The Corpse with the Emerald Thumb (26 page)

I had to make the most of what I already knew. I could eliminate some people from being in the frame for Margarita's murder, but now I also had to consider whether Tony's killing had anything to do with Margarita's death, or if it was to do with the barrels and bottles issue, which I'd worked out in Rutilio's Restaurant. It was confusing, to say the least. I needed a smoke. But I didn't have my purse. I strained to make out the time on my watch by what little light came through the barred window, but it was no use. If I was going to make the most of my time, it would be a good idea to first use Al's washroom, then settle in for the night. I called out to my jailer, hoping he would hear me.

“Hello, Al? Could I use the washroom, please?” Nothing. I waited. And waited. Having decided to go, I
needed
to go. “Al? Can you hear me? I need the washroom, please.” Still nothing.
Damn and blast!
I told my bladder to be patient—
because that always works!
Eventually, I heard some clattering off in the darkness of the municipal hall. “Is that you, Al?”

“Yes, who else would it be? What do you want?” Al sounded angry.

“I could do with using your washroom,” I replied, sounding as desperate as I felt. “I called and called, but you didn't answer.”

Clicks in the distance led to the hall being illuminated, then Al was outside my door. “I was speaking to the Federales. It was an important call. I'm here now.” He placed the big, old iron key into the lock of the door. It squealed as it turned. “I will accompany you to my bathroom. Don't even think of trying to run away—the whole building is locked. You have nowhere to run. Just follow me.” He pulled the door open, and I rushed out.

“I really need to get there quickly,” I pleaded. Al picked up on my genuine distress and marched quickly to the bathroom, flung open the door, and ushered me in. As I ran the water to wash my hands, I looked around the room for anything that might be of use to me, or Bud. This being Al's own bathroom, not just a public washroom, I dared to peep inside his medicine cabinet. Caffeine pills—possibly to help with late nights spent studying; a fair stock of Band-Aids—it looked as though he was as clumsy as me; and a couple of bottles of over-the-counter antihistamine pills were all that was there. I closed the medicine cabinet and took stock of myself in the mirror on its door. I was pretty much a blur; my face lacked definition and color. I was a pasty blob, with little eyes.
Cait Morgan, you've got work to do. Stop thinking that you're living in a looking-glass world and make some sense of all this stuff.
I turned off the water and opened the door. Al was right outside.

“Use enough water?” he asked acidly.

I blushed, recalling his point about how all we visitors use too much of the precious resource. And that gave me a thought.

“The water supply for the Hacienda Soleado tequila-making plant, where does it come from? Who runs the manufacturing, or I suppose it's the distillation, operation? Is it Greg?”

Al glared at me. “He oversees it, with Juan, though it's none of your business.” Any sense that Al and I were on the same side had clearly evaporated. I needed to make the most of the short walk back to my cell.

“Al, I know you're angry with me, but all I can do is ask that you believe me when I tell you that neither I nor the man you have incarcerated had anything to do with Margarita's death, let alone the Rose Killings. And, of course, I wouldn't smoke in that wonderful, historic room you've put me in, but is there any way I could have the nicotine gum that's in my purse?”

Al stopped in his tracks and gave my request some consideration. I hoped that, as a smoker himself, he'd help me out. He shrugged. “Can't hurt,” he replied gruffly.

“Oh, thanks ever so much, Al,” I gushed. “It'll help me relax. If you dig around in my purse you'll find it. You'll also find some notes I was making about Margarita's death and my camera, with a photo on it that can prove—” I didn't have a chance to finish.

“Stop it, Professor Morgan! I will give you your precious gum to assuage your addiction—you won't be so lucky when the Federales are in charge of you—but that's it! I will not buy into your tales anymore. Now come on, back to your . . . accommodations.” He grabbed my arm and more than steered me back into the little room, where he slammed the door and locked it, violently. A few moments later he pushed a pack of gum through the grille in the door. “Here—chew your jaw off! You'll be pleased to know that the Federales will come early. They will be here to collect you both at 9:00
AM
tomorrow. I have spoken to the officer heading the Rose Killer case, and he will be coming here himself, straight from the latest dump site. Make the most of your last few hours of comparative ‘freedom.' It won't be long now until I can prove my worth as a detective!”

