The Scared Stiff Read online

  Meanwhile, other patrons gathered around poor Lola to calm her, give her solace, and reassure her (without quite saying so) that once she was over the shock she’d realize she was better off without that bum. And Mike and his waitresses moved among the patrons, taking down names and addresses and distributing free drinks of the patrons’ choice.

  People didn’t want to leave, but they didn’t want to eat anymore either. After Mike’s free round, they began to buy their own drinks, and the occasion turned into a kind of Halloween party, a premature wake, while everybody waited for the police, or Señor Ortiz’s ambulance and crew, whichever got there first.

  It was, in fact, the police who arrived first, but not the ones from San Cristobal. He was one young cop from Vista Alegar, who seemed mostly embarrassed to be the center of all this attention. Headquarters at San Cristobal had phoned him, and it was his job to maintain order until more experienced police arrived from the capital. He was given the entire story several times over, was offered (and accepted) a rum drink by Mike, offered in his turn his condolences to Lola, and then decided to sit at her table until reinforcements came. A rich beautiful widow, and a native-born Guerreran at that; he might be young, that cop, but he wasn’t foolish.

  An hour and a half after Barry Lee’s final flight, Señor Ortiz’s ambulance arrived. The three-man crew carried their canvas stretcher and white sheet down under the restaurant and out into the light. They’d also brought along a strong rope, one end of which they tied to a restaurant support pillar, the other to the nearest rear window frame of the Beetle, so they’d have something to hold onto when going out and back. Then they carried the stretcher out to the car, and from above everyone saw that flash of royal blue as the body was moved from Beetle to stretcher.

  And then it was over, or at least the interesting part was over. The body was brought up over the boulders and stuffed into the ambulance, the ambulance drove away, and Señor Ortiz came back in from overseeing the operation to receive the thanks of the proprietor, the admiration of the crowd, a kiss from his adoring Señora Ortiz, and one last complimentary planter’s punch for the road.

  Now the patrons began to drift homeward, all pausing for a final word of condolence to the widow, so that it actually was very like a wake, except that the viewing was over. Lola had to stay, of course, to wait for the real cops to arrive from San Cristobal. The bashful young cop had to stay, and the Ortizes, and Mike, but he did send the staff home and from then on tended bar himself.

  Twenty-five minutes after my supposed departure in the ambulance, and two hours and ten minutes after my presumed departure from this life, the police from San Cristobal at last arrived, in two vehicles: a van containing eight uniformed policemen, and a Land Rover bearing a uniformed driver and two inspectors in plain clothes. Well, relatively plain; one, named Rafez, was in an off-white linen suit, pale yellow dress shirt, and tan sandals, while the other, named Loto, wore a pink guayabera shirt, pressed designer blue jeans, and black cowboy boots with silver decorations. Rafez in the suit was the suave one, while Loto in the boots was the blunt pragmatic one.

  At first, when they were introduced to Lola and she said a heartbroken word or two in Guerreran Spanish, these inspectors made the mistake of thinking that her dead husband must be local too, and not the rich northerner they’d been led to believe was the victim here. A dead Guerreran was not worth an exhausting midnight drive across most of Guerrera, as any fool was supposed to know. Until the situation was explained, they were quite frosty, but then, having been assured that Barry Lee, the departed, was indeed a North American, even a New Yorker, they relaxed; their dignity had not been impaired, after all.

  It was Loto, in the boots, who questioned Mike and the Ortizes and the bashful young cop, while Rafez, in his linen suit, joined Lola at her table to murmur delicate questions about her marriage and the events of the night. Lola answered tearfully but bravely, confessing there had been trouble in the marriage recently, brought on by financial reverses they had suffered, and that this vacation had been their last desperate attempt to recapture their earlier passion. “Ah,” Rafez murmured, smiling soulfully at her, “when passion has gone…”

  “But we wanted to try. We wanted to hope. And now…”

  Inspector Rafez reached across the table to grasp her hand in sympathy. “At such moments,” he said, “we can only bow to the will of Fate.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she agreed, and released her hand so she could sip chardonnay, the only drink she was permitting herself during this dangerous time.

