Atticus (14 page)

“Oh,
no!
Who?”

“Kid. Sixteen, seventeen years old. I got back and the pool door was open, and I heard him using the phone upstairs. His hands were empty, so I don't expect he swiped anything. Don't have my sea legs yet or I might of wrangled him downtown.”

“Oh, I'm so sorry, Atticus! How perfectly awful! You
must feel violated! We've been having so
much
of that lately.”

“Well—”

“Shall I have the police out?”

“I haven't been that impressed with them so far. Like as not they'd say he was guarding the house so no thieves could get in.”

Stuart was silent. Atticus heard the scritch of his lighter and the fizz of a fresh cigarette as he inhaled. Stuart said, “We do hope you'll still find a way to stop by for dinner. Even after our contretemps this morning.”

“Well, that's nice of you. As a matter of fact, I'm feeling kinda peckish.”

“Oh, good. Shall we pick you up?”

“You know what, Stuart? I think I'll have a nap and get changed and hike to your place. I haven't seen that much of the seaside yet and I'd kinda like to.”

Stuart gave him directions and failed to offer a goodbye before he hung up.

With the dining room telephone still in his hand, Atticus decided to try Frank's place in Colorado, but Marilyn told him Frank was giving a talk to a cattleman's association up in Sterling. She took the message about Scott's American Express card, and he gave her a no-fuss, facts-only version of the past few days before saying he was expected for dinner and he was enjoying the fine weather so much he might just stay for a bit.

Then he got out Scott's frayed brown wallet and flattened the folded slip of paper with phone numbers that he
found in it. The first number he recognized as Stuart's, so he dialed the second, which had an “S.” in front of it. After five rings a frazzled-sounding Mexican answered, flatly saying,
“El Alacrán,”
and Atticus heard the noise of some guy slamming down a leather cup of bar dice before he figured that
El Alacrán
was The Scorpion, and hung up. “P. I.” got a telephone answering machine that told the business hours for Printers Inc. And the penciled “R.” phone number was picked up in four rings, a hotel receptionist saying,
“Bueno, El Marinero.”
And Atticus could think of nothing to say; all he could think was,
R.

About twenty minutes before sundown he locked up the house and went down to the beach through the pool gate. The sea was in green turmoil, the waves as big as one-car garages. College girls with hardly anything on were still on the hotel cots in a brassy shine of baby oil, headphones playing, margaritas in their hands, their faces tilted up to a sun that was now behind them. A plump American woman was sitting in a palapa's shade, her skin patched scarlet with sunburn, her rose sunglasses raising up from a P. D. James paperback to linger on the old man in the gray mustache and gray cowboy boots who was falteringly stalking by. After the Maya Hotel was the El Presidente, the saltbox
casitas
of the Encanto condominiums, the Hotel Mexicana, the Marriott, and then a staircase of sea-grass and silt took Atticus up over an aggregation of dark brown stone that looked like the high pier of a lighthouse that neglect or age had torn down. Going over it and onto
a gray boardwalk down to the sand, Atticus stepped onto a quarter-mile of public beach still crowded with Mexican families. Heavy women in overwashed dresses were sitting up on higher land, talking intermittently as they cooked tortillas on iron grills or just gazed at baby girls who were happily patting the sand. Teenaged girls who were probably their daughters sat on top of a big concrete sewage pipe as though they were still in a public schoolyard, snickering and whispering and modestly putting their hands to their mouths when they blushed and pealed with laughter. Then Atticus was aware of a half-naked American in his late teens walking up beside him in gray San Antonio Spurs gym shorts, his skin a ginger brown, his hair as wild as a lion's mane, a green tattoo of a dagger and a green teardrop of blood just about where his heart ought to have been. The kid falsely smiled and in a soft Southern accent asked, “Say friend, would you happen to be able to maybe help me out?”

A handful of rings and studs glinted from his ears, and there was a kind of silver tack in his nose. “You need pliers?” Atticus asked.

But the kid was too far into his skit to listen. “You see, I'm fixin' to get out of this hole and I'm just about five dollars shy of a bus ticket. Might you have something you could lend me?”

