Ask for Me Tomorrow

Ten

About the time Aragon would be thinking of going to bed back home, Rio Seco was just opening up for the night. From the window of his hotel room he watched the street below. There were crowds of people, including whole families, in the cafés and markets and in a long line in front of the cinema. The curio and art dealers, the silversmiths and street vendors and sandal makers were starting the real business of the day.

Except for an hour off for dinner, Aragon had spent the evening waiting to hear from Harry Jenkins. He’d written a long letter to his wife and a short note to Smedler. He read the evening paper, La Diaria, and twice he went down to the desk to ask for messages. There were none. A third time he went down for a can of insecticide to get rid of the mosquitoes. What might have been an unusual request in most hotels was taken for granted at the Castillo. The insecticide was provided by the night clerk free of charge. “We have this problem with the bugs, sir. When we kill them, they come back. When we don’t kill them, they don’t go away.”

“I understand.”

The clerk looked surprised. “You do?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“That’s it, then. Lawyers understand everything, even bugs, yes?”

“Especially bugs,” Aragon said. “Good night.”

He sprayed the room until the mosquitoes were all dead. Then he had to open the window to get rid of the fumes, and a whole new swarm of mosquitoes entered. He settled down with some beer to match them, pint for pint. For every pint they took from him, he drank a pint to replace the fluid.

The din from the street below increased in volume. He almost missed hearing the knock on his door shortly after midnight.

He unlocked the door. “Mr. Jenkins?”

“That’s me, Harry Jenkins.”

“I’m Tom Aragon. Come in, won’t you?”

“Don’t mind if I do, seeing as you offered some reimbursement for my time and trouble. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Jenkins closed the door behind him. He was a small thin man in his mid-forties, dressed in a dark-blue suit frayed at the cuffs and so shiny across the seat of his pants that he looked as though he’d slipped in a pool of melted wax. “So you want to talk about B. J., right?”

“No. I want you to talk about him.”

“Same difference, like they say. After I read your note I sat me down to do some thinking. Here’s how it came out. One of B. J.’s old big-shot friends got a pang of conscience for not helping him out before and now he, or she, wants to buy a little peace of mind.”

“Go on.”

“Any damn fool knows that that’s the only piece of something not for sale in the world. So I figure it has to be a she, since they don’t go by the rules of reason. The question is, ‘What she?’ ”

“I thought the question was, ‘How much do you know and what is it worth?’ ”

“You have yourself a point there, laddie.”

Jenkins moved quickly and gracefully across the room, balancing on the balls of his feet like a featherweight boxer between punches. Everything about him seemed to be in motion except his eyes. They had no more life in them than patches of grey suede.

“If you read my note this afternoon,” Aragon said, “what took you so long to get here?”

“A place like this cramps my style. I don’t even have the clothes for it. I had to borrow the suit from a friend. It’s not much of a suit, but then, he’s not much of a friend, either.”

“Clothes don’t matter much anymore.”

“They do in my business.”

“What’s your business, Mr. Jenkins?”

“It varies. Right now things are slow, but I’m tossing a few ideas back and forth.” He smoothed his thinning hair across the bald spot on top of his head as if to protect the source of the ideas. “I can’t work at an ordinary job. Don’t have the stomach for it. Or the papers. The immigration boys are a nervous bunch. One little mistake and they jump you.”

“Jenlock Haciendas was more than a little mistake, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’d be the first to say it. I got in over my head. My other business ventures are less ambitious.”

“Sit down, will you?”

“Thanks.”

“Join me in a beer?”

“Might as well, I guess.” Jenkins stood at the window looking down at the street. “I’d like to get out of this crappy town.”

“Why don’t you?”

“There was a little episode in Albuquerque and maybe a couple of other places. Not everybody shares my philosophy of forgive and forget... How’d you track me down, anyway?”

“Went to the Quarry and hired a shouter. One of the inmates came over to talk to me.”