  Down below, the soldiers had clamped the Beetle with grappling hooks and metal cables. The cables ran up to a pulley on the front of their van, so the van’s engine could be used to winch the Beetle out of its watery resting place and grindingly up the boulder-strewn slope until, no longer quite recognizable as an automobile, it reached the parking lot.

  Had this been a crime scene, that would have been a terrible way to treat the primary piece of evidence, but it wasn’t a crime scene, was it? It was an accident scene.

  And now everyone was finished. Mike was turning his back to yawn, even the Ortizes were coming down from their self-satisfied high, and the bashful local cop had resigned himself to the fact that Inspector Rafez had the inside track with the beautiful rich widow. Rank, as everyone knows, has its privileges.

  Lola was driven home by the inspectors. Loto sat in front with the driver and Rafez sat in back with Lola. She’d expected she might have to fend him off, but he behaved himself as he and Loto and Lola chatted about Guerrera, the changes since she’d moved away (not many), and people they might know in common (a few).

  After a while, Loto began to doze. The silences lengthened. “I’ve been thinking about moving to the States myself,” Rafez said.

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Sure. New York City, I was thinking. I read about New York City a lot, and there’s a lot of Spanish people there.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The police there,” Rafez said, “they could use some cops talk Spanish, I bet that’s true.”

  “I’m sure they’ve got some,” Lola said.

  “Oh, yes, sure, they’d have to do that already. But look at this, Señora… Señora Lee. May I speak to you as Lola?”

  “Yes, I’d like that.”

  “Thank you. And I am Rafael. Rafael Rafez.”

  “How do you do,” she said politely.

  “Well, Lola, here’s what I think,” he said. “I think they got cops there that speak Spanish and maybe know the people from the south, know them a little, but you look at me. Already I’m a cop, and already I’m here in South America; I got dealings with all kinds of Spanish people in this country. Not just Guerrerans, all kinds. Look at all the borders around us.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I think, if I got to New York,” Rafez told her, “I’d get a job with the cops in New York, they’re glad to have me, a guy knows the people like I know the people, and already a cop. Already took two courses in police technique, up in Miami. U.S. government courses, you know about them?”

  “No, I don’t,” Lola said.

  “Very good, very professional. I got diplomas, I’ll show you sometime.”

  “That would be nice,” Lola said, and they arrived in San Cristobal, and the van behind them peeled off, and Loto woke up to say to the driver, “Take me home.”

  So they had a little middle-of-the-night tour of the empty streets of San Cristobal, with the widely spaced pinkish streetlights and all the facades shuttered and shut up for the night. They stopped at a newish concrete apartment building and Loto yawned, got out of the Land Rover, and then stuck his head back in to say, “Condolences, Señora.”

  “Thank you.”

  Once they’d left the lights of San Cristobal behind, on the road to Sabanon, Rafez did make his move. Apparently he was a little heavy-handed, the bastard, and Lola had to defend herself with increasing vigor. She’d hoped the presence of the dri
ver would be some sort of deterrent, but the driver never saw a thing, never even looked in the rearview mirror.

  She tried to remain gentle about it, the heartbroken and dazed widow lady, but Rafez just got more and more aggressive, and it wasn’t until she gave him the nosebleed that he accepted the idea that no meant no.

  Tenderhearted Lola; the nosebleed worked, but she still felt badly about it. “He’ll never get the blood out of that linen suit,” she said.

  Good.

  11

  “Arturo,” I said, bouncing around in the backseat like a single piece of popcorn, “stop a second.” I was in back as we drove too fast out the potholed dirt road from the Scarlet Toucan after we’d drop-kicked the Beetle into the river, because I was supposed to be changing clothes, out of Barry and into Felicio, but the road flung me around so much I couldn’t do a thing. “Stop, will you?”

