“You’re penciled in.”

“Stuart’s pouting, isn’t he,” I said.

Renata just said, “Ta-ta,” and put the phone handset in its cradle.

Late that night, just after two, I heard a great splash in my swimming pool and then the regular thrashing of Reinhardt doing laps. I felt confident the house doors were locked. I found I was able to go back to sleep.

***

I got up at eight Wednesday morning and tried to jog off a hangover with four miles on hard sand that still held the sheen of seawater. Kids were lighting firecrackers inside the huge girdered rooms of the four-story hotel that was just going up, and families were hauling sheets of plywood from the site to put their folding chairs on or to hoist up for fiesta shade.

María had the day off, so I cooked huevos rancheros for myself, skimmed some articles in Art Journal by the pool, got into blue jeans and a white shirt, and headed out to the casita on my Harley-Davidson at noon, halting on the highway to peer worriedly at the place where Señorita Carmen Martinez was killed.

Weeks had passed since I last painted in my studio, but there were fresh tire tracks on the forest path heading in to the house. I failed to be surprised. The hinge of the front door hasp had been pried from the jamb with my garden spade, and the shackled padlock hung there uselessly. Wrecked as my studio was inside, the harm seemed more petulant and hot-tempered than intimidating. My Radiola boom box was there along with my tapes, so sheer theft wasn’t the point. Jars of turpentine had been spilled and free paints had been flung on my unfinished canvases in a kind of high school violence that seemed in faint homage to Hans Hofmann’s art. Chairs were tipped, of course, a drafting table was overturned, torn pages from my sketch books skittered on the floor like fall leaves as I walked about assessing the havoc. Even the pathos of the fury—shirts pulled from their hangers, faucet water left running, a paring knife stabbed into my self-portrait—ought to have informed me it was not Reinhardt who did it, far more like him to clean me out—Wow, thanks for the pictures!—but I was too focused on him as my antagonist to make fine discriminations. Hours frittered by as I tidied the place and fastened the hasp to the jamb with new screws, and I was so zeroed in on my housekeeping chores that it was only when I was halfway down the hill again that I felt an ooze of suspicion and hurried back inside the casita to find out if the beautiful walnut gun case that Frank gave me at Christmas was still hidden in the closet. Well, the gun case was there; the Winchester shotgun and a handful of green Federal shells were gone.

Which was why, when evening came, I was a silent, hand-wringing, brooding lost soul, full of subtext and umbrage and haunted glances, contributing nothing to Renata’s and Stuart’s tinkling chatter at The Scorpion until Renata picked up on my dispiritedness and I confessed that my studio had been broken into, no big deal really, but what a pain, blah blah blah.

“Was anything stolen?” Renata asked, and I hung there over a gin and tonic, wondering how she’d take the news that the shotgun was gone, figuring she could only be frightened by that, and finally saying, no, nothing had been stolen, thank God. Wished they’d taken the horrible painting I was working on.

Stuart paid for the drinks because I found I’d mislaid my American Express card somewhere. Stuart simpered. “Have you checked all the bars?”

“Good idea. I’ll have to do that.”

Renata talked about the ferocity in Tennessee Williams’s plays on our stroll to the Marriott Hotel, and then I trailed away from Stuart and her, cattling my way with a hundred others to the trough of the fancy fiesta table, finagling a frosted pitcher of margarita from a waiter and becoming fundamental with it, like some high school lout who’d crashed the party, while Renata and various others read parts in The Night of the Iguana. I fully intended to talk to Renata about Reinhardt Schmidt and Carmen Martínez and the hazards and misfortunes of my life, but I had fallen into the alcoholic’s habit of first things first, of needing the heat and flush of hard liquor to feel myself, of finding forthrightness and confidence only after a heavy fix. But the old kaboom never came even after a full pitcher, and when Renata was finally free after the play, she was in no mood for me. She was up front beside the podium under the frothy watch of Stuart and in a flock of friends who congratulated her for the intricate shadings she’d brought to Ava Gardner’s role. And there I was, the horse’s ass, four sheets to the wind, hazy-eyed and hearty, my walk a confusion of tilts and pitches, saying “Great stuff!” so loudly it was like a whiskey glass smashed to the floor. Unforgiveness shot at me from fourteen faces, but Renata forced a smile and said, “You flatter me.”

