Cinnamon Skin

“So there’ll be time to end this a little better thar we did tonight. I was rotten. I’m sorry.”

“We’re both sorry.”

“How come two people can be more than the sum of the two individuals, and then so much les than the sum?”

“Comes of being some kind of human person Annie.”

“Okay, I had to call. Good night or good mornin, or whatever. Were you asleep?”

“I was topside with a cold drink, thinking Iong sorry thoughts and watching for the dawn. You?”

“I went down and sat at the water’s edge. Long sad thoughts. So I finally had to call.”

“Good luck to you, friend.”

“Good luck to both of us,” she said and hung up. I went back and nursed the rest of the drink, finishing it when the sun came up into the smutcl oozing red, bulging with the promise of angry burns on the young white hide of the visitors, and another deepening of the tan on the spare leather bodies of the lizardlike octogenarians on their retirement terraces. I went down and fell into sleep using it like a giant Band-aid. When the phone woke me at noon I felt an unlikely confusion, a sense of not knowing who I was or where.

Twelve

“WHERE ARE you?” I asked Meyer.

“In a Holiday Inn in Austin. What I have to report - is nothing to report. Except eyestrain.” He sounded tired and discouraged.

“You got my message?”

“About the name Jerry Tobin. Yes. My friend is on a sabbatical, but the graduate student who works for him had your letter here for me. I would say it helps confirm what we already suspected.”

“I agree.”

“Travis, I selected the seven most likely years, making the best possible estimate of the man’s age. I found that the Office of the Director of Development and Endowment has a library facility, and they were kind enough to provide me with adequate space and access to their complete collection of yearbooks, from the university facility here and also from the branches in Arlington, Dallas, and El Paso. They also have yearbooks from every other facility in the state. So I can state that the man did not graduate from any division of the University of Texas, or from Texas Christian in Fort Worth, Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth, Texas Southern in Houston, Texas Eastern in Tyler, Texas Lutheran in Seguin, Texas A and I at Kingsville, Texas A and M at College Station and Prairie View, East Texas Baptist at Marshall, East Texas State at Commerce, North Texas State at Denton, or West Texas State at Canyon. Or the University of Dallas at Irving.”

“Did you-”

“Let me finish. I found lots of people named Lawrence and lots of people named Tobin. I could not match them up in any productive way. I made the assumption that he may have attended without graduating, so I have been poring over the group photographs in all the yearbooks, one hundred and twenty-five, to be precise. One from East Texas Baptist, an unlikely place and an unlikely year, was missing. If it is possible to wear out a rather large magnifying glass, I have done so. I have had the picture of the man at hand to constantly refresh my memory. Have you ever realized how much most young men look like one another? Just as we, I suppose, look rather alike to them. I have made some reference notes as to certain possibles. Such and such an institution, yearbook for such and such a year, page fifty-six, football squad, second row from rear, fifth fellow from the left. There are about fifteen possibles, and I want to go back to them once I have gotten some transparent plastic for overlays, and a grease pencil to add facial hair in the same pattern as the possibles. I don’t expect to be able to eliminate them all. Whatever number is left out of the fifteen, I will assemble vital statistics for each.”

“That sounds like a lot of drudgery.”

“It is, it is. Research is part of my basic training. The accumulation of facts. One expects it to be dull. When enough facts are assembled, a conclusion can be drawn. That’s the interesting part.”

“Have we got a choice of conclusions?”

“I will find him, and we will learn who he really is, or was. I will not find him and we can conclude he did not graduate from a Texas institution and probably did not attend one or, if he did, was inactive in extracurricular activities.”

“You find that exciting?”

“Interesting, I said. My impression of him was that he had some education. A smattering. About what you’d get if you graduated from a state university after attending on an athletic scholarship, or if you had gone to one of the technical schools.”

“How soon will you be done?”

“I might finish up tomorrow. I would be done by now if they’d let me work evenings. But they close up at five, lock the doors, and set the alarms.”

“Makes for long evenings.”

“Travis, I have learned a very curious thing about television. The sponsors seem to be paying advertising agencies to create commercial spots which criticize competing products. The Lincoln is better than the Cadillac. California Cellars is better than Gallo or Inglenook or Almaden. Headache remedies, stomach acid remedies, deodorants-all of them are claiming to be better or stronger or more lasting.”

“So?”

I heard the little sniffing sound he makes when he is impatient at not being understood. “Travis, as an economist with a reasonable grasp on reality, I can tell you that the manufacturers who permit such obvious nonsense are guilty of monumental stupidity. One expects a kind of fumbling inanity from advertising account executives, but not from the men who are paying the bills.”

“I’m not following.”

“Merchants from the days of prehistory have known that the practice of knocking the product or service of the competition is self-defeating. When Jones, Smith, and Brown own stores on Main Street, and each tells customers that the other two merchants are thieves, within a reasonable period of time it will occur to the customers that all three are selling inferior goods and performing inferior services, and so their businesses will inevitably decline. And, on television, the average consumer pays so little attention to commercials, I would suspect that when a competing product is mentioned by name, it is lodged as firmly in the consciousness as the name being advertised. I am sorry to bring it up, but I am appalled at such expensive stupidity. It could only occur in a culture based upon administration by consensus, by committee. One can express resentment only by never buying a product which is held up as being better than another competing product. If enough of us would do that… Forgive the digression. What about Hack’s boat?”

“I walked down and took a look. It isn’t back in the slip yet. I asked around and they said it was still at the yard.”

“How’s Anne?”

“Just fine and dandy.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I said fine and dandy. What’s wrong with that?”

“A forced blitheness. A hollow cheer.”

“She’s going to be offered a better job, she thinks. Running a much bigger complex in Hawaii.”

“And if it is offered, she’ll take it.”

“Yes.”

“Hence the hollow cheer?”

“I guess so.”

“I plan to catch a midday flight back to Houston Saturday. Would it be convenient for you to-”

“I’ll be there in the afternoon, and see you at the apartment.”

“Find out when your flight will be in and call me back, and we can probably meet at the airport.”

By four o’clock on an almost bearable Saturday afternoon, we were back in the apartment. The interior air smelled hot, stale, and lifeless. Meyer turned on the air conditioning. The emptiness of the place was a further confirmation of the death of the niece. There was a collection of small pottery cats on a bookshelf, a closet still packed with her clothes.

Meyer had bought himself a shirt in Austin. Gray, in a western cut, with short sleeves and pearl buttons. His black pelt curled up out of the open neck. He sat and read the Xerox copy of the clipping about the death of Miss Doris Eagle.

“No doubt of its being the same man?” he asked.

“None. It really hit Eagle very hard.”

“And so that man is out there somewhere,” Meyer said, with an all-inclusive wave of his arm. “Eating, sleeping, washing his hands, thinking his thoughts, remembering his women. Let me show you what I’ve got.”

He had narrowed it down to four faces and had photocopies of the groups in which they appeared. “I tried to get the original negatives,” he said, “but because yearbooks are not reordered or reprinted, after the press run the artwork and photographic work and dummy pages are discarded. I’ve circled the possibles in red grease pencil. Look at them through the glass. You have to think of them as be mg Evan Lawrence, twenty years earlier. These seem to match the coloring, shape of the head, placement of the ears and eyes.”

I looked at the four. A baseball squad, an intramural track team, members of the theatrical club, and the members of a fraternity. I looked up at Meyer standing over me. “These could all be the same person.”

He handed me four file cards. Warren W Wyatt from Lubbock, Cody T. W Pittler from Eagle Pass, Coy Lee Rodefer from Corpus Christi, and B. J. Broome from Waco.

“Those were their addresses when they enrolled. Not one of these four got a degree from the universities they were attending when the photographs were taken. If the pictures were larger and clearer, maybe I could eliminate one, two, or all of them. Incidentally, all four went to the University of Texas-Wyatt at Austin, Pittler at El Paso, Rodefer at Austin, and Broome at Arlington. And there is no guarantee that the people in the pictures are correctly identified by name. The lists of names can be incorrect due to transpositions, deletions, and so forth. For example, in this fraternity picture there are thirty-two faces, thirty-three names.”

“And maybe he didn’t go there.”

“I’m inclined to believe he did. Or at least had some connection with it. If I went around saying I went to the University of Heidelberg, sooner or later I would come upon someone who either went there or who knew the city well. It’s easier to know than to lie. Dumb persons tell dumb lies. Evan Lawrence didn’t strike me as being dumb.”

“And he could be one of these four?”

“Say at twenty-to-one odds. Or more. But what were the odds against your learning that he probably was not aboard the Keynes? What were the odds against that woman from Venice coming along with her camera and taking a picture which happened to show with sufficient clarity Pogo’s left hand? Odds such as that are beyond calculation. Except for coincidence, we would have believed him blown to bits, even after finding out about Norma emptying out her trust. What do we do next, Travis? You’re better at this sort of thing than I am. Do we start checking these people out?”

“I think I’d rather see about those Japanese stone lanterns. He said he worked for a man named Guffey who had a place north of Harlingen. He gave the impression it was after he got out of school, but a lot longer ago than when he worked for Eagle Realty. Remember, he said that they won’t be needing any Japanese stone lanterns down in that end of Texas for a long time.”

“Look for the lanterns?” he said, eyebrows high. “They’re conspicuous. A ranch wife would probably put one in her flower garden. Coarse gray stone, and they usually come in three parts. The four legs, and then the middle part where the candle or light bulb goes-it usually has four openings, about fist size-and then an ornate cap on top, like a pagoda roof, too heavy for anything but a hurricane to blow off. They’d still be at the places where he sold them. Harlingen sounds likely enough; I’ll assume Guffey was a name he made up at the moment. But if we go poking around the back roads, we want to try to be a little less conspicuous. What’s her van look like? Roger Windham said it was old.”

And it was. A heavy-duty GM originally painted a dark blue. Where the paint hadn’t been knocked off by the stones of rough roads and the branches of overgrown trails, it was a faded patchy blue. Where it had been knocked off, it was rust. Big steel-belted Michelins, eight ply. I rolled the door up and tried it. The battery was weak, and I didn’t think it would ever catch, but it finally did, ragged at first, and then with a healthy roar. The speedometer said five thousand and something, and, guessing it at ten or eleven years old, I didn’t know whether it had been all the way around once or twice. It had a dual battery system, a cot, a DC icebox, heavy-duty air conditioning, and a wooden crate of tools. It had an empty water tank, a tiny sink, and a Porta Potti.

We went out while the motor was still running and took it ten miles west and ten miles back to give the alternator a chance to pick the batteries up. It was almost full of gas in both tanks, and the oil was up to the line, and the batteries needed no water. But it was loud and rough, with a slight tendency to wander.

After we got back, Meyer said we probably should ask Windham if it was all right to use it, to take it down past Victoria and Corpus Christi into the valley. The papers on it were in the side pocket. The owner was Norma Greene, not Norma Lawrence. He said he had the lawyer’s home number.

He caught Windham just as he was heading out for a cocktail party. Windham told Meyer that it was his truck to do with as he pleased, but there might be a question of insurance. The insured was deceased. And insurance companies, in the event of accident, leap upon any excuse to refuse to accept a claim. Just drive very very carefully until Monday afternoon or, better yet, not at all, and by that time he’d have it covered.

Meyer said it would probably be better not to drive it at all. He was tired. His eyes were tired. His mind felt fatigued. He said he felt older than usual. There was little daylight left. He fell asleep in a chair. I thought of going out and getting something to eat, but realized I would set off the alarm system if I went out without knowing the right numbers to punch into the control panel. I went foraging through the cupboards and icebox. I found some wine and some vodka under the sink, a can of chili in the cupboard, and a wrapped slab of rat cheese in the refrigerator. Had a vodka on the rocks, heated the chili with a lot of thin slices of cheese. Roused Meyer and we ate same, in silence. He trudged up to bed. I cleaned up, looking around, and found a paperback by Stephen King about a big weird dog. Took it to bed and read a lot longer than I’d planned to. Very scary dog. Very scary writer. Wondered if he would be able to guess what kind of person Evan Lawrence was: as scary as King’s dog, but in a different way.

I kept trying not to think about Anne Renzetti, but the instant I turned the light out, there she was. The thought that kept flashing on and off right in the front of my mind was YOU BLEW IT. YOU BLEW IT. Later on there was another sign, farther back and not as bright, which kept saying YOU’LL NEVER GET A BETTER SHOT AT IT.

At what? Home and fireside? A riding mower for Christmas? A golden retriever who’d ride with his head out the car window, panting?

As the old spinach eater said, “I yam what I yam.”

Thirteen

THERE WAS some red tape to be arranged about the estate and the vehicle registration, so we didn’t get out of town in the van until so late on Monday, the twenty-sixth, we got only as far as a place called Robstown, about ten miles west of the Corpus Christi city line. We holed up at a motel on the far side of Robstomn, on U.S. 77, and as soon as we got in the room, Meyer started looking up Rodefer in the Corpus Christi phone book.

He found nine Rodefers, but none of them were Coy Lee or C. L. or even C. So Meyer wanted to go right down the list. “We’re right near the city. Why not? Why does it have to be lanterns first when we can eliminate this one right away? Or maybe find out it is the right one.”

There was no answer at the first Rodefer. As he started to call the next one, I realized I should be doing it. To his obvious relief I took the phone and placed the second call.

“Hello?” A female voice, hesitant, neither young nor old.

“This Miz Rodefer?”

“Well… the way you say it, it isn’t Rod, it’s like Road.”

“Ro-defer. Sure, I knew that. It’s just, I guess, ma’am, I haven’t rightly said it in so long, I said it wrong. Mebbe you can ha’ep me, ma’am. Long long time back I went to school up to Austin with Coy Lee Rodefer, and I’m over here in a motel next to Robstown, and I was looking in the book to see if old Coy Lee was in the book and he isn’t. But there is a bunch of Rodefers and I thought, Well, why not take a chance and see if he’s related to them, and so they’d know where he is today. Him and me were on the same runnin‘ team together.”

“Coy Lee, he’s my husband’s first cousin! What did you say your name is?”

“Travis McGee, ma’am. Just passin‘ through the area.”

“Well, if you were up there in the college with him, then you’d know why he had to drop out.”

“I just purely don’t know, Miz Rodefer. You see I had to drop out too on account of bad sickness in the family, and I had to go home to take care. I’ve always promised myself I’d go back someday and finish up, but I somehow just never did.”

“What happened was he got so tired and run down and wore out, they thought up there he had that… what do they call it? That kissing sickness. I can’t think of the name.”

“It doesn’t come to me either right at the moment.”

“Anyway, after they gave him a lot of blood tests it turned out he had the leukemia.”

“That’s too bad! He was such a strong fella.”

“He came on back here and moved into his old room with his folks. He was in and out of the hospital I can’t remember how many times. He’d go into revision… that doesn’t sound right.”

“Is it remission, ma’am?”

“That’s it! Anyway, it was pure hell on his mama, and I think it was what really turned his daddy to drink. His daddy was my Ben’s father’s brother. He didn’t last a year after Coy Lee died.”

“Oh, he, died!”

“They both did, Coy Lee and his daddy, not quite a year to the day. His daddy died drunk, rolling the pickup over hisself at three o’clock in the morning. With Coy Lee it was pitiful. He went down to no more than ninety pounds, and he died in the hospital with his mama holding his hand and telling him everything was going to be real fine. I’d just started going with Ben, and he was broke up about it more than I realized he would be. It’s sure some terrible sickness, but I hear they can do a lot more for people that get it than they used to be able to do. The thing that was so pitiful was it was the only child they had. His mama she married a man with seven grown children about two years after Coy Lee’s daddy killed hisself. What I’ll do, I’ll tell her a fellow that was a friend of Coy Lee’s up in Austin, he called to locate Coy Lee, and I had to tell you what happened to him.”

“You tell his mama he was a good boy. He was a good friend, and I’m sure sorry to hear what happened. You tell her that everybody that knew him up there in Austin, they liked him just fine.”

“She’ll be glad to hear that, and I’ll be telling her tomorrow.”

“Thanks for helping me out.”

“Sorry it had to be such bad news. But that’s how it goes.”

“It surely does. Good evenin‘.”

Meyer had been sitting close on the side of my bed to hear both sides of the conversation. He moved away, shaking his head, as I hung up.

No matter how many times you do it, how many times you pretend to be someone you aren’t, and you get the goodhearted cooperation of some trusting person, you feel a little bit soiled. There is no smart-ass pleasure to be gained from misleading the innocent. In the country places of the Sun Belt, friendship has a lot of meaning. And when you want to know something, you find out the quickest way you can, even to trading on something that never existed.

We looked into the motel restaurant and decided to try almost anything else we could find. We drove over into the city and found a steak house where they guaranteed they would not, under any circumstances, fry the steak. Over coffee Meyer finally said, “That was depressing, talking to that woman.”

“You didn’t know old Coy Lee good as I did.”

“No jokes, hmm?”

“No good jokes, at least.”

“I was wondering what we would do. Suppose we found him in Corpus Christi? What if he was Evan Lawrence and Jerry Tobin and Coy Lee Rodefer? And we appear in front of him in these indigenous clothes, these big hats and twill pants and funny shirts. What then?”

“We try not to appear in front of him at any time.”

“Just locate him?”

“And bring him to justice. Like they used to say in the series there with Marshal Dillon. Gunsmoke.”

“Isn’t that going to be exceedingly difficult, Travis?”

“If we never get any more evidence than we have now, which is next door to nothing at all, exceedingly is a mild word.”

“So what then?”

“Meyer, for God’s sake, we can’t lay it all out in advance. We’ll play it by ear. Maybe he has been messed up in other things. We might stumble across something that can be proved against him. He seems to like killing women. For money. Maybe he was clumsier some time we don’t yet know about. Martin Eagle would like to know where he is, if and when we find him. I just have the feeling that the farther down the back trail we go, the more we’ll learn. I am not going to sneak up on the ridge and dry-gulch him. As far as we know right now, he isn’t wanted by anybody for anything. Maybe he didn’t kill four people. Maybe somebody set the charge to kill him, thinking he’d be on your boat that day. Maybe he was on the boat. You’re supposed to be the logical one, not me.”

He managed a smile. “I’m not doing very well, am I? I can’t seem to think about it. I want him shot. I want him dead.”

Early the next day we were well down into the Valley of the Rio Grande. We went on into Harlingen, which had every fast-food chain either of us had ever heard of, and a lot we hadn’t. We found a place to stop and look at the map. The likely counties were Willacy Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Brooks, and Kenedy. Lots of grove land down in the valley, more big vegetable farms and ranchlands as you went north.

If this was the area where Evan Lawrence a.k.a. Jerry Tobin peddled his thirty tons of Japanese stone lanterns, they were going to be right out in the weather in plain sight, if you could get close enough to the house. And that was a problem. Out in the ranch and farm country, the houses and barns and sheds were a couple of hundred yards down narrow private lanes.

We needed some kind of a cover story to avoid being shot for trespass. If we got the necessary gear to look like surveyers, we would probably be shot for surveying. Meyer finally came up with something suitable. It involved finding a specimen net for capturing insects and rigging up a specimen box.

We drove up to Raymondville and turned left on State Road 186. By the time we hit the third farm; he had the routine under control.

“Madam, we are working on a project for Texas A and I up in Kingsville. There has been an infestation of Brown Recluse spiders, or fiddlebacks as they are sometimes called. We’d like your permission to check around the foundations of your house and around your outbuildings. We don’t have to go inside any building, and we will not damage any plantings. It is a small drab=looking spider with an oblong body. The bite can cause fever, nausea, cramps, and ulceration at the location of the bite. If we pick any up here, we will let you know.”

