Dress Her in Indigo (19 page)

Thirteen

THE HOURS spent on the Coyotepec Road had taken too big a piece out of Enelio Fuentes'

available time, and he said we would have to delay the exploration of the unmarked road until later.

He drove us into the center of town. The girls from Guadalajara had planned to spend the morning shopping and have a late lunch on the veranda at the Marques, where we were to join them if we got back in time. Otherwise we would see them after the siesta time. But it was too early for lunch. Enelio said he might as well clean off another square foot of his desk and see us later. We let Meyer off near the big camera store on Hidalgo and Enelio took me around the zocalo to drop me in front of the hotel. There was, by some freak of chance, a parking space available, so he braked and swung in.

"Momentito, my friend." He sat with his big hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead, frowning.

"One thing I did not know. I did not know I would be so busy, so many things would happen to keep me busy. So what. I have done, I have made you two hombres into tourist guides and taxi drivers for the three little crumpets. I had been telling my conscience, why not? What man could not have pleasure to be with the tiny little flock of bright birds? But I forget. You are here on a sad and serious kind of business, eh? My God, that blood on that dusty ground is enough to wake me up. What I am saying, if they are a burden, arrangements can be made."

"No burden, amigo. They are a good contrast."

"You are certain? Good!" He grinned and winked. "I tell you, those sisters they are ver' pozzled by you two. I am old and good friends with Lita a long time. They tell her the pozzlement and she whispers it to me. These girl on vacations, McGee, they are having a beautiful time. But what soch pretty ones want on a vacation is the chance to say yes or say no. They do not know what it will be. Much depends on the asking, eh? But they look back on a vacation, they can say, well, I am sorry or I am glad I said yes, or I am sorry or I am glad I said no. Margarita thinks Meyer is one of the great men of our time, and Elena is beginning to think maybe she is ogly, or she is using the wrong toothpowder. I tell you one thing, with these girl, if you do not know the new Mexican working girl, maybe you are afraid they are wanting a permanent thing, hunting for keeps. Forget it. This is a vacation. They take care of themself pretty good, and they were upset with me I should find dates with Americans before they met you, because the Americans they meet, they are too much interested in one thing only. Do as you please. I just say they are pozzled. But if you ask, if they say yes, I tell you it will be one hell of a distraction from this serious matter you are doing here. No, I do not want answers or conversation, please. See you later on, my friend."

And he went swinging out, putting the fear of the hereafter into a bevy of bicycles and motor scooters. I claimed a table for four on the hotel porch. Though it was nearing the busiest time of day, it was not as crowded as usual. There were far fewer of the college young. It was time to head home, sort the gear, and head back to school. I could overhear the tourist conversations, and quite a few of them were exchanging very lurid and distorted versions of sudden death on the Coyotepec Road. One beflowered matron was explaining loudly to her friends as she walked by that some hippie had shoved a knife into five fellow drug addicts and had been killed resisting arrest.

Suddenly Wally McLeen scurried up and plopped into one of the empty chairs. "Remember me, Travis? Wally McLeen? God, wasn't that a terrible thing that happened! Did you hear about it?

Two wonderful kids were killed this morning..."

"Mike Barrington and Della Davis. And a Mexican girl."

"Their skulls were crushed. Absolutely crushed. I knew those two kids. Not well, of course, because they didn't come into town often. They knew my Minda, just casually. They were very nice to me, actually, because they knew I was tying sincerely and honestly to keep from making any emotional judgments about a white boy and a black girl living together. I mean it is rough enough for any young couple to make it, even when they have the same heritage, isn't it? But you have to respect genuine emotion wherever you find it, I say. No one could be with them without seeing that they were in love and were so terribly anxious to make it work. Now the difference in race doesn't seem important at all, does it? Dying is the same for everyone. I understand that they think a boy named Jerry Nesta did it while deranged by narcotics. Do you remember when either you or Meyer asked me about Jerry Nesta and Carl Sessions? I since found out that they were in the same little group that came down together, that my Minda was in! Did you know the Sessions boy died?"