Stuart shouted, “Don’t humor him, Renata! Aren’t you insulted? He’s drunk as a lord!”

“‘How like a man, is Man, who rises late and gazes on his unwashed dinner plate and gazes on the bottles, empty too, all gulphed in last night’s loud long how-do-you-do,—although one glass yet holds a gruesome bait—how like to Man is this man and his fate, still drunk and stumbling through the rusty trees to breakfast on stale rum, sardines, and peas.’” In the silence of hostility I said, “End of poem. ’Eye-opener,’ by Malcolm Lowry. Englishman, like you, Lowry was. Kin at all?”

“You silly knave,” Stuart sighed.

Renata just turned away.

Offended and foolish, I offered all a fraternal smile—See how harmless I am?—and hauled myself from that fiesta in the childhood of drunkenness, full of fury and incoherence, falling to my hands and knees more than once, hearing the boom and pop and whistle of fireworks from the Zuma Hotel farther north, seeking, God help me, a friendlier place where people drank like I did, faintly remembering a hellish cantina that was called La Cucaracha and ought to have been on Avenida de las Pulgas but was not, and finally hitting upon, in a kind of trance, my house on Avenida del Mar.

And there against the high white wall, as forgotten as a trike, was my Winchester shotgun. I felt heat in its nickel barrel as I hefted it, and I teetered off balance as I pumped it. A green shell flew out that I failed to follow in flight, and I hunted it for three or four minutes before giving up. I sniffed the shell chamber like a hound and affirmed the shotgun had been fired, and I shouted to the night, “Reinhardt! You forgot your persuader!” I was thinking that was terrifically funny, high comedy, the guy’s got a zing

er for every occasion, as I opened the front door with my key, failing to notice that the key pulled no bolt from its home. I heard the hush and scratch and ping of clothes tumbling in the kitchen dryer, and I heard Sinatra singing “Where or When” as I hulked my way to the dining room with the shotgun hanging over my forearm. And Reinhardt Schmidt was there on the Indian floor rug, flat out on his back and his face in red horror, the flesh raked off its architecture by that twelve-gauge shotgun shell.

I fell to my knees in the hallway, frail as an old man, letting the shotgun ease off my forearm and clank onto the pink marble floor. What is the opposite of worship? I have never felt so alone and hexed and loathsome and unblessed as when I watched Reinhardt’s blood ooze from him, wondering in my drunkenness if there were doctor things I ought to do, and then reading the dining room mirror where “Asesino,” murderer, was printed in Renata’s lipstick.

Worry and fear got me half sober again, for I was positive then that Reinhardt’s killer thought Reinhardt was me, he was a friend or relative of Carmen Martinez and he’d be back again for vengeance when he found out about his mistake. Even in the free fall of far too much juice I got on my feet and walked through to the kitchen and gave a try at a chronology, though Reinhardt’s murderer was a fill-in-the-blank to me then, not Renaldo Cruz, finding the full glass door to the pool that I’d locked was jimmied open, Reinhardt’s green plastic laundry basket was on the kitchen countertop with a box of Cheer inside it, his whiskey glass was on the floor by the stereo, and Reinhardt’s left hand was beside it in a kind of offering while the half of his face that gunshot hadn’t ravaged was as indifferent as a waiter’s.

