A Deadly Shade of Gold (19 page)

"Mister McGee?"

"Yes?"

"There was some trouble in the village tonight?"

"What do you mean?"

"Over a village girl?"

"Oh. Yes, a young fellow started waving a knife around and I knocked it out of his hand."

"And you were drinking?"

"You are beginning to puzzle me, Arista."

"Forgive me. I do not want you to be hurt, sir. It would be bad for our reputation here. Perhaps you were fortunate tonight. Those men are very deadly with knives. Forgive me, but it is not wise to... to approach the girls in the Tres Panchos. There has been much violence there. People tell me things, and the story worried me, sir. I believe a girl named Felicia Novaro was involved."

"People tell you very complete things, I guess."

"Sir, she is a wild reckless girl. There is always trouble around her. She worked for me here.

Her... behavior was not good. She cannot be controlled. And... that is a squalid place, is it not, sir?"

"It seemed very cheerful to me."

"Cheerful?" he said in a strained voice.

I clapped him on the shoulder. "Sure. Local color. Song and dance. Friendly natives. Salt of the earth. Pretty girls. Man, you couldn't keep me away from there. Goodnight, Senor Arista."

He stared at my arm. "You have been hurt?"

"Just chawed a little."

"B-Bitten? My God, by a dog?"

I gave him a nudge in the ribs, a dirty grin and an evil wink, and said, "Now you know better than that, pal." I went humming off to my room.

As SOON as I turned my room lights on, Nora came out of the darkness of her room, through the open doorway, wearing a foamy yellow robe with a stiff white collar. She squinted at the light, and came toward me, barefoot, looking small and solemn and strangely young.

"You were gone so long I was getting.... What's wrong with your arm?"

"Nothing serious. It's a long story."

I held her in my arms. After a little while she pushed me away and looked up at me, wrinkling her nose. "Such strange smells. Alcohol, and kerosene and some kind of terrible cheap perfume.

And smoke and sort of a cooking grease smell... Darling, you are a veritable symphony of smells. You are truly nasty."

"It is, in some ways, a nasty story."

"I am particularly curious about the perfume, dear."

"First I need a shower."

She sat on the foot of my bed and said, primly, "I shall wait."

When I came out of the bathroom, the lights were out, and she was in my bed. When I got in, she moved into my arms and said, "Mmmm. Now you smell like sunshine and soap."

"This is quite a long story."

"Mmmmhmmm."

"When I got there, that bartender with the mustache presented me with the change I left on the table when.... Are you listening? Nora?"

"What? Oh sure. Go ahead."

"So I split it with him. That was a popular gesture. He bought me a free drink.... I'm not sure you're paying attention."

"What? Well... I guess I'm not. Not at the moment. Excuse me. My mind wanders. Let me know when you get to the part about the perfume."

"Well, the hell with it."

"Yes, dear. Yes, of course," she said comfortably.

After breakfast, Nora and I walked up the winding road past the houses on the knoll beyond the boat basin. It was a wide graveled road with some kind of binder in it to make it firm. The drainage system looked competent and adequate. The homes were elaborate, and for the most part they were well screened from the road by heavy plantings, beautifully cared for. Each was so set on the hillside as to give a striking view of the sea. Gardeners worked in some of the yards.

There were entrance pillars at the private driveways. There were small name plates on the entrance pillars. I made mental note of the names. Martinez, Guerrero, Escutia, in that order, and then Huvermann-who had to be the Swiss by process of elimination. Arista had said the Californian was not in residence, and I could see, in a graveled area, a man carefully polishing a black Mercedes, and a swimming pool glinting a little further away. The next one was Boody.

There was a chain across the drive.

The last one was Garcia, the big pink one at the crest of the knoll. The grounds were walled. I made Nora walk more slowly. The wall, better than ten feet high, curved outward in a graceful concavity near the top. At the top, glinting in wicked festive colors in the sun, I could see the shards and spears of broken glass set into cement. Any trees which had stood near the wall on the outside had been cleared away. The wall was cream white in the morning light, following the contour of the land. It did not enclose a very large area, perhaps less than the area Garcia owned. The beauty of it obscured the fact that it was very businesslike.