"We heard about it."

"From drugs, I understand. Well, if they were using drugs, I'm certain that's the reason Minda left the group the first good chance she had. Even if we couldn't communicate, I know she
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Tespected her body too much to abuse it with narcotics, but I will have to accept the very real possibility that she uses marijuana and probably LSD. I've been trying them from time to time, without really very much effect. But I have had some periods of a new kind of selfawareness, a sort of spiritual feeling of kinship with all living things and all of history. Knowing the effects gives me a better chance to relate to Minda when she comes back here, I think. I thought that Jerry Nesta might have known when she was coming back or where to get in touch with her, so I'd been looking everywhere for him. Do you know, I rode my Honda right past that place twice this morning, where it happened, once on my way to the airport- and once on the way back!" His eyes looked goggly behind the thick lenses.

"Wally, Wally. A Honda yet."

"I got one, a rental, as soon as I got here. It was pretty hairy for a while, those trucks and buses, but now I'm getting quite confident with it."

"And those beads, Wally?"

"Well... they're from the market. They're made of the vertebrae from the backbones of little fish, stained with vegetable coloring."

"And that is, or will be, a goatee?"

He laughed unhappily and felt his chin. "Guilty. I don't know what the boys would say back home. But it's like... a protective coloration, Trav These kids, if they peg you as a square, they are absolutely cruel and merciless. That's the part I don't understand yet, the cruelty. The very first evening I was here a boy made an absolute ass of me, just for sport, I guess. I'd been up and down this veranda all day and all over the zocalo and the market, asking every kid I saw if they knew Minda McLeen. I had just flown down from Mexico City that morning, a Thursday morning. And this young man asked me if I was the one looking for Minda, and he took me back into that bar lounge there, to one of those circular booths. The place was absolutely empty.

He was very mysterious about it and very cautious. He said he might know Minda and he might know where she was, and she might be in some kind of a jam, and so what was it worth to me to have him see what he could do to get her out of the mess she was in and turn her over to me. I must say I was suspicious. We finally made a deal that if he'd bring me some proof, like a note from her, I would give him five thousand dollars, and then give him five thousand more when he brought Minda to me. But he just never showed up again. It was a game, a story to tell about how he blew my mind. It's hard to forgive him, but I think I can."

"So the beads and the Honda and the goatee are just a disguise, so they won't try so hard to put you on?"

"Oh no! It's more sincere than that. I mean they'd see through that in a minute. Why, last night there must have been thirty or forty kids milling around this porch at midnight having a good-by party. Most of them went out this morning. And I was genuinely part of it, Trav. They talked to me freely. They knew I was trying to find Jerry Nesta, and one girl told me that he was in bad shape and living in some Mexican hovel in Mitla, hitting up the tourists for money to live on. But I thought he might have some crumb of information about where my Minda is and what day she planned to come back here. Do you think they would let me talk to him at the jail?"

"Why not?"

"But isn't he in isolation or anything?"

"No. He was able to prove he was here in town when it happened. He came back in the jeep and found the three of them dead."

"Then why would he be in jail? Answer that, will you?"

"Because his tourist card ran out and he's an indigent, Wally."

"Oh. Then what everybody is saying about him-"

"Is inaccurate."

"How do you know so much about it, McGee?"

"I dropped in. A social visit, but I got there too late."

"Oh. Well, I suppose I better try to see Nesta then. Well... thanks again." He got up. "And if you happen to hear anything about my Minda, anything at all, I'm right here in the hotel. Room twelve. You can leave a note in my box. I would appreciate it so much."

He'd been gone maybe two minutes when Meyer, with a straw bag full of little gift-wrapped items, sat down at the table and said, "Guess who nearly ran me down?"

"Wally McLeen on his Honda."

"If I didn't like you, McGee, I'd find it very easy to hate you. So you saw him. Okay, what struck me about him? What item?"

