Cinnamon Skin (14 page)

"So maybe that is part of the game."

"If it is, it requires that the game be played differently every time. Otherwise there is a pattern:… Hah!"

"Hah what?"

"Let me think a bit."

He thought for about twenty miles and finally said, "I thought I had an inspiration, but I can't make it work. It struck me that maybe he had a very good reason to eliminate Evan Lawrence, the name and the identity, along with Norma. What could that reason be? That possibly, as Evan Lawrence, the hunt had not gone too well with the victim he dispatched before he met Norma. Maybe there was a trail left which someone might be shrewd enough to follow-just as we're trying to follow him now-and if that did happen, it would end right there when The John Maynard Keynes blew up. A dead end. Justice done. But actually, it would be a convenience to him to drop an identity. I would imagine he had another one all set to slip into."

"He could buy identities in Miami as easy as he could buy explosives."

"Travis, there is one thing about him we should keep in mind. He does really look like a great many other forty-year-old men. Driving around Houston I saw at least a half dozen men who, on first glance, looked like Evan Lawrence. Average height, square face, tan, standard haircut, no distinguishing marks. A pleasant expression. Bigger hands than average, thicker through the neck and shoulders. Remember, I found a great many yearbook pictures which looked as if they could have been Evan Lawrence. I am saying that he can disappear into the people pool the way a trout can rise and gulp a bug and slide back down out of sight in the depths. Money makes the disappearance easier. Money diverts suspicion. Money can give a false impression of respectability."

"So what good are we going to do in Eagle Pass?"

"Maybe he started as Cody T. W Pittler. And if so, maybe we can find out what turned him into a hunter."

"There we go again, Meyer. The old argument."

"Which one?"

"You start with the assumption that everybody is peachy, and then something comes along and warps them. You start with a concept of goodness, and so what we are supposed to do, as a society, is understand why they turn sour. Understand and try to heal. I start with the assumption that there is such a thing as evil which can exist without causation. The black heart which takes joy in being black. In almost every kind of herd animal, there is the phenomenon of the rogue."

"If he is Pittler, we'll find something unusual about his boyhood."

"You're sure of that?"

"Just as sure as I am that I learned some time ago what it was in your past that gives you a recurrent streak of paranoia."

"Now hold it!"

"Don't be insulted, Travis. That flaw is useful to you. It keeps you constantly suspicious. And thus it has probably kept you alive."

"Up till now."

There is a deceptive illusion of lushness near the riverbanks, but for the most part it is a burned land of scraggly brush, dry hills, weed, lizard, cedar, and salty creek beds that slant down from the Anacacho Mountains to the north. To the northeast is Uvalde, where John Nance Garner lived and died in a broad and pretty valley, noted in his declining years only for his brief statement about the value of the office of the Vice-President of the United States. "It's about as much use as a pitcher of warm spit," he said.

Here all along the valley from Cameron and Willacy counties on the Gulf through Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, Webb, Dimmit, Zavala, and Maverick, the American citizens of Mexican ancestry have, through the exercise of their right to vote, taken control of county functions: school boards, zoning, police and fire protection, road departments, library services, county welfare, and all the other boards and commissions which spring full grown from the over-fertilized minds of the political animals. This has been a slow and inevitable process for fifty years, and it is understandable that during this time most of the Anglos have been squeezed out of participation in county government. Some of those squeezed out were doubtless of exceptional competency. But so are some of the new ones. And the world keeps turning, and just as much money finds its way into the wrong pockets as under the old regime.

Sergeant Paul Sigiera saw us on Thursday morning at nine thirty after a twenty-minute wait in his outer office. There was room in his office for a gray steel desk, three straight-backed oak chairs without arms, and two green filing cabinets. He was in his thirties, in short-sleeved, sweat-darkened khakis. He had black bangs down almost to his eyebrows, anthracite eyes, and a desperado mustache. The small window was open and a big fan atop the file cabinets turned back and forth, back and forth, ruffling the corners of the papers on his desk and giving a recurrent illusion of comfort.

"Friends," he said in a Texican twang, "the goddarn compressor quit again, and it is hot as a fresh biscuit in heah. They don't fix it quick, I'm gonna assign me out to patrol and ride around with the cold air turned on high. Now what was it you wanted?"

"We're from Florida," I said. "My name is McGee and this is my friend Professor Meyer, a world famous economist. Perhaps, Sergeant, you remember reading in the paper about Professor Meyer's boat being blown up in the Atlantic Ocean just off Fort Lauderdale on the fifth of this month."

"I maybe do remember something."