Some Mexican boys played volleyball on the sand in dirty polyester pants that were rolled up past their knees. Some young mothers were struggling out into the waves in dark brassieres and underthings that they were trying to
conceal with white filmy shirts made transparent by the sea. A skinny hotel cook still in his red tennis shoes and checkered gray pants stood ankle deep with a one-year-old boy whom he'd happily swing into the air by his wrists so that the boy's toes skimmed along the water in the spikes and scribble of handwriting.

The kid was still beside Atticus. He asked the kid, “Where would you go?”

“Belize. Even Guatemala. Anywheres really. Heard good things about Costa Rica.”

“You been living here for a while, have ya?”

“Two heathenish years if you count jail time. Which you oughta count triple.”

Although he feared the answer, Atticus asked, “You happen to know Scott Cody by any chance?”

The kid's face was frankly stunned—
We know the same people!
The kid turned and walked backward as he perused the
playa
, looking past the hotels toward Scott's place but never quite finding it. “Scott lives up by the Maya somewheres.” His hand flew out. “I used to remember but I'm too forgetful lately. Went to a bitchin' party there once. He's
wild.”

Atticus heard the present tense but failed to correct the kid. One turquoise concession stand was selling green melon, cooked pork rinds, ginger brown bananas in a sugary stew, and black, barbecued chicken wings. A second concession that was crazily just a few yards away was under repair, and a boy in a bikini swimming suit was scooting along on his knees in the sand, painting at a huge
square footage of green cement block with just a one-inch brush, turning a one-day job into many. On a stepladder inside, a man who was hidden from the chest up appeared to be rewiring palm thatching to the overhead poles, and a second man's only responsibility was to keep one foot on the lower step and to hand up eight-inch wires, one at a time. Atticus flipped open his braid wallet and licked his thumb to get out a five-dollar bill that he withheld from the kid, like he was teasing a pup. “If I wanted to find Scott or his friends, where would I best look?”

The kid frowned and hunkered a little as he raked back his sorrel-colored hair with a hand. “You police?”

“I'm his father.”

The kid focused on his face. “Yeah! Right! In his house. You're the old man in that picture of his that he drew. My girlfriend thought you looked just like God.”

Atticus put on a smile. “Well, our voices are the same.”

“She was stoned of course.”

“Hell yes,” Atticus said, “goes without saying.”

The kid looked at the five-dollar bill. “Wow, this is so television.” And then he said, “Believe he hangs out in Boystown at night.”

“Boystown.”

“You know, massage parlors, whores, the after-hours places.”

Atticus handed him the five-dollar bill. “You sell him a car by any chance?”

The kid hesitantly said, “Wasn't no warranty to it or nothin'.”

“I know that. You have an accident in that Volkswagen you sold him?”

“No sir, I dint.”

“Was there just the original equipment on it?”

“I think so.” The kid furrowed his brow in a way that resembled profound contemplation. “Scott have an accident in it?”

“I think so.”

The kid halted in his walk and hung there for a half a minute, then hurried back up the beach as if his five-dollar bill would be lost if he stayed. Atticus headed toward Stuart's villa on the cape, passing the pirate's den of The Scorpion, with its blue neon and its palm-thatched roof and wooden deck and its dock leading out to some tied-up speedboats that rocked and smacked on the waves.
Cerveza
bottles and plastic glasses with green wedges of lime still in them were tipped and scattered over sand that was as gray as cigarette ash. And then there were some private homes that had the spiritless look of failed financial investments, places not slept in nor enjoyed but kept up by gardeners and maids who turned on the burglar alarms at night and went home. And at land's end was Stuart's grand pink villa and Renata in a soft white glamorous dress and a shawl, facing west on the lush green lawn to watch the sun flame out.

