The Frighteners (28 page)

I said, “What do you say, Mr. Cody?”

He regarded me for a moment. “What do you know, son?” I said, “I know that I came charging into a motel room where Señorita Sisneros was waiting for Horace Cody with a gun. Startled, she let go one wild shot, but she didn’t shoot again because she recognized instantly that I wasn’t him. Now, my disguise isn’t perfect, sir, but it isn’t that bad. In feet, you thought it was pretty good, didn’t you? So how the hell did a young woman under stress, catching a brief glimpse of a man in violent motion, a man carefully made up to resemble the man she wanted to shoot, manage to make the decision that he was the wrong man and hold her second shot?’’ I waited for him to speak; when he didn’t, I went on. “Later, Mrs. Beckman described the tall, gray-haired, gray-bearded Horace Cody her brother had been following. Antonia started to protest but decided against it. I think it would be interesting to hear her description of Cody, don’t you, sir?”

He nodded, and spoke to the Mexican girl: “Do I understand that you met Horace Cody, señorita?”

“No meet.” The girl’s voice was sullen; clearly she wasn’t sure she wasn’t being ridiculed. “I was send away when Cody coming. But I watch across street, I see him come. My Jorge such a lovely fool, do stupid things; somebody must watch he no get in trouble.” She shook her head sadly. “When I hear what he is plan to do for Señor Cody I try to stop, but he will not stop. He say we make rich. Who wants rich and dead?”

The old man nodded. “So you got a good look at Horace Cody when he came to make a deal with your Jorge? Jorge Medina, is that right?”

“Medina, yes. And I see Cody good, when he come and when he go.”

I said, “How about describing him for us.”

She looked at me suspiciously, still wondering if she wasn’t being made the butt of some kind of a strange
gringo
joke; then she shrugged.

“
S
í
, if you wish. When the medical señora was talk about the tall man with the
barba
and the
cabeza
pelada
—the head with not much hair—I am wish to laugh. So much boolsheet I never hear. And this old one, this so-tall one here in the bed, he should be Señor Cody, hah? I see Señor Cody good. He has not much tall, never one hundred and ninety centimeters like this viejo who takes the name. Not small man, no, but eighty kilos and a hundred and seventy-five centimeters, maybe. He has no bald; the hair is much for such an age, maybe sixty years.

I think maybe peluca, yes? Wig, you call? Brown, no gray. The face is shave very careful, no
barba
, no
mostacho
. Very careful the clothes, also. No big hat, no boots with the toes and heels, no cowboy thing around neck with big stone, very like the man of business, what you call conservative, hey? That is Señor Cody who come to Guaymas to send my Jorge to die. That is Señor Cody I will kill, hey?”

There was a silence in the room after she’d finished, then Jo burst out: “But that’s not Mr. Cody she’s describing. That’s Will Pierce!”

I looked at Cody, but his face was expressionless.

The Mexican girl asked sharply. “Pierce? That is not a name I hear. Who is this Señor Pierce?”

Jo ignored her, speaking to me: “Junior and I made fun of Will’s rug and his three-piece suits to Millie, and she slapped us down hard; if he wanted to look young for her, wasn’t that nice, and weren’t we as tired as she was of Texas men who dressed and talked like superannuated cowboys?” She glanced quickly at Cody, a little embarrassed. “I mean . . ."

The old man spoke at last: “No need to apologize, ma’am.” He grimaced and looked at me. “But she drove old Will plumb crazy, that Millie woman did. Seen it happen to other older fellers who got themselves infatuated with young girls, but Mrs. Charles was no young girl; still, she was a handsome, well-preserved female, I’ll hand her that, and he had her beat by more’n a dozen years, and it graveled him. He had to have himself a diet and a hairpiece, and even visits to a tanning parlor, as if we hadn’t had enough sun in our younger days to last us this lifetime and the next.”

I asked, “Did you know, sir?”

