The Frighteners (6 page)

“So you agreed to marry him.”

“Yes,” she said. “And three weeks later I learned that all those men had been hired by him to make it happen just that way! The driver of the pickup truck, the sniper in the vacant lot, the man in my dressing room who was also, it turned out, The

Voice. All working hard to scare the dumb wench into Uncle Bully’s arms and bring his long courtship that she hadn’t even known was a courtship to a successful conclusion.”

“The frighteners,” I said. “But they weren’t really trying to kill you?”

“Not then,” she said. “Oh, no, it couldn’t happen until we were safely married and I’d changed my will, you can guess how. But then, when the time was right, the paranoid dame would try to kill herself again. Only this time her dear, loving Uncle Bufly would be so heartbroken because he’d failed to find her before it was too late!”

Cananea was visible from several miles down the road, a small mining town nestling in a fold of the mountains—a northward extension of the Sierra Madre, I believe, called the Sierra de la Madera. The Timber Mountains, if my limited Spanish vocabulary can be trusted. Although they hardly qualified as Alpine peaks, they rose to respectable heights behind the town and the tall, smoking stacks of the mine. I didn’t see anything growing on them but the usual sparse scrub evergreens common to that arid country, good for nothing but firewood; but maybe they produced better lumber farther south.

Gloria started preparing herself for public appearance as we approached civilization, such as it was in these parts. Actually, she had very little to do since she hadn’t let herself yield much to the rigors of the long ride; no sprawling, unbuttoned, shoes-off relaxation here. She merely checked her golden hairdo, inspected her elaborate eye makeup, powdered her patrician nose, and repaired some minor lipstick wear. We entered a sprawling town of dirt streets and low mud buildings. Cheerful, ragged kids played in the dust along with scrawny dogs of indeterminate breeding. We missed the restaurant on the first pass and wound up in a rather dilapidated and unpromising residential area—not that any part of this mining community resembled Beverly Hills. I turned the Caddy around and drove back the way we’d come. I seemed to be doing a lot of backtracking on this safari.

“My lost pathfinder!” said Gloria dryly. “Who did you call from Douglas, just before we crossed the border?”

I glanced at her sharply. I’d made no great effort toward security, it hadn’t been that important; but she wouldn’t have seen me using the pay phone up the street if she’d followed instructions and stayed in the car at the filling station where we’d availed ourselves of our last opportunity to top up the tank with U.S. gas.

“Just checking with the time-of-day service, ma’am,” I said. “Incidentally, you’re supposed to set your watch back an hour. Mexico doesn’t have daylight saving.”

She laughed shortly. “You’re a liar.”

“Always. That’s the way they train us, and I was a prize student. But I’m right about the hour.”

She was watching me, frowning. She said, “I do have an interest in this operation, Matt. . . . I mean, Horace, dear. I’d like to know what’s going on. Telephone call from Deming, New Mexico, where we filled up the first time—you weren’t so sneaky about that one—telephone call from Douglas, Arizona, where you were supposedly laying in a supply of pesos in preparation for entering Mexico. Very mysterious. Is there something I should know that you aren’t telling me, Horace, dear?” She laughed again. “Yes, I was snooping. Actually, I just meant to walk around a bit after all the driving; but seeing you at that phone made me curious, so I followed you fora couple of blocks and watched around the comer. What were you doing in that hardware store, making contact with one of your secret agents? And in J.C. Penney’s? I thought the place to get foreign money was a bank.”

The fact that she’d watched me didn’t worry me; but the fact that I hadn’t been aware of her watching me was disturbing. Either she was better at surveillance than she ought to be, or I’d been less alert than I should have been.

I said, “The gas jockey told me that the banks in Douglas won’t handle Mexican money; you have to get it in one of the stores that deal with the Mexicans. The hardware store didn’t have any pesos to spare, so they sent me over to Penney’s, where a nice lady sold me fifty bucks’ worth. At the current rate of exchange, it makes for an impressive-looking wad of bills, all covered with zeros. First time I ever handled a piece of money reading ten thousand in any denomination.”

‘‘Anyway, it makes a good story,’’ Gloria said. ‘‘Look, there’s a cafe, but it doesn’t say Mr. Green.”

