Beauty and the Beast

7

In the year 1621, Governor William Bradford of Massachusetts decreed that December 13 be set aside as a day of feasting and prayer to express the gratitude of the colonists for the bounty of the first corn harvest they’d had since landing at Plymouth Rock. The Indians invited to the feast brought gifts of venison and wild turkey, which the women served together with the fish, geese, and ducks the men of the colony had provided. There was cornmeal bread in abundance, of course, and journeycake and succotash and nuts and pumpkin stewed in maple sap. The colonists and their Indian guests spent three days in prayer, singing, and feasting. That was America’s first Thanksgiving.

In this part of Florida, the Calusa and Timucua tribes of Indians weren’t faring quite as well as their neighbors far to the north. The first white man they had ever seen was the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León, who came to the Gulf Coast in 1513, fresh from his exploration on the Atlantic side, where he had given Florida its name and claimed for Spain all the land upon which he’d set foot. Here on the western side, he met with fierce resistance from the Indians, and was forced to sail back to Puerto Rico without the gold he was seeking. He did not keep his promise to return until eight years later, in 1521, only to be welcomed by a poisoned Indian arrow that ended his life and his dreams of glittering riches and eternal youth. (If he’d still been alive today, he’d probably have joined my three investor-clients in their intended conquistadorial plundering of the natural riches of Sabal Key.)

But de León wasn’t to be the last of the Spaniards who came to Florida’s shores. In 1539, his countryman Hernando de Soto landed on what is now known as Stone Crab Key, looking for the same gold that had eluded his predecessor, a treasure the Indians seemed not to know existed. The fighting was fierce and bloody, causing a Spanish defeat so monumental that Spain thereafter called off any future gold-seeking Gulf Coast expeditions. Other white men, however, could not be dissuaded from coming to Florida again and again, bringing with them a delightful array of civilized treasures like smallpox and syphilis (the Spanish disease, the French disease, the English disease, depending on where you came from) and taking back with them a commodity more valuable than the elusive gold they constantly sought — the able young bodies of Calusan and Timucuan braves.

By 1621, when those Massachusetts white men and Indians were celebrating together at their outdoor tables laden with food and drink, the Calusans and Timucuans were well on their way to extinction. By the turn of the century, there were scarcely more than three hundred of them left on the coastline they had inhabited for two thousand years. To the north, in Georgia and Alabama, the formidable Creeks were having troubles of their own, with the British, who were desperately trying to free their territories of Indian claims. Forced to move southward (where they became known as the Seminole, alternately meaning “seceders” and “runaways” in their native Muskogean language), the tribe met little resistance from the decimated Calusan-Timucuan inhabitants. Indian met Indian on Indian ground and Indian triumphed. The Calusa and the Timucua were no more — but the days of the Seminole were equally numbered.

Florida did not become an American territory until the year 1822, after the United States government purchased it from Spain. Fourteen years after that, at the insistence of impatient homesteaders, the government began its War of Indian Removal, a “final solution” to rival that undertaken in yet another civilized country a century later. The Seminole Indian War, as it was more familiarly called, did not end until 1842 — three years before Florida was admitted to the Union as its twenty-seventh state. By then, those of the Seminoles who had not been butchered had been sent off for relocation on reservations in Oklahoma, where perhaps their descendants were today celebrating Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November, ever since a 1941 congressional ruling) with the rest of us true “Americans.”

My partner Frank insists that one day the archaeologists will unearth a fossil proving without question that the first human beings on American soil were Russians who had crossed over from Siberia to Alaska when the Bering Strait was still a land bridge. This monumental discovery, Frank says, will cause the Soviet Union to make immediate claim to all the territory encompassed by the United States, thereby triggering a legal tangle that will last for centuries and provide gainful employment for every lawyer on either side of the Iron Curtain. As a by-product, the archaeological find will end all possibility of nuclear attack, the Russians then being loath to destroy a land that is theirs by birthright. Maybe Frank is right. Or maybe he should tell it to the Seminoles.

Thanksgiving Day was cold and bleak and gray — perfect for three people who planned to leave for Mexico’s sunshine early the next morning. Susan dropped off my daughter at 10:00 A.M., by which time Dale and I had already breakfasted, cleared the kitchen table, and begun taking from the refrigerator the raw materials she and Joanna planned to transform into our midafternoon feast. Joanna was carrying a suitcase designed for a month in Europe rather than the nine days we planned to spend south of the border. When I asked her why it was so heavy, she shrugged and said, “I always carry a traveling iron whenever I travel.” Susan, catching a glimpse of Dale in the kitchen — where she was simultaneously poring over a cookbook and pulling pinfeathers from the naked turkey — surprised me by saying, “She’s quite beautiful, Matthew,” and then walked swiftly to where her Mercedes-Benz (part of the divorce settlement) was parked at the curb. Dale hugged Joanna, and Joanna hugged her back, and then both of them shooed me out of the kitchen with the admonition that too many cooks spoiled the broth.

