Who Killed Lord Pacal? by Gary Alexander

You ought not to get yourself in a jackpot for accusing someone of bumping off his own father thirteen hundred years ago.

Wouldn’t you think?

Being a reasonable person, I did. But I’ll get to that later. All that concerned me at the moment was fresh air and not doing a Humpty Dumpty number. I don’t mind admitting I’d contemplated faking an old football injury.

The stone steps looked about ten degrees steeper than vertical. Slick and smooth, they were sweating as much as me. Bare bulbs dangling from a cord provided lighting, and illumination ranged from dim yellow to Black Hole of Calcutta.

“Bricklin Bates, come on,” Darla said, waving from deep in the mouth of that thing.

She only used my full moniker when she wanted to needle me or boot me in the backside. So down I went.

The core of Palenque’s Temple of the Inscriptions was a claustrophobic sauna. It was the final resting place of Lord Sun Shield Pacal, one of the longest reigning monarchs in history. Pacal’s bones were gone, but his profile and all sorts of gingerbread were carved into the sarcophagus lid suspended two feet above his tomb in a cramped, vaulted crypt. The limestone slab must have outweighed a Buick. The crummy light flickered, giving the chamber the appearance of a fly-by-night paint job.

Once outside, where I couldn’t get to quick enough, Darla noted that my butt was dragging and cut me some slack. She said we could do the full tour of the ruin tomorrow. It was late anyhow, and we hadn’t checked into our hotel yet. We’d been in four airports today and had driven a hundred and fifty harum-scarum klicks in a rental car from Villahermosa to Palenque, beelining it to the Temple of the Inscriptions.

Darla said it was the highlight of Palenque and that Palenque was the highlight of Mexico. This was like having your dessert first, at least from her viewpoint.

We’d compromised on our Mexican trip, which is to say she won and I lost. My druthers was Cancun and two weeks of bobbing around a pool bar clutching a cold Corona as a life preserver while my balding scalp roasted. Darla said Cancun was an aberration, the total antithesis of Yucatan Mexico, whatever that meant. Some of Darla’s words are bigger than my paragraphs.

Darla said it would be a travesty not to see the remnants of the great Maya civilization. She rattled off Uxmal, Edzna, Sayil, Labna, Kabah, Chichen Itza, and some longer names that tied my tongue in knots. She was determined to do every archaeological site she could.

I complained that it was gonna be like a whistlestop tour. She said what did it matter where we were? We’d still have the time and energy my “honeymoon without benefit of clergy” proposal entailed, though she referred to it as a proposition.

Don’t get me wrong. Darla likes the lovey-dovey stuff as much as me. If you were a peeping Tom you’d see us wrapped up like a basketful of boa constrictors.

And I had to hand it to her. She had us going first class on a budget. Our Palenque hotel was actually a resort with a series of cabins set next to thick jungle. Our cabin overlooked a creek and had charm coming out its ears, as did its open-air, thatch-roofed café, where we wound down and wet our whistles.

I waved a dead soldier at the barkeep and said, “I had a thought.”

“Me too, Brick. When I’m finished with my margarita.”

Darla Hogan teaches anthropology at a community college. She is a little slip of a woman with big hair and bigger glasses. She has the sweetest leer.

“No, another thought. What if Lord Pacal was whacked out? You know, assassinated.”

“What on earth gave you that idea?”

I pointed at the stack of books and notebooks on the table. Since we’d begun planning the trip, it was like they were grafted to her.

“You told me Pacal was born in 603 A.D., right? His mom, the queen, handed the keys to the kingdom over to him in 615. He was eighty when he croaked, after damn near seventy years in power. Hell, his reign alone was probably twice the normal lifespan.”

“Eighty was old then, it’s old today,” Darla reminded me. “You’re pushing forty, no spring chick—”

“Never mind. If Pacal lived to a ripe old age, wouldn’t there be a natural assumption he’d live forever? These dudes were god-kings, you know. Pacal’s older son, Chan Bahlum, a.k.a. Jaguar Serpent, was forty-eight when he took over from dad. Don’t you think he was getting antsy?”

Darla stroked my forearm hair, saying, “My Brick, always looking under rocks.”