"Three people died and no bodies were recovered. We have been trying to trace the person responsible, and there is a faint chance that he may have lived here as a young man before he went off to the University of Texas. He may have even been born here. His name is, or was, Cody T. W Pittler."

He studied us. His smile was amiable. "Before I come to my senses and come back home here, I worked Vice in Beaumont, and I saw the underside of everything, and I heard every scam known to mankind. You come on very smooth and reliablelike, just like every good scam does. So you fellas just empty out all the ID out of your wallets and pockets right here in front of me. Hang onto the money and the wallets, and I'll just poke around with the rest of it. Now if you'd just as soon not do that, you can get on up and leave and I'll go on to the next customer."

He took his time. He went through Meyer's little stack of paper and plastic first. "What were you doing in Canada, Professor?"

"Giving a series of lectures. My boat with my niece aboard was blown up while I was up there. The Miami Herald called me to tell me about it and ask questions. I flew back as soon as I could get a reservation."

"Who do you work for?"

"Myself. I give talks, do consulting work write papers."

"What kind of address is this?"

"I have no address actually. That's the slip at Bahia Mar where my boat has been moored for quite a few years. I lived aboard."

"So your house got blown up."

"That's right."

"When I was a little kid my gramma's house burned up. She lost everything. For years after, she'd remember something and then start crying because she'd know it went up in flames too."

"It is… difficult," Meyer said.

"This credit card here. What's the limit on it?"

"Limit?"

"How much can you charge on it?"

"I don't really know. I think it's five thousand." He looked at the picture on Meyer's driving license, holding it up as he looked carefully at Meyer. He nodded, pushed the little pile back toward Meyer, and began on mine.

He started with the license and the comparison, then read the license. "What does a salvage consultant do, McGee?"

"Advises people about how to go about salvaging something."

"Underwater?"

"Sometimes. And I do salvage work on a contingency basis, a percentage of recovery."

After a few more casual questions, he pushed my stack back and I stowed it away.

"Now let's get a couple of things straight that bother me some," he said. "You are coming down here into my back yard looking for somebody that killed three people."

"I guess you could put it that way," Meyer said.

"What other way is there, Professor? And so that makes you some kind of amateur detectives, don't it?"

"I guess we are doing what a detective would do."

"Why don't you leave it up to the people who know what the hell they're doing? You may be messing up a professional investigation. Ever think of that?"

"There isn't any investigation. At least, not in the way…" Meyer paused and shrugged and dug into his portfolio and took out the Xerox sheets of the clippings from the paper.

Sigiera read the account. "So this Pittler is some kind of terrorist?"

"We believe Pittler could be the Evan Lawrence that was reported killed in the explosion, along with his wife, who was my niece, and Captain Jenkins, my friend."

"No terrorists?"

"No terrorists," I said. "And three hundred thousand missing from the woman's estate, cleaned out before they went to Florida."

"It says here they were newlyweds."

"And so they were."

"How'd you people come up with that name?" Meyer explained about the yearbooks, and the days of studying the pictures. He showed Sigiera the color print of Evan Lawrence.

"Good-looking man. Doesn't mean much, though, does it? I caught me a guide last year, pretty as a movie actor. He'd led three groups of braceros across the river up near Quemado and killed them, every one, for the poor pitiful pesos they had left after paying him. Eleven bodies we found in a ditch with stones piled on them. And that killer had eyelashes you wouldn't believe, and if you looked right at him, he blushed." He pulled his wet shirt away from his chest, and said, "Question. What do you do if you find him?"

"Hold him for the authorities," I said.

"A salvage consultant doesn't have to do all that paperwork with licenses and all that, and he doesn't have to report to the law every time he enters a new territory. McGee, are you hired out to this professor?"

"We've been close friends for many years," Meyer said with enough indignation to be convincing. Sigiera picked up the card with the name and address Meyer had gotten from the university records. "Set still," he said, and headed out of the room, leaving the door open.

He was gone almost forty minutes. Time dragged. The fan made a clicking sound. An insane mockingbird played its endless variations in a live oak outside the window. It was too hot for conversation.

When he did come back, it was obvious that something had sobered him. He had a file folder in his hand, a buff folder of the type where the sheets are fastened at the top with metal tabs that come up through two holes in the sheets and are bent over. The metal fasteners were rusty.

"Had to go over to the courthouse annex to get this," he explained. "There was a card on it here because it's still an open file. It's still an open file because I think we're looking for the same fella." He checked the name again. "Cody Tom Walker Pittler, who, if he's living, was forty-two years old the twenty-fourth of this month. And what we want him for, it happened twenty-two years ago last month. I was a little kid then, but I can remember hearing about it because it was something dirty. You know how little kids are. Everybody whispered about it that summer. First, let's double-check on him being the same one."

