The Frighteners (5 page)

“Thank you. I don’t know how I’ve managed to live so long without that information,” she said dryly. She gave me a sideways look. “You sound as if you really know something about it.”

‘‘I’ve been there. On both the giving and the receiving ends.’’ She licked her lips. “Then you know what it’s like walking down the street after you’ve been shot at, feeling as if every window has a gun in it aimed straight at you! It took me hours to get up nerve enough to leave the house and I thought I’d faint every time somebody slammed a car door. It was an awful day; and that night there was another phone call: ‘You can’t be lucky all the time, lady. Your daddy wasn’t.’ This time the voice was definitely masculine. I didn’t even call the police again, what was the use? I just took a sleeping pill to knock myself out; and the next morning I went to Uncle Buffy, as I told you, and cried on his shoulder.”

‘‘And he patted you on the head—well, fanny—and told you to be careful, big help.”

She made a face. “Yes, that’s right. And that night I tried to kill myself.”

Among U.S. tourists you’ll hear a lot of horror stories about crazy Mexican drivers, but you won’t hear them from me. It’s simply a conflict between two automotive philosophies: defensive vs. aggressive driving. The American driver gets into a car to be safe; progress is a secondary consideration. The Mexican driver gets into a car to get somewhere; survival is in the hands of the gods. Since I wouldn’t be in the line of work I’m in if I were obsessed with safety, I find this kind of uninhibited motoring quite enjoyable; and we made good time—well, good time for that twisty little road.

I reviewed what Mr. Somerset had told me about the girl’s recent bereavement. William Walter Pierce, 62, Will to his friends, husband of Henrietta Barstow Pierce, who’d died of cancer eight years ago, and father of Gloria Henrietta Pierce, had been murdered the previous month along with a female companion, Millicent Charles, widow, 48. The crime had been committed along the highway leading from Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico, to Durango, Durango, Mexico. Mazatlan is on the west coast, at sea level. Durango is about two hundred miles inland and six thousand feet up. Or three hundred and twenty kilometers and two thousand meters, if you prefer the local units of measurement.

I remembered the road in question, although it had been a long time since I’d driven it. Some six hundred miles south of us, it was the next major east-west highway crossing the mountains that form the backbone of Mexico. By major highway I mean that it was paved all the way and could be negotiated by an ordinary car or truck if the driver was possessed of reasonable skill and patience. However, unless it had changed greatly since the last time I’d seen it, and the map showed no signs of that, it was no more a superhighway than the roller-coaster track we were on.

Will Pierce’s Lincoln had been spotted by one of the green rescue trucks that cruise all Mexico’s main roads—you see few if any speed cops but plenty of these angels of mercy, which seem like a nice twist. Actually, the
zopilotes
had been first on the scene. The Green Angels, as the rescue units are called, soon determined that the big scavenger birds really had no interest in the car, although it had been badly vandalized; their attention was focused on the bodies of Pierce and Mrs. Charles lying nearby. His wallet and her purse had been robbed of all money and tossed aside. His watch and her watch and jewelry were missing. Their luggage had been hauled out of the trunk of the car and thoroughly trashed. He had apparently tried to resist; a machete had almost severed one arm before it split his skull. She had been stripped and sexually abused before another machete stroke had almost beheaded her as she knelt before her tormentors.

The authorities had conceded that perhaps there were a few antisocial elements hiding out in the Sierra Madre Occidental but promised that the criminals would soon be brought to justice. The same authorities had stated that this tragic incident was deeply regretted, but potential tourists should note that such crimes were extremely rare and that violence was no more likely to be encountered along a Mexican highway than on a New York street. Which, to anyone acquainted with New York streets, wasn’t quite as reassuring as it was meant to be.

Even at the time of my hasty briefing, I’d had some doubts about those roadside
bandidos
. Now, after hearing Gloria’s story, I found it hard to sell myself on a bunch of primitive Mexican desperados who first hacked the daddy and his lady friend to death with machetes down in Durango, Mexico, and then came charging up to Texas, U.S.A., to harry the daughter with pickup trucks and sniper rifles. On the other hand, I couldn’t quite swallow the notion that the attacks on two members of the same family within a few weeks had been perpetrated by two groups of criminals operating quite independently of each other. “Well?” said my companion sharply.