I went into the small room I had furnished as a study and placed a call to Jim Willoughby at his home on Stone Crab. When I reported what I’d learned (or rather failed to learn), and told him I thought everyone had been lying to me, he immediately asked what had given me such an impression.

“Well,” I said, “their stories seem contradictory.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lying,” Willoughby said. “Besides, Matthew, I want you to remember something very important. The neophyte criminal lawyer will often fall into the trap of seeking a true murderer to replace his client, whom he believes has been wrongfully accused. That’s not our job. Our job is to show that our man is innocent of the crime, period. We don’t care who actually did it, Matthew. That’s a job for the cops once we get our man acquitted — let them find the maniac loose in the streets, do you see?”

“I don’t see that the two are mutually exclusive,” I said.

“Don’t go looking for a murderer,” Willoughby said more firmly. “Instead, go looking for people we can put on that witness stand to rebut the prosecution’s contention that our man is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s what we’re looking for — a parade of witnesses who’ll raise the question of reasonable doubt. That’s all we’re looking for. We want to know where Harper was and what he was doing while his wife was getting herself killed. I don’t know why you bothered going into all that shit about how he met her and when and where they got married, I really don’t see how that’s any concern of ours, Matthew. If you’ll stick to—”

“I thought if we could show how much he loved her—”

“A man can adore his wife in the morning and slit her throat in the afternoon. That’s a sad fact of life.”

“Why are these people lying to me, Jim?”

“If they’re lying, which of course you don’t know for a fact. Perhaps their memories are faulty — as well they might be if you’re asking questions about events that occurred a year ago, two years ago, which you shouldn’t be asking in the first place. Or perhaps they’ve got their own skeletons in the closet and they’re—”

“That’s just what I’m beginning to think,” I said.

“It’s not our job to rattle anybody else’s bones,” Willoughby said. “I don’t care if Andrew Bowen—”

“Owen.”

“Owen, was fucking Kitty Foyle and—”

“Reynolds.”

“And a dozen Chinese girls in Calusa’s only opium den, which to my knowledge does not exist. I’m interested in where the hell George Harper spent all day Sunday and Monday while his wife was first getting her brains beat out and then getting put to the torch. That’s what I’m interested in learning. If you can find me one person, male or female, who can testify that he or she actually saw George Harper in Miami at eleven forty-five on Sunday night, then he couldn’t have been here in Calusa beating his wife black and blue. And that’ll take care of the first part of the prosecution’s case, the alleged beating which they’ll attempt to tie in to the subsequent murder. And if we can find somebody who’ll say he was with George Harper on Monday night, why then the prosecution can shove its case, Matthew, and I don’t care how many of Harper’s gasoline cans they found at the scene, or how many of his fingerprints were all over them. A man can’t be in two places at the same time, that’s Newton’s Law or somebody’s. If we can prove where Harper was — and I hope to God it wasn’t here in Calusa — then we’re home free. So, Matthew, please concentrate on what we’re trying to prove here, and stop looking for skeletons in the closet, okay?”

“If there are skeletons, we should know about them,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because the state’s attorney is going to have a crack at any witness we put on the stand, and if those skeletons have something to do with George Harper, I sure as hell don’t want to be surprised by them.”

“Let me handle that when the time comes, okay?”

“No, Jim,” I said, “not okay. I don’t want any surprises.”

“What kind of surprises are you expecting?”

“I don’t know. But when people start lying to me—”

“I’ve already told you, that may only be—”

“And it may not.”

“Matthew, this is Thanksgiving Day, my brother and his wife are coming down from Tampa for the big turkey dinner, and that’s enough trouble for one day without you starting to sound like amateur night in Dixie.”

“I am amateur night in Dixie,” I said.

“Then change your act,” Willoughby said. “Unless you want our man to be the next turkey who gets roasted.”

“You know I don’t want that.”

“So trust me. I’ve had a lot of experience in such matters.”