The old blue van looked plausible, and soon we were sweaty enough to look plausible. There were no refusals. The people were not exactly bursting with friendship and goodwill, but Meyer’s fussy professional manner seemed to allay most of their suspicion.

We wandered the little roads, country roads, 1017 and 681, and went through towns named Puerto Rico, San Isidro, Agua Nueva, Viboras, Robberson, Guerra. I lost track of the number of stops we made. No stone lanterns. We had a bad sandwich and orange pop in a place named Premont, and an hour later we came upon the first stone lantern. It stood in the front yard of a small white farmhouse just north of a town named Rios, on County Road 1329.

A little round woman with a lot of gold in her smile gave us permission. By prearrangement, Meyer went about his net work, and I said, “Couldn’t help noticing your stone lantern there. I had a friend who use to sell those. Maybe you bought it from him.”

“Oh, no! We are being here only seis year. Eet wass here.”

“Have other people got them too?”

“Very pretty.”

“Yes, they are. Anybody else have one that you know?”

She beamed and waved a chubby arm that included the whole world north and west of Rios. “Minny minny peoples haff,” she said.

We headed north and turned west at the first intersection. We were in stone lantern country. At the third lantern stop, we encountered a man who had bought one.

“Hell, it must have been fifteen, seventeen years back, she got me to buy that sucker. Young fellow selling them from an old pickup. Real nice young fellow to talk to. The big ones were forty-two dollars cash money, and the little ones were thirty-five. She had to have the big one, naturally. She loved that fool thing. She’d run out on warm nights and put a candle in it, then stand inside and look at it through the screen. It made her happy to see it out there. I used to kid her, saying you could buy a lot of oil lamps and light bulbs for that forty-two dollars.”

He was a stringy man in his fifties, baked dry, straw hat tilted forward, his eyes the same washedout blue as his work shirt. His big hands were permanently curled by hard labor, and the veins in his leathery forearms were fat and blue.

“Do you think she’d remember the salesman’s name?”

“Allie died six years ago, friend. On a rainy June day just one day after her forty-fourth birthday. I took her a present but she didn’t know me. She didn’t know anything at all by then. She was never real well. She didn’t have a good heart or good kidneys or good lungs, and they all seemed to go bad at the same time. Don’t know why I go on like this. Man doesn’t see people all day, he tends to talk their ear off.”

“Did you happen to see the salesman?”

“Not up close. Saw him standing there when she came to me to get the money. I thought you fellows were after some kind of spider, but you sound like you’re after that lantern salesman.”

I laughed in a jolly hollow manner and said, “Two birds with one stone.” At that point Meyer came trotting up to us, holding a twist of the netting with great care.

“This is a fiddleback,” he said nervously.

“It sure is,” I said, and we transferred it to our improvised specimen box. It seemed slow and lethargic. Meyer took out his notebook and wrote down the time and place.

“Could you describe the lantern salesman?” I asked the man.

“Hell, he looked like any other young Anglo around here. But he sure could talk Mexican. I heard him and Allie jabbering away like crazy. I met Allie when I was working down in Vera Cruz a long time back. Prettiest thing I ever saw in my life. I never could get my mouth around that Mexican talk. God knows I tried. She was a real smart woman. Trouble was, I had things to say to her that I never really could say, because she just never did get to have that much American.”

“Where did he work out from?”

“I can tell you that. The one she wanted, it had a kind of a gouge in the top of it, into the stone. So he went right away and got a new top. Very obliging of him. He said it was a little less than a fifty-mile round trip. He had his stock at a place north of Freer, off State Road Sixteen.”

Meyer said, “You have a remarkable memory, sir.” The man smiled and shook his head. “Not really. Out here there aren’t so many stopping by you can’t remember them all. And Allie did talk to him a long time. I guess it made me kind of curious-to look him over good.”

We told him how much we appreciated his help. He seemed a little disconsolate at having us go. It meant company was leaving. The land around his buildings looked reasonably tidy, but the quick glance I had at the interior showed a fat brown dog stretched out on a welter of newspapers, and a young turkey pecking at something on the floor beyond it.

A couple of miles down the road, I stopped and Meyer dumped out the Brown Recluse. When he got back in, I asked him if he’d stomped it. He said that he had thought of it but decided that the spider had its rights, and had played its part in a charade reasonably well and at the right time, and anyway it was part of the scheme of things, just like the snail darter, the snow goose, and the ACLU. I reminded him that they were poisonous, and he said that you usually have to provoke something in nature to get it to bite. You have to threaten it or make it think it is threatened. Western sheep ranchers are poisonous, he said, because they believe they are threatened by coyotes, when all scientific data from reliable sources indicate otherwise. Wolves never chased the Russian sleighs, he said. A tarantula bite is less bothersome than a bee sting, he said. The more precarious the existence of all living creatures on the planet becomes, he said, the more valuable is each individual morsel of life. I told him he seemed to be getting one hell of a long way from stomping or not stomping a little brown insect, and he told me that the spider is not an insect at all but an eight-legged predacious arachnid of the order Araneae. I asked him if his veneration for life extended all the way from brown spiders to Evan Lawrence; he too was part of the scheme of things. Meyer told me that I had a tendency to put discussions on an emotional basis, thus depriving them of all intellectual interest. I told him I was sure lucky to have him along to straighten me out on all these things.

He studied his notes and said, “Of the four students who could have been Evan Lawrence, we have eliminated one: Rodefer. Of the remaining three, the one most likely to be fluent in Spanish is Cody T. W Pittler. Eagle Pass was his home town, apparently. On the border. And he went to the branch of the University of Texas at El Paso, also on the border. That, of course, does not eliminate Wyatt and Broome. Nor does it mean that any one of the remaining three could have been Evan Lawrence. All it does mean is that if it took an equal amount of effort to check out Wyatt, Pittler, and Broome, it would be logical to try Pittler first.”

“I think Allie was probably a pretty nice woman.”

“We should inquire in Freer about a Mr. Guffey, if indeed there is one.”

“And change our act, I think.”

“To what?” he asked me.

“We don’t have to have an act to go around asking where the Guffey place is. And when and if we find it, we’ll think of something.”

Fourteen

FREER was an intersection of three numbered highways. It looked flat and spread-out, with maybe two or three thousand people in it. On the edge of town I saw a farm equipment and supply agency, with a colorful row of tractors out by the shoulder.

I found some shade to park in and went inside. There was a small office and display room, with a maintenance floor out behind it. Meyer wandered over to the line of tractors and stood there, studying them, his cowboy straw shoved to the back of his head, kitchen match in the corner of his mouth, thumbs hooked into the side pockets of his ranch pants. He looked almost-not quite-authentic. But I was glad to see him improvising. He was beginning, in small ways, to enjoy the small arts of deception. As in the old days, before Dirty Bob.

I sauntered in and angled obliquely over to two men leaning against a monstrous piece of yellow equipment. I had no idea what it could be used for. It looked designed for the uprooting of trees and the mashing of small buildings. One was old, dressed in a yellow jumpsuit. He was the shape of a toby mug, had wild white hair sticking out in all directions, and wore a red embroidered Bunky over his left breast pocket. His face was almost as red as his embroidery.

The other man was swarthy and much younger, and huge. Size of a nose guard. Six-seven, maybe, and two sixty, thereabouts. He had a round amiable face and a nose that had been mashed almost flat.

As I came closer I heard Bunky say, “Now I’m not trying to tell you the bank will go for it, Miguel. You know how the times are. What I can’t do, honest to God, is go on the paper with you. We’re up to our eyeballs on the building here and the floor stock. I know you got a good record, and I’m sure that counts with the bank. But you should go talk to them first. I gave you the figures, the allowance and all.”

Miguel muttered something I couldn’t hear. They shook hands and Miguel left.

Bunky watched him go and then shook his head, smiled at me, shrugged. “What happens to too many of these farmers, they turn into machinery junkies. They get three dollars ahead, they want to go deep in hock to buy something about half again too big for the piece they’re working. Bigger tires. Sit higher. A hundred more horsepower. Then suppose they drop the support level on his crop. He can’t meet the payments on all that equipment, and pretty soon he gets foreclosed and loses the land too. And everybody from John Deere to International Harvester helps push them into bigger stuff. Fancy advertising. Know the smartest man in the county? Old Lopez. He’s down on the Benavides Road. He’s older than me, which means older than God himself. Old Lopez has got three husky sons. He had tractors and cultivators and all that shit. But when the gas price jumped out of sight-it takes eighty gallons to work one acre of land-he sat down on his porch a whole day thinking it over. And then he went right back to the way he used to do it. He works his spread with six mules. He drives the county agent crazy. He’s making more money than anybody else in this part of Texas. Now he’s got his land all free and clear. Doesn’t owe a dime. You take Miguel there that just drove away. If he don’t owe two hundred thousand right now today, I’ll eat one of old Lopez’s mules. Now wouldn’t it be funny if you come in here to buy a thirty-thousand-dollar tractor and I turned you off before you could even ask? But I don’t think so. You’re no farmer. If you want to sell me something, forget it.”

“No, sir. What we want to know is, would you know anybody around this area name of Guffey? A farmer, rancher, whatever.”

He kneaded his pink chin. “Guffey? Guffey. Guffey. Last name?”

“Last name.”

“Know anything else about him that could give me a hint?”

“A long time ago, more than fifteen years ago, he had a young fellow working for him who covered the whole area in a pickup truck, selling those stone Japanese garden lanterns that stand about so high.”

“Well, hell yes! That was closer to twenty years ago. Two sizes. My Mabel bought two of the little ones for two corners of her rose garden, and I wired them for her and put the switch on the side porch. Pink bulbs she put in there. Turns them on these days only when company is coming after dark. Nice fellow sold them to us. Obliging as could be. Toted them to right where she said to put them, and she changed her mind three times. Now who in the world was he working for? Let me think.”

“I was told he lived right around here.”

“Right around. here can cover a lot of land, friend. It’s starting to come back. He run off with the daughter. Crazy old coot bought tons of those lanterns. They came into Galveston by ship, and he freighted them on up here. What the hell was his name? Hold on. I know somebody that would know. I’ll give them a ring.”

He went back into the office, and I could see him in there through the glass, talking and laughing. He came out, shaking his head, after a very long conversation.

“There was a lot to that story that I’d forgot. I called a woman that remembers everything forever. Seems that over near Encinal, few miles east of the town on State Forty-four, there was a couple named Larker. She was close to thirty and he was closer to fifty. No kids. Mr. Larker, he worked in Encinal at the automobile agency there. His wife bought one of those lanterns when he wasn’t home. And about two months later, he started coming down with the flu at work, and he headed on home, about a fifteen-minute drive, and when he put his car away, he saw that pickup with the stone lanterns in it parked behind a shed. There was a good enough wind blowing so nobody heard him drive in. He tippytoed to one window after another until he looked in the parlor and there they were on the carpet having at it, with her big long legs hooked over his shoulders, and her butt propped up on a pillow her mother had needlepointed for them for their fifth anniversary. Their two pair of pants had been flung aside, and he could hear Betsy Ann crying out over the sound of the wind. Hume Larker, he said afterward he just felt so terrible, what with having a chill from the wind blowing, teeth chattering, he just turned and sat down and leaned his back against the house and cried like a baby, sitting there hugging his knees. Then he got back into his car and drove out, and apparently they never noticed. He drove around for about an hour, and when he came back the truck was gone. Betsy Ann was in the kitchen, and she asked him why he was home so early and he said he was sick. He said he was going to go to bed, but before he went to bed he had one thing he wanted to do and he wanted her to watch him. She tagged along, looking puzzled, and he got a sledge out of the barn and went out to the kitchen garden and, with her watching, he sledged that stone lantern down into gravel. She didn’t say a word and she didn’t look at him. The next day and the next, he was too sick to go looking for the salesman. He had a high fever and he was out of his head part of the time. Nearly died, his sister told me. He sort of remembered hearing Betsy Ann yelling at somebody to go away. By the time he could rise up out of his bed and load the Remington and go looking for the salesman, the salesman had gone for good. And he had taken Walker Garvey’s youngest daughter with him.”

“Garvey?” I asked. I felt a presence behind my left shoulder and glanced back and saw Meyer there, listening with a rapt expression. I was glad to see him, because it was beginning to be too much to remember and repeat. But Meyer would remember it, word for word. He has the knack.

“Garvey, not Guffey.” Bunky said. “Walker Garvey. Crazy stubborn old coot. Seven kids, all girls. They married and moved out soon as they could, until just Izzy was left. Isobelle. Jumpy little thing about sixteen when she left. Scrawny. Hardly even any boobs yet. Little old lively girl with buck teeth and hair so blond it looked white. Joe the salesman had a way with the ladies of all ages.”

“Joe?”

“Wait a minute. It was Larry Joe. That’s right. Larry Joe Harris.”

“Is Mrs. Larker still in the area?”

“Last I heard. Hume had a stroke about three years ago and it was a bad one. Sixty-eight, I think he was. He lasted about three months. She sold the place to a family named Echeverria. She moved into Encinal, and I think she stays with her mother and takes care of her. The old lady is about eighty and got bad arthritis. You ask around Encinal for Betsy Ann Larker, somebody is bound to know her. Big tall pale woman.”

“Is Walker Garvey still living?”

“He’s been dead years. I can’t even remember what he died of. He wasn’t much loss to anybody.”

“Where was his place?”

“Up near Cotulla. I think it’s still in the family, one or the other of those daughters of his living there, but I don’t know the name. I can tell you how to find it. The quickest way is take State Forty-four west to Encinal, get onto I Thirty-five, and it’s nearly thirty miles up to Cotulla. Get off the interstate there and take County Road Four Sixty-eight back southeast. It runs along parallel to the Nueces River. Four or five miles down that road you’ll see a couple of houses and some sheds and so on set well back, on your right-hand side. They still call it the Garvey place, I think. Pretty good land there, a couple miles from the river.

“Gentlemen, a pleasure talking to you. Hope I’ve been of some help. It’s coming upon closing time, and I don’t stay around here one minute more than I need to.”

We walked to the van. It was no longer in the shade, and hot enough inside to melt belt buckles. We talked it over and decided that the motel at Robstown had been comfortable enough and only about sixty miles away, so we decided to call it a day, but halfway there we came upon a motel in Alice that looked just about as good, and they had plenty of room, so we took a pair of singles out in the back wing of the place. The shower was a rusty trickle. The window air conditioners made a thumping roaring rattling sound, and the meat across the street was fried, but otherwise it was adequate. Good beds. Fresh clean linen.

Over a big country breakfast, Meyer said, “Larry Joe Harris. Same man?”

“Unless there’s been a lot of people crisscrossing this part of Texas eighteen years ago, selling Japanese stone lanterns.”

“That’s sarcasm, I assume.”

“I just think it’s him. I have that gut feeling. The womanizing fits. And Guffey is close to Garvey. He tried to be too entertaining that night aboard the Flush. Told us too much, and gave us a good lead. What if he said he’d been selling lightning rods or weathervanes? We could have gone in circles without finding anything. We’re narrowing it down.”

“It might narrow down to the point where it disappears for good.”

“You woke up cheery.”

“Norma has been dead for twenty-three days. Did you wake up especially jovial?”

“I woke up trying to grab hold of a dream I had just had about Annie. She was on some sort of platform that was pulling away from me, and I was running, but the harder I ran, the farther away it got. She was waving and smiling. No, I am not especially jovial, and you are not particularly cheery. I feel as if my ordered life had suddenly turned random on me. The ground under my feet has shifted. I want everything to be as it was. But it won’t be. Not ever again. Which do you like best, sincerity or sarcasm?”

He gave me a slow smile and the little blue eyes glinted. “On the whole, sarcasm is more becoming. Will we find Betsy Ann?”

“And we will show her the photograph.”

We made the eighty miles to Encinal in an hour and a half. I was growing fond of the rugged old blue van. When it got up to speed, it was steady as the Orange Bowl.

I made my inquiries at a gas station just off the interchange. The attendant was a fat bald man in high-heeled boots. As he filled the tank he said, “Well, sure. I guess nearly everybody in town knows Betsy Ann.” He looked at his watch. “She’ll be going to work pretty soon now. She comes on at eleven and works lunch. You go down that street there, and turn right at the corner, and you’ll see it on the right, with parking in front. Arturo’s Restaurant. You should want to eat there, it’s okay. But don’t get the tacos. Get the chicken enchiladas. And they got draft beer.”

We parked in front. There was only one other vehicle there, a dusty Datsun. There were beer signs in the windows, a rickety screen door, and three overhead fans down the narrow room. Booths on the right, counter on the left, tables in the back.

A tall woman in a waitress uniform was carrying a cup of coffee to a booth. She gave us a mechanical smile of welcome. She looked to be about fifty. She had long hair tinted an unnatural strawberry-blond shade and combed straight down in a young-girl style which emphasized rather than diminished the effect of the age lines in her pallid face. Under the blue uniform with its white cuffs on short sleeves, white collar, white trim on the pockets, her figure looked slim and attractive.

We took a table in the farthest corner. We had agreed that it would be best to get it over with before the restaurant filled up. She came back with menus. “The lunch special isn’t ready yet, but he says it will be in another fifteen minutes. So if you want to have coffee while you wait… The lunch special is a Spanish beef stew.”

Meyer by pre-agreement took over. He is better than I am at this sort of thing. “May we ask you a personal question, Betsy Ann?”

She frowned. “Do I know you? How do you know my name?”

“Believe me, we do not want to cause you any grief or any alarm. We want to be your friends.”

“I don’t understand. What do you want of me?”

“As I said, we want to ask you a personal question. We have to ask it, unfortunately.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Meyer. This is my friend, Travis McGee. We’re from Florida. A man killed my niece three weeks ago. We have very little information about him. We’re trying to find him by looking into his past.”

She looked bewildered. “I don’t know anybody killed anybody, mister. You’ve got the wrong person.”

“Just tell us if this is the man you once knew as Larry Joe Harris.”

He slid the color print out of the folder as he spoke.

She stared at it and made a strange, loud, moaning cry and bent forward from the waist as though she had been struck in the stomach. She put her hand against her mouth.

A man in a white chef’s hat came bursting through the swinging door out of the kitchen, a ten-inch knife in his hand.

“iQue pasa!” he said. “Whassa matta, Betsy Ann?”

“Nothing. It’s okay Arturo.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Everything is okay, really.”

He looked at her and at us with suspicion and went back to the kitchen. A young man with a beard was leaning out of a booth to look at us.

She tottered, then sat quickly in one of the other chairs at the table, eyes closed, and said, “Sorry. Sorry.”

Meyer covered her hand with his. “I’m really sorry.”

She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “Where’s the picture? I want to see it again. Thanks.” She leaned over it and studied it. “He’s kind of better looking than when he was young. I’ve told myself he died, or he would have got in touch somehow. But he didn’t. I knew he never would. Sure, that’s Larry Joe Harris. Is that all you want from me?”

“Yes. And we’re grateful.”

“He killed your niece?”

“It seems probable.”

“It was eighteen years ago. How did you know about him and me?”

“We talked to some people over in Freer.”

“Sure. That’s where Hume’s damn sister lives. That’s the worst thing he ever did to me, telling his sister what happened with me and Larry Joe, telling her he looked through the window. I suppose you could say I did something bad to him, too. All right. But telling his sister was like putting it on a billboard in living color in the middle of town. I just wasn’t that kind of a person. I was twenty-three when I married Hume Larker and he was forty-three. I loved that man. You don’t want to listen to all this dirty laundry.”