I tried the beads, then the goatee, but he smugly said no. "The best thing, the unforgettable thing was what I saw as he thundered by, jaw clamped. They glittered in the sun. Old-fashioned bicycle clips, by God, with his trousers neatly furled and held in place thereby."

"I envy you that vision," I said. I reported our conversation. I found that Meyer wanted to know more than I thought worth telling. He made me go back twice to the fellow who had conned Wally with the wild tale about Minda, and try to tell it in Wally's words.

"Whoa! Let me up, or at least tell me what you're after."

He gave me his most infuriatingly smug Buddha smile. "I would hate to think that a certain lady of noble blood romped you into permanent semiconsciousness, old friend. Nor would I like to believe that yesterday's lazy sun cooked the protein in your head. So why don't you take it from the top all by yourself, with one little clue. Just imagine that the fellow who wanted to peddle Minda to her father was named Rockland." And when he spoke again, several minutes later, he said, "Your face is all aglow with a look of rudimentary intelligence. Now try it out loud."

"McLeen said he'd been here since the first. So he could have arrived on the last day of July. That was a Thursday. It was the day that Rockland stayed away from the little nest on Calle las Artes all day long and part of the evening, and came back and asked for a loan of three thousand and made Bruce Bundy suspicious by not being sour about being turned down. So all of Rockland's troops had deserted him, and he had been tossed out of the trailer park, and he was trying to
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hustle a sizable piece of money anywhere he could find it. So maybe he spent a lot of time that same Thursday trying to establish contact with Minda McLeen. He would know where she was, but that house is a fortress, the Vitrier house. And neither girl would be very anxious to see Rockland for any reason, I'd assume. But let's say he did get in touch, or find out how he could get in touch later."

"You're recovering nicely." Meyer said.

"So Rockland had written off Bruce Bundy, at least as far as any willing donation is concerned.

So he decides to leave with the things that look most valuable, going on the basis that the Bundys of this world seldom blow the whistle. They would rather write off the loss than make it police business. But Bundy was too cute. And when Rockland tried to jump him, Bundy was too rough. Rockland got black-belted all to hell. It probably made him pretty sick. But he had to get out of there on Saturday to meet Minda."

"What would he be most worried about?" Meyer asked.

"I guess he would realize that if Wally McLeen located his daughter, that would end any chance of selling the information and delivering the girl to him for a price."

"So we have a gap in the sequence. Better than twenty-four hours, and we have Bix and an American up on that mountain Sunday afternoon, parked and both out of the car and talking.

Because it was Bundy's yellow car, we can assume it was Walter Rockland with Bix. He had to have a way to get down off the mountain. He could walk it after dark. But it would be full daylight before he could get down to the valley floor."

"Or somebody picked him up, by arrangement."

"He'd run out of people," Meyer said. "And if it was by arrangement, then there would have to be the assumption that he knew she would take off with the car and wouldn't make it all the way down. How could he be sure she wouldn't? What would the motive be?"

"Then there's the next gap until Tuesday morning, when he took the camper out of Bundy's shed." Meyer shook his head. "It doesn't fit together: None of it. We just don't have enough of the missing pieces to even be able to guess how many other pieces are missing. Unless Jerome Nesta is willing to talk freely, we might as well go home. And maybe even if he does talk it won't be helpful."

Just then the Guadalajara sisters came clattering and squealing down upon us, laden with purchases, and there was much arrangement of girls and packages. They were still avid with the lust and fury of shopping, and they made expensive burlesques of total exhaustion, then dived into the bags and bundles to open the small ones for the reassur ance of our admiration, and pluck open the corners of the big ones to show the pattern and texture of bright fabric.

And where is Lita? Ah, there was someone here in this city she had to call, an odd couple who were friends of her mother, and she had been putting it off, so at last she called and they had asked her to come to have lunch with them, and it seemed as good a time as any, so she had phoned Enelio and informed him and had gone to meet the old couple. So Enelio would not join us either.

The sisters were both thirsty and famished, so as soon as a drink came they ordered lunch, and
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