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you going to ask?”

“Ask what?”

“If I really tried to kill myself.”

“Did you really try to kill yourself, Mrs. Cody?”

She made a face at me. “Do I look like the suicidal type?” 

“What happened?”

She said, “I’d gone to bed early. I was alone in the house. We . . . I don’t have any live-in help, just a yardman, Aurelio, who works as much as needed to keep the grounds in shape, and a . . . well, I guess you’d call her a housekeeper, Teresa, who comes in time to make lunch and leaves when she’s cleaned up after dinner. I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing noises the way you do when it’s dark and there’s nobody else in the house. After a while I just had to get up and look around. ”

“Unarmed?”

She glanced at me irritably. “I’ve told you how I feel about guns! Anyway, Papa’s are all locked up in a steel cabinet he had built into the wall of his study. Even if I’d been able to put my hands on the key in a hurry, I wouldn’t have known how to get the bullets into them, and I’d probably have wound up shooting my foot off. Or my head.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I went all through the house and didn’t find anything. Anybody. I came back to my bedroom and took off my slippers and dressing gown and started into the bathroom to . . . well, to pee. There’s a kind of little dressing room I have to go through, with all my dresses hanging along one wall. Just as I reached into the bathroom and turned on the light, I heard something rustle among the clothes behind me. He must have slipped into my room from the rear of the house while I was looking around in front where I’d heard the noise.”

‘‘Maybe he had a partner making a noise to draw you away,’’ I said.

She said, “I wasn’t thinking about any partners; the man himself was scary enough. The big bathroom mirror faces the door. I could see him in the glass, a big dark man who needed a shave, stepping out from among my dresses to grab me. I tried to get into the bathroom and close the door, but he grabbed my hair and yanked me back. He put some kind of a weird hold on my neck. When he squeezed hard, not choking me, just digging into the side of my neck, I blacked out. When I woke up I was in a hospital bed.”

We live in different worlds. I couldn’t imagine myself at any age, after having a parent murdered and surviving two attempts on my own life, not locating the key to Pop’s gun cabinet and figuring out how to use one of the weapons inside—assuming I didn't already know how—and then packing it everywhere, even into the John. But I keep discovering that most other people, particularly female people, don’t think that way, which I suppose is why I’m in the business I’m in and they aren’t.

I said, “And they told you you’d tried to commit suicide?”

She nodded. “They had it all figured out, damn them. They’d decided that I’d been brooding about the terrible thing that had happened to Papa and Millie Charles. . . . I suppose you’ve been told all about that.”

“Yes.”

“Well, in my depressive mood, a minor car accident and a kid letting off a little .22 carelessly seemed to have given me the silly idea that somebody was trying to murder me, too. Perfectly ridiculous, of course, but you know how we paranoiacs are.” Her voice was dry. “I suppose you’ve heard the old joke: Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t trying to kill me!”

“I’ve heard it.”

She went on: “It was all supposed to have been just too much for me, I’m such a tender bud, you understand. I’d led a nice, sheltered, happy, comfortable life and first my mother had died in that horrible way, and then my father had been killed even more dreadfully, and now people were trying to murder me, too, and I just couldn’t stand this scary world I found myself in any longer. So I’d rounded up all the sleeping pills in the house and gulped them down and got into bed to die. Only, Uncle Buffy tried to call me about something and got worried when I didn’t answer the phone. He drove over and saw my car in the drive so he knew I was home; but I didn’t respond when he rang the bell and even banged hard on the front door. He remembered that I’d been in a state when I talked to him in his office that morning. He broke in and found me lying unconscious in bed and called 911; and wasn’t I glad I wasn’t dead the way I’d tried to make myself, silly me?”

I glanced at her profile as I drove. “Did you try to set them straight?”

“Yes, of course. The psychiatrist they sicced on me thought it was a healthy sign. The fact that I refused to accept the indisputable fact that I’d tried to kill myself indicated that I rejected my hasty action and wasn’t likely to try again. However, there was, he said, not the slightest evidence of intruders or of a struggle; and didn’t I think it was kind of a ridiculous story anyway, people hiding in my closet and cramming barbiturates down my throat?”