He slipped a photograph out of the file. A boy of about seventeen stood grinning at the camera. He was in football togs, helmet under his arm, hair tousled. The young Evan Lawrence, we agreed.

"High school," Sigiera said, "before he went away. Before he had the trouble."

He seemed thoughtful and in no hurry, and we made no attempt to push him. He flipped pages, read for long minutes.

He slapped the folder shut. "It's all in our damn cop language," he said. "The decedent, the angle of entry, the alleged this and that. Too many words. That's the trouble with the law lately. Too many words. Too many writs. Too many pleas. We can live with it. We have to live with it. But sometimes it gets a little scratchy.

"Here's what happened. Cody was apparently a normal kid. No juvenile record. No problems. His father, name of Bryce Pittler, owned a small contracting business that did foundations, put in septic tanks, and so on. Had a yard and a little warehouse and three transit-mix trucks. Worked hard at it and did okay. When Cody was about thirteen and his sister, Helen June, was eighteen, their mother died sudden. She caught the flu and it went into pneumonia and she tried to keep right on going no matter what, and they got her into the hospital too late. Bryce Pittler waited two years and then he married a twenty-five-year-old woman that worked in the office for him. Her name was Coralita Cardamone, half Mexican, half Italian, and she was supposed to be one very hot number around town at that time. If he hadn't up and married her so fast, his friends would maybe have had a chance to warn him off her. A year after they were married, that would be when Cody was sixteen or thereabouts, one of the big building supply outfits from Houston came down to all these little places along the river, buying up small contracting firms. They gave Bryce Pittler an offer he couldn't refuse, because it gave him a good piece of money, and they kept him on to run it the way he had before. They did that with the other outfits they bought, and some of the ex-owners turned out to be good managers and a lot didn't.

"Bryce Pittler turned out to be one of the good ones, so what they did after not too long was to make him a regional manager, covering all the way from Brownsville to El Paso. The daughter, Helen aune, got married and moved out. Bryce Pittler had to be away three and four nights a week. That left Coralita and the kid alone in the house. I don't know how they got started, but bet your ass it wasn't the kid's idea. He thought his old man was absolute tops. They were close. But it was going on. They interrogated Coralita's best friend, a woman named"-he flipped the folder open, turned a few pages-"Leona Puckett, who said Coralita had told her about the whole affair. Leona said she had begged Coralita to stop with the kid because it was a mortal sin. Apparently when the kid got back after his first year in college, they picked right up again, just like they probably did whenever he came home for vacation. She was a very ripe woman, and they say she never got as much as she needed, and from what Leona reported, the kid was so well hung she just couldn't bring herself to give it up. So it was the old old story, except it was the traveling man that came home to find his wife in bed with his son. He heard them and went and got his target pistol, the one he'd taught the boy to shoot. From the coroner's report, the woman was on top, and the headboard of the bed was against the wall opposite the kid's bedroom door. Maybe he didn't even know it was his son under there when he nailed her with one shot right to the base of the skull. She was instantly dead in mid-stroke. There were signs of a struggle. A chair tipped over. Bryce Pittler was on the floor, still alive, with a bullet that had gone through his lower right chest at an upward angle, nicked a big artery, and lodged against his spine. The pistol was near his right hand. The wound was consistent with what could have happened if they struggled for the gun. Pittler never came out of it. A neighbor walking his dog in the yard next door heard two shots, and then as he was wondering whether to phone it in, a car came roaring out of the drive and turned north. He phoned it in. Pittler died on the table. Never said a word. They had a double service. There was an all-points bulletin out. The law looked, but not very hard. I don't think the kid was running from us as much as he was running from what happened. I mean, that's about as rough as it can get for a kid. It's like in those old Greek plays. The neighbor recognized the profile of the kid driving the car as it passed the streetlight. And he hasn't been seen since. Here's a picture of the woman."

I looked at it and handed it to Meyer. Five-by-seven black-and-white glossy of a slender girl standing by a boat pulled up on a rocky beach. You could see the trees on the hazy far shore. She had turned to look back over her left shoulder, to smile at the camera. Her face looked small and sweet under the heavy weight of dark hair. Her smile was provocative. Her hips were rich and vital in taut white slacks below the narrowness of her waist. It was a starlet pose, hip-shot, canted. I wondered if Meyer was as surprised as I was to see how young she looked.