“Betsy Ann, we want to learn as much as we can about Larry Joe Harris.”

“He came by with those Japanese lanterns, and I thought they were just lovely. I got Hume to buy me one for the garden. I thought the salesman was a nice boy. I guessed he was twenty-two or twenty-three. He had a nice smile and he was polite. One morning around eleven o’clock, about a month later, he came by and asked me how I liked the lantern. I said I liked it fine. He said he sold lanterns and he read palms. I said that was nice, but I didn’t have any money for palm reading. He said he would read mine free, right there in the doorway. So I held it out and he took me by the wrist and studied it, and then smiled into my eyes and he said that he could read in my palm that I was soon to have a love affair. I said I was married. And he said it was going to happen very very soon. He just hung onto my wrist and smiled at me, and he walked me right back through my own house. And… it happened. I was like a person in a dream. You know those dreams where something is happening and you can’t stop it? I wasn’t that kind of a woman. He should have known that. But I guess he knew something else about me that I’d never known. He came back to the house eight more times while Hume was off working. I know the number because I counted. And we hardly ever had anything to say to each other. It was always just like the first time. I would say to myself I was going to tell him off next time he came by, and when that old pickup came banging into the drive I would get all pumped up to tell him no, I wouldn’t, we shouldn’t, but he would take my hand and I would go right along with him like some dumb kid. And I must have been years older than him then. He had power over me. I don’t know what it was. When Hume went out to find him and kill him, I hoped he would, because Larry Joe had ruined my marriage. But Larry Joe had already took off with Izzy Garvey. Just a dumb little school kid, and she ran off with him, taking all the money Walker Garvey had hid in the house and just about everything else wasn’t nailed down. Where is Larry Joe?”

“We don’t know. Where did he come from originally?”

“Like I said, we hardly said a word to each other. All the rest of the time we lived there, people stared at me and whispered. That damned sister of Hume’s. You’re a nice man, Mr. Meyer. I’d tell you anything I know that would help. But I don’t know anything. Every time I think about it, I feel so damn dumb. I could live a million years and still never know how that could happen to me that way. And the hell of it is, Mr. Meyer, if he came in right now and smiled at me and took me by the hand, I think he could lead me right off wherever he wanted.”

“I do appreciate your being so open and honest with us.”

“I hope you find him. You should do with him like they do with witches and vampires. Pound a stake right through his black heart.”

“You have no idea where he went when he left?”

“No, and neither did the law. Walker Garvey called them in on it first thing. They left with over two thousand dollars from under a loose board in the floor of his closet, some watches and some guns, and some sterling silver flatware that had come down from Izzy’s grandmother on her mother’s side. And of course, the pickup truck, which was found, I heard, in Abilene weeks and weeks later.”

“And the girl never came home?”

“Never even wrote.”

A group of men came into the restaurant, talking loudly and laughing. She got up quickly.

“I don’t know anything that would help you. Really. And I’d just as soon not talk about it any more.”

“Thank you for everything you told us,” Meyer said. “I know how hard it must have been for you, remembering it.”

Her face softened. “It was a long long time ago.” She hurried off to take orders from the new arrivals. When she came back toward the kitchen, we signaled to her and ordered the Spanish beef stew. When she waited on us she was polite but remote. It was as though the conversation never had happened.

Fifteen

IT WAS a quick twenty-eight miles to the Cotulla exit. In Cotulla-which looked to be twice the size of Freer-State Road 97 went straight, and we turned off on little old 468, narrow and lumpy.

We stopped twice to ask about the old Garvey place, and at the second stop we got explicit directions and were told to look for the name Statzer on the rural mailbox. That was one of old Garvey’s daughters, they said. Christine.

The Statzer drive was about four hundred yards long, and the buildings were spread out on a long knoll. Kids and dogs came swarming out. of the bushes. The dogs looked big and dangerous, but the little kids whapped them across the side of the nose and chased them back out of the way.

A chubby blond woman came out on the porch, shaded her eyes, and shouted, “Who you looking for?” She wore jeans and a T-shirt advertising Knotts Berry Farm.

“Christine Statzer?”

“That’s me. What’s it about?”

“Isobelle Garvey.”

“Izzy?” She plunged down the three steps and came trotting to the car as we were getting out. “Is she alive? Where is she?” All the little kids were standing around, wide-eyed.

“I don’t know where she is,” Meyer said. “We came to ask about her.”

The animation went out of her face. “So who is asking?”

“My name is Meyer. This is my associate, Mr. McGee. He is helping me look for the man we think married and then killed my niece. When he was using the name Larry Joe Harris, the same man is reported to have robbed your father and run away with your sister.”

She tilted her head to the side and frowned. “Friend, that was eighteen damn years ago! That ain’t exactly a red-hot trail you’re following.”

“The more we can learn about him, the better chance we have of finding him. We thought you might be willing to give us what help you can.”

She shooed the children away and led us up onto the long deep porch. “They aren’t all mine,” she said. “Summertime, two of my sisters bring their kids up from Laredo for me to look after. It all evens out sooner or later. Set.”

Meyer sat in a rocker. She sat on a bench and I sat on the porch railing. There was a mother cat with a basket of kittens under the bench. Three geese walked across the side yard, angling their heads to peer up at us.

“Papa didn’t know a thing about Larry Joe. The way he found him, Papa went over there to Galveston when they wired him about those damn Jap lanterns coming in on a freighter. Do you know about the lanterns?”

“Your father got mad at a garden-supply dealer?” I said.

“Right. He got mad easy and often. He tried to import a dozen and then fifty, but thirty tons was the least he could take. He got the license and went ahead with it, and by the time they came in, he had almost forgot about them. So he went over and arranged for them to be trucked right here to the farm. On the way back, Papa picked up Larry Joe, hitch-hiking, and got onto the problem of the thirteen hundred garden lanterns, all of them in three pieces, and this Larry Joe told him he could sell anything to anybody anywhere, and they struck a deal. I must say that everybody liked him. When I met him, I liked him fine. At that time I’d been married almost a year, and my first baby was beginning to show. You see, Izzy and me, we were the two youngest of the seven. And when I left the place to move in with Burt and his folks, just Izzy and Papa were left here.”

Meyer slid the photograph out of his folder and handed it over to her. She studied it. “Must be real recent. He’s forty here if he’s a day. Fine-looking man. Who’s that beyond him?”

“Norma. My niece.”

“She’s blurred but she looks pretty. Anyway, it looked like Papa had made a good choice, because Larry Joe surely unloaded those weird lanterns. He must have put ten thousand miles on that old pickup. The people that bought them made a real good buy, if you like that kind of thing. He got rid of all but about a dozen. They’re still out there in one of the sheds, I think. I remember seeing them a couple of years back. Maybe Burt moved them, I don’t know. Papa sicked the cops onto Larry Joe. I guess the trouble was that Papa always had too many deals going. He was always taking off to check out something he owned some kind of a piece of. And that meant that Izzy and Larry Joe were here alone probably once too often. We all really loved Izzy, all us sisters. She was the best of the lot, believe me. She was cute and warm and funny and loving. And just a kid. You know? Sixteen. Too young to really know what kind of man he was. After they’d been gone some time we heard of two situations where he was getting an extra bonus along with the pay for those lanterns. Some woman down near Encinal, and another one above Catarina. And if it came out there was two of them, you can be pretty sure there must have been ten more being so careful it never came out.”

“Your father must have been very upset.”

“He was like a crazy person. He never could figure out how Larry Joe knew about the money under the floor, because he’d never let on to any of us he kept that kind of cash money in the house. They took two gold watches out of Papa’s desk, and they took the sterling silver flatware that came down from my grandma. And the pickup truck which turned up in a used-car lot in Abilene weeks later. It turned Papa meaner than a snake. Not that he was exactly cheerful beforehand. He stayed sour until the day he died. Mom died when Izzy was three, wore down from having all us girls. Look, I’m telling you things. Tell me more about Larry Joe Harris.”

“When he married my niece earlier this year, his name was Evan Lawrence. Five years ago, when he ran away with the sister of a real-estate broker in Dallas, his name was Jerry Tobin. She was killed in an accident near Ingram, when the car hit a tree and burned and he was thrown free. We don’t know who he really is yet. We’re trying to find out.” She got up suddenly and walked to the end of the porch. She stood by the railing with her back to us, then turned around and snuffled and knuckled her eyes.

“It fits too good,” she said tearfully.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

She walked slowly back toward us and sat down. “Four years ago we had a rain here you wouldn’t believe. A hurricane came in off the Gulf and must have dropped sixteen inches here on Webb County. There’s a creek over there you can’t see it from here-it runs down into the Nueces and it’s sometimes a trickle and sometimes dry. It was a river all by itself when that rain came, and it carved out new banks, and afterward one of my eldest sister’s kids, she came running to the house talking about bones sticking out of the gravel bank. I went and looked and called the authorities. The experts dug it out. It had been buried near the creek about two or three feet down. They estimated it had been there ten to twenty years. The leg bones and one arm was gone, and so they couldn’t tell how tall it had been. The experts from the state said it was a female from twelve to twenty years old. They found a couple of scraps of fabric. The trouble was that Izzy had never had any cavities that had to be filled, and she’d broken just one bone in her life, and that was a bone in her leg, and nobody ever found the leg bones. They had washed on down into the Nueces and washed away. The skull was stove in the back kind of like she’d been hit with the flat of a shovel. We sisters all got together and talked it over. Nobody could prove that the remains were Isobelle, and nobody could prove they weren’t. And there was, of course, the note she left Papa. Something like, Please forgive us, we’re in love, we’re running off to get married, wish us happiness. We could understand running off, because every one of the rest of us couldn’t hardly wait to get out of this house and away from him. We talked it over, and it just didn’t seem natural he’d kill her before they even got started. Three of us out of six had met and talked to Larry Joe, and we all liked him. What we decided, there’s a track where you can drive down and park in a grove by the creek, and couples sneak in there. So probably it was somebody else, we said. But we hadn’t heard from her, not once in eighteen years, and we all loved her and she loved us all. And from what you tell me about him…”

She buried her face in her hands. She cried silently, shoulders shaking. Meyer hitched his rocker closer and patted her shoulder. He is a good patter. He isn’t awkward about it. And, like the veterinarian who can quiet jumpy animals with his touch, Meyer has good hands for patting and comforting.

She turned a streaming face toward him. “I think I knew it all along. I think I knew it even before the time it rained so hard.” She hopped up and ran into the house, saying in a smothered voice, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

It was closer to ten. The geese went by again, looking us over with beady suspicion. A kitten crawled over the side of the basket and sprawled mewling on the porch floor. Meyer put it back where it belonged, and the mother cat seemed to smile at him.

The children came racing by all yelling, the dogs in tongue-lolling pursuit. After the sound died, I could hear a meadowlark in the distance, an improbable sweetness.

She came out smiling and embarrassed. “It was a long time ago. I didn’t expect it to break me up like that.”

“We understand,” Meyer said. “Can you tell us anything at all about the man which would help us look for him?”

“Like what kind of thing?”

“His likes, dislikes, skills, habits.”

“Let me think. I saw him like three times, altogether it wouldn’t be an hour. Papa said he was a real good shot with a rifle. I don’t know how Papa found that out. Oh, and he spoke good Mexican. All of us down here in south Texas have some, but he had a lot more than most. I get along, but he went too fast for me. There’s another thing, but I don’t know as it means anything. We’ve always had dogs, and Izzy told me the dogs didn’t like Larry Joe at all. The hair on their backs would stand right up. Izzy said it made him mad the dogs didn’t like him. She said he liked to have everybody like him, everybody and everything.”

She decided to show us the lanterns, and she walked out back to the sheds. We followed. She opened the third one and peered in and beckoned to us. When my eyes were used to the dim light inside the shed, I could see the dozen or so lanterns clumped close together in the corner, standing there like little stone dwarfs in conical hats. They were a murky green-brown, and the vines had grown in through the breaks and splits in the old boards and wound around them, in and out of the oval holes where the light would shine out of them at night.

“That’s all there is left. He certainly sold one hell of a lot of stone lanterns. I didn’t think anybody could sell that many. I thought it was another one of Papa’s crazy ideas. You want a lantern?”

“No thanks,” Meyer said hastily. “Nice of you to offer.”

As she walked us to the car, she said, “If you should find him, could you let us know, me and my sisters? You write me and I’ll tell them. My oldest sister named her youngest Isobelle. She’s thirteen now, and she looks so much like Izzy used to, it breaks my heart to look at her.”

As we went down the long drive I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her back there, hands on her hips, a small plump figure in a wide rural land, encircled by kids and dogs.

“Eagle Pass?” I asked, glancing over at Meyer. He nodded agreement and sat there, arms folded, behind a wall of silence. When I came to a suitable place, I pulled over and looked at the map. Big Wells, Brundage, Crystal City. Maybe a hundred miles. A hundred miles of silence. A hundred years of solitude.

But it was only about thirty miles of silence. “Could you have believed this about him the night the four of us had dinner?”

“It would have taken some convincing.” I replied.

“Yet now you believe he killed Izzy?”

“Of course. And Doris Eagle and Norma and maybe a few we haven’t come across. Or more than a few.”

“Motive?”

“I think my guess would be that he is a hunter. Women are the game he specializes in. He is a loner. A rare kind of loner, a man who seems affable, agreeable, gregarious, fun to have around. That is his act. That is his camouflage suit. That’s the way he comes up on the blind side, downwind, every move calculated. Not every stalk has to end in death, Meyer. Betsy Ann was a practice stalk, no shell in the chamber. He got close enough to reach out and touch the game. The money is important to him only because it gives him the freedom to keep hunting. I have heard the same crap a couple of times from some of my delayed-development macho friends who go out and shoot things they have no intention of eating. ‘My God, Travis, I was in love with that elk. The most beautiful damn thing you ever saw in your life. Stood there in the morning light, never knowing there was a soul within a mile of him. Raised his head and I put the slug just behind the shoulder, blew his brave heart to shreds. I tell you truly, I went up to him and squatted beside him, and I stroked his hide and I had tears in my eyes, he was so noble!’

“I think our buddy Larry Joe/Evan/Jerry must have some of the same bullshit running in his bloodstream. I think that when he mounts one of his victims-to-be, the idea that he is going to one day kill her dead gives him a bigger and better orgasm. In fact, he might be unable to make it unless he knows that’s going to happen to her, at his hand. Murmurings of love on his lips, and murder in his damn black heart.”

“Blackbeard,” he said. “And other men down through history.”

“Jack the Ripper?”

“No. That’s quite a different motivation, I think. He wanted the world to know that murder had been done, that the evil women who sold their bodies had been punished by an agent of the Lord. We know of three possible victims of Larry Joe/Evan/ Jerry spread over eighteen years. In no case was it labeled murder.”

“So maybe that is part of the game.”

“If it is, it requires that the game be played differently every time. Otherwise there is a pattern:… Hah!”

“Hah what?”

“Let me think a bit.”

He thought for about twenty miles and finally said, “I thought I had an inspiration, but I can’t make it work. It struck me that maybe he had a very good reason to eliminate Evan Lawrence, the name and the identity, along with Norma. What could that reason be? That possibly, as Evan Lawrence, the hunt had not gone too well with the victim he dispatched before he met Norma. Maybe there was a trail left which someone might be shrewd enough to follow-just as we’re trying to follow him now-and if that did happen, it would end right there when The John Maynard Keynes blew up. A dead end. Justice done. But actually, it would be a convenience to him to drop an identity. I would imagine he had another one all set to slip into.”

“He could buy identities in Miami as easy as he could buy explosives.”

“Travis, there is one thing about him we should keep in mind. He does really look like a great many other forty-year-old men. Driving around Houston I saw at least a half dozen men who, on first glance, looked like Evan Lawrence. Average height, square face, tan, standard haircut, no distinguishing marks. A pleasant expression. Bigger hands than average, thicker through the neck and shoulders. Remember, I found a great many yearbook pictures which looked as if they could have been Evan Lawrence. I am saying that he can disappear into the people pool the way a trout can rise and gulp a bug and slide back down out of sight in the depths. Money makes the disappearance easier. Money diverts suspicion. Money can give a false impression of respectability.”

“So what good are we going to do in Eagle Pass?”

“Maybe he started as Cody T. W Pittler. And if so, maybe we can find out what turned him into a hunter.”

“There we go again, Meyer. The old argument.”

“Which one?”

“You start with the assumption that everybody is peachy, and then something comes along and warps them. You start with a concept of goodness, and so what we are supposed to do, as a society, is understand why they turn sour. Understand and try to heal. I start with the assumption that there is such a thing as evil which can exist without causation. The black heart which takes joy in being black. In almost every kind of herd animal, there is the phenomenon of the rogue.”

“If he is Pittler, we’ll find something unusual about his boyhood.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Just as sure as I am that I learned some time ago what it was in your past that gives you a recurrent streak of paranoia.”

“Now hold it!”

“Don’t be insulted, Travis. That flaw is useful to you. It keeps you constantly suspicious. And thus it has probably kept you alive.”

“Up till now.”

Sixteen

FROM EAGLE Pass in Maverick County, across the river from Piedras Negras, the Rio Grande drops seven hundred and twenty-six feet in a few hundred miles until it flows into the Gulf below Brownsville at Brazos Island.

There is a deceptive illusion of lushness near the riverbanks, but for the most part it is a burned land of scraggly brush, dry hills, weed, lizard, cedar, and salty creek beds that slant down from the Anacacho Mountains to the north. To the northeast is Uvalde, where John Nance Garner lived and died in a broad and pretty valley, noted in his declining years only for his brief statement about the value of the office of the Vice-President of the United States. “It’s about as much use as a pitcher of warm spit,” he said.

Here all along the valley from Cameron and Willacy counties on the Gulf through Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, Webb, Dimmit, Zavala, and Maverick, the American citizens of Mexican ancestry have, through the exercise of their right to vote, taken control of county functions: school boards, zoning, police and fire protection, road departments, library services, county welfare, and all the other boards and commissions which spring full grown from the over-fertilized minds of the political animals. This has been a slow and inevitable process for fifty years, and it is understandable that during this time most of the Anglos have been squeezed out of participation in county government. Some of those squeezed out were doubtless of exceptional competency. But so are some of the new ones. And the world keeps turning, and just as much money finds its way into the wrong pockets as under the old regime.

Sergeant Paul Sigiera saw us on Thursday morning at nine thirty after a twenty-minute wait in his outer office. There was room in his office for a gray steel desk, three straight-backed oak chairs without arms, and two green filing cabinets. He was in his thirties, in short-sleeved, sweat-darkened khakis. He had black bangs down almost to his eyebrows, anthracite eyes, and a desperado mustache. The small window was open and a big fan atop the file cabinets turned back and forth, back and forth, ruffling the corners of the papers on his desk and giving a recurrent illusion of comfort.

“Friends,” he said in a Texican twang, “the goddarn compressor quit again, and it is hot as a fresh biscuit in heah. They don’t fix it quick, I’m gonna assign me out to patrol and ride around with the cold air turned on high. Now what was it you wanted?”

“We’re from Florida,” I said. “My name is McGee and this is my friend Professor Meyer, a world famous economist. Perhaps, Sergeant, you remember reading in the paper about Professor Meyer’s boat being blown up in the Atlantic Ocean just off Fort Lauderdale on the fifth of this month.”