We were climbing now, and the narrow blacktop pavement was getting pretty bad, even more broken and patched than it had been. We’d already passed a couple of highway crews shoveling tarry gravel into the worst holes; about as effective as sticking a Band-Aid on a fatal wound.

Gloria said, “After that little encounter I gave up trying to convince the hospital people. They wouldn’t listen; they just hushed me like an unreasonable child. But when Uncle Buffy came around and gave me the same maddening routine . . . Well, he was sweet, he’d brought me some flowers and a suitcase of clothes from home; but he was acting the same idiot way as everybody else. You know, as if I was pretty young and not very bright and couldn’t help doing fool things sometimes, but he hoped it wouldn’t get to be a habit. As if he was really pretty disappointed in me although he was trying hard not to show it.

And he wouldn’t sit down and talk to me sensibly, either. He said we could talk later; right now I wasn’t supposed to upset myself. . . . The old bastard really put on a convincing act, considering that he was the one who’d arranged for me to attempt ‘suicide’ in the first place so that he could ‘save’ me! But of course I didn’t have the slightest suspicion of that at the time.’’ We met a big semi with the name TARAHUMARA painted in gaudy letters on the front bumper of the tractor, reminding me that years ago most Mexican truck drivers used to christen their roaring beasts. I wondered if this driver actually was a Tarahumara Indian. They used to have the reputation of being headhunters, I seemed to recall; and they lived in the bottom of the Barranca del Cobre west of Chihuahua City, a slash in the ground big enough to swallow a couple of Grand Canyons.

“Well, I blew my stack, I really did,” the girl beside me continued. “I jumped out of bed as he was reaching for the doorknob and grabbed his arm and swung him around and screamed at him. Something like: Just because he carried his brains up where the air was too thin to nourish them properly didn’t mean he had to be stubborn as well as stupid; and after two attempts on my life was he really going to swallow the third as a suicide try, for God’s sake? Didn’t he know me better than that? Just because everybody else had jumped to dumb conclusions about me didn’t mean he had to!” She swallowed hard. “I had to make him understand! The world was going all crazy and I felt he was the only person left I could trust!” She shook her head ruefully. “How naive can you get?”

I said, “So you threw a wingding and convinced him—well, thought you’d convinced him although he really didn’t need convincing—that your suicide was a phony. What then?”

She made a face. “I broke into tears, what else? It was a very weepy time for me; I’m not usually so soppy. Anyway, I went like: ‘Boo-hoo, everybody thinks I’m a suicidal moron and I wish I were really dead, boo-hoo!’ Words to that effect. And of course he held me and patted me and apologized for doubting me for a moment, he should have known I was a brave girl who’d never . . . Well, you can fill in the blanks. Big joke, although I wasn’t in on it then.” She drew a long breath. “He bent over and kissed me. It started out as a big-brother kiss, but then it changed, if you know what I mean. It startled me, and I was suddenly very much aware that my hair was a matted mess, and I had no makeup on and no shoes on and only one of those wrinkled cotton things they give you to wear in hospitals that’s all open behind. . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and she sat for a while looking straight ahead through the windshield at the road winding through the cactus-and-greasewood hills ahead.

I said, “And one thing led to another, I suppose, and wound up matrimony.”

She nodded. “Well, I tried to pass it off lightly: ‘Why, Uncle Buffy!’ And he said a bad word and told me he wasn’t my uncle, he’d never been my uncle, and he had no intention of ever becoming my uncle. He said he’d had his eye on me all the time I was growing up, but he’d never stepped out of line, not once, wasn’t that right? But now I was big enough, and I was sure purty enough, and if people were trying to kill me he damn well wanted me where he could keep an eye on me. . . . That was when the phone rang. Somehow I knew what it would be, and I pulled him over to it and picked it up and held it so we could both hear. It was The Voice again, of course: ‘Three times lucky is better than your daddy managed, girlie, but you can’t escape us forever.’ ” She grimaced. “It was the last straw. I’m no sturdy feminist heroine; I wanted somebody to protect me. I’d become pretty disillusioned about romantic young men my own age anyway; sooner or later I’d always see that cash-register look in their eyes. Poor little rich girl, ha! If romance was what I wanted, how could I do better than the man who’d waited for me so patiently and loyally all those years? But mostly I was just terrified and looking for shelter.”