  “I don’t know, man,” he said. “We gotta clear outa here.”

  “Just stop while I get these pants on, Arturo.”

  So he did stop, though reluctantly, and I at last finished getting dressed, switched to the front seat, and slammed the door, before Arturo sent us leaping forward again. Braced, I said, “One question.”

  “It was beautiful, man,” he said. He grinned, and his teeth gleamed in the reflected headlight glow; the dashboard lights didn’t work on the Impala either.

  I repeated myself. “One question, Arturo. Who was that guy?”

  He risked a quick glance at me. “What guy?”

  “The guy we put in the Beetle.”

  “How do I know?” he asked me. “He was just somebody Ortiz had around. He said we was lucky, he had a guy the right size and sex and age and everything.”

  “Arturo,” I said, “that was no peon, that was no nameless indigent. That guy had a manicure.”

  “He did?” Arturo made the turn onto the main road, heading north, and we could both relax a little. “A manicure,” Arturo repeated, and grinned and shook his head.

  “What’s going on, Arturo?”

  “Looks like,” Arturo said, “somebody else got a scam working.”

  “Just so it doesn’t make trouble for me.”

  “How can it? The body come from Ortiz, the body’s goin’ back to Ortiz.”

  “Well, that’s true.”

  He gave me another grin. “And whaddaya thinka that Beetle, out there in the air?”

  I grinned back at him. “It was great.”

  He nodded, watching the dark road. “It was beautiful, hermano. I shoulda brought a video camera.”

  I laughed, feeling the tension ease down another notch. “Arturo, we couldn’t stand there making a movie.”

  “Be a hell of a movie,” he said.

  •

  It was almost two-thirty in the morning when we finally pulled to a stop in front of the anonymous wall surrounding Cousin Carlos’s place. Carlos had given a key to Arturo, who gave it to me, and it worked first time, as simple as if I’d been coming here this way for years.

  I waved to Arturo, who yawned and waved back, and I went on inside as he drove off. I’d asked him earlier if he didn’t want to stay here tonight, rather than do more hours of driving, but he said that was okay, he wasn’t going all the way home to Sabanon but would stay over in San Cristobal. Maybe that meant his alleged wife and putative children were about to get a rare and precious Arturo sighting.

  In any event, I was now on my own. I let the door in the wall snick shut behind me, which put me in darkness alleviated only slightly by star shine, just enough to make out the general shape of the building. Arturo had told me what I should do next. The same key would unlock the front door of the house. I should go in there, and I’d see a nightlight down the hallway to my right, which would be in the kitchen. I should continue on past the kitchen to the door at the end of the hall, which would be open. That was my room.

  Yes. The key worked on the house door, as promised. I stepped inside into greater darkness, with what might have been a living room in front of me. I could vaguely see hints of the windows that would overlook the pool and the lawn and the river. A hall extended to my right, as advertised; the spill of light from a doorway on the left down there must be the kitchen. And the black rectangle beyond it would be the doorway to my new room.

  I moved slowly and silently down the carpeted hall, not wanting to wake anyone. More of those free-form metal sculptures were on the walls here, like the ones I’d noticed on the inside of the perimeter wall. They were interesting abstract things, at the same time both primitive and sophisticated. They didn’t seem to go with Cousin Carlos at all. But you never know about people.

  I reached the kitchen and looked in, and Luz was there, looking at me. She was seated facing me at a large heavy mahogany table, a paperback photo novel open in front of her, along with a beer bottle and a plate containing half a thick sandwich. She gave me a very loose smile, with mischief twinkling in those large dark eyes, and said, “How you doin’, Ernesto?”

  I knew enough now to pretend I hadn’t heard her, but that I would realize she’d spoken because I’d seen her lips move. So I smiled and nodded and waved my hand at her, and continued on along the hall, thinking, Damn it, what’s she doing here?

