Atticus

Atticus used to say of such a question that he wouldn’t dignify it with an answer. I filled a highball glass with beer.

Reinhardt smirked. “You are an innocent.”

“You were talking about your last fling.”

“Oh yes. A first-class flight to Frankfurt on Lufthansa, fine clothes and fabulous dinners, sex with beautiful prostitutes in the afternoons.”

“You’ll make each day your masterpiece.”

“What a fine way of putting it!” Reinhardt sipped some beer and pressed on. “I have a fantasy that I’ll finally end up in Monaco, gambling at chemin de fer just as James Bond did. If I win, I will throw the franc notes up in the air and laugh like a fat sultan as people fall to the floor for them. And if I lose, I’ll say, ’I am finished!’ and blow my brain

s out with a tiny pistol.”

“A guy’d have to spend four or five hundred dollars for all that, wouldn’t he?”

“Yesterday I deposited five hundred pesos in your bank account and asked for a balance. You have twenty-four thousand dollars here. You can afford to give me half that, I think.”

“We’re in cahoots, huh?”

“Cahoots?”

I faced the wall and faked writing 24,000, and I was just about to divide it by 2 when Reinhardt said with irritation, “Twelve thousand dollars.”

“Shall we go down to the bank right now?”

Reinhardt tried to hold his smile, but it fell into a sneer. “It’s six-fifteen.”

Eagerness imbued my face. “Well, first thing tomorrow then?”

“I presume you know there’s a fiesta Wednesday.”

“Damn. And they wonder why their economy’s failing.”

“You can play the joke with me, of course,” Reinhardt said, “but the police will not find your situation too funny. A hit-and-run accident is murder here. You’ll be in jail for a very long time.”

I lifted the highball glass and drank half the beer in it. Reinhardt lifted his glass, too, but felt foolish imitating me and put it back on the tray. “Do not delude yourself into thinking you are a dangerous person because you happened to kill a pretty girl. You do not have the hate, my friend. You are fatally inhibited.” In proof of that, Reinhardt got up from the bed and walked out of the house. Without inhibition.

Oh honey, no.

That night I got the Monday diario from the gift shop in the Cortez Hotel and flipped to the obituaries while having a Gentleman Jack whiskey in the saloon. Carmen Martínez was paragraphed there just as Reinhardt said, but I wasn’t up to a translation, the Spanish kept drifting sideways the harder I stared at it. So I folded the newspaper and had my whiskey glass filled again. An honorable guilt was flooding me, but with it came a hungry interest in self-preservation, and after an hour of pathos and regret I found myself trying to feature Reinhardt fulfilling his threat. I fancied a police sergeant tearing open an envelope and finding a white page filled with paste-on letters snipped from magazines—English about the hit-and-run driver who killed Carmen Martínez. And there, too, would be the flash camera shots of the girl and my Volkswagen’s rear license plate, and behind them the body shop receipts from Mérida. And then, perhaps, Stuart would be at my house in his American consul suit. “Would it be possible to chat with you for a bit?”

Even in my malaise and my shipwreck of rationality, I was not hard pressed to come up with a simple alibi. Reinhardt visited me at my casita where I’d stayed for a few days, hard at work, and seeing me wrestling to fit a too-large canvas into my Volkswagen, offered to swap cars with me. I took him up on it and he must have hit Carmen while I parked his Jeep in my driveway. Wasn’t he trying to hide his accident from me when he got the car fixed in Mérida? I fell low with the flu and forgot that we hadn’t changed cars again. María could vouch for the fact that I was home for two full days, and that Reinhardt brought the Volkswagen back Tuesday night. Yes, I noticed the fresh paint and new windshield. Reinhardt told me he’d hit a wild deer and got the car repaired for me in Mérida.

I hated the shameless face I’d wear for the jefe, so full of innocence and fraudulent worry about my hindrance to justice. And yet it did not seem to me that a great wrong would have been righted if I were jailed. I figured Renata ought to know about Reinhardt, though, just in case his frustration found her, but when I telephoned her it was Stuart, of course, who answered and asked, “Whom shall I say is calling?” I heard Stuart’s hand cover the mouthpiece for half a minute, but it finally lifted enough for me to hear Stuart say, “You can’t, you can not!” And then the hand held on more securely until Renata blithely said, “¡Hola!”

“Is this a bad time to talk?”

“You must be psychic.”

“Are you going to the play reading tomorrow night?”

“I’m in the cast, Scott.”

“Oh, that’s right. Well then, we’ll talk there, okay?”

“Easy on the whiskey, fella.”

“We’ll talk, though?”