Ask for Me Tomorrow

Fourteen

It was almost midnight when Aragon’s call to his wife in San Francisco was finally put through. Once the connection to the hospital was made, he had to hang on the line for another five minutes while Laurie was tracked down and brought to a phone.

She sounded breathless. “Hello, Tom?”

“How did you know it was me?”

“The operator told me. She recognized your voice. She thinks it’s cute.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

“You roll your r’s a bit too much.”

“Rrrrreally?”

“I don’t mind. I roll mine, too, being Scottish.”

“Let’s roll our r’s together.”

“That sounds dirty,” Laurie said. “I’m sure you didn’t mean it that way.”

“Are you?”

“Well, sort of sure. Tom, have you been drinking?”

“Just enough to ease the pain of reporting in to Gilly, the Dragon Lady.”

“Is she that bad?”

“I don’t know. And the more I talk to her, the more I don’t know.”

“You have been drinking. In fact, it sounds as if you’re at a party. Are you?”

“I may be the only person in Rio Seco who isn’t,” Aragon said. “This is when all the natives start whooping it up. Men, women, children, dogs, donkeys, anything that can move is out moving.”

“Would you like to be whooping it up with them?”

“No. I prefer to sit and talk to my beautiful wife who rolls her r’s.”

“I think you’re a dirty young man.”

“You should know, lassie.”

“That’s the first time you’ve ever called me lassie,” she said. “You sound sort of funny, Tom. What’s the matter?”

“It’s a long story, involving someone I liked... I have a medical question to ask you. Can you spare a minute?”

“Ten or so. I’m on my break, in the interns’ lounge.”

“What do you know about hallucinogenic drugs?”

“More than I want to, in one way. Not enough, in another. We’ve had kids brought in here so stoned we thought they were hopeless mental cases until the stuff wore off. Sometimes it didn’t. Last month an eight-year-old boy died of respiratory failure after an overdose of mescaline. He was never able to tell us how much he took or where he got it. His parents are both users, involved in some kind of consciousness-raising meditation, but neither of them would admit anything. In fact, they threatened to sue the hospital... Exactly what do you want me to tell you?”

“Just keep talking.”

“The trouble is that so many new hallucinogens are available now in addition to old stand-bys like hashish and LSD. Their street names are often enticing — Cherry Velvet, Angel Dust, China Dolls. The lethal doses vary tremendously and there is no real antidote. If the victims are in a state of great excitement, we calm them down with tranquilizers or barbituric acid derivatives, or pump their stomachs if there’s a chance some of the drug hasn’t been absorbed into the system. Ordinarily, though, we simply provide custodial care until the effects wear off. Does this sound like a lecture?”

“I asked for it. Go on.”

“In addition to the new drugs, we’re faced with combinations of old ones, or mixtures of old and new, which can be lethal. A tolerable amount of cocaine taken at the same time as a tolerable amount of methedrine becomes intolerable... This someone you liked, is he dead?”

“He was killed in a fall from a bridge. The police claim it was an accident. In a broad sense they’re right. If someone tampered with the brakes of my car and I couldn’t stop in time to avoid a collision with a truck, it would be an accident. I think someone tampered with Jenkins’ brakes. About forty-five minutes before I found him, he called me from a nightclub to postpone a date we’d made. He said he’d met someone with money to invest in Mexico and that he’d sold him the idea of investing in a chicken tortilla business. I was skeptical. I knew Jenkins was anxious to leave town before his girlfriend got out of jail and I didn’t want him to leave until he gave me the rest of the information he’d promised me. I went to the nightclub and found Jenkins in pretty bad shape. He was vomiting, sweating profusely and breathing very rapidly. He seemed to be out of his head. Or rather, in and out, mainly out. He recognized me briefly and talked to me.”

“Did he ask you for anything?”

“Help. He asked me for help and I couldn’t—”

“I meant something specific, a drink of water, perhaps.”

“He asked me for some water. He even tried to get some for himself out of a fountain. The fountain was dry.”

“Go on.”