“That Will was using my name down here?” He shook his head grimly. “Not for certain, not for a while, but I started hearing about places I’d been I hadn’t been and things I’d done I hadn’t done. If you know what I mean. It went against the grain to set the hound dogs sniffing after Will, after all these years; but I came to it at last and what I learned wasn’t easy to take. There was a drug deal first, going to make him millions, but it went wrong somehow, and he almost got caught. Scared him out of that business, and a good thing, too; but I reckon that was where he made the connections for this arms deal that was going to have him rolling in greenbacks. . . . Will was always like that; anybody could sell him pie in the sky if they just said if it was blueberry or apple so it would sound like they knew what they was talking about. But he was a good partner in the field, and he saved my life at least once, which made it mutual; and he had the goddamndest nose for oil in the ground of any man I ever met. Long as he stuck to finding it and let me handle the business of cashing in on it and making the money grow, he did fine.” Cody grimaced. “Only we had that fight I told you about, about the woman, and after that he wouldn’t listen to me, ndt even when I told him oil was going to drop through the floor and what we should do about it. So I bought him out, Cody and Pierce is all mine now, although not many folks know it. And Will took his money and put it in all the wrong places and lost most of it when the bottom fell out, there in Texas. Real massacre, and he was one of the massacrees. And with that woman egging him on, I reckon he got downright desperate, trying to get his stake back playing with drugs and arms like he did.”

“And using your name.” I looked at him. “Is that why you came down here, to set the record straight?’’

“What record?” The old man looked me straight in the eye. “Nothing on any record, son. A few people, including maybe some government people in a couple of governments, kinda think now that Buff Cody’s even a worse bastard than they thought before, if you’ll excuse it, ma’am; but there isn’t a damn thing they can prove, and I’m not about to smear Will’s name to whitewash mine, particularly now he’s dead. In most places I do business, having a crooked reputation is an advantage, and I never cared much what folks thought of me anyway.”

Jo asked, “Then what did you come down here for, Mr. Cody?”

‘‘Hell, some fellers done killed my partner, ma’am—or least ways the man who was my partner for forty years, even if we did break up at the end over a woman. ’’

She looked baffled. “You mean that after what he did to you, you still feel obliged to . . . to avenge him?”

Cody drew a long, painful breath. “Man’s a damn fool to criticize a friend’s woman; no better way to end a friendship. Maybe if I’d kept my mouth shut about her we wouldn’t have broke up the team, and I could have kept him from throwing his money away, and he wouldn’t have felt obliged to try the fool ventures he did in order to recoup his losses. And to sign my name to them out of anger.” The old man drew a long, painful breath. “Anyway, my reputation can stand being called a drug dealer and an arms dealer; it can’t stand being called the kind of man who does nothing when his partner of forty years has been chopped down by a bunch of machete-swinging hooligans. Soon’s I grow back a little of the blood I’m missing, I’ll take care of those big-hat insurgentes. I figure if I can find those weapons they want so bad, or you can, and blow them up with dynamite or give them to the government, that’ll put a spoke in their wheel and make them wish they’d never heard of Will Pierce. After that I’ll go after a political gent named Mondragon I’m told bosses this revolutionary gang who did the killing and may have taken a swing or two at Will and his lady himself. . . ."

Driving away from there I’d had a lot to think about; but what bothered me most was a discrepancy: apparently, contrary to what I’d been told, Buff Cody had not lost much if any of his money; he’d had no need for a rich wife’s fortune to bail him out. Yet there seemed to be clear evidence, still unrefuted, to show that he was the one who’d sent his frighteners to drive Gloria into a panic. I could see no way the blame for that could be switched to Will Pierce; and it seemed unlikely that Gloria had made up all those things that had happened to her: the accident, the gunshot, the almost-suicide. As I’d told Jo, I couldn’t believe now, having met him, that the old man really had eventual murder in mind, but everything indicated that he had given the girl a very bad time, and it seemed completely out of character for him. However, the conference had used up most of his remaining strength, and I couldn’t afford to hang around until he recovered enough to satisfy my curiosity. . . .

Unlike the motel manager, Greer seemed happy to be awakened in the middle of the night, meaning that after a week of standby duty he was bored out of his gourd. We established that the state of my health was satisfactory and that Washington had sent no recent queries or instructions.

“The Charles boy is going to make it,” he told me over the phone. “Too bad. Pistol-happy little creep!”

I found it rather touching that he felt more vindictive about my being shot than I did.