Hey, looking under rocks was what I did for a living. Darla had been stalked by her ex-boyfriend. She didn’t think the restraining order was worth the paper it was written on, so she let her fingers do the walking. She picked me because my worthy competition advertised as Security Consultants and Professional Investigators, wimpy crapola like that. I was the only one who hung out my shingle as a private eye.

She wanted me to track the creep and to dig up dirt that would land him in the pokey. He was nearly my age and lived with his mother. Trouble was, he was squeaky clean. He didn’t do diddlysquat except follow Darla around like a lovesick puppy. I knew the type. One fine day he’d go berserk. Then he’d be a model prisoner on death row.

At first sight I fell for Darla like a ton of bricks. I took her case mighty personal. One night I caught the freakoid alone and took the law in my own hands, as well as him. I never told Darla what I did, and I’m not spilling the beans to you either, other than that he fives with a maiden aunt on the opposite coast and is eligible to try out for the Vienna Boys Choir.

“You can take the shoulder holster off the shamus,” she said, doing the math on a napkin. “Lord Pacal died one thousand three hundred and fourteen years ago. How do you expect to prove Chan Bahlum committed patricide?”

I shrugged and patted my pocket. I’d given up smoking for her. Not to mention letting her toss the bottle of cheap whisky from my filing cabinet and thin out my trenchcoat and snapbrim fedora collection. There were still times I felt naked without an unfiltered Camel dangling from my kisser, and this was one of them. “So the trail’s gone a little cold.”

“Good luck tracing eyewitnesses.”

I said, “There’re tons of historical precedents, you know. I switched to Masterpiece Theater once when a prizefight ended fast on account of a KO. In that episode Augustus had been the big cheese in Rome for forty years. Then his current missus slipped hemlock in his vino. Bingo. Her son was the new emperor.

“And look at England. I’ll bet whatshisname is running out of patience. If Liz ever falls off her horse, the first thing I’d do is check under her saddle for a burr.”

“You’re reaching, love of my life.”

“You were telling me about these Maya folks and human sacrifice. Anything’s possible.”

“Blood lubricated their universe,” she said.

“Hacking off heads and gouging the living, beating hearts out of chests with those stone knives isn’t what you’d call your basic polite behavior,” I said. “If I was Pacal, I’d’ve walked around with a rear view mirror glued to my forehead.”

“Homicide is not the same as ritual killing. The typical sacrifice victim was a captured enemy, the higher ranking the better.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a coverup. It’s worth looking into.”

“Answer two questions,” Darla said. “Who’s your client? How are you going to get paid?”

I was speechless. I hated it when she made sense.


Next morning the sky poured down on us in buckets. I’d never been anywhere tropical and couldn’t believe my eyeballs. It was just like Chicken Little said.

I suggested to Darla that we spend the day in bed watching TV. She reminded me that we didn’t have television. I said so what. She called me a satyr. I asked what that was. She said it was a vulgar mythical creature with goat horns that had only one thing on its mind.

I said that flattery would get her everywhere. She said uh-uh, we were on a tight schedule. We’d do the museum today. If it was still yucky later, we’d do Palenque tomorrow. Then we’d head on up to Uxmal.

Like a good scout I bought breakfast and drove us to the museum and visitor center, a modem building a mile from the Palenque ruin. On display were an assortment of artifacts and replicas of wall murals and stone carvings. Those ancient Mayans sure had busy hands.

I hadn’t been inside a museum since a field trip in the fifth grade, and all I remembered about it was that everything was old, so when Darla commented that they’d done a nice job here, I had to agree. While she was taking notes and pictures, I zeroed in on a stucco head of my prime suspect, Chan Bahlum. Client or no client, I needed to scratch my itch.

Chan Bahlum had a big schnozz and pierced earlobes. Attitude was written all over him, and he was definitely shifty looking.

We met up at a wall carving reproduction of Lord Pacal, who was with this babe they identified as his principal wife, Lady Ahpo Hel. In between them was their son, Kan Xul. They were dressed to the nines in feathered headgear and ornate loincloths. Ma and Pa were giving the boy some stuff, including what may have been a crown on the end of a stick.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Lord Pacal and Lady Ahpo are anointing Kan Xul with the symbols of power.”

“Whoa, wait a second. Where does Kan perch in the family tree?”