Whenever anyone asks me to “trust” him, I usually run to hide the family silver. I listened now while Willoughby emphasized once again the sole matter that should concern me upon my return from Mexico — namely where and how George Harper had spent his time on the Sunday and Monday he claimed to have been in Miami.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’re doing a good job so far, Matthew,” he said. “Just don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees.”

“To coin a phrase,” I said.

“Huh?” he said.

“Nada,” I said. “I’ll talk to you when I get back.”

“Yes, do that,” he said. “Have a nice time, Matthew.”

One of the things I like most about Dale is her unpredictability.

Another is her spontaneity.

We had made love the night before (lengthily and satisfactorily, I’d thought) and had finally fallen asleep at two in the morning after promising ourselves similar and frequent passionate excursions during our nine days in Mexico. It was now 4:00 P.M. on Thanksgiving Day, scarcely fourteen hours later. We had consumed a meal that surely could have fed the entire population of Kansas. I had washed and dried all the pots and pans, stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, bagged and carried out the garbage, and taken Joanna to her mother’s house, where I’d exacted from Susan the promise that she would have her back to me by nine. I was still feeling logy and a bit drowsy as I pulled the car into my driveway, wanting nothing more than a little nap before I started packing. The sun had broken through at noon, and the temperature had reluctantly climbed to a shade above sixty-five, not quite warm enough to be lounging by the side of a pool in a string bikini — but that’s where Dale was, and that’s what she was wearing.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Get her home okay?”

“Yep.”

“When will she be coming back?”

“Nine.”

“Nine,” Dale repeated.

I should have detected a warning, or perhaps a promise, in the way she echoed that single word. Instead, I remained blithely unaware.

“What would you like to do now?” she asked.

“Take a nap,” I said. “How about you?”

“I’d like to practice,” she said.

“Practice?”

“For the beach in Mexico.”

She was wearing her hair tied at the back of her head with a green ribbon. I could not see her eyes behind the prescription sunglasses that shielded them from the sun. She lay quite still on her back, her body entirely relaxed and superbly tanned, a smooth even bronze against the white of the bikini. A pair of white, high-heeled sandals were on the terrace floor beside the chair.

“What’s there to practice for the beach in Mexico?” I asked, puzzled.

“What the ladies do here on North Sabal,” she said. I still could not see her eyes. There was a faint smile on her mouth.

“You do that in Mexico, you’ll end up in jail,” I said.

“I thought Puerto Vallarta was very chic and continental,” she said.

“It’s also very Catholic.”

“So are France and Italy. The ladies in France and Italy take off their tops, Matthew.”

“If you take off your top in Mexico, they won’t consider you a lady.”

“Didn’t Liz Taylor take off her top in Mexico?”

“I doubt it.”

“Mm,” Dale said. She was quiet for several moments. Then she said, “I’ll have to practice for here then. For when we get back from Mexico.”

I looked at her.

“Why don’t you sit down?” she said. “Sit down, Matthew.”

I took the chair opposite hers. Watching me, the smile still on her face, she sat up, and then reached for the sandals, and put on first one and then the other, and then rose suddenly, uncoiling the long length of her body, the high heels adding two inches to her already spectacular height. She reached up to loosen the ribbon in her hair, pulling it free like the rip cord on a parachute, unfurling a cascade of auburn hair that fell loose to just below her shoulders. She shook out the hair. She took off the sunglasses and placed them on the chair behind her. I saw her eyes.

“Tell me if I’m doing it right,” she said.

She turned abruptly then, and walked away from me to the far side of the pool, where low-growing mangroves and taller Australian pines shielded the house from the bayou beyond. There were people living on either side of us, but the owner from whom I was renting was known in the neighborhood as “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” a sobriquet applied after she had planted more trees, bushes, shrubs, and vines on her property than could be found on the entire six acres of Calusa’s Agnes Lorrimer Memorial Gardens. Whatever Dale planned to do, she’d be afforded a privacy she could never find on any beach in Calusa. I suddenly found myself very wide-awake.

At the far end of the pool, she turned and put her hands on her hips. “I thought I’d walk sort of innocently,” she said, “like this,” she said, “so no one’ll suspect what’s coming,” she said, and began undulating toward me as innocently as Delilah must have approached Samson, hands still on her hips, high-heeled sandals clicking on the baked clay tiles surrounding the pool, her breasts, captured in the flimsy string top of the bikini, bobbing ever so gently with each long-legged stride she took. I felt a vague, distinctly adolescent stirring in my jeans.

