican boy was doing in that kind of company.”

“Cervantes was Mexican?”

“Sure he was, in spite of all his stories. I didn’t want to take him in at first. I never had a Mexican roomer before. But the college says you have to or lose your listing, so I rented him a room. He didn’t last long, though.”

“What stories did he tell?”

“He was full of stories,” she said. “When I asked him if he was a Mex, he said he wasn’t. I’ve lived in California all my life, and I can tell a Mex when I see one. He even had an accent, which he claimed was a Spanish accent. He said he was a pureblooded Spaniard, from Spain.

“So I said, show me your passport. He didn’t have one. He said he was a fugitive from his country, that General Franco was after him for fighting the government. He didn’t take me in though. I know a Mex when I see one. If you ask me he was probably a wetback, and that’s why he lied. He didn’t want the Immigration to put him on a bus and send him home.”

“Did he tell any other lies?”

“You bet he did, right up to the day he left. He said when he left he was on his way to Paris, that he was going to the University there. He said the Spanish government had released some of his family money, and he could afford to go to a better school than ours. Good riddance of bad rubbish is what I said.”

“You didn’t like Cervantes, did you?”

“He was all right, in his place. But he was too uppity. Besides, here he was leaving me on the first of October, leaving me stuck with an empty room for the rest of the semester. It made me sorry I took him in the first place.”

“How was he uppity, Mrs. Grantham?”

“Lots of ways. Do you have a cigarette by any chance?”

I gave her one and lit it for her. She blew smoke in my face. “Why are you so interested in him? Is he back in town?”

“He has been.”

“What do you know. He told me he was going to come back. Come back in a Rolls Royce with a million dollars and marry a girl from Montevista. That was uppity. I told him he should stick to his own kind. But he said she was the only girl for him.”

“Did he name her?”

“Virginia Fablon. I knew who she was. My own daughter went to high school with her. She was a beautiful girl, I imagine she still is.”

“Cervantes thinks so. He just married her.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish I were. He came back a couple of months ago. In a Bentley, not a Rolls, with a hundred and twenty thousand instead of a million. But he married her.”

“Well, I’ll be.” Mrs. Grantham drew deep on her cigarette as if she were sucking the juice from the situation. “Wait until I tell my daughter.”

“I wouldn’t tell anyone for a day or two. Cervantes and Virginia have dropped out of sight. She may be in danger.”

“From him?” she said with avidity.

“Could be.”

I didn’t know what he wanted from Virginia: it was probably something that didn’t exist and I didn’t know what he’d do when he found out that it didn’t exist.

Mrs. Grantham put out her cigarette in a Breakwater Hotel ashtray and dropped the butt into a handleless teacup, which contained other butts. She leaned toward me confidentially, heartily: “Anything else you want to know?”

“Yes. Did Cervantes give you any explanation about the people who took him away?”

“This pair?”

She laid a finger on the picture in her lap. “I forget what he said exactly. I think he said they were friends of his, coming to pick him up.”

“He didn’t say who they were?”

“No, but they looked like they were loaded. I think he said that they were Hollywood people, and they were going to put him on the plane.”

“What plane?”

“The plane to France. I thought at the time it was a lot of malarkey. But now I don’t know. Did he ever make it to France?”

“I think he did.”

“Where did he get the money? You think his family really has money in Spain?”

“Castles in Spain, anyway.”

I thought as I drove away that Martel was one of those dangerous dreamers who acted out his dreams, a liar who forced his lies to become true. His world was highly colored and man made, like the pictures on the Tappingers’ walls which might have been his first vision of France.