“I maybe do remember something.”

“Three people died and no bodies were recovered. We have been trying to trace the person responsible, and there is a faint chance that he may have lived here as a young man before he went off to the University of Texas. He may have even been born here. His name is, or was, Cody T. W Pittler.”

He studied us. His smile was amiable. “Before I come to my senses and come back home here, I worked Vice in Beaumont, and I saw the underside of everything, and I heard every scam known to mankind. You come on very smooth and reliablelike, just like every good scam does. So you fellas just empty out all the ID out of your wallets and pockets right here in front of me. Hang onto the money and the wallets, and I’ll just poke around with the rest of it. Now if you’d just as soon not do that, you can get on up and leave and I’ll go on to the next customer.”

He took his time. He went through Meyer’s little stack of paper and plastic first. “What were you doing in Canada, Professor?”

“Giving a series of lectures. My boat with my niece aboard was blown up while I was up there. The Miami Herald called me to tell me about it and ask questions. I flew back as soon as I could get a reservation.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Myself. I give talks, do consulting work write papers.”

“What kind of address is this?”

“I have no address actually. That’s the slip at Bahia Mar where my boat has been moored for quite a few years. I lived aboard.”

“So your house got blown up.”

“That’s right.”

“When I was a little kid my gramma’s house burned up. She lost everything. For years after, she’d remember something and then start crying because she’d know it went up in flames too.”

“It is… difficult,” Meyer said.

“This credit card here. What’s the limit on it?”

“Limit?”

“How much can you charge on it?”

“I don’t really know. I think it’s five thousand.” He looked at the picture on Meyer’s driving license, holding it up as he looked carefully at Meyer. He nodded, pushed the little pile back toward Meyer, and began on mine.

He started with the license and the comparison, then read the license. “What does a salvage consultant do, McGee?”

“Advises people about how to go about salvaging something.”

“Underwater?”

“Sometimes. And I do salvage work on a contingency basis, a percentage of recovery.”

After a few more casual questions, he pushed my stack back and I stowed it away.

“Now let’s get a couple of things straight that bother me some,” he said. “You are coming down here into my back yard looking for somebody that killed three people.”

“I guess you could put it that way,” Meyer said.

“What other way is there, Professor? And so that makes you some kind of amateur detectives, don’t it?”

“I guess we are doing what a detective would do.”

“Why don’t you leave it up to the people who know what the hell they’re doing? You may be messing up a professional investigation. Ever think of that?”

“There isn’t any investigation. At least, not in the way…” Meyer paused and shrugged and dug into his portfolio and took out the Xerox sheets of the clippings from the paper.

Sigiera read the account. “So this Pittler is some kind of terrorist?”

“We believe Pittler could be the Evan Lawrence that was reported killed in the explosion, along with his wife, who was my niece, and Captain Jenkins, my friend.”

“No terrorists?”

“No terrorists,” I said. “And three hundred thousand missing from the woman’s estate, cleaned out before they went to Florida.”

“It says here they were newlyweds.”

“And so they were.”

“How’d you people come up with that name?” Meyer explained about the yearbooks, and the days of studying the pictures. He showed Sigiera the color print of Evan Lawrence.

“Good-looking man. Doesn’t mean much, though, does it? I caught me a guide last year, pretty as a movie actor. He’d led three groups of braceros across the river up near Quemado and killed them, every one, for the poor pitiful pesos they had left after paying him. Eleven bodies we found in a ditch with stones piled on them. And that killer had eyelashes you wouldn’t believe, and if you looked right at him, he blushed.” He pulled his wet shirt away from his chest, and said, “Question. What do you do if you find him?”

“Hold him for the authorities,” I said.

“A salvage consultant doesn’t have to do all that paperwork with licenses and all that, and he doesn’t have to report to the law every time he enters a new territory. McGee, are you hired out to this professor?”

“We’ve been close friends for many years,” Meyer said with enough indignation to be convincing. Sigiera picked up the card with the name and address Meyer had gotten from the university records. “Set still,” he said, and headed out of the room, leaving the door open.

He was gone almost forty minutes. Time dragged. The fan made a clicking sound. An insane mockingbird played its endless variations in a live oak outside the window. It was too hot for conversation.

When he did come back, it was obvious that something had sobered him. He had a file folder in his hand, a buff folder of the type where the sheets are fastened at the top with metal tabs that come up through two holes in the sheets and are bent over. The metal fasteners were rusty.

“Had to go over to the courthouse annex to get this,” he explained. “There was a card on it here because it’s still an open file. It’s still an open file because I think we’re looking for the same fella.” He checked the name again. “Cody Tom Walker Pittler, who, if he’s living, was forty-two years old the twenty-fourth of this month. And what we want him for, it happened twenty-two years ago last month. I was a little kid then, but I can remember hearing about it because it was something dirty. You know how little kids are. Everybody whispered about it that summer. First, let’s double-check on him being the same one.”

He slipped a photograph out of the file. A boy of about seventeen stood grinning at the camera. He was in football togs, helmet under his arm, hair tousled. The young Evan Lawrence, we agreed.

“High school,” Sigiera said, “before he went away. Before he had the trouble.”

He seemed thoughtful and in no hurry, and we made no attempt to push him. He flipped pages, read for long minutes.

He slapped the folder shut. “It’s all in our damn cop language,” he said. “The decedent, the angle of entry, the alleged this and that. Too many words. That’s the trouble with the law lately. Too many words. Too many writs. Too many pleas. We can live with it. We have to live with it. But sometimes it gets a little scratchy.

“Here’s what happened. Cody was apparently a normal kid. No juvenile record. No problems. His father, name of Bryce Pittler, owned a small contracting business that did foundations, put in septic tanks, and so on. Had a yard and a little warehouse and three transit-mix trucks. Worked hard at it and did okay. When Cody was about thirteen and his sister, Helen June, was eighteen, their mother died sudden. She caught the flu and it went into pneumonia and she tried to keep right on going no matter what, and they got her into the hospital too late. Bryce Pittler waited two years and then he married a twenty-five-year-old woman that worked in the office for him. Her name was Coralita Cardamone, half Mexican, half Italian, and she was supposed to be one very hot number around town at that time. If he hadn’t up and married her so fast, his friends would maybe have had a chance to warn him off her. A year after they were married, that would be when Cody was sixteen or thereabouts, one of the big building supply outfits from Houston came down to all these little places along the river, buying up small contracting firms. They gave Bryce Pittler an offer he couldn’t refuse, because it gave him a good piece of money, and they kept him on to run it the way he had before. They did that with the other outfits they bought, and some of the ex-owners turned out to be good managers and a lot didn’t.

“Bryce Pittler turned out to be one of the good ones, so what they did after not too long was to make him a regional manager, covering all the way from Brownsville to El Paso. The daughter, Helen aune, got married and moved out. Bryce Pittler had to be away three and four nights a week. That left Coralita and the kid alone in the house. I don’t know how they got started, but bet your ass it wasn’t the kid’s idea. He thought his old man was absolute tops. They were close. But it was going on. They interrogated Coralita’s best friend, a woman named”-he flipped the folder open, turned a few pages-“Leona Puckett, who said Coralita had told her about the whole affair. Leona said she had begged Coralita to stop with the kid because it was a mortal sin. Apparently when the kid got back after his first year in college, they picked right up again, just like they probably did whenever he came home for vacation. She was a very ripe woman, and they say she never got as much as she needed, and from what Leona reported, the kid was so well hung she just couldn’t bring herself to give it up. So it was the old old story, except it was the traveling man that came home to find his wife in bed with his son. He heard them and went and got his target pistol, the one he’d taught the boy to shoot. From the coroner’s report, the woman was on top, and the headboard of the bed was against the wall opposite the kid’s bedroom door. Maybe he didn’t even know it was his son under there when he nailed her with one shot right to the base of the skull. She was instantly dead in mid-stroke. There were signs of a struggle. A chair tipped over. Bryce Pittler was on the floor, still alive, with a bullet that had gone through his lower right chest at an upward angle, nicked a big artery, and lodged against his spine. The pistol was near his right hand. The wound was consistent with what could have happened if they struggled for the gun. Pittler never came out of it. A neighbor walking his dog in the yard next door heard two shots, and then as he was wondering whether to phone it in, a car came roaring out of the drive and turned north. He phoned it in. Pittler died on the table. Never said a word. They had a double service. There was an all-points bulletin out. The law looked, but not very hard. I don’t think the kid was running from us as much as he was running from what happened. I mean, that’s about as rough as it can get for a kid. It’s like in those old Greek plays. The neighbor recognized the profile of the kid driving the car as it passed the streetlight. And he hasn’t been seen since. Here’s a picture of the woman.”

I looked at it and handed it to Meyer. Five-by-seven black-and-white glossy of a slender girl standing by a boat pulled up on a rocky beach. You could see the trees on the hazy far shore. She had turned to look back over her left shoulder, to smile at the camera. Her face looked small and sweet under the heavy weight of dark hair. Her smile was provocative. Her hips were rich and vital in taut white slacks below the narrowness of her waist. It was a starlet pose, hip-shot, canted. I wondered if Meyer was as surprised as I was to see how young she looked.

“So let’s say Coralita started making it with the kid when he was seventeen. It wouldn’t be any big problem to get him started. Kids that age don’t think of very much else. So she would have him whenever she could when he was eighteen and nineteen and twenty. He must have felt real guilty about not being able to stop. A good strong boy that age could give Coralita a pretty good run. Maybe she tried to end it too. Who knows? But the old man would be away, and they would be alone in the house, eat supper, watch the TU, maybe try not to look at each other. Go to bed. Each one thinking of the other one in the other bedroom, both of them getting hornier and hornier. Both of them with the perfect excuse. What harm can one more time do? Who’s to know? Then one or the other coming cat-foot down the dark hall, sliding warm into the bed, all arms and mouths and groans and shudders.”

He shook his head.

“Human sexuality. A hell of an engine. Let it get out of control, and it can kill. You ever hear about the doctor that got asked to speak to the PTA about human sexuality? No? He went home and told his wife he was going to talk to the PTA and she said what about, and he didn’t want to get into some kind of discussion with her about what he should or shouldn’t say, so he told her he was going to talk to them about sailing. She was out of town the day he gave the speech, and when she got back a friend came running up to her and said, ‘Mary, your husband gave the most wonderful talk to the PTA yesterday! You should be very proud of that man.’ The wife stared at her and said, ‘I don’t understand. George just doesn’t know anything about it. He only tried it twice in his life, and once he got motion sick and the second time his hat blew off.’”

After our dutiful and politic laughter, Meyer said, “What you are telling us about Cody and Coralita, Sergeant, is that you don’t see them as evil people.”

“What’s evil? They got thrown together. She had the hots and he was just a kid. They were weak and they were stupid, and they happened to get caught. Maybe the best answer would have been if Bryce Pittler had killed them both and then himself. Not because of the punishment or anything like that, but just to keep from turning Cody loose on the world. You talk about psychology, I don’t know shit from Shinola. All I know as a law officer is that there would be no way in God’s world Cody T. W. Pittler could ever feel okay about himself. And the worst crimes I get are the ones done by people who are trying to punish themselves. I think they want to be dead, and they can’t go at it direct, so they keep circling it, giving it a chance to happen.”

All of a sudden there was a coughing roar that steadied into a loud hum, and cold air began coming out of the vents in the side wall. Paul Sigiera jumped up and closed the small window. He went and stood in front of the vents and bared his chest and said, “Ahhhhh. Finally.”

“We’ve taken up a lot of your time,” Meyer said.

He turned and shrugged. “This is Thursday morning, friend. The quiet time. Last weekend’s wars have been ironed out. The troops are regrouping. Tomorrow night there’ll be some skirmishes, and by Saturday the fire fights will start and I’ll be busy as a little dog in a big yard. This has been kinda interesting.”

“For us too,” I said. “One question. Did you develop a set of prints?”

“Sure did. Nice and clear. Beer bottle, bathroom glass, countertop, lots of good surfaces. They must have gotten a lot of sets of his and then picked the best and classified them and sent them in to FBI Central records. The theory is he gets picked up for something and the prints go in and they are cross-indexed in some damn way, and they identify him-sooner or later. It used to work better than it does now. But it didn’t work too well, I hear, way back when.”

“What happened to the car?”

“From the file they had hopes they could trace the kid that way. It was an almost new DeSoto, off white. It turned up finally near Alpine. It was at the bottom of a steep cliff out of sight of the highway. A backpacker reported it.” He flipped the folder open again. “Says here they estimate it had been down there six weeks. I don’t know how they worked that out. There was no body near it or in it. It was a place where there was a kind of scenic lookout, where he could have got out and pushed it and let it roll over the edge.”

I looked questioningly at Meyer. He knew what I meant. He gave a shrug of acquiescence. “What if, using the name Larry Joe Harris, he killed a young girl over in Cotulla eighteen years ago? What if, five years ago, using the name Jerry Tobin, he ran off with a girl from Dallas and killed her in a fake automobile accident down in the hill country? What if, as Evan Lawrence, he married Professor Meyer’s niece and blew her and two other people to bits. He made over two thousand dollars off the killing in Cotulla, two hundred thousand off the Dallas girl, three hundred thousand off his bride from Houston. What would you say to that?”

“Identification okay?”

“Through the picture we showed you. Total certainty.”

“Like I said, I don’t want to get artsy-fartsy fancy, like the psychiatrists in the courtroom. But isn’t what he’s doing, maybe, is killing Coralita over and over, killing his stepmother?”

“Punishing himself by killing her,” Meyer said. “I could agree.”

“So then there’s more,” Sigiera said. “It adds up to four years between Coralita and the girl in Cotulla, then a gap of twelve years? He counted with his fingers, tapping them on the edge of his desk. ”No, thirteen. Then five years until this one, this month. There’d be more in there. God only knows what his cycle is. If it’s every two years, that makes three you know about and eight you don’t.“

“Women seem to be strongly attracted to him,” Meyer said.

“Okay, he’s a compulsive. You take a rapist. They go on and on until you catch them. But that’s a crime of violence, not sex. They want to hurt and kill. This is different. He wants to love and be loved. He wants romance. He wants to heat somebody up until they’re as hungry for it as Coralita was. Then he’s got the excuse to punish himself and her for that kind of sex by killing her, depriving himself.”

“Meyer and I had dinner with them aboard my houseboat.”

“That’s the first time you didn’t throw in the word Professor, so now I’ll buy the idea you’re friends. Go ahead.”

“I remarked afterward to Meyer there was a kind of almost tangible erotic tension between them, almost visible, like smoke in the air.”

Sigiera shook his head slowly, making a bitter mouth under the droop of the mustache. “All the years,” he said. “All the years on the run. Roaming among the women, all smiles. Taking little jobs and then moving on. Roaming and killing, and in pain all the time. By now he must be damn well expert at picking up new identities. It’s never hard if you start with cash and with the smarts. But it can go wrong. Some little thing. He’d have to be ready at any time to fold the tent and run. I don’t think a man can stand that much tension for too long.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“When you’re a working lawman, you get used to every kind of criminal having a pattern. I got to know a very classy thief. I made a practically accidental collar when I was in Beaumont. He did rich people. Private homes. Coins and stamps and collectibles and jewelry. Portable stuff. He went to the big auctions in New York and Los Angeles. He got a line on his marks there. Would track one to, say, Atlanta. Research the house, the floor plan, the alarm system, the movements of the people who lived there. When the time was right and the house was empty, he’d park a rented van in the drive, with a sign he’d taped to the side saying BUGS-OFF INSECT CONTROL, and he’d walk in in his white suit carrying his spray equipment. Fifteen minutes after he’d bypassed the alarm system, he’d walk out with a pillowcase full of good stuff which he could fence for a very good score. Twice a year he did the same kind of job. I was cruising the neighborhood in an unmarked car, looking for an address of somebody we wanted a statement from. He had trouble busting into a safe and his time got so short he came out nervous, backed out of the blind driveway right into the side of my car. He thought I was a civilian. He came on very hard, but when I showed the badge and the gun he just wilted and sat down on the curbing. All the life went right out of him.

“While we were holding him, I used to go in and talk to him. Know what? He had a wife and kids in Cincinnati. He was an investment adviser. He had an office in a bank building. He belonged to a downtown club and a tennis club, the Junior Chamber and the Kiwanis. He did a lot of investment advising, and he was good at it. He washed his own money by feeding it in through the office, as consultant fees. He lived good. He had respectability. He told me that every time he made a good score and got back to home base with the money, he’d say to himself, Never again. He was safe. He could breathe. When he was out on a job, his wife and everybody else thought he was off taking a first-hand look at some of the companies where he was thinking of recommending the stock. He told me that he’d say never again, and in a couple of months it would start to build. He’d begin to get restless. And he’d remember how it‘ was when he was inside a rich home. It was a kind of excitement he never could find anywhere else.”

“I see what you mean,” Meyer said. “This man, Pittler might well have a base somewhere, a permanent identity he goes back to.”

“I think he would have to have,” Sigiera said. “A place to catch his breath. Stash money. Get his ducks in a row. Home base, where they don’t know about his hobby.”

“Would the sister know?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Helen June whatever.”

“Good thought,” he said. “They used to go grill her every few weeks until she moved away. She claimed she had never gotten a card or even a call from Cody. Let me see. Her married name ought to be in here someplace.” He looked and grunted when he found it. “Mrs. Kermit Fox. Kermit was called Sonny. But this address is way out of date. Helen June got to be forty-seven by now. There must be somebody in town still sending her Christmas cards. Old Boomer might know. He’s been working for the city for ninety-nine years. You like a little Mexican hot groceries? It’s about that time.”

He made a call, and then we went out to eat. It was a drive-in called Panchos. We sat at a table in the back. The specialty was chili with chunks of Chihuahua cheese melted in it and on it. Meyer, one of the world’s great chili experts, was under close observation by Sigiera as he tasted it. Sigiera expected a gasp, tears, a mad grab at the ice water. Meyer smacked his lips, looked thoughtful, reached for the Tabasco bottle, put a dozen drops into the chili, stirred it well, tasted again, nodded at Sigiera, and said, “Just right, Paul.”

“Professor, I’m beginning to like you.”

He told us about the trials and foul-ups of working with the border patrol on immigration and drugs, and about his adventures as an undercover man in Beaumont.

We were on second coffees when an erect old man with ample belly, white mustache, white goatee, arid a fifty-nine-gallon straw hat came to the table. Sigiera kicked a chair out for him. “Boomer, this here is McGee and this is the Professor. They’re the ones want to know about Helen June Pittler Fox.”

His handshake was big, dry, and muscular. He must have given his order on the way in. The waitress came with a glass of milk and a small order of tacos.

Boomer crunched a taco and washed it down with milk, wiped his mouth and whiskers, and said, “After Cody shot his step-ma and pa, about a year after, Sonny and Helen June moved clear out of the state. They moved on all the way up north. Sonny’s folks had original moved down from there and he had some kin up there. Rome, New York. No point in giving you that address, because it isn’t any good any more. Sonny and Helen June had but the one kid and it died in the first year from something wrong with its breathing. Sonny is the best auto mechanic I ever come across. He could make a living anyplace at all. They broke up. Can’t say if there’s a divorce. Anyway, she calls herself Helen June Fox and here’s the address.”

He put a scrap of envelope on the table. I held it so Meyer could read it as I did: Route 3, Box 810, Cold Brook, New York.

“Said to be someplace north of Utica,” Boomer said.

“Long way to go to come up empty.” Sigiera said.

