If that was an insult — and it did seem to have been intended as such — it had to be one of the strangest insults in history. Feeling mulish and put-upon, Valerie said, “That’s all right, then.”
Manny said, “Whadaya want her to do, Kirby?”
“Let’s talk over lunch,” Galway said. “I’m starved.” Looking at Valerie, he said, “How about you?”
Dear God! Her stomach! In all the excitement and activity and confusion, she hadn’t even noticed, but all of a sudden her stomach gave her such a hunger pang she actually gasped from it. Food? When was the last time she’d eaten? Nothing at all today, nothing since last night, on the run, when she’d eaten those tortillas.
The very thought made her head swim.
“Right,” Galway said, correctly reading her expression. “We’ll just wash up and then eat out here, Estelle, okay?”
Estelle nodded, tentatively smiling again, waving at the outdoor table beside the house.
Galway said, “Kids all in school? Just the four of us? What are we having?”
“Escabeche,” said Estelle.
One hen.
Two large onions.
Spices.
Kill, pluck and separate the hen. Stew in water one hour, adding cloves, pepper, and chopped-up chilis to taste.
While hen is stewing, prepare tortillas in usual manner, and thinly slice onions.
Add onions to stew for the last 15 minutes.
Serve stew in large bowls. Place napkin in bottom of basket, place tortillas in basket, close napkin across top, place in center of table.
Place small bottle of Pineridge Hot Pepper Sauce on table.
Open four bottles of Belikin beer, place on table.
Stand back.
“Oh, my, this is good,” Valerie said.
“There’s more,” Estelle told her, beaming from wrinkled ear to wrinkled ear.
“More beer?” Manny asked. “Kirby? Valerie?”
“Oh, yes,” everybody said, and Valerie was surprised to find herself smiling at Kirby, who grinned back and reached for another tortilla.
Kirby. Valerie. They were on a first-name basis now, ever since he had shown her into his surprisingly neat and Spartan apartment to clean up before lunch and she’d said, “Which door is the bathroom, Mister Galway?” and he had looked at her and said, “I don’t like to be called Mister Galway except by the police, and I refuse to call you Miss Greene any more, so what shall we call each other? Shall I call you Fido, and you call me Spot?” So that was that.
Sunlight gleamed on the yellow hair on Kirby Galway’s arm as he raised his spoon and ate. She kept glancing at him, thinking he had a good laugh and an easy self-confident manner, and it was too bad really that he was such a villain. If, in fact, he was a villain.
Was he not a villain? At his most furious with her, when he was waving that sword about, he hadn’t actually used it on her. A villain — and Valerie had met some villains now — would certainly have sliced her head off at that point, and thought no more about it.
Nor was he even a vile seducer. The contrast between this lunch and the eating of conch with Innocent that time was so extreme it almost made her laugh out loud. Innocent had been so smooth and so accomplished, and had just filled her mind with thoughts of sex. Kirby Galway laughed and told jokes and ate his escabeche and didn’t try to manipulate her at all, made not the slightest effort to fill her mind with thoughts of sex.
And if her mind was filled with thoughts of sex, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, making her blush — they’ll think it’s the hot sauce, and it almost is — she knew enough psychology to know it was merely a normal reaction to being in safety after a period of (extreme danger and extended physical stress.
And, of course, the sun gleaming on the yellow hair on Kirby’s arm.
He looked up and caught her eye and grinned, and she looked down at her bowl, suddenly flustered. Then, afraid she’d given herself away, she looked over at him again and he was frowning slightly at his own bowl, thinking about something.
Time to change the subject. “Listen, Kirby,” she said. “You wanted to tell me something.”
“Right.” He nodded at her, his brow clearing. “You’re right, Valerie,” he said. “It’s time I told you what’s been going on.”
“Good,” she said, and went on eating while he talked.
23
How To Make Money in Real Estate
Kirby told her the truth, almost every last little bit of it. “My big mistake,” he started, “was when I bought some land from Innocent,” and then he went on to tell her about the land, his finances, his meeting with Tommy Watson and the other Indians, his invention of the temple and the Indians faking the artifacts under Tommy’s direction, and Kirby himself going off to find his suckers in America to buy the fakes. “They think they’re breaking the law, so they don’t tell anybody about it.”
“So what I saw,” Valerie said, with a wondering expression, “was your fake temple.”
“A little bit of it, from a distance.”
“It was very good.”
“That was mostly Tommy’s doing. Anyway, when I first met you,” and he went on to describe Valerie’s inadvertent foiling of his first attempt to snare Whitman Lemuel, mentioning it with hardly any visible resentment at all, and then went on to tell her about the Indians dismantling the fake temple just as soon as she’d seen it, because everybody knew she was on her way back to Belmopan to report her discovery.
At that point, Valerie took over briefly, and told Kirby about her experiences with Vernon and the skinny black man and her wanderings in the wilderness, all of which had apparently been very difficult and frightening, though she was brave about it in the recital.
Kirby then took over again, saying, “Well, anyway, you were lost, and Innocent kept going back and forth between believing you were alive and believing you were dead, and if you were dead then he was sure I was pulling some con to persuade him you were alive for some reason, and back and forth like that. Also, he was going crazy about that hill and is there or isn’t there a temple.”
“We were all going crazy, Kirby.”
“Well,” Kirby said, “I offered him a deal. Buy the damn land back from me at the same price I paid for it, and I’d tell him the absolute truth about you and the temple, whether you were alive or not, and what the temple scam was.”
Valerie looked quite interested: “Did he say yes?”
“He did.”
“Well, that was very sweet,” she said, looking doe-eyed. “That Innocent would worry about me that much.”
“Sure,” Kirby said. “But that’s why I didn’t take you back there just now. Innocent and I no sooner shook hands on the deal when you showed up alive, so he already has that part. That’s half my deal gone already. Now, with what you already knew about my land and the people in South Abilene, and with what Innocent already knew, he could have put together for himself what I was doing with my temple scam, not needing to pay me to tell him about it, and that’s the other half. So why does he need me any more?”
“Oh,” Valerie said.
“If I know Innocent — and I do — at that point he would have found some way to weasel out of buying back the land.”
“So you don’t want me to talk to him,” Valerie said, “until fie has the land and you have your money.”
“That’s right.”