J is for Judgment (Kinsey Millhone 10)
For two days I cruised both the Hacienda Grande and the town of Viento Negro, looking for anyone who even halfway resembled the five-year-old photographs of Wendell Jaffe. If all else failed, I could try to quiz the staff in my amateur Spanish, but I worried that one of them might tip him off to the inquiry. If he was there, that is. I hung out by the pool, loitered in the hotel lobby, took the shuttle into town. I tried all the tourist attractions: the sunset cruise, a snorkling expedition, a bumpy ass-agonizing jaunt on a rented all-terrain vehicle, roaring up and down dusty mountain trails. I tried the two other hotels in the area, local restaurants, and bars. I sampled the nightly entertainment at the hotel where I was staying, all the discos, all the shops. There was no sign of him.
I finally managed to get a call through to Mac at home and filled him in on my efforts to date. “This is costing a lot of money if he’s already blown out of here…assuming your friend actually saw Wendell Jaffe in the first place.”
“Dick swore it was him.”
“After five long years?”
“Look, just keep at it for another couple of days. If he doesn’t turn up by the end of the week, you can head home.”
“Happy to oblige. I just like to warn you when I don’t get results.”
“I understand that. Keep trying.”
“You’re the boss,” I said.
I learned to like the town, which was a ten-minute taxi ride from the hotel down a dusty two-lane road. Most construction I passed was in a state of incompletion, raw cinder block and rebar abandoned to the weeds. A once stunning view of the harbor was obscured now by condominiums, and the streets were filled with tots selling Chiclets for a hundred pesos apiece. Dogs napped in the sunshine, sprawling on the sidewalks wherever it suited them, apparently trusting the local citizens to leave them unmolested. The store-fronts that lined the main street were painted harsh blues and yellows, bright reds and parrot greens, as gaudy as jungle flowers. Billboards proclaimed far-flung commercial influences from Fuji color film to Century 21 real estate. Most cars were parked with two wheels on the sidewalk, and the license plates suggested an influx of tourists from as far away as Oklahoma. The merchants were polite and responded with patience to my halting Spanish. There was no evidence of crime or civil rowdiness. Everyone was too dependent on the visiting Americans to risk offense. Even so, the goods in the market stalls were shoddy and overpriced, and the fare in the restaurants was strictly second-rate. Restlessly, I wandered from one location to the next, scanning the crowds for Wendell Jaffe or his look-alike.
On Wednesday afternoon—day two and a half of my stay—I finally gave up the search and retired to the pool, where I lathered myself with a glistening coat of sunscreen that made me smell like a freshly baked coconut macaroon. I had donned a faded black bikini, boldly exposing a body riddled with old bullet holes and crisscrossed with pale scars from the assorted injuries that had been inflicted on me over the years. Many people seem to worry about the state of my health. At the moment I was faintly orange, having recently applied a primer coat of Tan in a Can to disguise my winter pallor. Of course, I’d missed in places, and my ankles were oddly splotched with what looked like tawny hepatitis. I tipped my wide-brimmed straw hat down across my face, trying not to think about the sweat collecting on the underside of my burnt umber knees. Sunbathing has to be the most boring pastime on the planet. On the plus side, I was disconnected from telephones and TV. I hadn’t any notion what was happening in the world.
I must have dozed because the next thing I became aware of was the rattle of newspaper and a conversation in Spanish taking place between two people on the chaises to my right. Here’s how a conversation in Spanish sounds to someone with my limited vocabulary: blah, blah, blah …but…blah, blah, blah, blah,…because …blah, blah, blah…here. A woman, whose accent was clearly American, was saying something about Perdido, California, the small town thirty miles south of Santa Teresa. I perked right up. I was in the process of lifting the brim of my hat so I could see who she was when her male companion responded in a rift of Spanish. I adjusted my hat, turning by degrees until he came into view. Shit, it had to be Jaffe. If I made allowances for aging and cosmetic surgery, this guy was certainly a distinct possibility. I can’t say he was a dead ringer for the Wendell Jaffe in the pictures, but he was close enough: the age, the build, something about the man’s posture and the way he held his head, characteristics he probably wasn’t aware were part of the image he projected. He was scanning the newspaper, his eye moving restlessly from one column to the next. He sensed my scrutiny and flashed a cautious look in my direction. His gaze held mine briefly while the woman rattled on. Emotions shifted in his face, and he touched her arm with a warning look at me. The flow of talk was halted temporarily. I liked the paranoia. It spoke volumes about his mental state.