“That would be nice.”
“ `Two men came here with your recent picture, claiming you have been killing women for their money and using other names. One was a professor named Meyer and he is a very nice man. He said you blew up his niece named Norma in a boat with two other people. He said you killed somebody named Doris and somebody named Isabel and maybe more. They made me believe you really did. It makes me feel sick. If you are doing things like this, terrible things, then the police should stop you. The other man is a lot taller and he has sort of a mean look sometimes. And he can fight. Be careful. I tried not to tell them anything. They got my address from Boomer: I think you would remember him.‘
“So I asked her if those were the exact words and she said they weren’t. She said she had taken notes and then put it down in a better way than Helen June had told it. She said Helen June had cussed a lot. I suppose you want the address to where she was sending it.”
“It would be nice.”
“It was going to Senor Roberto Hoffmann, Apartado Postal Number seven one oh, Cancьn, Cluintana Roo, Mexico. Did you get that?”
“I wrote it down,” I said, and read it back.
“Now what will you do?” he asked.
“We’ll go down there and show the picture.”
“Well, did I do good?”
“You were practically perfect.”
“I hope you two know you are dealing with a flake, a weirdo.”
“We know that. We plan to be very careful.”
“Let me tell you something about old Mexico. If he’s been down there a long time, with money to spend, then he is dug in, and he’ll have some good Mexican connections. You try to put local law on him and you will be the ones on the inside, rattling the bars.”
“What’s to keep her from writing the same thing over again and mailing it?”
“She and me, we reached an understanding. I told her if she did that, I would go to Sid and tell him how she has been screwing around writing notes to a guy that is still wanted for killing his own father. And I would tell him she had been doing it behind his back. I took a chance there. Maybe she told Sid. But she hadn’t, and it scared hell out of her. He is known as a hitter. Besides, she feels like Helen June betrayed her. They swore never to tell anybody. She looked like she’d like to kill Helen June. There’s another thing too.”
“Such as?”
“It was sort of play pretend for her. It took her back to when she was twenty and Cody was fifteen and she wished he was older, back to when she and Helen June were real close. She’d bought Helen June’s idea of how it happened, Bryce Pittler trying to kill himself and finally shooting himself when they struggled for the gun. And all the trouble was on account of Bryce marrying that trashy little second wife, who got what she deserved. All she ever had to send before was addresses, and a note saying she and Helen June hoped he was okay. He had phoned her a couple of times, making sure she never told Helen June his address. But then all this comes up, the idea he could have been killing people. Little old Clara, she doesn’t want any part of that kind of going on. That could be some kind of trouble that would hurt her husband and her and spoil the life they’ve built up. And Helen June had been kind of hysterical over the phone. That took the fun out of it too. Okay, I did good, but it was ready to come apart anyway. You two did even better up there. He kept his two lives fastened together with a very thin thread, McGee, and it took hard work and luck to even find out it existed.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s an official file here needs closing. So you could let me know.”
“Could you get an assignment to go down there with us?”
“You’ve got to be out of your mind! The budget we got, we’re down three men here already, and it could be more. We stay on our side of the river and they stay on theirs. Sometimes they’ll bring somebody to the middle of the bridge for us, and we do the same for them. But it doesn’t happen often. When you go down there, walk easy. Get yourself a local and pay him good.”
Meyer got back at two o’clock, and I told him the conversation I’d had with Paul Sigiera. He sat, utterly quiet, sorting it out after I’d finished.
“One thing we know,” he said. “He couldn’t be Roberto Hoffmann in Cancun and be Evan Lawrence in Cancun. There must be endless thousands of American tourists flowing through that place, but the Americans in permanent or semipermanent, residence must be well known to each other and to the resident Mexicans. So we start with Evan Lawrence’s friend Willy, who sells time shares in condominium apartments, and this Willy might know a local who will help us.”
“I checked with Fran at Triple A Travel, and she said the best and quickest way to get there is go to Miami and take Mexicana. I think she said it leaves at four thirty. We can get a tourist card at the airline desk. Mexicana and Aero Mexico always say all flights are full, but they leave about two thirds full, except at Christmastime, including the standby people. Hot there, she said. Very very hot. We can try to set up a rental car in the Miami airport, but she said that hardly ever works too well. No problem with hotels at this time of year, she said. When do you want to go?”
“Right now,” Meyer said.
As it turned out, we weren’t able to leave until the next day, the fourth, a day of hot wind and rain that lasted all the way to the parking garage.
The severe young man at the airline desk took the cash money from Meyer for round-trip tickets. My protests did not work. Return trip unreserved. We were on standby for the flight to Cancun. We went downstairs to a bus which took us to a new terminal building, where we sat in plastic chairs in a broad vista of plastic and filled out the tourist permit forms. We had tried to look tourist. Mesh shirts, seer-sucker pants, sandals, the big ranch hats we’d picked up in Texas, battered carry-on bags. Meyer had a lot of funds strapped around his waist under his shirt, in a canvas money belt. Money, he has always said, solves the unanticipated problems. It won’t buy happiness, but it will rent a fair share of it.
It was a one-class flight on a 727, with no room for my knees. The flight time was two hours and a bit, and the hard-working Mexican flight attendants served a meal. There was an hour time change, so it was only a little past five fifteen when we began our long curving descent into the Cancun airport. The pilot took us over the Cancun peninsula. It was a spectacular view, lowering clouds overhead, storms out at sea, and a long slant of golden sunshine striking the column of tall hotels along the beach.
Meyer, thorough as ever, had arranged to read up on the place, and he explained it to me en route. “It is that rarity” he said, “a totally artificial community, without a history, without traditions. Less than ten years ago there were about thirty-five people living in the mainland village of Cancun. Several narrow islands stretched out into the Gulf. Mexico needed hard dollars, so they took aerial photographs of the seacoast and decided that this would make an attractive resort. Now there are over fifty thousand permanent residents. They made low interest loans to people who wanted to build hotels and resorts. They linked the islands with a causeway and bridges, built an airport, built a road down the coast to Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo, and the dollars do indeed flow in. There have been problems, of course: help for the hotels, food production, and transportation. Now they are getting small cruise ships and convoys of recreational vehicles and yachts and flocks of tour buses. It has become a popular resort for middle-class Mexicans and Americans. Lately there have been a lot of condominium developments scattered near the hotels.”