I noted another interesting detail. The wall and the big iron gates were set back from the road, and the private drive, with a high cement curbing, made a very abrupt curve just before it reached the gates. No one was going to be able to get up enough speed to smack their way through in anything less than a combat tank. A man moved into view and stared morosely at us through the bars of the spiked gate. He wore wrinkled khaki, a gun belt, an incongruous straw hat-one of those jaunty little narrow-brim cocoa straw things with a band of bright batik fabric.

He had a black stubble of beard.

I found his appearance promising. Guard morale is one of the most difficult things in the world to maintain. A long time of guarding against no apparent danger is a corrosive boredom, and is usually reflected in the appearance of the guards. When they are smart and crisp and shining, they are likely to be very alert.

In a low voice I told Nora what to call out to him. She turned to him and in a clear, smiling voice, called out, "Buenos dias!"

He touched the brim of the hat and said, "Buenuh dia."

Beyond the far corner of the wall, at a wide turnaround area, the road ended. "He's a Cuban," I said to Nora. "I didn't think he would answer me if I tried it."

"How can you tell?"

"They speak just about the ugliest Spanish in the hemisphere. You hear the best in Mexico and Colombia. The Cubans leave the s endings off words. They use a lot of contractions. They make it kind of a guttural tongue. A friend of mine said once that they sound as if they were trying to speak Spanish with a mouth full of macaroons."

We went back down the road. The guard looked out at us again, almost wistfully. He looked as if he wanted to walk down the road, go to the village and see how much pulque he could drink.

But he had to hang around the gate in all the morning silence, listening to the bugs and birds, counting the slow hours of his tour of duty.

We were around a curve and out of sight of the Garcia place when we came to the Boody house.

I stood by the chain and looked in. The hotel people weren't doing too good a job on
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maintaining the grounds. It looked scraggly. The drive needed edging. I stepped over the chain and said, "Let's take a look."

She looked a little alarmed, but came with me. It was a pale blue house, with areas of brick painted white. It was shuttered. Within the next year it was going to need some more paint. The pool area behind the house was, despite an unkempt air, a nymphet's dream of Hollywood. A huge area was screened. The pool apron was on several levels, separated by planting areas. There was a bar area, a barbecue area, heavy chaises with the cushions stored away, a diving platform, a men's bathhouse and women's bathhouse with terribly cute symbols on the doors, weatherproof speakers fastened to palm boles, dozens of outdoor spots and floods, a couple of thatched tea houses, storage bins, big shade devices made of pipe, with fading canvas still lashed in place.

The pool was empty, the screening torn in a few places, the bright paint peeling and fading. It all had a look of plaintive gayety, like an abandoned amusement park. The effect was doubled when I remembered what had bought this hideaway paradise. Arista had said Boody was in television.

Thus the armpits, nasal passages and stomach acids of America had financed this unoccupied splendor. In an L shaped building beyond the pool plantings were garages and servants'

quarters. There was one red jeep in residence. We made our comments in hushed tones.

I took a closer look at the rear of the main house. An inside hook on a pair of shutters lifted readily when I slid the knife blade in.

"Are you out of your damned mind?" Nora asked nervously.

"I'm just a delinquent at heart," I said. The windows behind the open shutters were aluminum awning windows, horizontal, with the screen on the inside. I closed the shutters and wedged them shut with a piece of twig, and continued my prowl.

"Do you want to get in there? Why?"

"Because it's next door to Garcia."

"Ask a stupid question," she said.

It finally turned out that the front door was the vulnerable place. The big brass fittings were more decorative than practical. The sturdy plastic of a gasoline credit card slid the latch out of the recess in the frame. I invited Nora in. She shrugged and came in.

Bright spots of light came through openings in the shutters. The big living room was persuasively vulgar, white rugs, white art-movie furniture, and some big oil portraits on the wall in kodachrome technique, of a jowly man looking imperious, a pretty dark-haired woman with a look of strain around her mouth; and two little girls in pink sitting on an upholstered bench with their arms around each other. The Clan Boody. There was a white concert grand piano, and as I passed it I ran a fingernail down the keys.