“He’s Chan Bahlum’s younger brother.”

“Aha!”

“Shhhhh. You big galoot, everybody’s looking at us.”

“Don’t you get it? Palace intrigue. Jealousy, envy, high-level hanky-panky. Chan Bahlum learned he was being passed over in favor of his kid brother. He decided to control his own destiny by clipping his old man.”

“Prove it, Brick,” Darla said, then immediately saw my stupidest grin. She covered her mouth, realizing her atrocious mistake.

She had just dared Brick Bates.


Opposites attract. That’s not exactly a news bulletin. Take Darla and me in regards to sheepskins alone. She’s got a B.S., an M.S., and is wrapping up her Ph.D. Although she’s always saying I’m a master in the b.s. department, my formal schooling involved a matchbook cover application to the Gumshoe Correspondence Institute of Private Detection.

And frankly I think she was kind of lording her education over me at lunch. We were in Santo Domingo, a.k.a. Palenque Village, a compact town five miles from the ruin. It was a busy, friendly burg swarming with lethal taxicabs. Santo Domingo was here because of tourists and what they came to see, but the folks weren’t constantly in your face, hard-core hustling you like they’d be in Cancun, I had to admit.

“You’re cuckoo,” she said.

“That’s irrelevant and immaterial,” I said.

“Bricklin Bates, I acknowledge that you are the world’s greatest private eye.”

I bowed my head modestly.

“All right, how do you propose clearing up a hypothetical thirteen-century-old homicide?”

“You canvass the neighborhood and shake the hypotheticals out of the trees. The rain’s letting up.”

“Oh, Brick.”

“After lunch and before we head back to the ruin, we’ll do some snooping in town.” I whipped a postcard out of my pocket. “A photo of Lord Pacal’s sarcophagus lid. Look at him, surrounded by all those doodads.”

Darla sighed.

“These street vendors we’ve seen, it’s a toss-up whether this picture in one form or another or those Zapatista dolls is the hottest item.”

“Fringie types believe he’s at the controls of his spaceship.”

Actually, he looked like he was squinting into an ornate periscope, fixing to fire torpedoes. “Bat guano, huh?”

“Without question. In fact, the elaborate sculpture is quite consistent with Maya cosmology. The departed king isn’t perched on an alien booster rocket, he’s falling into the fleshless jaws of the earth monster. He’s hanging onto a two-headed serpent that represents the sky. Lord Pacal is in transition from one world to the next.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Any fool can see that. C’mon, let’s give it a shot.”

With Darla’s Spanish phrasebook in hand, I took the postcard along Avenida Juarez, Santo Domingo’s main drag, to anyone willing to rehash the good old days. I realized this wasn’t a scientific approach, though sometimes folklore’s passed along. At this point I was willing to settle for an unsubstantiated innuendo.

Darla wasn’t as enthusiastic as me, to put it mildly. She hung back and off to the side, like she could deny she knew me if push came to shove with the locals.

I concentrated on older shopkeepers. Showing them the postcard, I’d run a finger across my throat, make a face, and say, “Asesinato?”

The usual reaction was a shrug and that loco gringo widening of the eyes, a response with which I was not totally unfamiliar. I caught Darla a couple of times twirling a finger beside her head; that didn’t advance the investigation one little bit.

It was obvious they were stonewalling me and would do so even without Darla’s goofing. I was beginning to wonder what they had to hide. Anyway, I was getting nowhere fast, so I threw in the towel.

We went back to the cabin to change before heading out to the ruin. I was ready first and sat on the porch in a rocking chair, enjoying the scenery. The sky was breaking up into dumpling clouds, and it was warming fast. The jungle was steamy, smelling like salad.

I had to do a doubletake on what I spotted beyond the creek. This was in trees and vines and shadows right out of a Tarzan movie. The guy wasn’t much more than a silhouette, like a shape that’d pop up at the target range. I could make out only that he was short, stumpy, and naked except for a loincloth and some kind of headdress that would’ve made Carmen Miranda drool.

What got to me was his evil scowl, mostly cuz I couldn’t see it, I could just feel it. A puff cloud crossed in front of the sun. A breeze blew through a clump of bamboo next to me, making it creak like a door with rusty hinges. I, who could stare down a Ten Most Wanted fugitive and his mother-in-law, too, was getting the willies.

