“Yes,” I said.
He looked at the picture himself, then dropped the passport on the desk. “So you are Felicio Tobón,” he said.
“It would seem so,” I agreed.
“Yet you are an American.”
I shrugged, with a sheepish little smile. These anomalies happen.
He thought it over. He drummed his fingers on the desk. Then he doodled awhile on the yellow pad. Then he did some silent whistling as he gazed over my head at the far wall. Then he nodded, apparently agreeing with himself about something, and focused on me again. “So it’s actually a case of murder,” he said.
I blinked. “Murder? Whose murder?”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Emory,” he said, “or whoever you are. You are not Felicio Tobón, although your photo is in his passport and you possess all his identification. How do you happen to possess his identification?”
“That’s my picture on the driver’s license too,” I pointed out.
“I saw that,” he said impatiently. “I can only assume bribes were paid.”
“No,” I said. “You know that’s not possible. Too much bureaucracy.” I felt I should be saying warm or cold, but I was damned if I would.
He nodded; he knew I was right about the bureaucracy. Then he thought a little more, eyes inward. Then, as though talking mostly to himself, he said, “All we need is the body.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake, Felicio Tobón’s body. Good luck, pal, I thought. If that was all he needed, I was home free. Except I wasn’t, and I knew I wasn’t.
“Carlos Perez,” he said.
I watched him. Now what?
“He is the one,” Rafez decided, “who would have disposed of the body. In fact,” he said, sitting up more alertly, looking more intent, “he is related to the Tobóns!”
I watched him.
“There are Tobóns in Tapitepe as well,” he said. “That truck will turn out to belong to one of them, and you were in it, which is where this manure stain on your traveling bag came from. Oh, yes, Mr. Emory, I am a detective.”
I watched him.
“You were in Tapitepe,” he said, “dressed as Emory but with Felicio Tobón’s identification. You were in that truck, which ran out of gas. A falling out among thieves? What is your relationship with the Tobóns? First Carlos Perez in Rancio, then those scoundrels in Tapitepe. What is the link there?”
Behind me, the driver said something, an explanation or reminder of something. Rafez listened, alert, then nodded and said, “Si, si. Gracias.” To me he said, “There was a motor vehicle accident in Tapitepe tonight, a truck and a motorcycle, involving Tobóns.”
I said, “Was anyone hurt?”
“I believe everyone was hurt,” he said, “but no one was killed.”
“Good,” I said, by which I meant, bad.
“So that is connected as well,” he told me.
I watched him.
I saw it come over him, like sunrise. His head lifted, and he looked at me as though I were a Christmas present. “Felicio Tobón!” he cried.
I watched him. He leaned toward me over the desk, his voice lowering, as though this were a secret just between the two of us. “Is Lola Lee your sister?”
“Now,” I said, “I can explain.” And I did.
45
He was a good listener. I left out Luz, but I told him the scheme, and about Arturo’s part in it, and Carlos and Manfredo and them from Tapitepe. I included dinner with Leon Kaplan, but I left out Carlita Carnal, saying merely that we “got” the application letter from the Bureau of Records. “And that’s all,” I finished.
“Well, no,” he said. “That isn’t all. But it’s a great deal. You are very resourceful, Mr. Lee.”
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d rather be Felicio. I’m trying to get used to it.”
“Among all those other names.”
“Exactly.”
He studied me. He liked me now, I could see that, because I was a rascal now, and he could control rascals. “You have been very clever,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“And at times very lucky.”
“And at times very unlucky.”
That made him laugh. “Am I one of your unlucky times?”
“I think you’ll tell me,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It was intelligent of you to tell me the truth when you did. Or part of the truth.”
“I didn’t tell you any lies,” I said.
He said, “Are you Catholic?”
“No. But I was married in the Church. Down in Sabanon.”
“For Catholics,” he told me, “there are two kinds of sin.”
“Mortal and venial. I know about that.”
His smile was becoming edgy. “I was thinking of a different two kinds of sin.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“There are sins of commission” he explained, “and there are sins of omission. You say you told me no lies, so there are no sins of commission. Will you say you also committed no sins of omission?”
“Well,” I said, and shrugged, “nobody’s perfect.”
“Which is what makes my job possible,” he assured me. “Let me congratulate you on your wife, by the way. A very attractive woman.”
“Yes,” I said. “She told me you were attracted.”
He shrugged, palms up. “At that time,” he pointed out, “you were dead.”
“I still am,” I said. “Leon Kaplan gave up, he went back to the States. But if he finds out I’m alive, he’ll put Lola in jail. He told me so; he said it himself.”
“You aren’t worried about what will happen to you?”
“What have I done?” I asked him. “What crimes have I committed in Guerrera?”
“You faked your death,” he said, surprised by my question.
“What law did that break?” I asked him. “I made no effort to profit from that little prank, I—”
“Prank?”
“What else is it? If I were to dye my hair blond, I’d be faking something. Is that a crime? If I then tried to collect an inheritance that belonged to somebody who was blond, that’s a crime.”
He didn’t like this. He didn’t like the idea that I’d been doing all this scamming and scheming without breaking a whole bunch of laws. “What about the funeral?” he demanded. “You buried someone.”
“An indigent,” I told him, quashing my own doubts on that score. “An unknown person provided by Señor Ortiz.”
Scornfully, he said, “Impossible. It isn’t that easy to—” And then he stopped, and blinked, and immediately became tough again. “Very unlikely. We’ll check into it.”
Ah. I can be quick too. We will not check into it. The body Señor Ortiz provided — and the name Ortiz had struck Rafez between the eyes, I’d noticed — was actually something to do with Rafez himself, and now he knows it. He will not want that grave opened, though it would probably not be a good idea to force his hand by letting him know I know it. People who traffic in mysteriously dead bodies should not be toyed with.
So I merely said, “It was a funeral, that’s all. Señor Ortiz provided the body, he was paid, and he hasn’t complained.”
He cast around for something else, something to distract me from the body in my grave. “You destroyed an automobile.”
“A terrible accident, declared so by yourself, I believe, plus all those witnesses. The car rental people are insured, and they haven’t complained.”