Even as I write this I have no idea how Renaldo Cruz found out that I killed his novia. But the forest is full of eyes along that highway, he may have been informed about a crazy rubio who’d flashed by just before Carmen was hit, and then found my house in the forest and ransacked it and stole my fancy shotgun. Even children in the fields could have told him where I oh so flagrantly lived in town. Was he tracking me from then on? Or was he tracking Reinhardt by mistake? Was it just the fiesta that forced Renaldo to wait until Wednesday night to hike himself up over the pool’s high fence and jimmy the full glass door? And then did he walk through the upstairs rooms, handling my possessions, hating the differences he saw between my life in Mexico and the harder one of his family and friends? But he wrecked nothing then, took nothing but Renata’s brass lipstick case, possibly thinking of it as a present for his sister. Renaldo must have hidden inside, focusing on his purpose, until he heard the front door open. Even then he must have held himself in check as Reinhardt hauled his laundry inside the house and filled the dryer with my clothes, filled the washer with his. Was Renaldo in the hallway while Reinhardt filled his glass with whiskey? Was Reinhardt carrying his whiskey from the kitchen to the dining room when Renaldo lifted the shotgun? Was there a moment when Renaldo saw him and hesitated? Did Reinhardt look up in surprise? Were things said? Was Reinhardt inserting the Sinatra CD when he heard footsteps and turned? Was he kneeling by the stereo when he put his whiskey glass down on the floor? And did he hear the shotgun as the hammer was cocked? Was he shocked at the sound? Did he think that Renaldo was me? And did Reinhardt smirk when he turned from the stereo? Was there time for Reinhardt to say in English that he was not who Renaldo thought he was? How long before Renaldo found out he was wrong?

Well, it was too much for me then, far more than I could handle in that condition with my head sending out flashes and flares. Even things as simple as the alphabet were slewing off into “e, f, green, hello.” I’ll have to think about this later, I thought, and knew I’d have a host of years of thinking of nothing else.

Shall I confess my envy for Reinhardt then? Suddenly he seemed full of such certainty and purpose. And it was I whose life seemed in chaos, whose innermost fears and longings and beliefs were a mystery to himself. We were at the crisis point in our plot. We were at the spot where our hero is forced to make a choice. You are in trouble, I finally thought to myself. You’d better do something quick.

Looked at my watch. A quarter to eleven. I got up and carried the dining chairs into the kitchen. Skidded the dining table off the Indian rug and against the full glass doors. I got down on my knees beside Reinhardt and gingerly lifted him until he was lying across my knees, as conquered as Christ in a pietà. I felt as hollow as a child, felt how unfair and cruel and unjust it was that our likenesses had killed him for me and there was no unkilling him, no way of undoing the deed or defending myself but to hide it.

So I heaved the huge load of Reinhardt up onto my left thigh and hitched my back until I found a way to get up to my feet and haul him to the hallway, his head knocking dully against the wall once, his huaraches hitting together as I laid him by the front door. I folded in half a dining room rug that was heavy with blood and then halved it again and slung it behind me as I tilted into the hallway with it. I found white vinegar and a sponge under the kitchen sink, washed Asesino from the dining room mirror, and hunted the floor and walls for blood, fastidious to a fault, then looked along the hallway for telltales of our lurch and wobble to the door. I thoroughly rinsed out the sponge and hand-washed the sink, then carried the dining chairs out from the kitchen, skidded the table back, and tidied the room.

I fortified myself with whiskey from Reinhardt’s glass and frowned at myself in the Cinemascope of the dining room mirror. My face was white, the life flushed from it. My eyes were scary, yelling Don’t cross me. Even I shied from them. I found inkblots of blood on the front of my white oxford shirt and I got it half off when I freaked at the sudden noise of the telephone, fierce as a bayonet that ringing. My hand went for it, hesitated, and finally let it ring, four times, five. Was it Renata or someone else? (Well, you see I’m kind of busy now. I have to hide a guy’s body.) Wrestling out of the shirt, I took it out the kitchen door to the green garbage container, pushing it beneath the trash already there, then got into a hot, gray Stanford T-shirt that was falling with my clothes in the dryer. Emptying the full load into his green plastic basket and pitching Reinhardt’s wet clothes into the dryer, I found his handwriting on a notepad that hung next to the kitchen phone, a Mexico City number that I found the presence of mind to dial.

A female voice told me in Spanish that it was the American Express Travel Office. I got out my wallet and flipped it open as I asked if she spoke English.

“Yes, sir.”

Tags: Ron Hansen Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net