“I went to find help for him,” Aragon said. “I thought he’d stay there at the fountain until I came back. He didn’t. He started running away when he saw me again as if he was trying to escape from an enemy. I ran after him. He was probably heading for home, he lived on the other side of the bridge. Well, he didn’t make it. Suddenly he went to the railing, leaned over and fell.”

“Did he seem dizzy?”

“Crazy, dizzy, how do you tell the difference?”

“Vertigo and disorientation are both signs of LSD poisoning. So are the other symptoms you mentioned — profuse sweating, very rapid pulse, nausea and vomiting, dryness of the mouth, dilation of the pupils. An autopsy might reveal traces of LSD in the urine.”

“There won’t be an autopsy. He’s already buried. And the bottle he was drinking from is in a pile of rubbish with a hundred other bottles like it, and the man he was drinking with can’t be identified, let alone questioned.”

“Is your story the only evidence of foul play?”

“My story is not evidence. Even if it were, even if the police were certain that Jenkins was murdered, it wouldn’t concern them much. He was unimportant, an ex-convict with no money and a warrant waiting for him in Albuquerque and maybe a dozen other places. He was low man on the totem pole. There was no way up, no way down. The only way was out, to grow wings and fly out.” I met this pigeon... the chicken tortilla business is a winner... the hustlers flock around the jail like starlings... I’m chicken birdie, lean fly. “He talked a lot about birds. I mean, they came naturally into his conversation more than into most people’s. He may even have been trying to fly when he went off the bridge.”

“That’s not uncommon with LSD.”

Aragon heard a faint tap-tap-tap on the line and he knew Laurie was drumming her fingers on the table or desk the way she did when something was bothering her and she was trying to straighten it out in her mind. He said, “Okay, what’s the matter?”

“The man who gave Jenkins the LSD, or whatever, had no way of predicting that Jenkins would either attempt to fly or suffer an attack of vertigo just as he happened to be crossing a bridge. He was betting on a very, very long shot. That’s dumb.”

“So we have a dumb murderer. They’re not, as a class, noted for brains.”

“Or else the bridge thing wasn’t actually necessary and the man was sure Jenkins had already ingested a lethal dose. He could have been waiting around for Jenkins to pass out when you appeared at the club and scared him off... You have to consider a third possibility, too.”

“Such as?”

“There wasn’t any murder or any murderer. A couple of guys were getting their kicks by mixing drinks and drugs, like the housewife taking her Valium with a glass of muscatel or the high school kid carrying a flask of vodka to wash down the rainbows he can buy in the hall for a quarter apiece. Alcohol is usually half of the lethal mixtures in the cases that come our way.”

“Jenkins was drinking beer—”

“Mild, but still alcohol. Drink enough and you’re drunk.”

“—and only one bottle, according to the bartender. The man with him was someone Jenkins hoped to con out of enough money to get him to Mexicali. He needed all his wits about him. He wasn’t likely, under the circumstances, to mess around with any drugs or to break his pattern of nursing along one beer for a whole evening.”

“So where are we?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “I’ll be going back to Santa Felicia either tomorrow or Friday. The Dragon Lady has asked me to check the American consulate here for any record of her ex-husband. After that I’ll head for home and forget all about Jenkins and bridges and B. J. and Tula, the whole enchilada.”

“No, you won’t.”

“How do you know I won’t?”

“You’ve always liked enchiladas.”

“I can take them or leave them.”

“You’d better leave this one,” she said. “I mean that seriously, Tom. You should be in court handling a complicated tax case or somebody’s nice messy divorce.”

“This is somebody’s messy divorce, or was at the beginning. Now it’s something even messier, something weird, crazy. I’m getting bad vibes.”

“I speak as a doctor — there’s nothing you can do for bad vibes except walk away from their source. So start walking.”

“Tomorrow. Friday at the latest. May I ask you one more question?”

“You will, anyway.”

“Is LSD readily accessible?”