When I'd checked my watch by the light in the bathroom, I'd seen that it was midnight. Nine hours, that's all I had! Nine hours to use my brain to figure out what had really happened since Bud and I had arrived in Punta de las Rocas. I popped out a square of nicotine gum and chewed furiously. Within a few moments the craving for a cigarette had passed.
The gum really works!
I knew that I'd be able to concentrate better without feeling the terrible pangs of my addiction, which had become very strong again, very quickly. I chastised myself for having given in to buying cigarettes at all, and I saw again, in my mind's eye, the picture of the wonderful
In Search of Reason
on the Malecón in Puerto Vallarta.
Apply yourself, Cait!
As I visualized myself clambering up Bustamante's unsupported ladder, the first clap of thunder boomed above my head. Seconds later I could hear fat drops of rain slap against the metal bars that encased the window. I opened the casement just a little and drew in deep breaths of the metallic air: rain on sunbaked dust smells wonderful, but it was all I had to smile about.

I lay down on the cushioned bench in my little room and closed my eyes, releasing my thoughts to run free and form themselves into a reasonable explanation of all the facts I'd gathered and observations I'd made. The answer had to be in there . . . somewhere.

Usually when I'm using the wakeful dreaming technique, my thoughts whirl about in no particular order to begin with, then various aspects of my findings gather themselves about a person or a place. This time, things went a little differently. I allowed the process to take the path it had chosen for itself, because, after all, that's the whole point, but it seemed to be leading me into a world where Edward Lear had laid his hands on everything I saw, and I felt uncomfortably like a very confused Alice.

First I saw Bud,
dear Bud
. He was running around in his cell with a giant watch face hanging about his neck. He looked panic-stricken and shouted, “I'm out of time, I'm out of time!” He kept bouncing off the bars of his cell, and, as he did so, they transformed into giant rose stems, the thorns cutting into his flesh until he was covered in blood. But he didn't stop running, around and around, bouncing and bleeding. I felt sorrow, and anguish, gripping my stomach.

Dorothea appeared next. She was a red-cloaked giant, swooshing into the municipal hall demanding that Bud be hanged. Her voice made the walls shake. She pumped her fists at the roof, which blew away to reveal dark thunderclouds. “Hang him, hang him!” she bellowed, and a gallows appeared in the corner of the hall, looming ominously, and growing by the minute.

I saw myself pop into existence in the middle of the hall, surrounded by a group of menacingly tall men. Al, Frank, and Dean crowded around me. As they grew ever taller, I felt as though I was shrinking. The foliage on Dean's Hawaiian shirt sprang to life and started to grow independently of the man. Sinuous vines crept across the floor of the municipal hall, which was disappearing and transforming into Margarita's flower shop. Suddenly the vines blew apart, and the insubstantial flower shop was full of living blooms. They were singing and weeping for Margarita, who lay among them, broken into pieces, but alive. “My children, I love you all,” she was saying, as she gathered as many of the living, singing, weeping flowers into her arms as she could.

I reached toward the woman, who I saw had a golden scar running across her face, which she stroked proudly, but she turned away from me and screamed to Al that he had to save her, he had to make her whole. Al ran to her, his chest puffed out in his glittering dress uniform, which I somehow recognized as an ancient French general's style, and he gathered the pieces of Margarita together, but they kept slipping through his arms. He called, in French, for Frank to help him, but Frank was drinking tea with Ada. They seemed completely oblivious of everything that was going on around them, content to be in their own little world, with Ada pouring tea and Frank telling her how useless their children had turned out, but how much he loved her. Ada was pushing his hat off his head. Telling him it was rude to wear it indoors.

I saw a cigar in Frank's hand, but I couldn't smell the smoke. I did smell an overwhelming scent of dampness, mold. I turned from the scene where Margarita lay to see Greg Hollins curled up on a big, moldy cushion on the floor in front of me. He was leering up at me and offering me a pack of cigarettes that I somehow knew were made of rose petals, not tobacco. “You'll enjoy them; they are very good quality; they are exactly what I tell you they are . . . you know you want them,” he said greasily, with a sly look and a crooked smile. I pushed the packet, and him, away, and I turned again to try to escape.