“I’ll go in and ask,” I said, stopping the car.

The sign read CAFE all right, but when I got inside, I found that it wasn’t an eating place at all, but just a store selling coffee. A combination of broken Spanish and broken English brought out the information that the restaurant I wanted was just down the street, I couldn’t miss it.

“We can’t miss it,” I said, starting the car again.

“That’s very reassuring,” said Gloria, “considering that we’ve already missed it once. . . . No, look, there it is!”

She was right. Up ahead on the right was Mr. Green’s Restaurant,
Buen Comer
. There was also the Blanco y Negro Bar,
Ladies, Ambiente Familiar
. And there was a motel. How we’d failed to spot this long, low, brick-front complex the first time through, I have no idea, except that it sat back a little on a street that met ours at an acute angle, and there was also a third street involved, creating a confused, wide, unpaved intersection, more like a dusty vacant lot that had presumably taken all my attention and maybe Gloria’s as well. There was only one vehicle parked in front of the restaurant, an elderly red Ford pickup with Sonora plates. I stopped the Allante behind it.

“Let’s try this good eating they advertise,” I said. “It’s about that time.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t join the ladies and sample the family ambiance in the Black and White Bar? I thought all secret contacts took place in bars.”

“Nobody told me anything about a bar,” I said. “The word I got was restaurant. Come on.”

I went around to help her out, wondering if this was in character: did oil-field roughnecks, even millionaire oil-field roughnecks, hand ladies out of horseless carriages these days? I decided that the older ones probably did and still go in for this kind of cowboy chivalry. The younger ones undoubtedly just snapped their fingers and told their dates, “Move the assets, baby, you’re holding up the merger.”

The restaurant was moderately large and encouragingly clean and empty of customers except for a single Mexican couple at a side table, presumably the owners of the pickup outside. They were drinking beer. We were early for dinner, which down there is normally served at an hour when decent American citizens are beginning to think of bed. A pleasant-looking, plump brown lady in a loose brown dress and a blue apron indicated that any place we cared to sit was acceptable to her. I picked a comer table with a view of the front door, the kitchen door, and the modesty screen nearby that was marked DAMAS at one end and CABALLEROS at the other, indicating the nature of the facilities concealed behind it.

I couldn’t help remembering that not too long ago I’d visited a rest room in another country where they spoke a lot of Spanish—Puerto Rico, if you must know—and a big guy had tried to shoot me with a silenced .22 pistol. I’d had to use my knife to discourage him. I wasn’t oveijoyed by the knowledge that, if no contact approached me within a reasonable time, I was going to have to enter that CABALLEROS to see if he was waiting in there for me. Well, for Horace Hosmer Cody. Just what was supposed to pass between us remained to be seen. It would be the first close test of my disguise; and I hoped nobody’d been handing out photographs of the true Mr. Cody. But for the moment, if my contact was in there, let him wait. And if he was sitting at a table fifteen feet away pretending to be a Mexican peasant bringing his wife—well, on second glance, daughter—to town in their pickup truck, let him wait, too.

I said, “I’m not usually a beer drinker, but it’s very good down here, it goes well with the local food, and after that drive I’ve got a Sahara thirst.”

We settled on Dos Equis and
carne asada
. The beer was brought, along with com chips and a spicy dip, salsa, that carried considerable authority. I studied the shining young woman across the table who should have been imbibing champagne in the honeymoon suite of a big-city hotel about this time, instead of slugging down cerveza in a backwoods eatery.

“So you have reason to think Buff Cody intended to kill you,” I said.

“It’s not exactly an original idea,” she said dryly. “Other men, caught in a financial bind—I gather the slump in the oil industry has hit him hard—have had the bright notion of marrying a rich girl and arranging to inherit all her money as soon after the wedding as the, er, removal can be carried out without arousing suspicion.” She made a wry face. “Wanted: paranoid heiress with demonstrated mental instability and proven suicidal tendencies. Who’s going to ask questions if the poor screwball wench tries to kill herself again and succeeds? Well, Uncle Buffy couldn’t find a suitable subject ready-made, so he manufactured one. Me. If one of his hirelings hadn’t talked, he’d have been home free.”