Darla came out in a banana-colored sundress.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

She scanned where my eyeballs were frozen. There was nothing to see. She gave me a funny look and stroked my arms to smooth out the goosebumps.


Palenque rose on artificial terraces, backstopped by lush green foothills. The buildings were stuck in the hillside, as if growing out of it. Low clouds docked against the hills. From the ground, tourists climbing the taller temples appeared to be walking into the mist.

From those higher elevations you had a wide view of the valley. I imagined that Palenque had plenty of warning prior to an attack and that their enemies had a severe ass-kicking in store for them. Darla confirmed this.

“Palenque’s architects considered danger as well as aesthetics when they designed the city,” she said. “There was no such thing as a Maya empire. During the classic period, 250 to 900 A.D., the region was a loose collection of city-states linked by trade, royal intermarriage, and warfare. Especially the last. Palenque expanded its influence considerably under Pacal’s rule.”

“How big is this place, Darla?”

“Experts say the unexcavated ruins extend as far as ten kilometers. Palenque ruled neighboring cities, too.”

“That’s a lot of real estate to inherit.”

“You’re a broken record on that subject, Bricklin.”

She was right. Again. I took the needle off the turntable for the rest of the tour. And let her do the talking. On how Palenque was abandoned in the ninth century for reasons yet unclear. How Cortes and his gold-crazed conquistadors passed within miles of it. How the site wasn’t discovered until the 1700’s. How we don’t even know what the residents called it, palenque being Spanish for “palisade.”

Very interesting, but I was ready to move on. So was Darla, chattering on the way to the exit about what fun we’d have at Uxmal. That is, until we saw that all four tires on our rental unit were flat. From her sweet lips came forth some words I hadn’t heard since I last ran down a bail skip and escorted his scuzzy rear to the county lockup.

One of the first lessons I learned in my Gumshoe Correspondence Institute of Private Detection studies was that nature abhors a coincidence. Sure enough, the air hadn’t seeped out of the pores of the tread. Each tire had an inch-long sidewall slash. There was something wedged in one of the cuts, and I went after it with a pocketknife.

The entrance area was jam-packed with park employees, tourists, and vendors. Most of the visitors today were Eurogringos who’d piled out of buses. Darla asked around, but her French and German were minimal, and the other tourists weren’t generally inclined to be friendly and helpful toward Yanks. Her Spanish was passable, but nobody saw nothing nohow. No other cars had been touched.

“What do you make of this?” I asked, showing her a shiny black rock I’d dug out. It was triangular, the size of a fingernail.

“Obsidian,” she said. “Volcanic glass. The Maya didn’t have metal. They made tools of it.”

“Like sacrificial knives?”

“Brick.”

“Okay, okay. Tell me this, do the locals still walk around with them? Seems to me they have access to metal nowadays.”

She didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d scored an intellectual point on her. If my nose hadn’t been so out of joint on account of the vandalism, I would’ve been walking on air.

We caught a cab into town. The driver was a sourpuss and a dead ringer for the guys scratched into those temple walls. He had a Miami Heat T-shirt and an attitude, but Darla’s combination of Spanish and pidgin to him got us to a tire store without a shortcut through Guatemala.

A young fella said they’d take four tires out there and mount them, then deliver the car to us that evening. I put two on my Visa card, and Darla put the other two on her MasterCard. There were a bunch of zeros on the pesos, but I tried to think of it as Monopoly money. We’d sort out the fine print on the insurance coverage later.

The same taxi was cruising the street, so we had Smiley run us to the resort, where we unwound with drinks. Timing was of the essence, so I waited until Darla’s third margarita before saying, “Speaking of sacrificial knives whittled out of obsidian...”

“No, we weren’t.”

“What did they use them for besides open heart surgery?”

“Not all sacrifice was fatal. The kings drew blood from other parts of the body, including the penis. The blood dripped on paper made of bark, which they burned to appease the gods.”

I cringed and said, “How would somebody get hold of a knife?”

“I suppose replicas are sold as souvenirs.”

“How’s about an original?”

“An archaeological find or theft from a museum. I’ve been thinking about what happened, Brick. Somebody you offended slashed our tires with a replica and broke it off to make a statement.”