“Emilia.”

“Yes.”

“What’d she tell you?”

“That when she’s released she’s going to mash you like a turnip.”

“She will, too,” Jenkins said gloomily. “Unless I get out before she does. I always had a weakness for fiery women, but now I think I’m over it.” He took a sip of beer, grimacing, as though the stuff had the bitter taste of regrets. “I have to shake this town. The cops, the immigration boys, Emilia’s relatives — I can’t walk around the block without being hassled. My only chance is meeting up with a well-heeled sucker at one of the American bars. Funny how Americans who wouldn’t give each other the time of day in Chicago or Louisville become bosom pals over a couple of drinks at the Domino Club. Well, all I need is the right bosom.” Jenkins turned and studied Aragon carefully for a moment. “It’s too bad we know each other. It cramps my style. I prefer to deal with strangers.”

“I bet you do.”

“Friends are murder in this business... I wouldn’t mind another beer if you were offering any, laddie.”

“I’m offering.” Aragon opened another can. “How did you get mixed up in something as big as the Jenlock Haciendas project?”

“Innocent-like. I mean, I didn’t walk into it. I just stood there and it grew up around me.”

“Is that what you told the magistrate?”

“I tried to. My Spanish isn’t too good. Maybe he didn’t understand me.”

“Or maybe he did.”

“It was true, so help me. I’d been hearing plenty of talk about how Baja was due for a big boom as soon as the new highway was finished. I borrowed some money, rented a jeep and went down to have a look-see. Well, the boom’s on now and it’s big, so I was right about that. The wrong part was the location and B. J... To this day I don’t know how I managed to get lost. But I did. And that’s how I arrived at Bahía de Ballenas. Ever hear of it?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Well, there was B. J., living in a super-deluxe motor home and looking like money. A bunch of money. It went to my head. No drink ever invented could go to my head like that. It wasn’t like getting drunk alone and sleeping it off. B. J. stayed right with me. Every idea I came up with, he came up with an improvement. Then I improved on the improvement, until finally there it was, Jenlock Haciendas, bigger than both of us. I didn’t have sense enough to be scared. I was not only out of my league, I didn’t even know what game I was playing.”

“It’s called fraud.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Me, Harry Jenkins, who never wrote on anything he didn’t swipe from a hotel lobby, suddenly had his name on a fancy letterhead. Me, who never had more than a couple of hundred bucks in his pocket, was suddenly throwing money around like there was no tomorrow. It was the longest drunk a man’s ever been on — and not a drop of liquor, so to speak.”

“What sobered you up?”

“Tomorrow,” Jenkins said. “Tomorrow came. If it was the longest drunk, it sure as hell brought the biggest hangover. I won’t be over it until I get out of this place.”

“Where’s B. J. now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“I’m a lousy guesser. Look at my record.”

“Try.”

“I kind of guess he’s dead.”

“Why?”

“Some people make out okay in the Quarry but B. J. wasn’t the type. First off, he was the wrong nationality. He kept demanding his rights and bail and habeas corpus and a bunch of stuff they never heard of in this country and wouldn’t care if they had. Second off, he was a rich boy, spoiled rotten. He never had anything but the best all his life, and suddenly there he was with nothing but the worst. There we both were, only with me it didn’t matter so much. If sheepshead is all they give me to eat — hell, I eat it. B. J. threw up just looking at it. Oversensitive he was, and then some. Bled like a stuck pig if he got the slightest scratch. And scratch he did, laddie, scratch he did. The mosquitoes had a banquet on him every night. You could hear them flying around laughing as soon as the sun went down. Call it buzzing, humming, hissing, whatever. Down here they laugh.” He added with a touch of nostalgia, “One thing you could say about Jenlock Haciendas, we never had any mosquitoes there.”

“Why not?”

“No water. Tons of sea water but no drink water.”

“You should have thought of that before you started thinking of building a bunch of haciendas.”