“And then, you know,” she said, “I’ll just sort of reach up behind me,” she said, “casually, no big deal, Matthew, just reach up behind me,” she said, still moving slowly and inexorably toward me, high heels clicking, belly gently rounded above the patch of white that shielded the contradictorily blonde hair of her crotch, arms going up behind her, bent at the elbows, “and just give the string here a little tug, you know, and let them just sort of... ooooh!” she said, and glanced down at her own breasts in mock surprise as they virtually exploded free of the scanty top. “Am I doing it right?” she asked.

She stopped stock-still some ten feet away from me, approximately half a pool length away from me, and put her hands on her hips again, one hip jutting. Her breasts, where the sun had not touched them, were a pale white, the nipples surprisingly erect. She stood that way for what seemed a long time, motionless, and then began walking toward me again in that same slow, tantalizing strut, her eyes never leaving my face, her hands moving lower on her hips, her thumbs hooking into the tight band of the bikini bottom.

“And then,” she said, “if I can find the courage,” she said, “and if I can quell my natural fear of the police, why then I might just, you know, slowly lower the bottom part, Matthew, just to where” (and she began lowering it) “the blonde hair begins to show, you know, just about to here, Matthew” (and she lowered it to just about there) “where you can see the, you know, the beginning of my—”

The telephone rang.

“Shit,” Dale said.

The phone kept ringing.

She stood there with her thumbs still hooked into the waistband of the bikini, her long fingers pointed downward in a triangle that framed the triangle of the string patch, the uppermost side of it exposing the faintest hint of the crisper blonde patch beneath it.

“Don’t answer it,” she whispered.

“It might be Joanna,” I said.

“No, it’s your fucking friend Bloom,” she said.

It was my fucking friend Bloom.

“Matthew,” he said, “something terrible has happened, I hope you’re sitting down.”

“What is it?” I said.

“Your man’s out.”

“What?”

“Harper. He’s broken out of jail.”

“What?”

“Stole a sheriff’s car parked out back, knocked the officer flat on his ass, Christ knows where he is now, Matthew. I’ve put out an all-points bulletin — excuse me, BOLO, I’ll never get used to what they call it down here. That’s a ‘Be on the Lookout For,’ it means every law-enforcement officer in the state’ll be looking for him, not that I think he’ll hang on to that sheriff’s car any longer than he has to. Matthew? Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said.

It was raining when we got to Puerto Vallarta, the kind of torrential downpour that one expected in Calusa during the summer months; when we’d left Calusa that morning the sun had been shining brightly. My partner Frank claims to like rain; he also claims to like snow. He says that the sameness of the weather in Calusa can drive a man to distraction, this despite the fact that he has lived through many a hurricane season there. Frank would have enjoyed the wind and the water that swept in through the sides of the windowless Jeep as Sam Thorn drove us from the airport.

Sam was wearing a yellow hat and rain slicker better suited to a Cape Cod fisherman than a retired Circuit Court judge, but he obviously knew his environment and he was the only one properly dressed for the wild ride to his villa. The rest of us were wearing what we’d worn in sunny Calusa that morning; none of us had expected to step off the plane into a goddamn typhoon. Dale had on blue jeans and a green T-shirt that matched her eyes; her long auburn hair flailed wildly in the wind, her face was wet, her glasses flecked with raindrops. Joanna had dressed identically in emulation and adoration — blue jeans, green shirt, even a locket that looked identical to the one Dale had around her neck. Her blonde hair was caught in a ponytail. She kept squinting her eyes into the wind and the rain. I, too, was wearing jeans with a casual sports shirt open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up over my wrists. The shirt was soaked through even before we’d driven out of the airport and onto the road that hugged the shoreline, where the wind blowing in off the Pacific was much fiercer.

Sam explained that this was unusual for Puerto Vallarta in the month of November. Sam said that the precipitation in November was supposed to average something less than a third of an inch, and the temperature was supposed to average seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit, twenty-six on the Celsius scale. For the past few days, he said, it had been rainy and cold. Very unusual, he said. Sam was a man in his midsixties, tall and slender, with a nose like a hatchet, and bright intelligent blue eyes, and a shock of white hair that somehow made him look younger than his actual years. He spoke with the precision one might expect from a former judge, weighing his words as carefully as if he were charging a jury, measuring them out as surely as justice itself.

The villa he had purchased (or rather leased for ninety-nine years: in Mexico, foreigners are not allowed to own real estate) was located six windy, rainy, shitty miles south of the center of town, perched high on a hilltop overlooking Mismaloya Beach. It took us fifteen minutes to get there, but it seemed more like an hour. “Here it is,” Sam said at last, and we stepped down out of the Jeep and passed through a wrought-iron gate to the right of which was a tile set into the wall and lettered with the words casa espina.

