Atticus

I asked the office clerk in Spanish if she was still holding a Lufthansa ticket for Scott Cody.

When did I order it?

Wednesday night.

“Momentito,” she said, and then she confirmed that she did have it, but I was too late for the flight out tonight.

Was it good for any night?

Of course; it was full fare. But I’d need to make a reservation.

Would she have it delivered to 69 Avenida del Mar?

“Mañana,” she said, and only after I hung up did I think that mañana was a flexible term and could mean either morning or tomorrow or sometime in the future. I tried to telephone the office again, but it was then after nine.

I foolishly put the visa and passport down somewhere in the darkness when I hunted Reinhardt’s suitcase in the walk-in closet of the guest bedroom. I couldn’t remember if I’d got everything out of Reinhardt’s luggage but felt around with my hand and knew that I had, and I shut the hard-sided suitcase tight with a red shock cord. And forgot about the passport and visa. My own private attention deficit disorder. Then I heard a truck halt in the street right in front of the place. I held my breath and heard singing on the truck radio and the talking of four or five men. A flashlight beam glanced through the high window of the stairway, walked along the house, and then shot into the kitchen and flooded the dining room. But that was all. Half a minute passed and I heard shoes and the chunk of a truck door and the singing gradually faded as the truck rolled down the hill. I hustled down the stairs then, and out through the pool door, and trotted along the hard wet sand of high tide to the centro.

Printers Inc would have closed by nine, but on the off chance that Renata would still be there, I walked down the alley behind the bookstore and looked in through the window of the storage room and its green-curtained doorway. A flash of a feminine hand holding a paperback, then nothing, then a plaid skirt and the fluorescent lights fluttering off from the front of the store to the rear. I tried the door handle, dodged inside, and held myself against a high bookcase, in darkness. Renata walked into the storage room with four hardbacks that she forced into a box. I tackled her against me and whacked her mouth shut with my hand. “Don’t scream,” I hissed. “It’s Scott.”

I felt her shock at first, that hard stiffening of fear, and then she changed as she got who it was, struggling fiercely, wrestling and whimpering, falling away and kicking at me, far more wrath than worry to it, and I just held her more tightly, hoarsely whispering into her hair, “Shhh. Shhh. Stop it. Are you alone?”

She relented a little and nodded.

I let Renata go and she turned and angrily flung herself at me again, her fists hitting hard at my chest and face and head for a full minute, shrieking calumnies and dirty words, shrieking how could I do that to her? put her through that? talk to her now? it was horrible. Et cetera. I accepted it all like a proper penance, and when she grew tired I held her away from me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hoped to keep you out of it.”

“Well you didn’t. Creep! I had to lie to the police. And I had no clue about you or what the truth was. What the hell is going on? Who was he?”

“Reinhardt Schmidt. Did they buy it?”

“The police? Yes, I think so. At least, they’re not investigating.” She felt her mouth. “You hurt my mouth with your hand.”

I held her face toward the office light and looked. “It’s not bleeding.”

Renata twisted away and again struck my chest, but weakly now, hardly more than a pat, an emotional metaphor. “You have no idea how I’ve hated you today!” She fumed for a moment, then threw back her tangled hair and flung closed the green hanging draperies, shielding us from the front windows. “What happened?”

“I found Reinhardt dead in the dining room Wednesday night.”

“Why in your house? Who was he?”

“I have no time to go into that now.”

“Make time.”

Sighing at the fatigue of it, I said, “Reinhardt’s just a guy I met who was trying to get money from me. Why he was killed and by whom is a mystery. Okay? Wednesday night, though, I thought it looked like I’d done it, so I tried to hide what had happened. I was drunk, and scared. I had a hard time figuring out what to do.”

She hotly said, “Don’t you dare talk to me about being scared! You know what he looked like when I found him? You know how that hurts? My first thought was that it was you. And all afternoon I wished it was. Stuart forced me to call your father. What fun that was.” She harshly wiped both eyes with her palms. “God, I resent these tears!”

“What does Stuart know?”

Renata sat against the box of hardbacks and hung her head as she got out a tissue. “Nothing.”

“Maintain that.”

She touched her nose with the tissue and scowled. “You really are crazy, you know. Your father’s flying down. Am I supposed to keep playing your stupid charade?”

“You have to, I think. Don’t let on to my father and he’ll leave right after the funeral. I have to get out of Mexico first. We’ll straighten everything out after that.”