“Oh, we did. B. J. said it was no problem. All we had to do was build a desalinization plant to take the salt out of the sea water. He put up the money, and I mean large money. He wanted the best. Me, I never heard of a desalinization plant before, but by God, suddenly there I was with the wherewithal, so I started building one. You know what I’d do if I had it to do all over again, laddie?”

“Tell me.”

“I’d take every penny and lam out of there. Nasty, you say? Not a bit of it. I would have been doing both of us a favor, like putting a plug in a sink where a heap of money was going down the drain. Down the drain, that’s how it was. Before you could say ‘desalinization,’ things began going wrong. The boom started and the price of everything doubled, tripled, quadrupled. Supplies had to come by boat, and mostly they didn’t. Work crews had to be trucked in, and so did water. Maybe one arrived, maybe the other, maybe neither. And all the time the government was making up new rules about building on the coast. Boy, I wouldn’t go through that again for a million dollars.” He added wistfully, “Which is roughly what I expected to make.”

“That much.”

“I told you, I was drunk, crazy drunk, without touching a drop. Well, at least I didn’t lose much except time. B. J. lost everything, shirt, pants and shoelaces. Funny about that man. He must have been over fifty then, but I swear he was like a five-year-old kid believing in everything, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy.”

“I don’t see you as a tooth fairy, Jenkins, though you’d be pretty good at extractions.”

Jenkins made a small sound like a mosquito’s laugh. “So I didn’t fit the role. Well, I never asked for it, either. I got sucked into somebody else’s dream. B. J. really believed in Jenlock Haciendas. In his mind’s eye the whole project was built and operating, the haciendas occupied, people playing on the golf course, swimming in the pool, sailing around the marina, even flushing their toilets. Sure, they sent both of us to jail for fraud, but with B. J. there actually was no fraud, just a big fat dumb dream... Well, that’s all over now and good riddance.” For the first time since he entered the room, Jenkins’ eyes brightened. “I’ve been thinking, if I could lay my hands on enough cash, I’d open up a fried chicken business here. Quality stuff only, both table and takeout service.”

“I don’t think you have the beard for it, Jenkins.”

“You may be missing out on a fortune. Mexicans are crazy about chicken and if we coated it with corn meal it would be sort of like a chicken tortilla. Roll that around on your tongue. Savor it. How does it taste?”

“It tastes like one of the residents of Jenlock Haciendas just tried to flush his toilet.”

“Hell, you probably don’t have the money, anyway. That’s a cheap suit you’re wearing.”

“J. C. Penney’s.”

“You got to think bigger than J. C. Penney’s, laddie. With a well-tailored suit you could make a pretty good appearance, sort of the ambitious but honest type.”

“Thanks. I’ll try it someday.”

“Nothing too extreme, remember. People distrust extremities. One of my own weaknesses was Hawaiian shirts. I should have known better. Who’s going to trust a man in a Hawaiian shirt with anything but a ukulele concession? Nobody. Not even B. J.”

“Would you like another beer?”

“I better be moseying along to the Domino Club or El Alegre. This is the best time of night for new contacts.”

“Suckers.”

Jenkins shrugged. “Same difference. I got to live, don’t I? And if the tourists didn’t have money to spare they wouldn’t be here, so it’s not like robbing orphans and widows... Oh hell, let the suckers wait. One more beer would be nice considering how we’re down to brass tacks, you and me. I don’t often get to the brass-tacks stage with people. I hope it doesn’t become a habit.”

“I don’t think you have to worry.”

The third beer increased Jenkins’ spirit of camaraderie. “Laddie me lad, what do you want to know? Name it. What’s mine is yours — for a small stipend, of course.”

“So you think B. J. died in jail.”

“He was a sick man, I told you. Cried a lot, couldn’t eat, shriveled up like a prune. The guards kept him pretty well doped so he’d be quiet and wouldn’t bother anyone.”