“Espina means ‘thorn’ in Spanish,” Sam said, and then shouted at the top of his lungs, “Carlos! Ven acá!”

Carlos was one-half of the live-in couple Sam had only recently hired and whom, he confided in a whisper, he would fire as soon as he could find a pair more suited to the job. Carlos did not speak a word of English. He came clambering up the stone steps that wound down the side of the villa for the height of its full three stories, almost slipping on the uppermost step and catching his balance in time to avoid what I was sure would be a fatal plunge to the highway far below and the beach on the other side of it. The villa had been built almost at the very top of the mountain, approached only by a winding dirt road that had been all but washed away during the last few days’ torrential rains, Sam explained, but affording him the privacy and solitude he wanted in his retirement. Carlos scrambled into the Jeep and began piling our luggage onto the tiled entryway outside the wrought-iron gate. In the pouring rain, we started our precarious way down the stone steps that led to the entrance door on the uppermost level of the house.

“The door is two centuries old,” Sam said, “almost as old as I am.”

We followed Sam into a room — and a view beyond — that caused me to catch my breath. We were on the dining level of the house — what Sam called “el comedor,” a spacious, open, terraced area that included the dining room itself and “la cocina ” off to the left. The floor was covered with tiles glazed a green as deep as Dale’s eyes, somewhat imperfectly cast so that they created an illusion of a swelling sea enclosed by a waist-high wrought-iron railing that defined the terrace and provided a sense of security against the rugged terrain dropping off below the room and the real sea far below that. The view was spectacular. To the left was the wide sandy arc of the beach with its fishing dinghies belly-side up against the rain, and its thatched palapas, and the jutting peninsula where (Sam explained) the company shooting Night of the Iguana had built a functional set later destroyed by fire for a scene in the film. “This is where it all started,” Sam said. “You can thank Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for what Puerto Vallarta is today.”

The highway curved past the ruins of the Iguana set and disappeared into jungle-fringed mountains that seemed to roll endlessly into the distance, each lush succeeding peak a fainter echo of the one before it. To the right of the beach and the highway that ran above it was the Pacific itself, roiling and tempestuous today, stretching as far as the eye could see, presumably to China itself, punctuated by a pair of huge boulders closer inshore, identified by Sam as “Los Arcos,” so called because of the natural arches that ran through them and under them. And there — suddenly on the horizon — a rainbow!

“Daddy, look,” Joanna whispered beside me, and took my hand.

“You brought the good weather,” Sam said, and grinned. “Let’s all have a drink. Toni should be back from town any minute.”

Toni was a nineteen-year-old Swedish girl, almost as tall as Sam, blonder than my daughter, braless in T-shirt and string-tie baggy white pants, and obviously Sam’s live-in au pair, judging from the way she embraced him after she’d swept into the villa and put down the armful of packages she was carrying. She shook our hands energetically when she was introduced and then excused herself (“For just one minute, yes?”) and, her arms full of the purchases she’d made in town, hurried down the stone steps leading to the master bedroom below the living room, on the same level as the guest wing, and similarly opening onto the poolside terrace.

“You should see our bed,” Sam said like the good judge he used to be, leaving nothing open to interpretation. “It’s round, like the one that Playboy guy has in Chicago.”

We were on the living-room terrace, sipping margaritas prepared by Maria and served by Carlos, who seemed to be ideal servants, causing me to wonder why Sam wanted to fire them.

“Toni speaks six languages,” Sam said.

The six languages she spoke were Swedish (of course), English, French, Italian, Spanish, and a little bit of Portuguese. When she joined us, she was wearing one of the dresses she’d picked up in town, a white lace concoction with peek-a-boo eyelets that did nothing to discourage the notion that she was completely naked under it. She was barefoot (“It’s better so not to slip on the tiles,” she explained) and carrying in her hand the low-heeled sandals she expected to wear to dinner in town that night. “I have already made a reservation for nine o’clock,” she told Sam, who accepted the information with a judgelike noncommittal nod. It was obvious — at a little past four in the afternoon — that Toni’s “minute” in the master bedroom had included a shower, a shampoo, a careful makeup job, and the donning of what she called her “wedding dress.” She explained, rather mysteriously, that there was an errand she had to attend to, but that she’d be back before seven, and perhaps we would all like to drive into town together then, to walk around a little or perhaps to shop (“I adore the shopping here!” she said, and rolled her big blue eyes) before we had dinner at La Concha, which, she assured us, and Sam affirmed, was the best restaurant in town. She kissed Sam briefly on the cheek, said, “See you later then, okay?” and whisked off up the tiled steps to the main level, her sandals dangling in one hand, her long legs flashing briefly before she passed out of view above. A moment later, we heard a car starting outside.