“No place is too far,” Meyer said. “And why empty?”

“Because most old cold leads turn out empty, that’s all. The new hot ones pay off a lot more often.”

We bought the lunch over Sigiera’s protests, and we promised to let him know if we learned anything.

Seventeen

THEY LET US check out of the little motel north of Eagle Pass at three in the afternoon without paying for the extra night on the two rooms.

I estimated on the map that we were a little less than three hundred and fifty miles from Houston on Route 57, then I-35 and I-10, and so should make it back to the Houston apartment by midnight.

A brassy sun filled half the sky, and with the air on full blast it was still warm inside the van. At speed the van was just noisy enough to inhibit conversation. We were both involved in independent guesswork. When either of us came up with something, we would yell across to the other side of the seat to check it out.

“Hideout in Mexico?” Meyer shouted. “Got the language. Use the same papers going back and forth to the States. Change identity once he’s across the border?”

“He was using Evan Lawrence down there, working with somebody named Willy in Cancun.”

I glanced over at him. He looked disappointed. Once, when we stopped for gas, he said, “If I had a hide-out I would use trip wires and tin cans and cow bells to let me know if anybody was approaching.”

“If we ever get close, we can expect that. And expect him to be dangerous.”

“I still like the idea of Mexico. Maybe Evan Lawrence is his hideaway name.”

“So why would he call attention to it by arranging to have himself killed?”

“I see what you mean. I’m not thinking well.”

“We’re doing okay. Thanks to you, we know the name he started with. And we know what started him.”

“It seems incredible to me that we could have had dinner with him and Norma, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of violence under that friendly face.”

Then we were back on the highway, booming along through the end of the day, the sunset behind us, our shadow long, angling to one side or the other as the road changed subtle directions. I grunted and pulled into the next rest stop, parked with the motor running, and turned and faced Meyer. “We make it too complicated.”

“How do you mean?”

“It just came to me. He had to destroy Evan Lawrence.”

“Why?”

“The money.”

Meyer frowned and then suddenly said, “Of course! It would be too risky to hang around as the mourning husband and wait for the legal procedures to clean up the details and hand over the money. When he talked Norma into gradually moving all the cash out of the trust, he knew he was going to stage a common disaster. Otherwise, if he could have risked staying right there, he would have left the money in the trust and it would have come to him on her death. But that would have meant a more careful research job on him by the law and the lawyers.”

“Wouldn’t you have inherited under the terms of the will?”

“Wouldn’t it have been an easy job for him to get her to make a new will? And then that too would have been significant. You’re right, Travis. Evan Lawrence was a temporary person. He could only last so long. How long was it, a half year maybe? And now he’s back in his safe place. And sooner or later he’ll come out again, as someone else. On the hunt. Prowling. Searching. Smiling.”

Back up to speed, each of us thinking, adding up the little morsels we had discovered, from Christine Statzer, Martin Eagle, Betsy Ann Larker, Bunky Boomer, Paul Sigiera. Like a child’s game in the Sunday comics. Connect the dots and find the animal.

“Common disasters are hard to stage,” Meyer shouted.

So I worked on that one, through the end of daylight into night, into late quarter-pounders at an almost deserted McDonald’s at Seguin. “You can arrange it with fire,” I said, “if you can find somebody approximately the right size. Hitchhiker. Backpacker. A transient is best, because he won’t be missed for a long time, if ever. Chunk them both on the head, drive off the road into a tree, jumping liree at the last minute, the way he probably did in Ingram. Then toss the match. Put your ring on his finger before you toss the match. Take off any rings he might have. Car fires are hot. Water is easier. Overturned boat, drowned woman, man missing presumed dead. Explosives are good too, except it takes an awful lot. Send her up in a plane with a bomb in the luggage, after buying two tickets. Last minute excuse. Join you later honey. But you kill a lot of other folks that way.”

Suddenly a small elderly woman jumped up out of a booth across the way. I hadn’t noticed her. She glared at me. “Monsters!” she said in a breathy whisper. “Monsters!” She scuttled out.

And Meyer started laughing. It was the first genuine laugh I had heard from him in a year. His eyes ran. He hugged his belly and groaned. “Oh, oh, oh.” I levered him up and aimed him toward the car. He staggered with laughter. The little old lady might call the law, and it would be well to be up to speed in reasonable time.

On Friday morning at a travel agency in the shopping mall near Piney Village, we discovered that if you want to get to Utica, Houston isn’t a good place to start from. Maybe there aren’t any good places to start from. But they could get us to Syracuse by six that evening, with a long wait between flights at Atlanta.

A few minutes from Houston we came up through hot murky clouds into a bright white blaze of sunshine. At Atlanta we took a train from our gate back to the terminal. I wandered back and forth past a row of phone booths and finally went in and phoned Naples.

She answered on the first half of the first ring. “Yes?”

“Me,” I said. “Where are you?”

“Atlanta, heading north pretty soon. I wondered about the job.”

“You didn’t wonder enough to call me on Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday, or-”

“I thought about it every day.”

“I bet.”

“I really did. We’ve been doing a lot of scuffling. Okay, tell me how it came out.”

“The job was offered and the terms are marvelous. They gave me until Monday to think it over, so I did, and I phoned them and said yes.”

“And if I had phoned Sunday?”

“McGee, I would like to stick you with it. I would like to tell you that if you’d called, maybe I would have said no. But it just ain’t true, darlin‘. I want that job so bad I can hardly breathe.”

“When will you be leaving?”

“The man I’m training to replace me reported this morning. They want me in Maui on August fifteenth.”

“How’s the guy they sent?”

“Howard is a little bit slow to catch on, but once he has something firmly in mind, it stays there. I think he’ll be okay. Cornell hotel school. They made him very well aware of the records I set here, so he knows he’d be a fool to make any big changes.”

“Seems awful soon.”

“It is soon. I’ve been a little bit depressed ever since I said yes, as a matter of fact. Not just about you but about the whole thing here. It’s been a wonderful part of my life.”

“Past tense.”

“What’s over, as they say, is over. How are you doing?”

“We learned the name he started with. Cody T. W Pittler. And we think we know why he is a congenital murderer.”

“More murders?”

“Lots we don’t know about, probably.”

“Do be careful, will you?”

“We may never get any closer to him than we are now. We’re going up north to see his sister. She hasn’t seen him in twenty-two years, probably. We think he has some safe place from which he ventures forth from time to time, to evil do. The great lover. He sets up passionate affairs with women and then does them in.”

“At least they die happy. Sorry. That was bad taste.”

“I encouraged it. I was giving it the light touch. But I don’t feel light at all inside. I’m depressed by how soon it is going to be the middle of August.”

“I’m glad, at least, that you finally called. I was beginning to get really annoyed with you.”

“I’ve been basking in garden spots, like Freer, Encinal, Cotulla, and Eagle Pass.”

“City life, huh? Excuse, Travis. I was on my way out when the phone rang. I’m to have a rum something with Howard by the pool, and we are going to talk about getting the east forty rezoned. We really need it if we’re to have any room at all to grow here. Phone me, please, when you get back home. The minute you get home, okay?”

“Okay. Good luck with the rezoning.”

“Good luck with your mass murderer, baby.”

I hung up and went over to where Meyer was sitting. He was fatuously content. He had found a copy of The Economist on the newsstand and was learning all about economic crisis in the NATO countries.

By the time we reached the Avis counter in the Syracuse airport, it was six thirty on a hot sticky Friday evening, the sun still high. We’d reserved the car in Atlanta, on Meyer’s card, and it was waiting for us out in slot 20, a burgundy two-door with a drooped nose and a memory of cigar smoke inside. The Avis woman had given us instructions as to how to get on the Thruway. It was still bright daylight when we took the Utica exit and found, on the way toward downtown, an elderly and overpriced Howard Johnson motel. I could stomach the motel but not the restaurant, so Meyer studied the yellow pages. He has good instincts.

“What they seem to have the most of here is Italian,” he said.

“So one goes with the tide. Objection?”

“Not at all.”

“Grimaldi’s, I think. Let me see. Yes. Grimaldi’s.” When we finally found it, the daylight was almost gone. It was on a corner, with a public park across from one side of it and some sort of yellow-brick public housing project across from the front entrance. We had a hard time finding a parking place. Meyer said that was a good sign. The doors opened onto smoke, loud talk, laughter, a general Thank God It’s Friday flavor. The bar was off to the left, the dining area to the right. A slender, grave, darkhaired woman led us to a table for two against the far mall and gave us over-sized menus. A small bald elderly waiter came trotting over and took our order for extra-dry martinis with twists. They came quickly. Meyer sipped, he smiled, he relaxed. “The food will be good,” he said. “You never get a generous and delicious cocktail in a proper glass in a restaurant where the food is bad.” Another Meyer dictum. They seem to work out.

And the veal piccata was indeed splendid, and went well with the Valpolicella.

Over coffee, Meyer said, “It’s like coming back to life. All this. I was shut down for a year. Now there is a kind of internal pressure that every now and then pops another area of me wide open the way it once was. When I take pleasure in it, then I feel guilty that I owe this conditional resurrection to Norma.”

“Conditional?”

“Of course. How long does it last? Only until the next animal gives me a choice between acting like a man or sitting on the floor and forgetting my name. At times I am anxious to find out, and at other times I hope there will never be another confrontation.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“My words to myself exactly. Meyer, I say to myself, you’ll be fine. Just fine.” His smile was wry.

I looked around at the patrons of the restaurant and the bar. Politicos, many of them young. Lawyers and elected officials and appointees. Some with their wives or girls. It looked to me as if a lot of the city and county business might be transacted right here. They had a lot of energy, these Italianate young men, a feverish gregariousness. I wondered aloud why they seemed so frantic about having a good time.

Meyer studied the question and finally said, “It’s energy without a productive outlet, I think. Most of these Mohawk Valley cities are dying, have been for years: Albany, Troy, Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rome. And so they made an industry out of government. State office buildings in the decaying downtowns. A proliferation of committees, surveys, advisory boards, commissions, legal actions, grants, welfare, zoning boards, road departments, health care groups… thousands upon thousands of people making a reasonably good living working for city, county, state, and federal governments in these dwindling cities, passing the same tax dollars back and forth. I think that man, by instinct, is productive. He wants to make something, a stone ax, a big ger cave, better arrows, whatever. But these bright and energetic men know in their hearts they are not making anything. They use every connection, every contact, every device, to stay within reach of public monies. Working within an abstraction is just not a totally honorable way of life. Hence the air of jumpy joy, the backslaps ringing too loudly, compliments too extravagant, toasts too ornate, marriages too brief, lawsuits too long-drawn, obligatory forms too complex and too long. Their city has gone stale, and as the light wanes, they dance.”

“Very poetic, Professor.”

“Valpolicella tends to do that to me.”

“I’ve missed your impromptu lectures.”

“Be careful what you say, I may try to make up for the lost year.”

“I haven’t missed them that much.”

Eighteen

AFTER BREAKFAST, the morning news on the car radio said that the high for the day was estimated to be one hundred and two degrees in downtown Utica, a record for the last day of July. I drove, following the directions given me at the motel desk when we checked out.

We headed out of the valley, up Deerfield Hill, past television towers, on a two-lane road so steep in places that the little dark-red car had a problem handling both the grade and the air conditioning, lugging down until it shifted itself into a lower gear. After the suburban houses came the small rundown farms, barns dark-gray and sagging, a few horses grazing. The farms were on a plateau where the road led straight into the distance, toward the misted foothills of the Adirondacks.

There was less traffic headed north than I expected. No doubt the vacation-bound had left the city on Friday. It was a little cooler on the plateau. We had merged with Route S, and I wanted to get to the post office in Poland-as the man at the desk suggested-to find out how I might find Mrs. Fox.

We came down off the plateau to run along a creek valley into Poland, a small commuter town with such large maples bordering the main street that they gave an illusion of coolness on this summer Saturday. Route 8 turned left by a tiny island of greenery in the middle of the village. Meyer spotted the post office ahead on the right, and I stayed at the wheel while he went in.

He came out quite soon and said, “We stay on Route Eight up through Cold Brook, another village the size of this one. And we’ll see the name on a mailbox on the right side of the road, across from the house. The house is a mobile home. He said he thought it was gray and blue, but he wasn’t sure. He guessed it at about ten miles past the far edge of Cold Brook. Strange thing, though.”

“Such as?”

“He was reasonably cordial when I went to the window. But when I told him who I was trying to find, he got very short with me. Abrupt and impatient. He gave me the information and walked away. He registered disapproval of her, and of me for asking how to find her.”

It was only two miles between villages, and I checked the speedometer when we left Cold Brook. Soon the road made a long curve up a gentle slope, and a sign at the top of the hill told us we had entered the Adirondack Park Preserve.

The man had underestimated by about three miles. When we came to her place, I began to understand why he had acted as he did. At one time evergreens had been planted in a long line, close together, along the left side of the road to provide, I guessed, a snow fence to keep the road clear in winter. The trees were very large. Several of them were gone, and her trailer sat in the gap about fifty feet from the road and parallel to it. It could have once been gray and blue. There was a big battered red-and-white four-wheel-drive Bronco on extra wide and extra tall tires parked in the dirt driveway headed out, leaving us no room to turn in.

I parked beyond her mailbox and we got out and stood there, stunned by the profusion of junk that filled the yard from fence to fence. Car parts, refrigerators, cargo trailers without wheels, stovewood, rolls of roofing paper, bed frames, broken rocking chairs, broken deck furniture, piles of cinder block, piles of roof tiles, a stack of full sheets of plywood, moldering away. Glass bottles, plastic bottles, cans, fenders, old washing machines, fencing wire, window frames, 55-gallon drums rust red, an old horse-drawn sleigh, crates half full of empty soft drink bottles, and many other bulky objects which did not seem to have had any useful purpose ever. The scene stunned the mind. It was impossible to take it all in at once. In a strange way it had an almost artistic impact, a new art form devised in three dimensions to show the collapse of Western civilization. It made me think of an object I had seen in New York when a woman persuaded me to go with her to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. That object was a realisticlooking plastic hamburger on a bun with an ooze of mustard, pickle, and catsup. It was ten feet in diameter and stood five feet high. This scene had that same total familiarity plus unreality.

“Maybe she’s in violation of the zoning laws,” Meyer murmured.

“If those are her own clothes hung out over there on the fence to dry, she is sizable.”

We walked in, past the big vehicle. She must have seen us through the window. She opened the nar row door of the trailer and stepped down onto the top step of the three that led to the door. The trailer was up on cinder blocks.

“What are you looking for?”

“Mrs. Helen June Fox?”

“What do you want her for?”

She was a fairly tall woman. Her brown hair hung stringy straight, unbrushed. Her enormous breasts stretched the damp fabric of a pink T-shirt, sagging toward the protruding belly that bulged over the belt that held up her knee-length khaki shorts. She wore ragged white deck shoes, and there were scars and scratches on her plump white legs from insect bites. Her features were strong, the jaw heavy, the eyes muddy, unfriendly, and unwavering. The mouth was a little crescent, a tight inverted smile, like a bulldog. She and her clothing were smudged and stained. She was an untidy mess, and yet she radiated such a forceful presence that in some strange way she was almost attractive. She held herself well. One could see that twentyfive years ago she had been one hell of a woman, and she remembered how it had been and had retained the pattern of responding to admiration.

“Well?” she said. She finished the last of the beer from the can in her hand, crushed the aluminum, and flipped it out into the yard. It bounced behind a cinder block. “You government again? I told the last batch to get off my land and get off my ass or they’d be pickin‘ bird shot.”

Meyer solved the problem. “Boomer told us where to find you.” To my surprise and admiration, he managed to put just a little bit of south Texas in his speech.

Helen June grunted in surprise; came down the other two steps, and then sat heavily on the middle step. “That old fart still living?”

“Looks fine,” I said.

“Always knew everything about everybody. I wonder who give him my address. Probably Auntie Minna. She always sends birthday money. She must be ninety by now.”

“He didn’t know if you were divorced from Sonny.”

“He took off. I never bothered filing. Glad to get rid of the surly son of a bitch. What do you two want? You sure God aren’t a matched set, are you. You look like some kind of bear, mister. A friendly bear. Cuddly. What’s your name, dear?”

“Meyer. And he is McGee.”

“We want to talk about your brother Cody,” I, said. She got up and beckoned to us to follow her. We threaded our way through the tons of junk to an old picnic table with benches near the side fence, in the shade of a big spruce. We sat on one side and she sat facing us. She said, “We keep talking where we were, it could maybe wake up Jesse. He was out real late. He plays piano Friday nights. He gets ugly, you wake him up too soon. So what if I don’t want to talk about my little brother? Did they catch him? Are you newspaper guys or cops?”

“He hasn’t been caught,” I said.

“Good. It wasn’t his fault, any of it.”

“Whose, then?”

“Boomer could have told you, you asked him. It was Coralita’s fault, that little Eye-talian piece of ass. That was the worst mistake my daddy ever made in his whole life. He was a wonderful man. Everybody liked him. He was smart in business, but he was sure stupid about women. I was twenty when he married her. She was only five years older than me. She’d sure been busy. When I was in high school, the guys made jokes about her. Know what her nickname was? Gang-bang Cardamone. You don’t get no nickname like that without making the effort. After Momma died, I spent two years trying to take her place around the house. I loved my daddy, and I did all the cooking and cleaning and dusting and bed-making and all. I studied recipe books. I kept everything shining for him. I was going to take care of him my whole life, and after two years he brought home that slut. He married her and brought her right into my house, right into my kitchen, right into his bed. I used to lie awake at night, and sometimes I could hear the two of them in there together, and I would think of the ways I could kill her without being caught. I had the feeling all the time that she knew exactly what I was thinking, and she was laughing at me. Most of the time she acted as if I wasn’t there at all. But she certainly knew Cody was there. He was kind of an innocent kid. Younger really than his age. I tried to warn him about Coraьta. I was afraid of what could happen, and I didn’t want to hang around and watch. I got out by marrying Sonny Fox. Never did love him. What I loved was getting out of there, away from Coralita. So she wasn’t getting enough, and she didn’t dare go hunt for it because somebody would tell my daddy, and there was Cody right in the same house, safe as could be, and he would be too scared to talk, so she nailed him. I bet it was as easy as clubbing a bunny. She waggled that fine ass at him until he couldn’t think about anything else, then I think what she must have done was slip into his bed while he was asleep, so he’d wake up so close to doing it he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. And that one time would be all it would take to make it permanent. I just don’t think she could have gotten him into it any other way. I used to think about that a lot. But that was a Iorig time ago. Cody would never have been one to sneaky-cheat on his own daddy unless she worked him into it before he knew what was going on.”

“What do you think happened that night Coralita was killed?” I asked.

“I told the stupid cops what must have happened. My daddy would never have shot Cody no matter what he did. The bed lamp was on, okay? He shot her in the back of the head, near the neck, and she died in one second. Cody heard the loud shot and he came scrambling out from under the body. When my daddy saw who it was, he couldn’t shoot and so he turned the gun on himself to kill himself. That’s what he would have done. And Cody saw what was going to happen and leaped for the gun, and my daddy kept trying to shoot himself, and while they struggled there, the gun went off and he did shoot himself. Cody thought he was dead and he took the car keys and ran down and got in that car and took off like a crazy person. They’ve never caught him and they never will.”

“Why are you so sure that-” Meyer started to ask, but he was interrupted by a man yelling across the yard.

