We beamed at each other. “Let me see the book.”
“Is not permitted.”
Finally, for a negotiated fee it was permitted, but the book he put on the counter went back to January 1 only. He did not know where the old book was. He had no idea. Then he talked to the surly girl. Another fee was negotiated. She went away, behind the scenes, and returned in ten minutes with the book. I carried it off into the small lounge, pretending not to hear the cries of consternation from the three of them.
I did not see how a hotel could be operated on the basis of such terrible records. Six unkempt varieties of handwriting. Blots, erasures, dates, amounts, and room numbers scratched out and changed. I found the reservation for Mr. and Mrs. Barley. A one-hundred-dollar deposit had been received in October. The room number written beside the name and date had been scratched out and not rewritten. I took the book back to the desk. I pointed to the entry and said, “They never arrived, did they?”
They moved away to have a heated conference, full of gestures and interruptions, flashing eyes and gigantic shrugs. Smiley came back to me and said, “Why you are wanting to know?”
“What difference does that make?”
“You are not wanting the hundred dollars back?”
“No.”
“You are right, señor. We never heard again from them. That is what this mark is meaning here.”
I took a long walk on the white, hot, empty beach, walking south from the hotel, wearing a new pair of swim pants and a straw hat from the hotel shop. The sun scalded my shoulders. There was an almost total lack of seashells. I walked in the wash of the small waves that were nibbling away at the sand, making small cliffs. I avoided the tar balls, big as plums and apples, rolling in the white foam. I walked by a house so elegantly beautiful and so enormous, I knew it had to belong to a politician. Suspicion confirmed when I saw some Mexican army up on the road, two of them standing in the shade, wearing automatic weapons.
Finally I sat on one of the sand cliffs, chair height, comfortable, the sea sucking at the sand under my bare feet. I felt very grouchy. I had expected some kind of confrontation down here, even though the voice of sanity in the back of my mind had said from the beginning: Don’t waste the money on the trip, Duke.
OK. Haul it out into the open and look at it. I never get big brilliant flashes of inspiration. Like a dog with a slipper, I have to pull it out from under the bed and gnaw.
A false trail. Which is a very common happening when straight people suddenly go crooked. A man gets in over His head in business deals, and when he knows the whole thing is going to fall in on him, he grabs the loose cash, leaves his folded clothes on the beach, and heads for Belize. Or he squirrels away money over a period of time, then goes on a sedate trip with the little woman, takes a little walk in downtown Algiers, and is never seen again, he hopes. But I found that one in downtown San Miguel de Allende, wearing beard and smock, and he wept when I called him by his old name. Pity.
There is one constant factor. The false trail is always clearly marked. You can’t miss it. But this trail had been obscure. I’d reaped the reward of a lot of diligence and a lot of luck. Tired feet and a sharp nose, like a wise old hound dog.
A brown pelican hovered and tilted and came crash-diving down into the blue water next to some floating weed, sat for a moment, then gulped something down.
So either the lady and her partner changed their mind and picked a different hideaway. Or somebody had overlooked or disturbed or thrown away the false clues left behind. Or the partnership had come to an abrupt and untidy end somewhere along the line.
Why come here anyway? The sun, the sand, and the sea. And Mayan ruins? Not the place to unload stolen gems, apparently. Maybe they had been fenced on the Saturday in November between the theft and the departure. Because they were very good diamonds, and selected for anonymity of cut and size once separated from the platinum settings, it could have been for three hundred thousand. If everybody trusted everybody. But do you tote that kind of cash to a middle-class, contrived resort? Would you put that amount of cash in the Garza Blanca office vault?
I could not make the pieces fit properly. I could make them fit, but I didn’t like the fit. I recently saw a puzzle advertised. The ad said that every piece fit every other piece, but they had to be assembled in the right order or the puzzle could not be completed. Optimum sadism.
No light bulbs flashed on above my head. Nobody said, “Aha!” I followed an old rule. If you go somewhere expensive to get to, make sure you don’t have to return. I had not found a lady alone in the Garza Blanca pages for November under any kind of anagram name, in fact not many ladies alone at all. I went back to the room, changed, gathered up my various photographs and sketches of Miz Anne Farley, rented a VW bug from a sleepy man in the lobby, and went droning from hotel to hotel, showing my wares, smiling my smile, doing my John Wayne imitation where necessary. Kid sister of a dear old friend. She was last seen down here in November. Could be using the name Farley, Arley, Barley, Fayhee, Fanny France, Harley, Carlee, Parley, Arleen Fay. She hadn’t wanted her big brother to find her. Now the poor chap was dying, and desperate. And maybe you could look at the reservations for last November... Please? Or let me run down the names. Won’t take more than a minute.
The Camino Real was the best organized, and the most helpful. The attitude at the Presidente was one of hostile indifference. The Cancún Caribe wanted authorization from the police. When I got tears in my eyes and shook my head slowly in shocked disbelief, they relented. Money worked pretty well. Five-hundred-peso notes. Worth a little over twenty dollars.
Nothing checked out. So the next day I caught the early afternoon flight to Miami. My back was red-brown and tender from the two beach sessions. I had the Aztec two-step from the Garza Blanca food. My purse was considerably lighter, with a lot of expense that Equity Protection was not going to pick up and would not have authorized had I asked.
I caught Libby Franklin just as she was leaving her place to go learn a little more about communications. There was concern in her voice when I told her I had come up absolutely empty. Concern changed to coolness when I said I wanted a chance to talk to Laura Wheelock, the one who had been an employee of Wescott and Sons almost as long as Anne Farley. She said of course she could fix me up. Would lunch tomorrow be useful?
On the morrow at a few minutes after twelve, she brought Laura over into the hotel lounge to the designated area. I stood up when I saw them approaching, dressed alike like flight attendants on the Junior League Airlines. Libby was very correct. Mission accomplished, she whirled and headed back to the shop. I called to her to wait. She turned and flashed a totally artificial smile and waved and kept going.
Laura Wheelock was as slim as the rest of them. But older. Gloss of black bangs curling to her dark eyebrows, thick weight of shiny black hair straight to her shoulders. Dark brown eyes, dark complexion, high round cheekbones dotted with the acne scars of her adolescence of twenty years ago.
She looked pleased when I suggested the hotel’s best restaurant and told her I had made a reservation. We had a corner table behind a low stone wall, looking down over the length of the Gee Whiz lobby from an elevation about sixty feet above it.
When we had our drinks, she said that she was doing this as a favor to Libby, such a dear child, because she had vowed that she would not talk about the Anne Farley incident anymore. She was desperately tired of it. Everyone had assumed that because they had worked together for over ten years, they were friends. It worked the other way actually. One did not want close friendships with someone one worked with all day, every day, did one? Besides, Anne did not have the gift of friendship. She was second-in-command, Mr. Laneer’s assistant, and one was wise never to forget that. If one was insubordinate, Anne Farley gave them the worst chores in the store for weeks on end. You know, like in the army. P.K.