“There’s something else about the gun,” I said. “All the hotel servants know about it. They lost a gun up there the other night. It makes a pretty easy two plus-two. But I don’t think anybody will make a move. Menterez is helpless. The girl is demoralized. I don’t think any of them want any police problems. Some girl that works in the hotel sees one of those Cubans. Word would get back that way, probably last night. Probably water swirling out of the tank moved the gun and it got in the way of the mechanism. One of those things.”
“If those guards decide it was you, Trav, what would they think you were trying to do?”
“Friend of Mineros, maybe, coming to take another crack at Menterez. If they know about the gun, let’s assume they know we’re leaving. There’s nothing more here, Nora. We go and try it from the other direction. Tomberlin and Mineros, the friends of Mineros.”
“Why haven’t those friends come after Carlos Menterez before now?”
“Maybe they have been around. Killing a man in that shape would be doing him a favor. And it would have to be a personal thing. Mineros could blame Carlos for the death of his brother, his brother’s wife, his nephew. Maybe the people who knew what Mineros was trying to do, maybe they don’t have strong reasons. This is remote. It’s hard to get at him. And it’s obviously dangerous. Maybe the two younger men who were killed along with Mineros are the only ones who would have had the push to make another try. Hell, maybe somebody is setting it up more carefully for the next attempt. We’re in the dark, Nora.”
“And the girl and that lawyer will get the money?”
“If she can get him to sign. If the bank accepts it. If somebody isn’t waiting for her to walk out with it. If the cash isn’t found at the border and impounded. Carlos Menterez must know exactly what she is. And he knows that’s all he has left. Money he can’t get to, and a girl who doesn’t give a damn about him. A big house and a crazy wife and not much more time left. And a stranger’s face at his window. Nora?”
“Yes?”
“Does it do any good to tell you I’m sorry?”
“It was probably a good thing, Trav. Maybe I was getting emotionally dependent. Maybe… things were getting too important.” She tried to smile. “I guess it’s a little bit like waking up.”
I checked my watch. It was two-thirty. “Do you want lunch?”
“I guess not. Not now.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Lie down for a little while, I guess.” She went into her room. In a few moments she rapped and came back in and handed me the garish little bedroom gun.
“By the way, you handled that well,” I told her. She made a sour mouth. “I imagined her with Sam. I guess it made me pretty convincing. That plus a natural antagonism toward pretty blondes.” The door closed.
I was able to get a sandwich at the hotel bar. Afterwards I wandered down to the boat basin and walked around to the other side reserved for resident boats. There were four tied up there. I would have expected La Chispa to have been one of the two bigger ones. But it was a flush deck cruiser, about 42 feet, twin screw, doubtless gas fueled. It was custom, with a big bow flare, outriggers, too much chrome for my taste. It had that look of neglect which a boat can acquire quicker than any other gadget known to man. The varnish was turning milky. The chrome was pitted. The white hull was black-ringed like a boardinghouse bathtub. Birds had left their tokens topsides. The mooring lines were chafed and bearded, and she looked a little low in the water, as if the pumps would have a long chore when somebody turned her on. The dinghy was upside down topsides, and named the Chispita. Sam’s assault craft. The stupid son of a bitch.
I went back past the sign which said Owners and Guests Only, and hunted for Heintz and found him in the shed behind the dock office putting a new diaphragm in a complex-looking fuel pump. I made some small talk, and when I thought I could do it casually enough, I said, “it looks like one of those over there is going to sink at the dock one of these days.”
“Oh. La Chispa? The owner is sick.”
“Doesn’t he have anyone to look after it?”
“The man left when he got sick.”
“I hate to see that happen to a boat.”
“I know. One of these days, maybe, I’ll see if I can get permission to fix it up.”
“Pretty small to go anywhere from here, isn’t it?”
“Just a local boat. He had it freightered to Mazatlan and brought up here. A long run for that boat, Mazatlan to here. You have to wait for good weather. If he wanted, he could run it over to La Paz, but nowhere from there except back. Not enough range. A damn fool maybe could get it up to Guaymas, or maybe even down to Manzanillo, but that’s the end of the line. The big motor sailers are what you have to have on this coast.”
“I understand some pretty good sized yachts get lost in these waters. I read about one a couple of months ago.”
He tightened up the last bolts on the housing of the fuel pump before answering. “The Columbine. She was in here. She anchored off. A good sea boat. I would guess an eight hundred mile range at low cruising. Things can happen. It was chartered. Maybe bad maintenance. Dry rot. Bottled gas explosion in the galley. Maybe they set course for Cabo San Lucas and the compensation chart was wrong and they made a bad estimate of speed and passed it too far to the south. It’s a damn big ocean out there.”
He put the tools away and walked to his office. I walked along with him. He stopped suddenly and stared across the small boat basin.
“Maybe we can both stop worrying about La Chispa,” he said.
I looked over and saw a swarthy little man in khakis trot out along the finger pier and leap nimbly aboard the boat, a cardboard carton under one arm, and a bulging burlap sack over the other shoulder.
“That one worked as mate aboard,” he said. “Hola! Miguel!” he called.
The man looked around the side of the trunk cabin. I could not see him distinctly at a hundred and fifty feet, but I saw the white streak of grin.
“Buena tarde, Senor Heintz!” he called back. Heintz said about two hundred words at high speed, ending in an interrogating lift of his voice. Miguel answered at length. Heintz laughed. Miguel disappeared.
“I told him he should be ashamed of the condition of the boat, and he said that if one works twenty hours a day, there is no time for playing with toys. Now he is ordered to put it in condition to sell it, very quickly and cheaply, and perhaps he will buy it himself and compete with the hotel for fishing charters. That was a joke. He’s not that good with a boat, and you couldn’t run that thing at a profit. I’ve been relieved not to have him around for a couple of months. He’s a violent little man. He hurt two of my men badly. They were making loud remarks about the Cubans, for his benefit. If Taggart hadn’t broken it up, he might have killed them both. He looked as if he wanted to. Taggart grabbed him and threw him off the dock.”
“Was he taking supplies aboard?”
“Maybe. There’d be a better market for it in La Paz or Mazatlan. The owner will never use it again. But I wouldn’t want to trust Miguel to get it there. I’ve seen him at the wheel. He tried to handle it like Taggart did. That is like letting a child drive a sports car.”
After I had left Heintz, I went up to the pool level and sat at a shady table overlooking the boat basin and had a bottle of beer. I watched Miguel working around the boat and I felt curious and oddly uneasy about it. It made sense that Almah should try to pry loose all the money she could. Sell everything that wasn’t bolted down. Maybe Carlos would sign the boat documentation, releasing ownership. And perhaps the title papers on the automobiles. But by doing that she would be delaying the day when she could force him to sign the bank papers. And from the look of him, she couldn’t count on too much time.