Jean George sprang out of the ground in front of me. She scowled. “We don't want you here!” she screamed, but as she did so, her voice was drowned out by another, more piercing scream. I knew it was Serena. I would recognize her scream anywhere. She flew into the room, a bird with a giant female head and a bill that was wide open. She landed on top of Bud's prison cell, and her claws and beak tried to reach him inside. I ran to chase the woman-bird away, but Al grabbed me, dragging me back to Henry's house, where he pushed open the front door with one finger and said, “You should lock your door, Cait. It's too easy for people to get inside.”

“Leave her alone,” shouted Ada Taylor, suddenly beside me. “She's a Canadian; she can't have done anything wrong.”

“She is
not
Canadian,” shouted Al. “Like me, she is nothing, she is no one. We have no home, people like us. We are not one thing, not another. Look,” he pointed at my face, “she has no face. No identity. Look around—no one has a face!”

I looked around, and I could see that Al was right.
No one
had a face. They were just blobs, with no bodies, no faces, no identities. One blob moved, and it immediately became Greg Hollins, but a new version of the man: this version was wearing a hat with corks dangling from it, and had the legs of a kangaroo. Now, instead of holding a pack of cigarettes, he was holding a bottle of tequila toward a blob I knew to be Dorothea. “G'day Dotty, strewth, you're fair dinkum. Have some of this . . .” he said, with a strangled Australian accent.

Tony Booth appeared next. He was in his chef whites, but instead of a head he had a Día de los Muertos skull, like the one popularized in the etching
La Calavera Catrina
by José Guadalupe Posada. His body was elongated in the same style, and he was tossing pepper around his kitchen and wailing, “I am going to ride the surf forever!” Beside him appeared a weeping Madonna, who I knew, instinctively, was his wife, Callie. She showered her dead husband with yellow sticky notes as she sang, “The numbers always tell our secrets.”

Dean and Jean George rushed by on a white horse, being chased by Juan Martinez in his blue pickup truck, which trailed blood and water rather than exhaust. His arm was hanging from the window of his truck, and I could hear him screaming the name of his dead daughter.

Margarita magically appeared, alive and whole, filling her little white van with gas at a gas station, but the tank was overflowing, gas pouring down the hill, which was, I knew, the hill upon which the municipal hall was built. Then her white van transformed into a horse, still white because it was made of ice. It reared up and galloped away, and I was on its back. We passed grave after grave along the roadside until we reached Rutilio's Restaurant, which was now floating on a pontoon out at sea, with fish swimming away from it in all directions. I jumped off the frozen horse and found myself behind Margarita's flower shop, inside a tiny box that was so small I could hardly move. Rutilio stood above me, pouring tequila into the box from a tiny little bottle that seemed to pour forever. “Drink, drink, it is the good stuff—see, it is dark; that shows it has aged in the barrel.”

“I don't like tequila—I hate it!” I cried. I burst out of the little box and stood in front of Rutilio, who was holding a giant bunch of white roses.

“For my dead niece, and for my dead friend.” He wept.

Bob and Maria were now beside him, their individual faces mixed in my mind into one. They were twins, male and female. Then Miguel appeared, so very different from his brother. He slapped a big badge made of mirrored metal onto his brother's puffed chest. “Now he is my pretty baby brother policeman,” he said. They all carried white roses.

Dorothea, appearing as a red cloud above us all, blew at our little group like a fierce wind, scattering the others away so that only Rutilio and I remained. The roses he clenched were white, his shirt red, and he was grinning so widely I thought his head would split open. Then he began to disappear. In a series of blinks, he and I were at his niece's grave, then at a church in Punta de las Rocas, then at a church in Puerto Vallarta, then back inside Margarita's flower shop. As we moved from location to location he kept getting dimmer and dimmer, until all that was left was his chef hat, his teeth, and the white roses, all hanging in the air. Margarita's store evaporated, leaving Rutilio standing in front of the rear wall of his restaurant, where his remaining features disappeared completely against the white of the wall.