  Can it be she wants to check me out anyway, that the thought of syphilis — cured, after all — is becoming less of a deterrent? I don’t need this, I really don’t. I don’t need Luz hanging around, and I don’t need Lola hearing that Luz is hanging around.

  I was closing the door of my pitch-black room when what she’d said floated through my brain again: “How you doin’, Ernesto?”

  In English.

  12

  I woke up late; ten-forty by the Rolex, which I still had. I’d thought long and hard about whether to accessorize Mr. X with my watch and wedding ring, in addition to my wallet, and finally decided there was too much likelihood they’d be lost in the crash. So the heck with it; they were lost in the crash. I’d keep them both with me, but hidden, until I could get back to the States as Felicio, when they would be given to me, as part of her dead husband’s remaining effects, by my grateful sister, Lola.

  This was the very tricky part now, when I was floating among identities. I couldn’t very well claim to be Lola’s brother in front of her family, most of whom weren’t in on the scam, so that’s why I was having to be Ernesto Lopez, the pitiful but no longer scabrous deaf mute, until the time was right to leave the country. I was hoping it would only be a week or two.

  The idea was, Barry Lee would be buried on Monday, after a very touching funeral mass in the same church in which he’d been married only fourteen years ago, and on Tuesday Lola would fly to New York, carrying with her the death certificate and the funeral card and videotape of the funeral and a copy of the order for the gravestone and Señor Ortiz’s undertaker bill and the deed for the grave plot, and turn all that over to our insurance agent. Then she’d go out and buy a lot of black.

  How I’d love to fly north with her, but of course I couldn’t. Or, that is, her brother Felicio couldn’t, since he didn’t at this point have a passport. Soon he would apply for one — with, as usual, the invaluable assistance of his brother Arturo — but we didn’t think it would be safe for Felicio to make any official move until after the insurance company, having decided there was no problem, had paid off. Then, once Lola had that check in hand, Felicio would leave the land of his birth for the very first time just as quickly as he could, to fly north to comfort his widowed sister in her hour of travail.

  The death certificate was the key to all this, and one of the reasons we’d decided to work this scam in Guerrera instead of at home is that, in Guerrera, the coroner doesn’t actually have to see the body to give you a death certificate, just so he has a signed statement from a mortician. The reason is that there’s only one coroner for the whole country, but there are morticians everywhere there’s a graveyard. So Señor Ortiz would drive his statement to San Cristobal on Monday, come back with the cert
ificate, and Lola would catch her plane north on Tuesday.

  That was the plan, and for the next part of it my job was to do nothing. Not that I had to stay in this tiny room all my life. Seen by the light of day, it really was very small and plain; the word monastic comes to mind, and not only because of the huge mahogany crucifix hanging above the bed. The bars on both windows also helped.

  The furniture, apart from this fairly comfortable single bed, consisted of a very crude clunky small dresser, which looked as though it had been made by a Shaker on speed, and a bulky uncomfortable mahogany armless chair built by the same person during rehab.

  Well, it was a small room, and it was very late, and yet I was reluctant to get up and start my day, and the reason for that was Luz. She’d spoken to me in English last night. She didn’t buy Arturo’s story, masterful though it had been. She believed something else, but what?

  She believed I could hear, and she believed I spoke English.

  So Luz was a problem, though I didn’t know yet what problem she was. But it was a problem that would have to be dealt with.

  Finally, though, it wasn’t the need to deal with Luz that got me out of bed and into the white terry-cloth robe draped over the chair. It was my bladder. I needed a bathroom.

  When I opened the door, the hall was empty and the house silent. I stepped out and saw an open door on my right, before the kitchen, and when I looked in I saw it was a bathroom. It was very modern, with a stall shower and a stack of thick white towels on an attractively graceful small white-painted wooden table completely unlike the usual cumbersome mahogany creations with which so much of Guerrera is littered.