“I love her to death,” Sam said, and I thought of George Harper saying almost those identical words during his interrogation, and felt a sudden pang of guilt.

There were two spiders, each the size of a fifty-peso coin, on our bathroom ceiling. I wanted to spray them dead, but Dale informed me that they’d been there before us and were entitled to their space. She named them Ike and Mike. Every time I went into the bathroom, I checked to see that they were where they were supposed to be. They seemed never to move. Neither did they have webs. They simply sat there. I wondered how they survived.

On our first morning at Casa Espina, I began to understand why Sam planned to fire his live-in couple. We were all awake and bustling by seven-thirty, but Carlos and Maria did not come into the kitchen to prepare breakfast until almost nine, Maria explaining that she had misunderstood (although Toni had given her instructions in impeccable Spanish) what time we planned to have our first meal. The meal itself was worth waiting for — freshly squeezed orange juice, sliced papaya, eggs served with bacon unlike any I’d ever tasted before, crisp and only faintly salty, rich dark coffee brimming in pottery cups Sam had bought on his last trip to Guadalajara. Sam asked us if the people who manufactured the decaffeinated coffee Brim were still broadcasting their asinine television commercials, the ones in which the tagline “Fill it to the rim — with Brim” provoked gales of hysterical laughter, as though the actors had just heard the wittiest comment of the century. I told him I didn’t watch much television.

There were no television sets at Casa Espina. Neither was there a telephone. Sam had told me, when he’d invited us, that we could be reached at the Garza Blanca Hotel — perhaps a mile or two away on the road to town — where of course there were telephones, and where the hotel manager would be happy to send a runner to the house with a message. I had left the number with Cynthia, but I did not expect her to call except in an emergency. Sam told us now that he could have a phone installed, but he preferred not to.

“The thing I like best about being here is the utter sense of serenity,” he said. “Nothing disturbs it, unless you want to call the flock of green parrots that flies past the terrace at precisely nine each morning a disturbance. I can remember being back in Calusa, Matthew, that damn phone ringing every ten minutes. I’m happy to be away from it all. I’ll never go back.”

I, too, was happy to be away from it all. But, unlike Sam, I had to go back on the fifth of December.

On Sunday morning Sam awakened us at 7:00 with the announcement that we would have an early breakfast and then take a boat to Yalapa — a beach accessible only by boat — some two hours away. We boarded the boat — a ferry, really — at 9:00 A.M. and were in Yalapa before lunch, which we ate at a beachside restaurant called Rogelio’s, where a wandering peddler tried to sell Dale the identical abalone barrette she had bought in Puerto Vallarta for forty pesos less. On the beach after lunch, I met a man who suddenly reminded me again of what was waiting for me back in Calusa.

He and his wife came wandering up the beach, and spread a blanket beside us. She was the thinnest woman I’d ever seen in my life, with contradictorily enormous breasts swelling in the top of a brown bikini almost as dark as her tanned skin. Her hair was black. She smiled as she made herself comfortable on the blanket. Her husband smiled, too, and soon we were chatting. He told me he had worked for an advertising agency in New York before coming to Mexico eight years ago. He told me he had been accused of killing his wife in a fit of rage one night, and had been acquitted of the crime after a trial that had lasted almost two months. He told me he had quit his job soon afterward, selling all his worldly possessions, and moving down here to Yalapa with his former secretary — the wife who now lay smiling beside him on the blanket, her enormous breasts bulging in the scanty top of the bikini — where together they had found a happiness they had never known before. As he told all this to me, his eyes were twitching, and his mouth was twitching, and I sensed in him a loneliness so deep and so pathetic that it almost caused me to weep. We shook hands when the ferry blasted the signal for departure. I waded into the water beside Dale and my daughter, and as we boarded the waiting motor dinghy I thought of George Harper, who had broken jail and stolen a sheriff’s car, and I wondered what sort of loneliness he might be feeling just then.