Nora started violently and said, "My God! Don't do that."

The basic plan of the house was pleasant. Big bedrooms, playrooms, studio, library, big kitchen and service area. It was moist and hot and still inside the house, with a smell of damp and mildew. The immediate procedure was to set up rapid access. She watched me rig the door at the side, a solid door opening onto the pool area from the bedroom wing. It was locked by an
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inside latch, and the aluminum screen door beyond it was latched. I unlocked them both. I found a piece of cord in the kitchen and tied the screen door shut. Anyone checking the house would find it firm. But if I wanted to come in in a hurry, all I had to do was yank hard enough to break the cord, then latch both doors behind me.

"I don't understand you," Nora whispered.

"The gopher acts like a very sassy and fearless beast, honey. But he is all coward. He spends a lot of time and labor preparing escape tunnels he hardly ever gets to use. But sometimes he needs one, and that makes him feel real sassy. Just settle down. You saw me try the lights and the water.

If they were coming back in a hurry, they'd have them turned on, and the hotel would get the grounds in better shape and fill the pool and so on. Now let's check a couple of things."

I used my lighter to look at the cans in the storage pantry. "See, dear? Plenty of canned fruit juices. And stuff that doesn't taste too bad cold-beans, beef stew, chili. This is an advance base, next to unfriendly territory. Maybe we never use it."

She followed me to the library, staying very close to me, saying, "It just makes me so damned nervous, Trav.

" When I sat at the desk and began to look through the papers in the middle drawer, she sat on the edge of a straight chair, turning her head sharply from side to side as she heard imaginary noises.

"Claude and Eloise Boody," I said finally, "of Beverly Hills. Claude is Amity Productions. He is also Trans-Pacific Television Associates, and Clabo Studios, unless these are all obsolete letterheads."

"Can we leave now? Please?"

We went back out the front door. It locked behind us. She was a dozen feet in the lead all the way to the driveway chain, and she kept that lead until we were a hundred feet down the road.

She slowed down then, and gave a huge lifting sigh of relief.

"I don't understand you, Trav."

"Carlos Menterez y Cruzada has or had a taste for the Yankee celebrity, show biz variety. He partied it up here. Boody would be a pretty good procurement agent. He lived next door. I wanted the California address. If things peter out here, it's another starting point."

"But still...."

"The houses seem to have been done by the same architects. I wanted the feel of one of the houses, what to expect about the interior planning -materials, surfaces, lighting, changes of floor level. Garcia's is bigger and it will sure as hell be furnished differently, but I know a lot more about it now."

"But why should you...."

"Tonight I'm going to pay an informal call."

She stopped and stared at me. "You can't!"

"It's the next step, honey. Over the wall, like Robin Hood."

"No, Trav. Please. You've been so careful about everything and...."

"Care and preparation can take you just so far, Nora. And then you have to make a move. Then you have to joggle the wasp nest. I'll be very very careful."

Her eyes filled. "I couldn't stand losing you too."

"Not a chance of it. Never fear."

I told her too early in the day. It gave her a bad day. She got very broody and upset. She toyed with her food. I knew what was happening to her. She was shifting to a new basis for her emotional survival. Maybe it was good, maybe it was bad. I couldn't judge her. The steam was going out of her. She was identifying more closely with what we were becoming to each other.

God knows it could not have been a substitute for Sam. But they set the mad ones to weaving baskets, and it seems to help. Maybe the baskets become important-when all you have is a basket.

I left her by the pool in the afternoon while I walked into town and made some random purchases here and there. I had become some kind of a minor celebrity. I could tell by the way the kids acted. They didn't hustle me for coins. They followed me in a small and solemn herd, about twenty feet behind me.

At one corner two bravos were squatting on their heels. As I went by one of them spat across my bows. I stopped and stared at the pair of them, at two lazy smiles. One of them unsheathed a great ugly toadstabber of a knife and began cleaning his nails. I began to feel like the tortured hero of a thousand westerns, the fast gun, the one everybody wants to try their luck against.