“Offended,” I said, dumbfounded. “Me?”

That set off a case of the giggles that I contracted from her like a common cold. People were looking at us, so we retired to the cabin and continued to make fools of ourselves in several different ways I won’t elaborate on. At sundown I went out front to look for our rental car, which had just been delivered.

Darla was sitting on our porch in her bathrobe, arms wrapped around herself, shivering. “Brick, when you were out here and said you saw nothing, were you fibbing?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t want you to think I’d gone wacko.”

“Oh, I already do. Describe what you saw.” I did as I scanned the jungle shadows. “Don’t bother,” Darla said. “I didn’t see him at all, but I knew he was there and I know he’s gone.”


I had a hunch, and it didn’t take much doing to get Darla to play along. She went through her books until she came to a profile of Chan Bahlum.

“That’s him,” I said, tapping the picture. “Same as the head in the museum, same as our cabbie.”

“Brick, be reasonable. Chan Bahlum died thirteen hundred years ago.”

I could tell by the tone in her voice that Ms. Smarty-pants wasn’t so sure of herself any more. “Yeah, well, let’s find out.”

“How?”

“Ask him. We’ll go into town to eat — anyway, I’m hungry enough to eat a burro.”

The game plan was to have the desk clerk phone for a cab. If our Chan Bahlum lookalike wasn’t dispatched, we’d hang loose in Santo Domingo until we crossed paths. But there he was, parked next to our rental, leaning against a fender, smoking a cigarette. I hadn’t realized how short he was. Like other pureblooded Maya we’d seen, he couldn’t have been much over five feet tall, though he looked solid, like a cinder block stood on end.

“What’s next?” I asked him. “Sugar in the gas tank?”

He flicked his smoke onto the road and shrugged. “No hablo inglés.”

“Yeah, right. And my Aunt Hazel wears army boots.”

Darla told him in Spanish that we didn’t feel like driving and asked for a recommendation of a nice restaurant. He didn’t say a peep but took us to a decent-looking open-air cafe. Darla invited him to eat with us, to discuss a matter of great importance.

He shrugged again. “Hablo un poquito español.”

“That may be the truth, Brick. Spanish is still a second language to many Maya, who primarily speak their own tongue.”

“Maybe,” I said as we got out.

After I paid him, I held the obsidian knife tip in front of his face. “Lose something, Chan?”

He looked at it, then me, and said in English as stellar as mine, “Are you buying the dinner?”

“Off the top of the menu if you want. Anything your heart desires.”

He left his taxi where it was, parking regulations being kind of casual in Santo Domingo. We took a table, and he lit up. An unfiltered Camel, as a matter of fact. Darla saw me gaze fondly at his pack and moisten my lips, and said, “Brick, no.”

As soon as we ordered drinks, I said, “Okay, pal, who are you?”

He cocked his head toward Darla, cigarette hanging in a corner of his mug, a look I myself had copied from an old Cassavetes flick. “She understands the Maya concept of time.”

Darla told me, “The Maya believe that time is cyclical, an endless series of repeated patterns. The past always returns in a certain order. The past is the present and the future.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China, and what’s your beef with us?”

He chugged his Corona in one gulp and shook his head. “I dislike it when a tourist pokes his nose where it does not belong. This is twice. The other time was when a crackpot was preaching the space alien theory to his lamebrain followers. I could not tolerate this. I had to deal with him. I kicked him from the Temple of the Inscriptions to the Palace to the Temple of the Cross. You two are not in that crowd, are you?”

“Absolutely not,” Darla said.

“I get the program,” I said, nodding knowingly. “You have a bone to pick with tourists, and we’re your Ugly Americans du jour. You vandalize our car and lurk out in the woods in a tutu, trying to scare hell out of us.”

He blew a smoke ring. “A word of advice. Mind your own business.”

“Hey, murder is my business,” I snarled. “I don’t know the law in old Maya stomping grounds, but in this day and age there’s no statute of limitations. You throttle your old man, bub, sooner or later you gotta pay the fiddler, even if just in the history books.”

He held his fork like he was gonna use it on me. “Chan did not kill his father.” Before I could ask him how he knew, our food arrived. He dug into the biggest plate of enchiladas I’d ever seen, talking as he gobbled. “Before the flying saucer cultist lost consciousness, he said Lord Pacal was mentored by the king of Venus.”

