Atticus

“Montezuma’s revenge,” Atticus said.

Espinoza seemed offended but got up and unlocked the iron-barred door and ambled down a hot, green hallway, his knuckles grazing against the walls. On the right was a foul dormitory as big as a gym, with just one door and four iron-barred windows high overhead and probably twelve prisoners on their hands and knees, wiping the floor around their green canvas cots with sopping towels that they twisted into tin pails. Espinoza stopped to insert an iron skeleton key in an old plank door with a hand-printed sign on it that read DEPÓSITO, and he let Renata and Atticus step past him into an overwhelmingly hot storage space that was as jammed as a pawnshop with assorted luggage and boxes and car tires and Mexican Army rifles and a Chevrolet V-8 engine. Espinoza worked himself down a skinny aisle, talking to Renata in Spanish. She translated, “They’ve got his gun and clothes and motorcycle and he has no idea what else.” The sergeant got to a green paper package that he flung across the room like silage. “We’re supposed to check it,” Renata said.

Atticus squatted to tear the green paper away and saw Scott’s frayed wallet, a Swiss watch just like his own, a worn, yellow chamois shirt, and the fly and side pocket of his paint-dotted blue jeans. Opening the wallet, Atticus found no pesos, but he did find a Mexican library card, a Bancomex card, a passport picture of Renata, an expired Visa credit card, and a torn slip of paper with phone numbers on it. His Colorado driver’s license and American Express card were gone, just as Renata had said. Atticus thought about asking Espinoza about them but quickly imagined the sergeant’s shrug, his feigned or real ignorance, and he didn’t bother. Stolen, he guessed; he’d get Frank to cancel the credit card account. He fitted the wallet in his front pocket and laid a hand on the clothing. Even that wasn’t right. Atticus had been inside the police station for less than ten minutes, but already his perspiration was beading up from his hands and wrists. His shirt was grayly spotted with it. And yet Scott had been wearing a hot yellow chamois shirt and blue jeans. Atticus picked up the yellow shirt and pressed it to his nose but could smell neither blood nor sweat nor turpentine nor paints.

Espinoza was heavily breathing over him, and Atticus looked up to see in the policeman’s hands the handsome twelve-gauge shotgun with its checkered walnut stock. Atticus stood up to cautiously accept the shotgun, and Espinoza spoke to Renata in Spanish.

“He says not to worry, they took the shells out.”

“Shells?”

She seemed puzzled. “That’s what he said.”

“¿Cuántos?” Atticus asked Sergeant Espinoza and patted the shotgun’s magazine.

Espinoza frowned and held up three fingers.

“¿Donde están?” Where are they?

Sergeant Espinoza shrugged.

Atticus turned to Renata. “You don’t regularly put four shells in a gun if you’re fixing to kill yourself. You figure one oughta do it, don’t you?”

Renata just stared at him.

Espinoza was perusing an inventory sheet, and Atticus followed him past the Chevrolet engine to a nook where Scott’s Harley-Davidson, with a film of dust on its fuel tank and jungle grass on one foot peg and handgrip, was angled over into the anarchy of five or six misshapen bicycles. The key was still in the ignition. Espinoza tried to lunge it over its kickstand, but the six hundred pounds tipped into him before Atticus jerked the huge weight of it upright and adjusted it on its kickstand again. He put the shotgun beside the green package of clothes as the police sergeant rummaged through a gray steel file cabinet and pulled out a red folder and handed it to him. Atticus sat in an oak chair and hooked on his gold-rimmed eyeglasses while Espinoza spoke in Spanish.

Renata said, “He says he had an assistant fill out the report for him. He was fishing for tarpon off the Gulf of Honduras.”

Atticus looked up and out of habit asked. “You get anything?”

Espinoza smiled and held his stomach. “Mareado,” he said.

“Seasick,” Renata said.

“Mareado. I’ll have to remember that one.” Atticus paged open the red folder to a form filled out in Spanish, which seemed to be Sergeant José-María Espinoza’s report of his investigación de suicidio. The body was identified as Scott William Cody, a blue-eyed white male. His height was one meter ninety centimeters; his weight was eighty kilos. His ciudadanía was the United States; his birthplace Antelope, Colorado; his residencia provisoria was 69 Avenida del Mar in Resurrección. Whoever filled out the report was a gun fancier, for far greater detail went into its description: a four-foot-long Winchester Ranger SG twelve-gauge pump shotgun, model 1300, weighing seven and one-half pounds, with one fired Federal shell in the chamber and three shells in a magazine that held five. Everything else seemed of far lesser import. Atticus could make out little more beyond Renata Isaacs’s name and the hour the police arrived on the scene, “las diez menos cinco,” or 9:55 A.M. And that was it. It could have been the report of a household accident without injuries, of an American’s favorite shotgun having been stolen.

Atticus flipped over the page and was aggrieved by a faulty, off-focus, black-and-white photo of the face he’d briefly seen in the coffin, flesh and sinews torn from the skull, the right eye just an ugly socket, the blond hair glossily matted in blood, and blood painting his jaw and neck, caking inside his right ear. Underneath that was another photograph taken from the front door without a flash so that Scott was just a faintly seen figure behind four unbusy policemen in the foreground. A high-angle photograph showed him sagged over in the green wingback chair with his first finger inside the trigger housing of the shotgun at his feet. Each photograph seemed to emphasize the head wound or the features of the room, so there was nothing to offer a father a painful, final glimpse of his son, he was just any human being in gradual decay. Atticus stared again at the high-angle photo. Scott’s bare left foot listed over onto his ankle; his right foot was square to the floor, and a dark saucer of blood was behind the heel.

Atticus frowned at Renata. “Shoeless,” he said.

“¿Cómo?” Espinoza asked.

Renata fidgeted with the green package of clothes but found no shoes. She straightened. “Wasn’t it possible Scott was barefoot?”

“Wouldn’t of been on a motorcycle. And if he got out of ’em while he worked, we’d of found his shoes on the floor.”

Offended, Sergeant Espinoza said, “Ustedes hablan muy rápido.” You are speaking very fast.

Renata worriedly peered at the photograph, her hand tenderly finding his shoulder. Her face was so close to his that Atticus could see the fine blond hairs on her cheek. Even in that filthy room, he could smell her perfumed soap. “You’re right,” she said. “It is strange.”

Espinoza was standing behind him, hissing out gray cigarette smoke and interestedly scowling over Atticus’s head, as if seeing the photographs for the first time.

Atticus tapped them together and looked at Renata. “Three pictures?”

Renata spoke to Espinoza and he replied.

“Ran out of film,” she said.