“Goddamn you, how the hell am I supposed to get my sleep with all this yattering going on?” He came down the steps out of the trailer, zipping the fly on his jeans. He wore black pointy cowboy boots. He was naked and brown from the waist up. He was slat thin, with bad posture. His chest was caved in, his shoulders thrust forward. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. With every move there was a ripple of small wiry muscles in his arms, torso, and shoulders. He had a long lean head, hollow cheeks, a thrusting lantern jaw, eyes deep under a shelf of brow.

“Who are these guys?” he demanded, coming across through the trash.

“We were just talking about my brother, Jesse. That’s all.”

“You woke me up!”

“We moved way over here so we wouldn’t.”

“You especially, Helen June, big mouth. Going on and on and on. You two. Git!”

She said in a nervous voice, “You better do like he says.”

“But we haven’t-”

“I mean it. I really mean it, McGee. You best leave.” The man reached the table and as Meyer stood up, Jesse grabbed his ear and yanked him back over the bench. The bench went down and Meyer fell on his back. I took a long step to the side; to reasonably open ground, and waited to see what he had in mind. He feinted at me with a long swinging left, and as I ducked to the left to avoid it, he went up into the air into a strange scissoring kick, and one of those boots whistled toward my mouth. I have a lot of quick. It’s nothing I’ve earned or worked for, it’s just that the hookup between senses, nerves, and muscles works faster than most. And adrenaline makes it work even faster. I saw the sole and heel of that boot, parallel to the ground, floating toward my teeth. The feint had moved me into the kick, and I moved back almost quickly enough. Not quite. The toe of the boot ticked the outside edge of my left ear and made it feel for a moment as if it had been torn off. He was having a big day on ears. The miss left him slightly off balance, but he recovered in the air, twisting like a cat, landing lightly.

One of those, I thought. Another one of those. They yell Hah! and try to chop you with the edge of the hand. About all I ever had of that came in basic training long ago. They want you to take your best shot, and then they use the momentum and leverage to fell you.

He moved warily, and I saw him gathering himself for another kick. When it started I moved back, and when the boot came at my throat I knocked it sky high with my forearm. Jesse landed hard on the nape of his neck. He rolled to the left and came to his feet again, too close to Meyer, who took the twenty-inch piece of two-by-four he had picked up out of the rubble and, holding it in both hands, swung at the back of Jesse’s head. It went ponk! and Jesse sighed and looked far beyond me and collapsed slowly into a fetal position. As I moved toward him, Helen June yelled, “Don’t stomp him, please. Don’t hurt his hands! You better go right now while you can. Please.”

She really meant it. I had begun to wonder how sane Jesse was. Or how sane either of them were. “When will he be gone so we can talk?”

“Tomorrow evening.”

So we left. I looked back. She was kneeling beside him, smoothing his lank hair back from his forehead.

After we had gone three miles back toward Cold Brook, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the red-and-white Bronco overtaking us, coming on at high speed. I made several guesses, all of them bad news as I floored the accelerator. The little car jumped out pretty good but, as I soon saw, not quite good enough. My speedometer said seventy-two on the flat, less uphill, more down. When he came up behind me and didn’t smack into my rear end with his big steel bumper, I knew that he was waiting for enough clear vision ahead to come up beside me and edge me off the road. That gave me a better chance.

When the road was clear ahead, he came on up alongside. I could see him, sitting high and grinning.

The instant he started to move in toward my front corner, I warned Meyer and hit the brakes hard. Jesse went shooting on ahead. The moment I slid to a full stop, I put it in reverse and backed it on up to speed, then banged the brakes again, turning the wheel hard right as I did so. The front end slid around beautifully and we rocked up onto two wheels momentarily, bounced back down, and I had it in gear and gaining speed, leaving a teenage pattern of black rubber on the pavement behind us.

I had come to my dead stop, and gone into reverse, right near the brink of that long upcurve to the left, that climbing curve a little way out of Cold Brook. Jesse had gone down the downhill curve to the right, out of sight. I kept looking back. No Jesse. Meyer said, “I heard something back there.”

“Such as.”

“Well… a thud. A kind of crunch-thud noise.” At the end of a long straight stretch, I found an unmarked dirt lane. I turned in, went up a way, turned around, and came back to where I could park out of sight of the main road, yet see anything that sped past the leafy mouth of the lane. Nothing came from the south. A bread truck and a pickup passed by from the north. After ten long minutes, we started up and headed south, after them.

From his tire marks and the location and condition of his vehicle, it was easy to see what had happened: an error of judgment. When I had out-smarted him again, it had made him very very angry. And in his rage he had tried to make a U-turn halfway down that slope. He probably knew his vehicle well enough so that, had he tried the same turn at the same speed on the flat, he would have had no problem. But on the slope, the inside wheels were at a slightly higher level, and about two thirds of the way around his U-turn, he lost it. The Bronco tipped over and rolled. It threw him out ahead of the roll, and rolled over him, and kept rolling until it wedged itself into a grove of small trees beyond the ditch.

He lay face down amid bits of glass and twisted little pieces of tarnished trim. His back was bloody. We parked beyond the bread truck and walked up to the scene. He had tried to make his turn where the curving downslope had been widened to three lanes to accommodate cars turning left into a side road. He was stretched out on the shoulder, face down, only his head on the paving. As we neared him, it looked as though his face had sunk into the concrete road surface as if into a liquid. The pool of red around his head revealed the basis of this curious and sickening illusion. Some part of the vehicle, probably one of the big tires, had rolled across the back of his head, and under the pressure the facial bones had given way, leaving the back of the skull undamaged. A spectator who had been headed north brought a frayed old blanket from his car trunk and spread it over the upper half of the body.

The pickup driver said to the bread-truck driver, “You know who it is, don’t you?”

“I know who it was, pal. Crazy Jesse that played piano weekends up to Heneman’s Grill. Moved in with the Fox woman last year. I said he was going to kill himself sooner or later the way he drove that souped-up Bronco.”

There were seven of us standing there by now, and we all turned and looked down the hill slope to the southwest as we heard the distant keening of the ambulance siren, coming closer.

“No need to hurry.” Bread truck said.

“Funny thing,” Pickup said. “If they had put Jesse away for a couple of years for assaulting that Jamison kid, like they should have, instead of giving him probation, he wouldn’t have been out getting himself killed today.”

The Dodge ambulance pulled up, and two attendants ran to the body, slowed when they saw the blanket. One lifted it up, felt for a pulse in the neck dropped it again, shrugged. The other strolled over to slide the body basket out of the back of the ambulance. A couple of northbound cars slowed for a look, then hurried on. A State Police sedan arrived. Meyer and I walked back to the rental. and got in.

Meyer said, “If there is anything at all useful that she can tell us, we had better be the ones who tell her about Jesse.”

“I want to thank you for thumping him.”

“Not exactly a frontal assault. Not exactly meritorious. You would have taken care of the problem.”

“Don’t be too sure. He was reaching to unsnap that little knife case on his belt when you turned off his lights.”

“I was too angry and too humiliated to stop to think about what I was doing. Look at my ear.” He turned and looked to the rear so I could see his right ear. It was puffy and bright red.

I had turned back north, leaving the little roadside scene behind. I said, “I think you’ll be better at talking to her. Okay?”

“If you wish.”

He was silent until we turned into the dirt driveway, to park where the red-and-white Bronco had been. Then he said, “Stay in the car.” A direct order. Unusual and unexpected.

She came out, trotting toward him when he was halfway to the trailer, her strong face vivid with the unasked question. The left side of her face was swollen and was turning dark. I heard her helpless cry. “I tried to stop him! I tried. I really tried!” Then I could hear the murmur of his voice, explaining. She seemed to become a smaller person, to collapse in upon herself. He touched her shoulder and she turned into his arms. He patted her, comforted her. They walked together to the steps, his arm around her thick waist. He lowered her to a sitting position on the middle step, and she put her face down on her knees.

Meyer looked toward the car and made a small beckoning gesture. I got out and went to them. Her shoulders were shaking, but I could hear no audible sobbing. Finally she raised up and looked at both of us, tears running down her face, and tried to smile. “You’d miss even a lizard if you lived with it and fed it for over a year. He could be real sweet sometimes. I told him not to go after you and he knocked me down. Is the Bronco ruint?”

“It isn’t very pretty,” I said, “but I think it’s just damage to the body. Frame, engine, wheels, and radiator should be okay.”

“I’ll have to see about getting it fixed up. I got to have a car, living way out here. I bought it for him. I traded my old car in on it, and it’s in my name.”

“Insurance?” Meyer asked.

“Only what they make you take out. I don’t even know where they’ll take the body. I haven’t got any phone out here any more. It was a party line, and Jesse cussed the people who were talking when he wanted to use it, so they complained and one of them recorded what he said to them, and they came and took it out. I didn’t know they could do that, but they can.”

“We’ll take you down to the village,” Meyer said. “You can find out there, and make arrangements about the truck.”

She wiped her eyes. “That would be a real help. I got to fix up a little.” She struggled to her feet and went in and closed the door.

“What else do you think she can tell us?” I asked Meyer.

“I noticed something when we talked before. She said she was certain they would never catch him. There didn’t seem to be any thought in her mind that he might be dead. It was a long time ago. If she had no word at all from him in all that time, she might believe he was dead. It would be a logical assumption. Certainly he had a better-than-average reason for suicide. But his possible death was no part of her monologue, Travis. So that seems to me reason to believe he has been in touch with her. I want to find out how. And when.”

When she came out, ready to go, the change startled both of us. She wore a dark blue dress and carried a shiny blue shoulder bag. Her hair had been brushed, and she had managed to hide the deepening color of the bruise on her left cheek. She wore sandals with one-inch heels, and stockings which covered her scratched and bitten legs. She wore lipstick and some eye shadow. She looked slimmer and younger.

“Do you want to lock up?” Meyer asked.

She gave him a pitying look. “Who would look at my place and think there’s anything worth stealing?” She patted the shoulder bag. “Anything worth stealing is in here.”

Meyer folded the seat down and climbed into the hack. She sat beside me. Meyer leaned over toward her and spoke to her. “How does Cody keep track of where you are?”

“I let-” She stopped abruptly.

“Who is it you let know? Who is the intermediary?”

“Damn you, Meyer. I thought you looked cuddly. You’re a smart-ass son of a bitch. You tricked me.” She worked herself around to face him. “You could set fire to my feet, I’d never tell you. You could pull out my fingernails, I wouldn’t say a word.”

“I don’t think you know where Cody is.”

“You’re right! I don’t have no idea at all.”

“So you would write to this intermediary, or maybe phone when there’s a change of address, and then when Cody phoned the intermediary he would get the information.”

“Smart-ass!”

“He needs the address because he sends you money.”

“Why would he do that?”

“You and he are family. He did a terrible thing. He wants to take care of you, so you’ll think well of him. As you obviously do.”

“He sends it because he’s my kid brother and, until Coralita came along, we always looked out for each other. He doesn’t have to buy my feeling for him.”

“How does he send it?”

“He ties it onto a pigeon.”

“Come on, Helen June,” Meyer said in a wheedling tone. “If you don’t know where he is, and I don’t believe you do, then the way he sends the money can’t tip us off as to where to find him. He’s a very clever man. I’m just curious as to how he would go about sending cash to you. It must be cleverly done.”

“He’s smart.”

“We know. He’d have to be to stay at liberty so long.”

“I nearly messed up the first time he sent any. It was a kind of messy old package that came for me. I was still living with Sonny. Thank God he wasn’t around when I opened it. On the outside it said BOOKS. My name was typed on the label. The return address was a box number in New Orleans. Inside were three paperback books with two rubber bands around them, one going one way and the other going the other way. I read the titles and decided it was some kind of sales gimmick. I’m no reader. Maybe the newspaper sometimes. So I unsnapped the rubber bands and leafed through the first one looking for the sales letter. And when I opened the second one, a bunch of hundred-dollar bills fell out onto the floor. There was forty of them. I damn near fainted. The middle book had been hollowed out, probably with a razor. Kind of a messy job. I guess it didn’t have to be real neat. There was a typed note with it. And it said, ‘Happy birthday Helen June. Whenever you move, let so-and-so know right away. Get rid of this note and don’t talk about the money.’ Isn’t that great? Here I am talking about the money.”

“How many packages have you gotten?” Meyer asked.

“I don’t know. What do you care? You with the IRS? Maybe a dozen, maybe more. They were mailed from Miami, Tampa, Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles. Big cities. Sometimes with a little note. Birthday or Christmas or something. The biggest was eighty-five hundred. And the smallest was the first one. I never know when they’re coming. He cares about me, that’s all I know. That’s all I care. It keeps me alive. I told you this just to show you that he’s a good person.”

When we got to the place where Jesse had died, a tow truck was backed up to the Bronco. The winch was grinding and they were gently picking it out of the small trees. There were no other cars there. Two little farm kids were watching.

Helen June got out and trotted to the tow truck.

“This is my car!” she shouted over the sound of the winch. “Where are you going with it?”

He turned off the winch. “Hi, Helen June. Sorry about Jesse. His own damn fool fault. Bound to happen some day. We’re taking it down to the Village Garage. Okay?”

“What’s it costing me for you to take it, Jimmy?”

“Forty bucks, to you.”

“Is that a discount or are you hiking the price?”

“A discount, damn it. Sixty otherwise.”

“I got it right here and I want a receipt. Just a second.”

She came back to the car.

“Thank you for coming to tell me, and thank you for the ride. I talked too damn much. I don’t know what got into me. I don’t tell people my private business. Not to a couple of strangers. Meyer, you came up on my blind side.”

“I’m sorry that we… caused all this.”

“If you hadn’t it would have been somebody else. Or something else.” Her mouth twisted, the smile bitter. “He was a real sorry man, but he was the only one I got.”

“I know you don’t want to talk about your brother,” Meyer said, “but…”

“You are so right.”

“… you might want to see a recent picture of him.”

She stared at him. “You got one? How?”

“It’s back at the motel in Utica,” he lied.

“I sure would like to see how Cody turned out,” she said.

“It’s a little past noon now,” he said. “We could go get it and come back.”

The Bronco had been plucked out of the shrubbery, and they had it ready to roll. “Hey, Helen June!” She turned and yelled, “Hold it a minute, okay?”

She turned back to us.

“I hafta see about my car. I hafta find out where they took Jesse and tell his people. He’s got folks in Gloversville. You want to come out to my place late this afternoon? Four thirty?”

When we agreed, she turned and loped off toward the tow truck in a clumsy, pigeon-toed trot. As she climbed in, Meyer said, “I better come back alone. I think it will work better.”

“Then we better check back into the motel.” I headed south. “You got more than I ever thought you’d get.”

“When people have something they don’t want to think about, they’ll talk about other things, sometimes too much. One time, long ago, I visited a friend in the hospital one afternoon and found out that they had told him that very morning he wasn’t going to make it. He babbled at me for two hours. He was quick and funny and intense. He told me the dirty details of his failed marriage. I suspected he had never intended to tell all that to anyone. It was a strange and uncomfortable period for me. Then he started to cry and ordered me out. I went to see him again, but he resented me because he had told me too much. I took advantage of the way she was feeling. She didn’t want to think about Jesse.”

Meyer left me in the motel with some magazines and the Saturday afternoon television. I took a lateafternoon walk but the heat was still too intense. It inade you feel as if you could not breathe deeply enough. I phoned Annie’s private line, but there was no answer. I watched a portion of a bad ball game. I took a nap. I read the magazines. I tried television. Lawrence Welk had replaced the ball game. He had a batch of very old citizens there, playing old music very well on shiny horns. They had doubtless come out of the big band era and were happy to find work playing the same old stuff.

Meyer got in at ten fifteen. He looked grainy and old. I knew he’d tell me about it when he was ready, so I didn’t push him. Inexpensive bourbon has its own aroma, and he smelled as if he’d had more than two. He took a shower and came out and stretched out on his bed, fingers laced behind his head.

“I think that what we had was a two-person wake, without the body. She thinks she’s glad he’s dead, but she isn’t sure. She couldn’t stop looking at the picture of the grown-up Cody. She said he had turned out to be a really good-looking man, like his father. I let her keep the picture. All right?”

“Of course. We’ve got three left. Anyway, why ask me? This is your parade.”

“Every time I’d try to ease in on the identity of her correspondent in Eagle Pass, she’d sidestep. Nothing else was going to work. So I told her some stories. I told her all about Doris Eagle and Isobelle Garvey and Norma Lawrence. I told her about Larry Joe and Jerry and Evan. You see, Travis, Cody was her hero. The little brother, corrupted by the stepmother, had escaped and had made a successful life somewhere and was able to send money to his beloved big sister. She pictured him in a big house with a wife and kids and two cars. She couldn’t stand what I was telling her. When she finally came to believe that the photograph she held in her hand had been positively identified by all concerned as Cody T. W. Pittler, her next line of defense was that Doris Eagle had died in a legitimate accident, that Izzy Garvey had gone off with Cody and run out on him later, and that he had been blown up aboard my boat. I asked her why all the names, and she said it was because the police still wanted him for what had happened at Eagle Pass. I had showed her the Doris Eagle clippings and the clippings about Norma’s death. I told her about Norma’s life, what kind of a woman she had been. She kept drinking. I kept drinking. We wept. I kept asking her why she wanted to protect such a man, even if he was her brother. She kept saying he was all the family she had.

“Finally she said that whenever she had changed her address, she had phoned the best friend she ever had, a woman in Eagle Pass named Clara Chappel. They had been all through the grades together back when she had been Clara Pitts. Because seating was alphabetical, they always sat near one another. They had double-dated, and they had Uoth gotten drunk on tequila on the same date and lost their virginity the same night. They had been married at the same time, she to Sonny Fox, and Clara to Sid Chappel. Clara had always told her she wished Cody was a little older so she could marry him. She said she had moved seven times, since she had gone north with Sonny Fox, and had phoned Clara each time. Cody stayed in touch with Clara. She didn’t know how. Clara never told her. She said it proved Cody was smart. He knew that if his sister knew how to get in touch with him, the police could find out from her. And she would never tell anyone about Clara. Then she seemed to realize she was telling me and shouldn’t be. She drank more. It became difficult to understand what she was saying.

“At one point she led me out into that dreadful backyard and reached into the bottom of an old iron stove and took out a tiny candy box and opened it, shone the flashlight into it, onto a wad of hundred-dollar bills. Jesse had never found out about the money. She said he would have just taken it and left. She said Jesse wasn’t good about money. Then she told me it had arrived early last month, early June. Seven thousand two hundred. You realize of course, Travis, that it was Norma’s money. I told her it had been Norma’s money. She wanted me to take it. I wouldn’t. She put it back in the stove and clanged the old door. We were both crying. We supported each other back to the house. She said her head was aching terribly from being hit by Jesse. She called it his last love tap. She tripped on the top step and fell heavily into the trailer. I pulled her to her bed and lifted her onto it, half of her at a time. I drove back here with one eye shut so there would be one center line instead of two, one pair of oncoming headlights instead of two. It is a criminal act to drive in such a condition. I could have killed innocent people. I feel very sad and soiled and old. She really hasn’t anything left now.”

“I’ll see if I can reach Paul Sigiera.”

“You do that.”

He kept his eyes shut while I tried. His breathing became heavier. He produced a long rattling snore. I finally reached Sigiera despite the efforts of two other officers on duty.

“Ah so,” he said. “The Consultant and the Professor. What are you all consulting and professing?”