“Okay, I don’t blame you for getting in the clown’s face, but why’d you act like a punk and slash our tires?”

He looked up from his food, which was already half scarfed down. “To let you know that our history is not to be trifled with.”

“I got Mr. Bahlum dead to rights. The proofs in the museum. Kan Xul, his kid brother with his ma and pa. Ring a bell?”

He laughed. “That?”

“What’s so damned funny?”

“I have nothing more to say to you.”

“That Miranda crap doesn’t wash with me.”

“Brick, please keep your voice down.”

He smiled. “You are angry. Are you going to hit me?”

“Don’t tempt me,” I said.

“Shall we step outside and get it over with?”

“We are outside. Kind of,” I said. “And I’d advise you to watch your mouth. I’m twice your size, you know.”

He shrugged, downed his last enchilada in one gulp, and said, “Of course if you do not have the guts.”

I came out of my chair like a Saturn booster. Darla rolled her eyes. “God, I don’t believe this.”

Before I could assure her I’d go easy on the little guy, he was leading us around the side, down stairs, and into what they had in mind when they coined the phrase “dark alley.”

“Look, I really don’t want to hurt you.”

He had his dukes up.

“If you children expect me to play the hysterical female, you’re sadly mistaken,” Darla said, arms folded. “I’m not cleaning anybody up afterward either.”

“Hey, let’s get on with it,” I said. “I’ll even give you the first punch.”

I didn’t figure he’d take me up on my offer, but he laid a fist into my ribs that felt like a sledgehammer. I made a whooshing noise like an airlock in a science fiction movie and landed on my knees. I couldn’t breathe, and he’d gone out of focus.

“Please listen to me,” he said.

“If you’ve had enough,” I gasped. Darla had a gentle hand on my shoulder in case I was inclined to bounce to my feet and finish him off.

“The representation of Chan Bahlum’s father, mother, and younger brother was of an event that took place after the death of his parents.”

Then to Darla he said, “You would have discovered the truth sooner or later in your readings. To the Maya, time is fluid. They were anointing Kan Xul to replace Chan after he died. Chan ruled until his death in your year 702. Kan Xul succeeded him. In 720 Kan was captured by one of Palenque’s enemies and sacrificed.”

Then to both of us, scanning us with eyes as dark and hard as obsidian, he said, “Lord Pacal died in a mysterious manner that you can perhaps explain to me.”

“Shoot,” I said, wincing.

“On the morning of your August 31, 683, he awakened ill in his stomach. It had been unbearably hot for days, so it was thought his nausea was a result of the heat. Soon he complained that his left arm was on fire, but no flame was seen. His chest felt to him as if ten men were standing on it. His breath came in gasps. Suddenly he was gone. Maya medicine could not save him. It is our belief that our gods sent for him uniquely. Is this true, or do others die this death?”

His obsidian eyes were shiny, damp. Darla and I looked at each other.

She said, “It is true. Lord Pacal was a great king for nearly seven decades. The gods could not invite him as they would an ordinary mortal.”

I thought he almost smiled, but I couldn’t vouch for that on account of after Darla helped me to my feet, he was gone. We went back to the café. We’d lost our appetites, but we stayed for coffee. We didn’t talk for a while. We watched this big fuss between the cops and a guy who said he was the rightful owner of the taxi.

Darla said, “It’s logical that they were unfamiliar with the symptoms of a heart attack. In that era they didn’t have the risk factors of coronary artery disease, and it was rare for a person to five long enough to die of a degenerative disease.”

I agreed. “Yeah. The biggest risk of heart trouble was having it sliced out of you. But answer me this, how come our cabbie didn’t know the signs that his ticker was kaput? These days twelve-year-olds take CPR training.”

She took my hand. “These days. Maybe those are the key words.”

“Maybe.”

“Case closed?”

“Case closed,” I said.

We headed out to Uxmal at oh-dark-thirty. We made a deal on the way. She wouldn’t pester me about culture if I kept my nose out of local business.

The rest of the trip she spent her days at ruins with her notebooks and camera. I reconnoitered the pool area with a cold one locked on my lips.

It was the best vacation of my life.

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