“This man who was caught, one of the three Cody had working on you,” I said. “How was he persuaded to talk?”

Gloria shook her head unhappily. “It seems incredible, as if we were talking about someone I never met instead of someone who . . . who brought me bubblegum when I was a little girl. I knew that he and Papa hadn’t always been model citizens, of course; they were actually kind of proud of their gaudy past, although I was always told that the details weren’t fit for my tender ears. But to think of Uncle Buffy giving orders for a man to be killed, like a gangster putting out a contract . . . !” She stopped, breathless.

“Cody ordered a hit on one of his own people? Why?”

“Well, as I told you, the man was careless,” Gloria said. “He was the one who’d hid in the bathroom; and he’d let me see his face in the mirror. If he were caught, I could identify him. Apparently Uncle Buffy was afraid that under those circumstances he’d talk and incriminate everyone involved including Uncle Buffy. Well, it seems that Mr. Somerset’s men had them all under surveillance. They frustrated an attempt on Dixon’s life—that was his name, Marty Dixon—and the man realized that he was marked for death and made a deal. He’d tell everything in return for government protection.”

“You’re sure of the man.”

She glanced up irritably. “Yes, of course I’m sure! I not only recognized his face when I saw him; I recognized his voice. The Voice. There’s no possible doubt. And he gave Mr. Somerset the names of the others: the man who'd run me off the road and the man who’d shot at me. Oil-field roughnecks who’d worked for Uncle Buffy in the past. The frighteners, you called them. That’s very appropriate. Scaring me into begging Uncle Buffy for protection and at the same time giving me the reputation of being a suicidal freak was Phase One of the operation. Of course they had orders to be very careful not to hurt me—yet.” Her voice was bitter. “I’d be worthless if I wound up with a broken neck or a lethal bullet hole before the wedding could take place. Just as Uncle Buffy was careful, himself, to save me the night I was supposed to have swallowed all those barbiturates before they could take effect. Phase One. Of course Phase Two was going to be a different proposition entirely!’’ Gloria drew a long breath and rose, picking up her purse. “I think I’d better pay a visit to the little girls’ room before I eat.”

I grinned. “In case you have trouble with the translation, you want the one marked DAMAS. Like in dames.”

She made a face at me and walked off. I finished my beer and ordered another. As I’d indicated to Gloria, it’s not my favorite tipple, but in Germany and Mexico, where they do it so well, I sometimes find myself actually enjoying the stuff if I’m thirsty enough.

The lady with the blue apron brought the dinners.
Carne asada
just stands for roasted meat; this seemed to be beef and it was done pretty black, but that’s customary. I hesitated. Would Horace Hosmer Cody wait politely for his wife to rejoin him? I decided he’d take at least a couple of bites to check things out, and did so, feeling slightly uncomfortable about eating with my hat on, since it was something my mother had been very strict about. In spite of its overcooked appearance, the meat was good, a bit tough but quite tasty. . . . I found myself laying down my knife and fork and getting to my feet without really making the decision and walking across the largely empty restaurant.

It had been too long. I found myself thanking Buff Cody silently for not going in for boots with over-high heels; some of that cowboy footgear feels like walking on stilts. I was also grateful for the modesty screen that would permit me to investigate the DAMAS without having the restaurant lady come running to tell the dumb
gringo
that he had the wrong door. But most of my gratitude was reserved for Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson, whose reliable .38-caliber product I removed from its place of concealment as soon as I could no longer be seen from the restaurant. I had, of course, entered the space behind the screen from the right, the CABALLEROS side. I passed that door and knocked left-handed on the DAMAS.

“Gloria,” I called innocently. “Gloria, are you okay in there? The food’s getting cold.”

There was no answer. I turned the knob with my left hand, standing well aside, and pushed the door back far enough to make certain nobody was hiding behind it. It was a tiled room of reasonable size for a john. It was empty. I backed away, letting that door close automatically, and looked at the other one. Well, I’d had a bad feeling about the CABALLEROS from the moment I first saw it. I stepped over to where the blast of a firearm inside wouldn’t wipe me out. There was no need for conversation. If they were in there—and Gloria would hardly have entered those masculine premises of her own accord—they would already have heard me. The door was unlocked. I kicked it open and went in with it.