The ferry left at 4:30 P.M. and we were back in Puerto Vallarta by 7:00. We ate dinner at a restaurant in town, and during the meal Joanna informed us that tomorrow was the big day, tomorrow she would wear her bikini for the first time anywhere in public, and she exacted from all of us the promise that we wouldn’t laugh. When we got back to the villa, all the womenfolk, as Sam called them, went promptly to bed, leaving both of us in the living room with cognacs and our chess pieces. Sam was white, I was black. Within ten minutes, he had me checkmated.

“What’s troubling you?” he asked.

I told him all about the Harper case. I told him about my conversations with Lloyd Davis and his wife, and Sally Owen and her former husband; I told him about having talked to Harper’s mother and the woman who lived next door to her; I told him about my unsatisfying conversation with Kitty Reynolds and my conviction that almost everyone I’d spoken to had been lying to me.

“Nobody lies unless there’s something to hide,” Sam said.

“But everybody? Does everybody have something to hide?”

“In a conspiracy, yes.”

“Come on, Sam, what the hell kind of conspiracy?”

“Dope?” Sam asked.

“No, no.”

“Florida’s second-biggest industry next to tourism. You say some of these people live in Miami?”

“Yes.”

“The local drug trade there is estimated at seven billion dollars annually,” Sam said. “Seventy percent of the cocaine, eighty percent of the marijuana, and ninety percent of the counterfeit quaaludes coming into the United States pass through the port of Miami from South America.”

“I don’t think Harper or his wife were involved in dope traffic.”

“How about their friends?”

“I didn’t get any indication of that, Sam.”

“Then why are they lying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, what else?”

I told him I’d asked Karl Jennings to track down the garage attendant who’d sold Harper the gasoline can and then filled it with five gallons of gas, told him I’d asked Karl to find out why Loomis’s prints weren’t on that can, and then admitted I was concerned over the fact that Karl hadn’t yet called to let me know what he’d found out.

“Did you leave the number at the Garza Blanca?”

“Yes.”

“Well, this is Sunday,” Sam said. “Thursday was Thanksgiving Day, and your office was probably closed on Friday...”

“It was.”

“You can’t expect him to have worked over the weekend, Matthew. Besides, he knows you’ll be back on the fifth, so even when he does have the information you requested — which, by the way, is sound prepar—”

“It wasn’t my idea,” I said. “Jim Willoughby put me onto it.”

“Is he the lawyer you’re working with?”

“Yes.”

“A good man, but a bit on the paranoid side. Skye Bannister’s the best state’s attorney Calusa ever had, and I’ve seen plenty of them, believe me. The way Willoughby bad-mouths him, you’d think...” Sam shook his head. “Anyway,” he said, “you’ll have the information on that can when you get home, I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose.”

“What would you do with it if you had it here?”

“Well — nothing.”

“Exactly. Relax, Matthew. Enjoy being here, enjoy Mexico City when you get there. You’ll be back in the Calusa salt mines soon enough.”

“Am I handling it right so far?” I asked.

“Your approach cannot be flawed,” Sam said, and grinned.

We finished our drinks. Sam rose and yawned, and said we might as well sleep late tomorrow since nothing was planned but a leisurely day of flopping on the Mismaloya Beach. Dale was still awake when I got to our room.

“What’s going on here?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Why is Toni tiptoeing around like a spy?”

“I didn’t notice her tiptoeing around.”

“You haven’t noticed all those secret whispered conversations in Spanish with Carlos and Maria?”

“No.”

“What’s going on?” Dale asked again.

We did not find out what was going on till Monday night at eight o’clock. Sam, Toni, Dale, and I — Joanna had finally got back from the beach and was downstairs frantically packing — were sitting in the living room drinking the piña coladas Carlos had made for us, when suddenly we heard the sound of several automobiles outside, car doors slamming, voices calling to each other, laughter, and — all at once — music. Toni was grinning from ear to ear as a dozen or more people, followed by a mariachi band, came down the steps from the main level and into the living room, all of them singing “Happy Birthday to You” at the top of their lungs, while the band played a distinctly Mexican accompaniment behind them.

“I’ll be a son of a gun,” Sam said, and embraced first Toni and then Dale and me, and then all the guests Toni had invited to celebrate Sam’s sixty-fifth birthday. Carlos and Maria — in on the secret, of course — had informed us earlier that dinner would not be served till nine o’clock, and they now paraded down from the dining level carrying pitchers of margaritas and piña coladas, followed by Maria’s sister Blanca, hired especially for the occasion and carrying a platterful of hors d’oeuvres. The mariachi band consisted of two guitarists, a trumpet player, a violinist, and a man shaking maracas, all of them wearing ruffled white shirts with blue silk scarves tied at the throat, sombreros large enough to float the owl and the pussycat out to sea, and shiny black suits, the trousers of which were decorated with tiny silver bells along each outside leg. They set up shop near the fireplace, and — encouraged by the margaritas Carlos served them and the general high spirits of the guests — launched into a medley of Mexican hits they knew far better than “Happy Birthday to You.”