Evening dinner conversation was full of Stuart and his qualms about the high-speed trains that might rape Resurrección someday, the shoddy plastic plumbing in the house
that was now being fouled with rainwater, the fancy condominiums that were being sold at a loss with the peso in such pitiful shape. Stuart talked about his bookstore and
Publishers Weekly
and a female employee who intentionally got pregnant, and that fed other topics that were passed around like bowls of food and handily put down in favor of others. Everything was kept light and tittering, though there was something fraught about their talk, as if there were levels of meaning that a visitor to their household would only hopelessly try to interpret. Renata flattered Stuart or held her silence while Stuart ruthlessly imitated friends or offered his firm opinions or quickly began arguments that were just as quickly forgotten. And Atticus turned his frosted glass of tonic water in his hand, imagining his son handling fall and winter nights like this, being as disquietingly quiet as he himself was, gently smiling at his company even while he fumed and ached inside.

He thought about the wrongness of much that he'd heard and seen in just two days. He considered asking Renata to go out and talk to the Mexican girl, but he felt unsure that he'd get anything further, that Renata was free to tell him the facts as she got them. Even now she was peculiar, flinching, private, scrutinizing, the first to start laughing, the first to stop, fairly timid in speech, tentative in action, for the most part seemingly uninterested in him. She was like a fresh, spoiled girl forced to eat with the old folks, and she couldn't wait for the dinner to end. Was he murdered? she'd asked, and he'd said, I think so, and she still hadn't asked him anything more.

Stuart finished the hollandaise sauce while delivering his assessment of the faltering real estate market, and Atticus questioned him about his own investments.

Renata said, with a hint of exasperation, “Stuart owns hotels.”

“I have
partnerships
in hotels,” he said, foolishly bowing to her. Stuart was falling into drunkenness, but he turned half around in his dining room chair and called, “Julia?
Más vino por favor.”

Atticus filled his plate with fettucine. “Would it be likely I'd seen any of them?”

Stuart considered Atticus as if he'd found a fresh complexity in him. “It wouldn't speak well of your sterling character. They're in, how shall I say it?, a
sportif
part of our fair city.”

“Would that be Boystown?”

“Unexplored depths, Renata!” Stuart said. She failed to smile at him. “Don't tell me you've been talking to taxi drivers?”

Atticus twisted fettucine on his fork. “I got big ears, is all.”

“Don't think I haven't noticed,” Stuart said, and tilted away as a plump, happy maid named Julia poured a Chilean red wine into his goblet. “Oh,
what
is the name of that one, Renata?”

“Which?”

“Barry helped me refinance it. You
know.
”

“Casa Fantasía?”

“No, no, no! On El Camino, for god's sake!”

“El Marinero,” she said.

Atticus held his face as it was.

“Yes! Exactly, darling. I blow you a kiss.” Stuart held up the Chilean wine and frowned at its label, then put it down again. “Would you like to hear about my stroke of genius, Atticus?”

“Anytime.”

“Wasn't it a stroke of genius, Renata? Would you for god's sake support me on
that?”

Renata told Atticus, “Stuart advertised in the International
Herald-Tribune.”

Stuart fell back in his chair. “Well, I don't have a story to tell now, do I? I have been
trumped.”

“Oh, there's more to say.”

“Well, that was the
punch line.”

“Don't pout.”

“You
have been Madame Ennui all night, and then, when I have a good story to tell, you go and give him the punch line!”

“It's late,” Atticus said. “I oughta be going.”

Stuart held his wristwatch close to his face. “Ten o'clock is not
late.”

And so they retired to a green library for Kahlua and coffee, but the partying had gone out of them—Stuart was fighting off sleep and Renata's conversation seemed practiced, as though she were rising to an occasion; she finally walked over to a high bookcase and pulled down whatever came to hand, bleakly reading a paragraph or two before shelving the book again. Stuart politely asked Atticus
dispirited questions about petroleum refineries and cattle ranching, frequently peeking at Renata as he lifted his fragile coffee cup until Atticus frankly looked at his own wristwatch and told Stuart what a good dinner it was and got up.

Renata laid her book aside. “Shall I drive you?”

“Don't bother yourself. I like to take a constitutional after dinner. Habit I picked up from Harry Truman.”

Renata stared at him with fresh interest.