“Cody sends money to his sister at irregular intervals. Cash. From four to ten thousand in hundreds. Over a dozen shipments since he took off. He keeps track of her through a woman named Clara Chappel. She used to be Clara Pitts. Married to a Sid or Sidney Chappel. She phones Clara her changes of address and Clara relays them to Cody.So you know a Chappel family?”

“Hope to spit. There is no place in Maverick County high enough to stand on and see everything Sid Chappel owns.”

“I have the feeling that when sister Helen June sobers up tomorrow, she is going to get to a phone and let Clara know that McGee and Meyer know about Cody’s pipeline. So I thought if you got to Clara Chappel first-”

“And leaned on her? You’ve got to be kidding. Maybe I can do it with footwork and fancy talk. How’s Helen June?”

“Living among junk with a piano player until today; then he rolled his Bronco over on himself and squashed his head.”

“Just a coincidence?”

“You could call it that.”

“Why in hell did Helen June tell you people anything?”

“The Professor talked nice to her. And she was in kind of a shocked condition. I would appreciate it if you would do what you can and let me know.”

I gave him my phone number aboard the Flush. He said he would give it a try, but not right now, not on a Saturday night. There was too much action going on among the lower classes, such as cops, he said. Meyer slept on. I walked to the restaurant and had a bowl of chowder and a hot dog. A leggy sixteen-year-old girl with blond hair black at the roots, wearing a quarter pound of eye makeup, gave me the fixed challenging stare of the seasoned hooker while she ate her strawberry cone. There’s no VD any more. Now it is all STD, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and there are a lot more of them than there used to be, and a lot more people have them than used to, and some of them are resistant to all known antibiotics. I walked back through the hot night, thinking sad bad thoughts.

Nineteen

WHEN WE finally got into Lauderdale, late on Sunday afternoon, after bad flight connections, I took a long hot shower and then phoned Annie. She sounded cross and overworked. The comptroller was down from Chicago. There were conferences about updating the computer system.

“Try me tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know what tomorrow will be like, but it won’t be any worse than today. Any luck on your quest?”

“Quest? Nice word for a series of blind alleys. I got kicked in the ear. Otherwise fine. Take care of yourself. Happy computing.”

When I tried her on Monday on her private line, I got a solemn and heavy masculine voice saying, “Eden Beach, Howard Pine speaking.”

“May I speak to Anne Renzetti, please?”

“I’m the new manager. Perhaps I can help you.”

“This is personal, thanks.”

“Oh. She flew back up to Chicago this morning out of Fort Meyers with the comptroller. I would say she’ll probably be back Wednesday. But it might be Thursday. I can give you a number where-”

“No thanks. I’ll try again.”

Meyer had gone over to B-80 to look at the thirty-one-foot Rawson. After that he had an appointment with the insurance agent. Then he was going to go buy clothes. And get a haircut.

I roamed around the houseboat, seeking out small chores, trying not to notice the big ones that needed doing. Restless, restless. I knew too much About Cody T. W Pittler, and at the same time not nearly enough. I wanted to bounce what we knew about him off some knowledgeable person, and I suddenly realized that the ideal person would be Laura Honneker. About eleven years ago, after she had been practicing her profession of psychiatry in Fort Lauderdale for a little over two years, an unstable patient had broken into her office and made off with a batch of patient files. Though in the files she had referred to the patients by initials other than their own, she had foolishly left her crossindex in the same file cabinet and he had taken that too.

Her patients had begun to complain. They were outraged at the calls they were receiving from the thief. Along with all the usual dirty words, he was telling them details of their lives known only to them and to Dr. Honneker.

She did not want to take the matter to the police. She did not want the responsibility of what that would do to the patient who had taken the files. A mutual friend told her about me, and she asked me to come see her. I explained that I attempted to recover things of value which could not be recovered in any normal manner, and I usually kept half the value. She said that in one sense the files had no value, but in another sense, if the misuse of them destroyed her in Fort Lauderdale professionally, they were very valuable. So we agreed that I would bill her according to the difficulty I encountered.

She was about my age, maybe two years younger. She was a big Norse-looking woman, fair and well scrubbed, with a trick of establishing very direct eye contact, her eyes a skeptic green. She was tall and aglow with health. I found out that she ran miles on the beach at first light every day, back when it wasn’t dangerous.

I phoned in and brought her crazy man to the office the next day, files and all. He was a heavy little man who believed the world was out to get him, and the best defense was to be offensive. He sat in the corner like a naughty child while she went through the files to be certain they were all there. She asked me if it had been a lot of trouble, and I smiled at the heavy little man and said, “No trouble at all.”

She ordered him into the next room, and he trudged in and closed the door without making a sound.

“What would be a fair fee for your trouble, Mr. McGee?” she had asked.

The question seemed to be put in a challenging way. So I had replied, “We should set up an appointment and negotiate it, don’t you think?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“We could negotiate over dinner.”

She thought that over, smiled, agreed. We set a date. I picked her up at her place. It was a pleasant evening. We had a lot of attitudes in common. The way we negotiated it, she bought the dinner and I bought the wine. I sensed that she had all her defenses ready in case I threatened to presume too much. When we said good night at her door, I said I would give her a ring sometime. She said that would be nice. But we both knew it wouldn’t happen.

About six months later I went to a big party at a conspicuously large and expensive house on the bay. I do not generally go to cocktail parties. I forget why I went to that one. Some people named Hunter gave the party. I arrived late and found, among the celebrants, one Dr. Laura Honneker, solemnly, quietly smashed. She walked and talked very very carefully. She told me in a slow and precise speech pattern that she did not drink, but that the previous night, at 3:00 A.M., a woman she thought she was helping had put the bedside gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger, thus awakening her husband in the ugliest possible way. So she had decided to have a cocktail. Or two.

I soon discovered she had been targeted by Ron Robinette, who was then living aboard a half million worth of motor sailer over at Bahia Mar, with an income from mysterious sources. He was big and ruddy with hair dyed black, teeth capped white, a lot of chest hair showing, and a constant smile underneath his little mean eyes. He hovered close and managed to keep touching her, establishing management and control. I saw him muttering into her ear and saw her shaking her head no. But Robinette manages to score in situations much less promising than this one.

So I worked it out and went over to them and said, “Time we took off, Laura honey, or we’ll be late for dinner with the others.”

“Others?” she said.

I got her by the elbow, and she resisted for just a moment and then came along, docile and unsteady.

“Now hold it, McGee,” Robinette said, following closely. He put his hand on my shoulder.

I spun, shrugging his hand off, and said, “Screw around with me, Ronnie, and I’ll do exactly what I did last time.”

He tried to bring himself up to the point of actual resistance, but his memory was too good. He shrugged and gave me an evil look and turned away. Ten seconds after I handed her into the passenger side of my old Rolls pickup, she passed out. I wanted to take her to her place, but I couldn’t rouse her. I rifled her purse and found her apartment keys, but they had no number on them. I knew the building but not the number. So I took her back to the Busted Flush, toted her aboard-she was a considerable burden-and laid her down on the bed in the spare cabin. I eased her shoes off. She was so slack I wondered if she had something else beside too much booze, some kind of illness. I took her pulse. It was a heavy, slow ta-bump, ta-bump, ta-bump. She didn’t feel feverish. So I left her there. I fixed myself a light supper and then read until after eleven.

Before I went to bed, I looked in at her. She had pulled her dress off and dropped it on the floor. I put a blanket over her and left a robe and a disposable toilet kit on the chair near the bed.

By midmorning, when I was on the second half of the paper and the second cup of coffee, I heard the shower. Soon she came out wearing the robe, her head wrapped in a white towel.

She said she felt rotten. She turned gray at the offer of eggs and settled for coffee, black. She seemed very ill at ease. Finally she said, “What am I doing here anyway?”

“Nursing a hangover, I think,” I told her. And I told her about snatching her away from one Ron Robinette, thinking to drive her home, but having her pass out on me.

“Robinette. Big fellow with a red face. Smiles a lot?”

“The same.”

“What was wrong with him taking me home?”

“I thought you deserved better. After all, you are an old acquaintance of mine, right? And Robinette has a case of what you professional people call satyriasis. You’d have been screwed lame by now, conscious or unconscious, sitting, kneeling, lying down, or standing on one leg. You’d walk funny for a week. And I didn’t touch you, except to tote you from my pickup to your bed.”

I felt a lot of tension go out of her, tension and suspicion. “Oh,” she said. “And thanks. Who took my dress off?”

“It had to be you, because it wasn’t me, Laura.”

“I can’t even remember,” she said. “I guess you saved me from an ugly experience, which would have been my own fool fault. I was depressed. I hardly ever drink. I had some martinis. Then things got kind of blurred. It isn’t fair. A man can get depressed and drink too much and he… he isn’t vulnerable the way a woman is.”

When her hair was reasonably dry, she combed it out, went in and dressed, and I drove her back to her car. Before she got out of Miss Agnes, she frowned at me and said, “If you hadn’t known me at all, would you have rescued me from that man?”

“I doubt it. I can’t run around under the trees catching everything that falls out of the nests, Doctor. Why should I steer Robinette to somebody else who might have just as bad a time?”

“Then I’m very glad poor Mr. Finch broke into my files and you came to that party. Very glad.” She leaned toward me and put a quick light shy kiss on the corner of my mouth. It was not invitational. It was the kiss a young girl gives her uncle at Christmas.

My upright behavior must have intrigued her, because she began to appear at the right places and right times with such uncanny accuracy that we drifted into an affair which lasted not more than a month and was called off by mutual consent. We were able to say the right things, do the right things, satisfy each other, enjoy each other, but there was something lacking. We were friends making love, not lovers making love. The bodies functioned, but the hearts never took to the wild leaping. So it had a faint flavor of the mechanical, an aura of the incestuous. And, also, I had the feeling she was watching both of us with her professional eye, a surveillance guaranteed to chill any alliance.

So now, needing advice, I phoned her office. The Noman who answered told me the doctor was with a patient, but she could be disturbed if it was an emergency. I said it was a social call and left my name and number.

Laura called back twenty minutes later. “Travis! How good to hear your voice.”

“I’ve been trying to remember when I saw you last. About four years ago, I think.”

“Closer to five. We ran into each other at Sears. Housewares.”

“It’s been five years? How are you anyway?”

“One hundred forty and holding.”

“Married yet?”

“Almost was, but I backed out at the very last moment, almost when he was putting the ring on me. Turned chicken. I know you aren’t.”

“How would you know that?”

“Let’s just say that your social circles and my professional clients overlap a little here and there. And sometimes we talk about you.”

“Favorably?”

“Sometimes, sure.”

“The reason I called, I want to pick your doctor brains over dinner. I want to tell you what I know about someone, and you tell me what you can guess about him. I buy the food and the wine.”

She said she was free that very evening, but she had some dictation to catch up on and had planned to stay in the office for a couple of hours after the last patient, so she thought she had better meet me at the restaurant. She named one of the new French ones. She said she would make the reservation.

They are popping up all over Florida like toadstools after a rain. They vary from wretched to superb. The very best one I know, and I think it the best between Miami and New Orleans, is over on the west coast of Florida, at a shopping mall called Sarasota Square. It is outside the mall, in an area containing a Kmart and a supermarket. It is called the Cafe La Chaumiere and is owned and operated by an agreeable type named Alain who used to be a chef at the Rive Gauche in Washington.

When I got there at eight, they were all smiles when I said I was joining the Doctor Honneker. Would I go to the table? No, thank you, I would wait luere at this little corner bar. She came in looking elegant in her office business suit. A little heftier in the hip, a trifle thicker around the waist, some horizontal lines across the throat and verticals bracketing the mouth. But a fine figure of a woman, with a lovely green-eyed smile.

I carried my drink to the table and we ordered bc-sr one. She told me her practice was booming, alI due mostly to having some luck with the nosecandy crowd: young lawyers, doctors, contractors, merchants, dentists, politicians. “I get them of course after they are finally willing to admit they are in serious trouble. So they are pretty well habituated by then, and very jumpy. Have you ever used it?”

“Tried it twice and didn’t like it either time. The great big rush of confidence and well-being is just fine, but when it fades it’s hard to remember just exactly what it was like. You just remember you felt real good, and now you don’t feel so great.”

“My reaction exactly. I’ve been having some luck with diet, drug therapy, and analysis. One thing I am sure of: when I have a patient who backslides and comes back to me six months later, there is a discernable diminution of intelligence and awareness. I’m administering standard intelligence measurements to all my cocaine patients now as standard procedure. If I can accumulate enough data, I’m going to try to do a paper on it.”

Over the soup she asked me what I wanted to ask her. I had gone through some mental rehearsals. “Here is your hypothetical patient, Laura. He is now forty-two. When he was thirteen, his mother died suddenly. He had one sister, five years older. When he was fifteen his father married a twenty-five-year-old woman who worked in his office. She was a very sexy item, with a chronic case of the hots. The father was promoted to a job where he had to travel three and four days a week and stay away overnight. When he was seventeen, after his sister married and moved out, the patient was seduced by his stepmother and they entered into a relationship that lasted perhaps three years. Call it two years, plus the vacations when he came home from college when he was twenty.”

“That’s really a fairly common form of incest, Travis, and-”

“That’s just part of it. After the end of his freshman year, the boy came home from college and they picked up where they left off. The father came home unexpectedly one night, heard them, listened at the bedroom door, got his gun, and stepped in and killed her with one shot to the back of the head, near the nape of the neck. From the evidence at the scene, the woman was on top, her feet toward the doorway. The boy squirmed out from under her, and we do not know what happened next. There was evidence of a struggle. So either he father tried to kill the boy or tried to kill himself. They fought for the gun and the father was shot. He died soon after they found him. A neighbor heard the two shots and saw the boy as he drove away in the father’s car. The car was found weeks later at the bottom of a canyon, with nobody in it or near it.”

She dropped her soup spoon into her shallow bowl and stared at me. “Good grief! What was the boy’s relationship to his father?”

“The boy loved and respected his old man.”

“Worser and worser. What kind of boy was he?”

“Standard issue. Athletic. Not a great student. Interested in theater, I guess. He was in the drama club. Reasonably good-looking. Big shoulders and hands.”

“Are you quite sure he’s alive?”

“It is a reasonable certainty.”

“Is the sister alive?”

“Yes. He sends cash to her, secretly. He has a way of keeping track of where she is. He’s sent her the better part of a hundred thousand dollars over the last fifteen years or so.”

“Does she condone his behavior?”

“She says it was all the fault of the second wife.”

“Is he still a fugitive?”

“Technically I guess. Nobody is really looking for him for that early shooting.”

“But they are looking for him for something else?”

“I’d rather not say yet. What would it do to a person, that kind of history?”

“I don’t think… I don’t believe anyone would be strong enough to walk away from something like that undamaged. If he loved his father, then he hated the stepmother. The long history of betraying his father every time they had a chance, that isn’t something he could get used to. It would just pile guilt upon guilt, higher and higher. He would have contempt for himself, for being unable to stop. He would feel weak and used and contemptible.”

“How would it have ended if the old man hadn’t caught them?”

“I don’t know. I can guess. The stepmother was turned on by the danger of it, by the ‘badness’ of it. She was walking a very dangerous tightrope and knew it. One scenario would be for the boy to kill her, to strangle her or beat her to death. That would be an understandable way of seeking punishment for all his sinning. That would give themmeaning society-the excuse to jail him for life, put him away, out of touch with decent people. A less dramatic and probably more plausible reaction would be for the boy to just run away, leave it all behind. Killing himself would be one kind of running away. Killing himself and the woman must certainly have occurred to him as a way of expiating guilt and punishing both the guilty parties. Guilt is a powerful and frightening thing, Travis. He might just have disappeared into limbo. A wander ing migrant worker. A future bum on a park bench somewhere. But when it was all taken out of his hands in such a gaudy brutal way, before he could plan and make expiation, I… I just can’t predict the effect. I do have the gut feeling that this might be a terribly dangerous personality, a man completely dead inside. I think he would probably be ritualistic. He… he would want to take revenge on his own sexuality as being the agent that caused the trouble.”

“How would he do that?”

“Self-mutilation would be understandable. Or total denial and deprivation.”

“How would he react toward women?”

“Oh, God. That would be a bucket of worms: I think he would want to punish them for their sexuality, for being the symbol of the temptress. What are you getting at?”

“Try this. Would this be possible? For him to hunt down women, one after the other, young attractive women, seduce them, enchant them into a very physical and erotic affair, actually seem to love them, sometimes even marry them, and then kill them?”

For a moment she frowned, and then her eyes widened. “It would be ritualistic. He would be punishing her for her sexuality, and he would be punishing himself by depriving himself of her passion. It’s intricate, Trav, but I could buy it. Yes. And he would acquire a very special knack of making himself attractive to women, of always saying the right thing, doing the right thing. He would have to keep changing his identity, wouldn’t he?”

“I know the name he started with and three more, and know of three dead women.”

We were side by side on a banquette. She grabbed me so strongly just above my right knee I could feel her nails through the fabric of my trousers. “My God, tell me about him! Tell me all about him!”

It took a long time. She asked questions. We suddenly stirred ourselves, realizing the check had been on the table for a long time and the waiters were circling at a discreet distance, coughing, and the place was absolutely empty except for us. So, in apology, I overtipped, and she followed me in her car, back to the Busted Flush so we could keep the discussion going.

We sat in the lounge with cold beer in hand, and I said, “Maybe we won’t ever find him, Meyer and I. But suppose we do. Suppose we find him and walk up to him. He is going to know us. How will he react?”

She took a long time thinking it over. She said, “You must realize that he has been wondering for years what he would do if that happened, if somebody was able to unmask him. Since you say he is likable and plausible, I think he will give you a totally fabricated account of what actually happened. He will make it sound real. He has depended on charm for a long time. I think you will have to pretend to believe him.”

“Why?”

“He’s a murderer, Travis. He has developed his capacity for violence. There will be no hesitation in him at all. Believing his story, you will have to maneuver him to a place and time where he can’t hurt you and can’t get away from you. Then and only then do you start casually dropping the names of the dead. Not accusatory. Affable. Almost laughing at him. Doris Eagle. Isobelle Garvey. He will not know how much you know, and suddenly you will seem to be all-knowing. You will become the God/Daddy here to punish him at last, and I think he will come completely, totally apart, with no hope of ever putting himself together again. I have broken people that way so that I could put them back together again in a better pattern, with their help. The more you look amused at their lies, the wilder the lies become. And quite suddenly they break.”

“And if he just denies it? Maybe I didn’t get it across to you. This is a very plausible, likable man. If he can hold himself together, no jury will convict.”

“If he just denies it, you must edge very very carefully into the Coralita situation.”

“Why delicately?”

“There is such a phenomenon as denial. By now he may well have convinced himself that it didn’t happen. Confrontation would reinforce the denial. You would have to ask him about little things. What color were Coralita’s eyes? Can you think of the unimaginable hell it must have been for that boy when his father was home? To sit at dinner with his father and Coralita. To try not to look at Coralita’s breasts and her hips and her mouth for fear his father would guess what was going on between them. To lie in bed and hear his father in another bedroom, perhaps in the same bed where he had had sex with Coralita. It must have been an unimaginable misery for the boy, and then to have it end with the death of both of them…” She shook her head. “It would just be too uncomfortable for him to carry that around. It would be too vivid. And so the brain would wall it off. Be very careful with him if you find him. Don’t give him any chance at all. People who are quite mad-a very unprofessional word-have enormous quickness and strength. We see a lot of it in mental hospitals. It will take four or five husky young attendants to overpower some frail little old man who has decided he does not want his medication.”