“Here in San Francisco you can practically buy it over the counter if you go to the right counter. In Mexico, the whole drug situation is pretty murky. Officially, narcotics and hallucinogens are illegal. Yet it’s well known that mescal buttons and high-grade marijuana are widely grown. Less well known is the fact that opium poppies are cultivated just as successfully as they are in Turkey. The heroin extracted from them is not white like the stuff grown in Turkey. It’s a peculiar color, that’s why they call it Mexican Brown. It’s equally strong, and a hundred times more dangerous because it’s so much easier to smuggle into the country. There are nearly two thousand miles of border, most of it unguarded... But I haven’t really answered your question. Maybe I was just postponing admitting that I don’t know how accessible LSD is in Rio Seco. My guess is, not very. It’s a product of labs, not fields. An American like Jenkins would be more likely than a Mexican to know about it and buy it.”

“Good.”

“Why good?”

“It fits in with what I’ve thought since the beginning, that the man with Jenkins at the Domino Club was an American and the bartender’s description of him was phony. I’d better go and pay another call on Mitchell. He plays bartender, but I’m pretty sure he’s part owner of the club.”

“It’s terribly late. And if Mitchell lied before, why shouldn’t he lie again? You can’t choke the truth out of him.”

“He was bribed. I’ll rebribe him.”

“Tom, I hate the idea of your mingling with people like that in a place like that.”

“I grew up in a barrio with people like that. I didn’t even know there were any other kinds until I reached high school.”

“Don’t give me any of that macho bull.”

“Okay, cut out the maternal bit. Bargain?”

“Some bargain,” she said. “You do what you want and I’m too far away to stop you.”

“How would you stop me, fair means or foul?”

“Diseases aren’t the only things you learn about in med school. Definitely foul.”

“I’ll take you up on that some time.”

“Tom, listen—”

“Stop worrying about me. I haven’t been in a fight for ten years. Or five, anyway. I promise to be sensible, cautious, alert, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

“It would have been more reassuring without all those et ceteras,” she said coolly. “And if you bring up that barrio stuff once again, I’ll scream.”

“You can’t. You’ll scare your patients.”

“There aren’t any patients in here. Just a couple of interns so tired they wouldn’t wake up if a bomb exploded.”

“Anyway, thanks for the information about drugs. I truly appreciate it.”

“How truly?”

“I’ll bring you a present, a great big sombrero to hide all those brains of yours. Us macho men like dumb dames.”

“Go back to your enchilada. I hope you get heartburn.”

“I love you, too.”

It was one o’clock, the peak of the evening in the Domino Club district. Before going inside, Aragon stopped to talk to the hustlers waiting across the street. There were about half a dozen left by this time. Most of them merely looked blank when Aragon mentioned the name. Tula Lopez. Only one, a girl about seventeen, said she used to know a Tula years ago when she first went into the racket. The Tula she knew must be very old by now, maybe twenty-five, and surely Aragon wouldn’t be interested in such a hag.

“I just want to talk to her about a family matter. Can you put out the word?”

“How much word?”

“Twenty dollars. My name is Aragon and I’m staying at the Hotel Castillo.”

“Sure, okay.”

“What’s your name?”

“Blondie.”

“Blondie?”

The girl had jet-black hair reaching to her waist. “Why do you look funny? Don’t you like that name?”

“I like it fine.”

“So do all the other men. They laugh, it makes them feel good, I don’t know why. But they give me more money when they laugh and feel good. How about you?”

“We agreed on a price.”

When she opened her purse to deposit the twenty-dollar bill Aragon gave her, he saw the gleam of a knife. Blondie wasn’t taking any chances on a customer getting away without paying.

He went inside the club. Mitchell saw him coming. He wasn’t happy about it: “I thought you left town.”

“I stayed around to pick up some loose ends.”

“Loose ends is what we got plenty of. Take your pick.”

“You lied to me, Mitchell.”

“I lie a lot,” Mitchell said. “I took a course.”

“How much were you paid?”

“What for? Who by?”

“The American with Jenkins last night. How much did he pay you to forget he was here?”

“Nobody has to pay me to forget. I took a course in that, too. It’s called Elementary Survival. I recommend it to you.”

“Maybe I could hire you as a tutor. What do you charge?”

“Don’t waste your money. You’d flunk the first lesson, how not to ask questions. The second lesson’s even harder — how to spot a rat fink, get rid of him and stay in business. Adios, amigo, nice knowing you. Don’t hurry back.”