“Suppose he didn’t die but simply served his time and was released. Where would he be likely to go?”

“If he didn’t have a habit, back to Bahía de Ballenas, maybe. Only he had a habit, a big one. You can’t feed a habit by holing up in a little Mexican village. You got to get out and fight, hustle, beg, steal. Poor B. J. He was soft as a marshmallow; none of that would come natural to him.”

“Perhaps he had someone who’d do it for him.”

“You mean Tula?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Oh, she could do it, all right. She was hustling a couple of weeks after she hit town. But I doubt that a nickel of the money she picked up went to B. J. She was a taker, not a giver.”

“Why do you say was?”

“I don’t know whether she is or not. So to me she’s was until I find out for sure.”

“Can you find out?”

“Maybe. I never tried. Me and Tula weren’t real buddy-buddy. Know what she used to call me? Uncle Harry. Me, half a dozen years younger than her husband and still in the prime, so to speak.”

“What was her attitude toward B. J.?”

“As long as the money held out, she put on a show of affection. She even came to see him in jail a few times for what they call in polite society ‘connubial privileges.’ That’s probably where she got the idea of taking up the work professionally. On visiting days the hustlers flock around the jail like starlings. Tula just naturally followed the flock. There wasn’t much else she was prepared to do, she couldn’t read or write. I used to see her once in a while, all gussied up hanging around the cheap bars. She pretended not to recognize me. Good old Uncle Harry found himself de-uncled.”

“You don’t think she might have paid B. J.’s fine, or put up bail or bribe money?”

“Not in a million years would be my guess. But what’s that worth? Women are not reasonable creatures, so how can a reasonable man like me tell what they’re going to do?”

“Let’s assume,” Aragon said, “that Tula is still in town and you have the right connections for finding her.”

“Consider it assumed. And then?”

“I’d like to ask her some questions. Given enough time, I might be able to find her myself. But I don’t know the city, what name she’s using, where her hangouts are, or even what she looks like.”

“So how much is it worth to you if I ask around?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

Jenkins ran an expert eye up and down the J. C. Penney suit, the Sears, Roebuck shirt and the orange birthday tie from his cousin Sandoval, who was color-blind.

“You can’t afford that kind of money, laddie, unless the job is real important. Two hundred is pretty small potatoes for something real important. Let’s raise the ante to three hundred, fifty in advance.”

The deal was settled at $250. Gilly might squawk, but Aragon had the feeling that if she and Jenkins ever met, at the Domino Club or El Alegre, they would understand each other immediately.

Jenkins put the bills Aragon gave him in his coat pocket. “I could walk out of here with this fifty and you might never see me again. Did that occur to you?”

“Certainly. You won’t do it, though. You need the rest of the money to help you get out of town. There’s Emilia and the turnip mashing, remember?”

“Hell, how could I forget. One of those relatives of hers is probably standing right outside the hotel this very minute waiting for me to come out. It’s not fair. Me, I don’t have a relative in the world unless it’s a kid some place where I got careless... Did you know B. J. and Tula had a kid?”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“Crazy as a coot. Makes funny noises.”

“We all make funny noises. Some may be just a little funnier.”

“Is that philosophy or bullshit, laddie?”

“A little of both.”

“No matter. I try to avoid stepping in either.” Jenkins stood up. He was unsteady on his feet, and small round patches of red had appeared at the tip of his nose and on both cheekbones like the make-up of a circus clown. “I’d better start to work. That two fifty ought to set me up in Mexicali. Mexicali’s full of tourists, it’ll be a gold mine.”

“Stay out of real estate.”

“Oh, I can’t truly regret Jenlock Haciendas. It was a great place while it lasted.” It sounded like a fitting epitaph.

Aragon said, “Suppose you come back here tomorrow night and give me a progress report.”

“If that’s how you want it.”

“I’ll be waiting for you. Good night, Jenkins.”

“I have a nice feeling about you, laddie. You’re going to bring me luck.”