After we had worn out the topic of Cody T. W Pittler, his life and times, she cocked her head and said, “You seem troubled about something else, too.”

“I had no idea it showed.”

“I’m a trained observer, and once upon a time I knew you pretty darn well.”

“I remember. Well, I’m having a little trouble with my old lady, to put it in the chauvinistic pig manner.”

“The nice little hotel executive?”

“How do you know about her?”

“Somebody once defined gossip quite properly as emotional speculation. And I am interested in you and your life.”

“She is being promoted and sent to Hawaii. End of whatever it is we’ve been having.”

“An arrangement?”

“Good enough word, I guess. There was no abused party in the deal. It seemed okay for both of us.”

“Do you think it should be more important to her than moving ahead in her job?”

“I don’t know exactly what to think. I just feel sort of depressed about it.”

“Do you love her?”

“What can I say? I feel very good being with her. I like to look at her. I like to listen to her talk. We have a lot of dumb little private personal games we play. When I’m away from her I miss her.”

“How does she feel about you?”

“Sort of the same. But she says it has never been enough. She says she has never been able to really let go completely with me because I keep a certain distance from her. Perhaps I do. If so, maybe it’s a flaw in my character. She says we’re a convenience to each other, a handy shack job without complications or obligations, and she says that it is not a very noble preoccupation for either of us. She says that at first she thought it was going to be everything, because each time we were together, we got further and further into each other, into knowing and understanding. But it went only so far and then stopped. I did not stop anything on purpose. The accusation makes me feel… sort of puzzled and inadequate.”

“Does she really want the job?”

“As badly, she says, as she ever wanted anything in her life.”

“Why don’t you follow her out there?”

“I belong right here.”

“With all anchors set, all lines made fast?”

“I guess so.”

“Want to marry her?”

“I don’t want to marry anybody.”

She smiled, hitched closer, took my hand in both of hers. “Hey, can you remember back eleven years?”

“Of course.”

“We had the same problem, my dear, in a different degree. I really wanted to fall in love with you. I thought it would be good for me. Turned out we could love each other in a physical sense, but we couldn’t fall in love. We fell into like, not love. And that isn’t ever quite enough. Bawdy as we got at times, we were still, in an unfortunate sense, brother and sister. So we knocked it off. Without rancor. And I confess to a little sense of relief when it ended. I could stop pretending to be in love. Got a feeling of relief about her? Are you tucking it away, as an unworthy emotion? Is that making you a little ashamed of yourself, and is that why you feel depressed?”

“Doctor, you are too damned smart.”

“Just be awfully awfully glad you and she had a good run at it. That’s all. And be glad for her if she’s getting what she wants. And for heaven’s sake, don’t try to punish her as she leaves, like a little kid who’s losing all his candy.”

“Am I like that?”

“You poor dummy, everybody is like that!”

So we kissed and I walked the doctor to her car, held the door open, and gave her a proprietary pat on the behind.

When l closed the door, she ran the window down and leaned to look up at me. “I don’t want to make you angry.”

“Then don’t.”

“Please, Travis. Don’t obstruct. What I want to say, which may make the whole situation easier for you to understand, is that maybe your hotel executive friend has more capacity for genuine maturity than you have.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“It need not be an insult, if you don’t take it as one. You have been living your life on your own terms. You need make only those concessions which please you. There are always funny friends, parties, beach girls, and the occasional dragon to go after. I don’t pretend to know any of the circumstances that shaped you. I would guess that at some time during your formative years there was an incident that gave you a distaste for most kinds of permanence. None of us decide arbitrarily to be what we are. We just are what we are, through environment, heredity, and the quality of our mind and our emotions. Are you ashamed of what you are?”

“No, but…”

“And that, dear heart, has to be everybody’s answer: No, but… And I can finish your sentence. No, but I wish I were a better person.”

“You too?”

She rested her hand on mine. “I’ve got your disease, Travis. That’s why I chickened out on marriage. I didn’t think I could handle the role. I know I couldn’t. But I do get so awful damn lonely sometimes.” Her hand tightened on mine.

“And they tell me it can get even lonelier.”

“I know.”

“So, Doctor Laura, after my bird has flown, maybe you could offer some physical comfort, and accept some.”

“I think I would like that very much. It doesn’t have to be a case of turning the clock back. Somebody to hang onto in the long long dark night, somebody warm, somebody breathing warmth against my flesh. Somebody giving a damn. Even just a little damn.”

I bent clumsily through the window and kissed her mouth. When I straightened I thumped my head on the top of the opening. She laughed. I told her doctors should have more sympathy, and she laughed again and backed out and drove away.

Meyer arrived at a quarter past one, as I was getting ready for bed. “Who stays open this late?” I asked him. “Barbers or clothing stores?”

“Was I supposed to report?”

“Don’t get stuffy. I just thought you might be here while I was out to dinner, to take any call that might come from Sigiera.”

“I came back and dropped off the clothes I bought. And then I went back to that Rawson again. The old lady had me stay and eat with her. And we’ve been talking. Her name is Margaret Howey, and she is really a hell of a woman.”

“Going to buy it?”

“What? The boat? Yes, of course. It’s a good buy, and it’s roomier than the Keynes was. The insurance will cover most of it.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“Times have changed. Perceptions change. Fashions change. Also, a boat has to fit its name. I thought first it might be the Adam Smith. But Margaret and I decided that the Tharstein Veblen would be nice.”

“The who?”

“Veblen died in 1929 at the age of seventy-two. He was an economist, and some of his theories became clouded by his sociological theories. His book The Theory of the Leisure Class, with its ideas about conspicuous consumption, had a vogue for a time. I have never been a Veblenian myself. But Margaret thinks it makes a neat name for a boat.”

“Whatever Margaret thinks.”

“It will be utterly meaningless to everyone who graduated from high school in the past twenty years. That’s the nice part of it.”

“What will you call it for short?”

“For short? The Thorstein Ueblen is quite short enough.”

When he is in that mood, there is nothing reasonable that you can say to him. He told me Margaret would move north in two weeks, and he could have possession on August sixteenth, and on that day he would move it to the berth where The John Maynard Keynes had always squatted, with its meager freeboard making it look underprivileged.

Twenty

TUESDAY, THE third of August, was one of those rare Atlantic coast days with no wind at all. Every scrap of cloth on every boat docked at Bahia Mar hung limp as rejection. The endless midday traffic droned past the marina and motel, under the pedestrian bridge over to the beach, leaving an oppressive chemical stink in the air.

There was a sheen of oil on the boat basin. Compressors chugged, cooling stale air belowdecks. Brown girls lay stunned on open decks, sweat rolling off them. A ship’s cat lay in the shade of a tarp aboard a nearby motor sailer, sleeping on its back with all four feet in the air.

Sigiera phoned at one fifteen.

“McGee? This here is your smart Texican law officer speaking.”

“Glad to hear from you.”

“Thought you might be. I didn’t go bulling into this thing. What I did, I tried to think of the angles. I tried to add up everything I’d ever heard about the Chappel family, and I didn’t move in on Mrs. Chappel until I had a real good angle to play. This is my angle. A bunch of good old boys are going to try to put Sid Chappel in the state legislature next chance. He’s willing. God knows he’s willing. He’s taken to shaking hands with people on the street he doesn’t hardly know.

“So I got out there this morning about ten, and Miz Clara was in the pool, and the maid took me out and left me. I can tell you, it’s hard to believe she’s got to be forty-seven if a day. Pretty little thing, built like a schoolgirl. I just come back from there.”

“And?”

“Don’t try to rush me along. In some cases it’s smart to kind of hem and haw and beat around until they finally ask. And she did. She said she would sure like to know what I had on my mind. That’s when you kind of blurt it out, like you just hated to say it. So I said I’d come to do her a favor. I said some political enemies of her husband had me checking out the old Cody Pittler file, because they had the idea of using it against him when he would up and run for office. She asked me what that could possibly mean to her. She said I should talk to Sid. And I told her I was talking to her because she was the one who kept in touch with Cody, as a favor to Helen June. I tell you, McGee, she came up out of that pool water like a porpoise. One minute she’s in the water, and the next minute she’s standing in front of me, sopping wet. She asked me where I’d heard a damn fool thing like that, and I said Helen June tended to talk when she had more than three, and she said some words about Helen June that I didn’t think a lady like that would know. She knew lots of them, and how to hang them together in chunks.”

“And so?”

“And so I asked her if she’d heard from Helen June lately, and she said she’d gotten a call yesterday in the afternoon, and she had written down what Helen June told her, and she had planned on driving the fifty-five miles up to Del Rio, like she usually did with messages for him, and mailing it from there. So I told her that what she could do would be give it to me quiet like, and if it ever came up, I would swear that she had been intercepting messages and turning them over to me, and it would turn back on whoever was after Sid’s hide. And if she didn’t want to-right here I slapped my pocket-I’d just have to hand her this here warrant that I didn’t have-and search the house. So she called me some of the names she called Helen June, and she was so darn cute, I was willing to forget the seventeen years she’s got to have on me and tote her right over onto one of those big sun cots they got. And she knew what I had in mind and liked stirring me up that way, and pretty soon we both started to laughing. She went and got the letter, and I got it right here. The note inside was typed. It didn’t say dear anything, and there was no name at the end. I’ll read it to you.”

“That would be nice.”

“ `Two men came here with your recent picture, claiming you have been killing women for their money and using other names. One was a professor named Meyer and he is a very nice man. He said you blew up his niece named Norma in a boat with two other people. He said you killed somebody named Doris and somebody named Isabel and maybe more. They made me believe you really did. It makes me feel sick. If you are doing things like this, terrible things, then the police should stop you. The other man is a lot taller and he has sort of a mean look sometimes. And he can fight. Be careful. I tried not to tell them anything. They got my address from Boomer: I think you would remember him.‘

“So I asked her if those were the exact words and she said they weren’t. She said she had taken notes and then put it down in a better way than Helen June had told it. She said Helen June had cussed a lot. I suppose you want the address to where she was sending it.”

“It would be nice.”

“It was going to Senor Roberto Hoffmann, Apartado Postal Number seven one oh, Cancьn, Cluintana Roo, Mexico. Did you get that?”

“I wrote it down,” I said, and read it back.

“Now what will you do?” he asked.

“We’ll go down there and show the picture.”

“Well, did I do good?”

“You were practically perfect.”

“I hope you two know you are dealing with a flake, a weirdo.”

“We know that. We plan to be very careful.”

“Let me tell you something about old Mexico. If he’s been down there a long time, with money to spend, then he is dug in, and he’ll have some good Mexican connections. You try to put local law on him and you will be the ones on the inside, rattling the bars.”

“What’s to keep her from writing the same thing over again and mailing it?”

“She and me, we reached an understanding. I told her if she did that, I would go to Sid and tell him how she has been screwing around writing notes to a guy that is still wanted for killing his own father. And I would tell him she had been doing it behind his back. I took a chance there. Maybe she told Sid. But she hadn’t, and it scared hell out of her. He is known as a hitter. Besides, she feels like Helen June betrayed her. They swore never to tell anybody. She looked like she’d like to kill Helen June. There’s another thing too.”

“Such as?”

“It was sort of play pretend for her. It took her back to when she was twenty and Cody was fifteen and she wished he was older, back to when she and Helen June were real close. She’d bought Helen June’s idea of how it happened, Bryce Pittler trying to kill himself and finally shooting himself when they struggled for the gun. And all the trouble was on account of Bryce marrying that trashy little second wife, who got what she deserved. All she ever had to send before was addresses, and a note saying she and Helen June hoped he was okay. He had phoned her a couple of times, making sure she never told Helen June his address. But then all this comes up, the idea he could have been killing people. Little old Clara, she doesn’t want any part of that kind of going on. That could be some kind of trouble that would hurt her husband and her and spoil the life they’ve built up. And Helen June had been kind of hysterical over the phone. That took the fun out of it too. Okay, I did good, but it was ready to come apart anyway. You two did even better up there. He kept his two lives fastened together with a very thin thread, McGee, and it took hard work and luck to even find out it existed.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s an official file here needs closing. So you could let me know.”

“Could you get an assignment to go down there with us?”

“You’ve got to be out of your mind! The budget we got, we’re down three men here already, and it could be more. We stay on our side of the river and they stay on theirs. Sometimes they’ll bring somebody to the middle of the bridge for us, and we do the same for them. But it doesn’t happen often. When you go down there, walk easy. Get yourself a local and pay him good.”

Meyer got back at two o’clock, and I told him the conversation I’d had with Paul Sigiera. He sat, utterly quiet, sorting it out after I’d finished.

“One thing we know,” he said. “He couldn’t be Roberto Hoffmann in Cancun and be Evan Lawrence in Cancun. There must be endless thousands of American tourists flowing through that place, but the Americans in permanent or semipermanent, residence must be well known to each other and to the resident Mexicans. So we start with Evan Lawrence’s friend Willy, who sells time shares in condominium apartments, and this Willy might know a local who will help us.”

“I checked with Fran at Triple A Travel, and she said the best and quickest way to get there is go to Miami and take Mexicana. I think she said it leaves at four thirty. We can get a tourist card at the airline desk. Mexicana and Aero Mexico always say all flights are full, but they leave about two thirds full, except at Christmastime, including the standby people. Hot there, she said. Very very hot. We can try to set up a rental car in the Miami airport, but she said that hardly ever works too well. No problem with hotels at this time of year, she said. When do you want to go?”

“Right now,” Meyer said.

As it turned out, we weren’t able to leave until the next day, the fourth, a day of hot wind and rain that lasted all the way to the parking garage.

The severe young man at the airline desk took the cash money from Meyer for round-trip tickets. My protests did not work. Return trip unreserved. We were on standby for the flight to Cancun. We went downstairs to a bus which took us to a new terminal building, where we sat in plastic chairs in a broad vista of plastic and filled out the tourist permit forms. We had tried to look tourist. Mesh shirts, seer-sucker pants, sandals, the big ranch hats we’d picked up in Texas, battered carry-on bags. Meyer had a lot of funds strapped around his waist under his shirt, in a canvas money belt. Money, he has always said, solves the unanticipated problems. It won’t buy happiness, but it will rent a fair share of it.

It was a one-class flight on a 727, with no room for my knees. The flight time was two hours and a bit, and the hard-working Mexican flight attendants served a meal. There was an hour time change, so it was only a little past five fifteen when we began our long curving descent into the Cancun airport. The pilot took us over the Cancun peninsula. It was a spectacular view, lowering clouds overhead, storms out at sea, and a long slant of golden sunshine striking the column of tall hotels along the beach.

Meyer, thorough as ever, had arranged to read up on the place, and he explained it to me en route. “It is that rarity” he said, “a totally artificial community, without a history, without traditions. Less than ten years ago there were about thirty-five people living in the mainland village of Cancun. Several narrow islands stretched out into the Gulf. Mexico needed hard dollars, so they took aerial photographs of the seacoast and decided that this would make an attractive resort. Now there are over fifty thousand permanent residents. They made low interest loans to people who wanted to build hotels and resorts. They linked the islands with a causeway and bridges, built an airport, built a road down the coast to Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo, and the dollars do indeed flow in. There have been problems, of course: help for the hotels, food production, and transportation. Now they are getting small cruise ships and convoys of recreational vehicles and yachts and flocks of tour buses. It has become a popular resort for middle-class Mexicans and Americans. Lately there have been a lot of condominium developments scattered near the hotels.”

I glanced at him. He had the window seat. He was staring straight ahead, expressionless. He sensed me looking at him and turned toward me.

“What are we doing, Travis? Just what in the name of hell are we trying to do?”

“We’re trying to find the man who killed Norma. And we might even succeed.”

“Then what?”

“There are no pamphlets about what to do. No instructions. He’s one kind of hunter, I’m another. We can do a little diving around the reefs, maybe a little fishing, call it a day, and head for the barn. Maybe it’s enough to know where he is.”

There was an unexpectedly steely look in his small blue eyes. “Surely you jest, my friend. We owe something to his next ten years of victims, be they two, four, or twenty. We will find him. We will find a way to…” He hesitated. “All I can think of is a phrase I hear on television. A way to terminate him with prejudice.”

The plane squealed its tires on the runway, taxied back to the small modern terminal building, and we climbed down the rolling stairs into twilight, sweat, far-off thunder, and the smell of something frying.

We all stood in line at tall narrow desks where immigration officers checked our passports, then stamped our signed permits and slid them back to us. There was a lot of bright fluorescence in the airport building, and large clocks which did not work. The passengers stood waiting by the stationary conveyor belt which would start up and bring their luggage out of the holes in the wall. Tour guides were herding their customers into small groups, shouting at them about which bus to take. “We all going to Hotel Presidente. You say that, eh? All now. Presidente!”

“Presidente!” they cried in ragged unison. “Good! That where you going. Boos numero saventy-one!”

There was a guard by the glass doors. Nobody seemed to be going out into the main part of the terminal. I walked smiling toward him, Meyer behind me. I nodded and pushed the door open and he hesitated and backed out of the way. So much for bringing things into Mexico.

We came out into the rental car area. Some of the stations were closed. Hertz, Avis, Dollar, and Budget were open. We nailed down a three-year-old Plymouth at Budget, pronounced Bood-zhet. It had fifty-two thousand kilometers on it and had recently been painted a curious pink. The air conditioning made conversation impossible. When we had to confer, we turned it off.

It was about seventeen miles into downtown Cancun. We had to turn right before we got to the center of the city. We turned, as per instructions, at the Volkswagen garage and headed on out to the hotel district. It was a dark hot night and beginning to rain. The hotels were lighted like birthday cakes.

I pulled into the Bojorquez, and then the Carrousel, waving away each time the bellhops who scurried out into the rain to take our luggage.

Farther along, the Dos Playas looked suitable. Not too fancy, not too grubby. For eighty dollars a night, summer rates, plus tax, about twenty-two hundred pesos, we got a small fourth-floor suite with kitchenette. If you put your cheek against the window you could see the Caribbean. If you slid the glass door open you could go out onto a miniature balcony and see a lot more of it, as well as a corner of the pool and some vacant lighted tennis courts, the lights glinting off the bounce of rain.

We had a big bedroom and a little bedroom. We matched, and Meyer won the little one. We went down to a busy bar. Most of the customers were Mexican tourists. There were a few senior citizens from the States, paired off, drinking tequila, going through the funny ceremony of the slice of lime between the fingers, the salt on the back of the hand. Lick the salt, toss down the shot, bite into the lime. This was creating a certain amount of amusement among the Mexicans, because the tequila they were drinking was a nice amber anejo, which is as smooth as bonded bourbon. The salt-and-lime bit is imperative only when drinking the coarsest kind of mescal, that second distillation from the maguey which tends to remove the plaque from your molars.

No Dos Equis at the bar, so we had a pair of Cervesa Negra Modela.

Meyer said, “He could walk in here, you know.”

“Totally improbable. But remotely possible. Sure.”

“And what do we do then?”

“We become thunderstruck. We stagger with the shock of it all. We point the quivering finger at him and say, ‘B-b-but you’re d-dead!’ ”

“And then it’s his play?”

“Exactly right.”

“I will have absolutely no trouble looking shocked.”

We took a look at the menu and decided to try a place we had passed on the right-hand side about four hotels back: Carlos ‘n’ Charlie’s. When we looked outside, the rain had stopped, so we walked it, on a curving path, quite wide, made of some kind of red tile blocks, between plantings that smelled like flowers and richness after the rain.