“Was it a surprise? Did I surprise you?” Toni asked Sam.

“You are constantly surprising me, my dear,” Sam said, and hugged her close again.

Four of the invited guests lived there on the hill — a retired schoolteacher and his wife from Michigan, and a homosexual couple who had just built a $250,000 house as a retreat from the perilous climate of Connecticut, where they ran a motor lodge. The other guests lived in town, all of them along Gringo Gulch, some of them ninety-nine-year property owners, the rest renters. The couples broke down unevenly into seven Mexicans and five Americans; the odd man out (or woman as the case happened to be) accounting for the uneven breakdown was a Mexican married to a retired dairy farmer from Pennsylvania. She looked a lot like Carmen Miranda; he looked a lot like the man holding the pitchfork in the Grant Wood painting.

I was deep in conversation with him — I had never met a dairy farmer, retired or otherwise, in my entire life — when another car pulled up to the main gate of the villa. I thought at first that more guests were arriving. But Carlos came down the steps into the living room, and held a hurried conversation in Spanish with Toni, and then Toni came to me and said under the sound of the trumpet playing an old Mexican favorite even I recognized, “Matthew, it’s a runner from the Garza Blanca. There’s been a telephone call for you!”

The runner was actually a driver. The vehicle he maneuvered down the curving hillside road was a Jeep not unlike the one Sam himself was renting, except that it was brand-new and painted white and decorated on its side panels with the hotel’s distinctive colophon. The runner did not speak a word of English. When we reached the bottom of the hill and he made the turn onto the highway, I could still hear above us the sound of the mariachi band playing another chorus of “Cielito Lindo.” He drove a bit more recklessly than Sam did; we were at the hotel in seven minutes. A young Mexican woman wearing a long gown slit up the leg to the thigh turned to look at me as I approached the main desk where she was standing talking to the room clerk. I interrupted their conversation (“The Ugly American,” I could hear her thinking) and told the clerk I was Matthew Hope.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Hope,” he said, “would you call this number, please? You can use the booth on the left there. It is better to make it collect or to use your credit card.”

The number he’d scrawled on a piece of hotel stationery was Morris Bloom’s at the Public Safety Building in Calusa.

“Morrie,” I said, “it’s Matthew.”

“Hello, Matthew,” he said, “I’m sorry to break in on your trip this way, but this is important.”

“What is it?”

“I called your partner at home, he gave me this number I could reach you at in an emergency. I hope it’s okay, my calling...”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s fine. What is it?”

“I hate to be the one giving you this news, but I thought I’d better get to you right away. Your man’s still loose out there, we haven’t been able to find him, and now it looks like he’s killed another person.”

“What?”

“Sally Owen’s been murdered.”

“What?”

“Lady who lives next door found her at... what time is it there, anyway? How many hours difference is there?”

“It’s eight-thirty,” I said.

“Only an hour behind us, huh?”

“Morrie, tell me what—”

“Lady who lives next door went over there about seven o’clock our time, to return a pie dish, nice lady, walked in on bloody murder. She was lying on the floor near the sink. Her head was crushed, Matthew. With a hammer.”

“How do you know it was a hammer?”

“Found it on the floor next to the body.”

“What makes you think Harper—”

“His initials are on the hammer, Matthew. Burned into the handle. G.N.H. for George N. Harper.”

“Anyone could have burned those initials into—”

“Well, I know that. But if it really is his hammer, the way we think it is, then this is another one, Matthew, this is the second one. And I was thinking if you could make some kind of personal appeal to him, talk to him personally, then maybe we could get him to come in before he hurts somebody else.” Bloom paused.

“Before he kills somebody else, Matthew.”

“How can I talk to him if I don’t know where he is?”

“I thought you could go on television or something.”

“How can I do that, Morrie?”

He didn’t answer me.

“Morrie, I’m here in Mexico,” I said. “How can I go on television when I’m here in Mexico?”

He still didn’t answer me.

“Morrie,” I said, “the answer is no.”

“I was hoping—”

“The answer is no.”

“Before he does it again, Matthew.”

This time, I didn’t answer.

“Well, think it over,” Bloom said. “How’s the weather down there?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Think it over,” he said, and hung up.