The Scared Stiff (6 page)

Something was wrong here, but there wasn't time to do anything about it. I'd have to ask Arturo later. Who are we getting rid of here?

"Come on,
hermano
."

"Yes, yes," I said, "I'm coming!"

I stood up out of the car and shut its door and the light went off. He was a peon again; he was me again; he was no longer a mystery. I reached in past him to start the engine, which immediately coughed into life. I shifted into DRIVE and got my arm out of there, and the Beetle moved forward to poke the rail fence, insistent but not strong enough to break through.

Now, while I stood there, Arturo ran to the Impala. He got in, started it without switching on the headlights, and backed up to get behind the Beetle. As I stepped backward out of the way, he suddenly accelerated as fast as he could at the rear of the Beetle, hitting it with a
crunch
that popped the smaller car forward, through the fence and off the edge.

Out it arched, into all that light above the river, a white descending balloon. No. A white descending refrigerator.

Arturo slammed on the brakes, and the Impala stopped just before the drop. He backed around in a tight circle, and I turned away from the dramatic instant of my death. As I ran for the Impala and jumped into the backseat, I heard the screams start inside the restaurant.

I could pick out Lola's scream. It was the loudest one of all.

When next I saw her, Lola described for me the scene after my departure from the Scarlet Toucan. Into the at-last-calm atmosphere of the restaurant, the shiny white Beetle made a sudden dramatic appearance in the middle of the air, hung there like a surrealist painting, then crashed with a great geyser of foam and spray and auto parts.

The patrons, of course, were horrified and began to scream and point and leap to their feet. Naturally, Lola had recognized the car, and she made it clear that she knew at once what must have happened, and after her first horrified shriek she blamed herself, loudly and inconsolably: "It's all my fault! I never appreciated him! I drove him to it!"

The first thing that happened was that two guys in dirty aprons from the kitchen scrambled down the boulders and among the support pillars under the restaurant, carrying flashlights. They came out into the floodlit area, standing on the brink of the rushing river, while the observers above crowded dangerously close to the edge of the platform to watch. The staff guys couldn't get very close to the car, but they stood on wet boulders and shone their flashlights into it and saw the royal-blue mound slumped in the front seat. Then they looked up at the people on the restaurant rim and shook their heads. One of them made a horizontal motion in the air with one hand, palm down, while the other drew a finger across his throat. The driver is dead; no hope.

Fortunately, there just happened to be, among the diners in the Scarlet Toucan that evening, one Señor Ortiz, a well-known and widely respected mortician from the city of Marona. Grasping the situation at once, Señor Ortiz promptly volunteered his services, which Mike was happy to accept.

Señor Ortiz ordered Mike to take down the names and addresses of all the patrons in the restaurant, as witnesses to the tragic accident, while he himself got on the phone. First he called his staff in Marona and told them to rush to the Scarlet Toucan with the ambulance used for dead bodies. Only then did he phone the police, but he didn't call the small local constabulary in Vista Alegar, just up the road, but police headquarters instead, in San Cristobal, 170 miles away.

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 driver 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.

"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."