I said, “Yes, his sister got through to the hospital this afternoon. She told me. Any further word from
El Cacique?
”

“No. But he seems to have plenty of clout; he got the lid clapped on here like Reagan putting the hush on Grenada. The courtesy of the local authorities you wouldn’t believe. It had me shaking worse than if they’d tossed me into the Black Hole; a polite cop always scares the shit out of me. Oh, and your Cacique friend said to tell you your bride remains safe, and he finds her a most charming young person. ”

It’ll probably go down as another serious mark against my character, one of many, that I received this information with a certain amount of relief. Apparently Gloria had taken our crude mountain affair no more seriously than I had. The fact that Ramón now found her charming indicated that she’d been as quick to look elsewhere as I had, or even a little quicker; he wouldn’t have been singing her praises if she’d slapped him down.

“Well, he always was a ladies’ man,” I said. “I’m glad to hear he hasn’t lost his touch. How soon can you get down here?’’

“Kino Bay? Normally, I gather, it’s an hour’s drive; call it an hour and a half in the dark, Mexican roads being what they are. I should be there by . . . call it five o’clock. Where do I go and what do I do when I get there?” When I’d told him, and given him the background, he said, “Do I understand that you want me to arrive with bells and whistles and make a big production of guarding the house?”

“You’ve got it. Let everybody know that I’m still in that bed, still in bad shape, and that with my secret hideaway compromised and everybody milling around it—this evening you could hardly tell it from Times Square, with all the traffic in and out—you figure I now need close protection until I get back on my feet, if I ever do. Have Washington send you a couple of men or borrow them from Ramón if you think it’ll help you look convincing.”

Greer hesitated. “If you’ll excuse my asking, what’s the point? So they think Agent Helm is laid up in Kino Bay at death’s door, heavily protected, unreachable, and the man they’re chasing up El Mirador way is the same Mr. Cody who got away from them in El Paso, so what? They’ll still be after him to kill him. You.”

I said, “Cody asked the same question. The answer is that if they know I’m me, an experienced fellow operative with a certain reputation, I flatter myself they won’t take any chances dealing with me. But Cody’s not a pro, and he’s a fairly elderly party. Sure, he’s a tough old bird; sure, he made saps of them once; but if they think I’m him they’ll still come after me as if they were chasing an aging amateur, just a little optimistically and carelessly. It could give me an edge when I need one. ” I laughed. “Let’s just say that after all the time I’ve messed around with this idiot impersonation I want to get something out of it.”

The motel manager was wearing a maroon brocade dressing gown over red silk pajamas. He was a short, plump, brownfaced individual with thick, slick, black hair he’d taken time to brush neatly into place before joining me. Or maybe he wore a nightcap to bed to keep it undisturbed. I gave him an additional fifty, although I had a hunch that old Cody, while he’d willingly pay what things were worth, wasn’t too generous with handouts. But the folks following him weren’t likely to be aware of that— they’d know his bank account to the last half cent and every scar on his body; but they wouldn’t waste much time on vague stuff like his psychology—and the large bills so casually distributed did a good job of convincing the manager that my shapeless white suit and battered white hat and smudged white boots were mere affectations; he was in the presence of real Yankee money.

“I apologize for disturbing you, Señor Saiz,” I said.

‘‘
Por nada
,’’ he said. “I am happy that I could be of service, Señor Cody.”

I’d parked Cody’s pickup in the lot at the rear of the motel, but I went out the front and circled the place cautiously. They’d have spread the word to all their contacts in this part of the world, and they had more of them than we did. Sooner or later somebody’d pick up Cody’s trail. He, or she, would pass the word to the big brain controlling their operation, and he’d give the kill order again, and Mr. Cody would have them breathing down his neck again. My neck now. Which was exactly what I was planning on, but I didn’t want to make the mistake of assuming it hadn’t happened already. . . . The moon was down now, but when I came around the comer of the building and peeked through the ornate shrubbery I could see that somebody was sitting cross-legged on the hood of the parked red truck.

It didn’t seem like very hostile behavior, and the figure was small enough not to be too much of a burden to the sheet metal. I reached for my gun anyway and watched for several minutes, checking the surroundings for indications of an ambush; then the seated figure gave a very feminine toss of its head and I could see, even in the darkness, that the tossed-back hair was glossy black and quite long. I drew a long breath and walked forward.