“What I need is for you to find a guy who flimflammed me and get me my money back.”
“Did you go to the police?”
Lamm smirked. “I went in that little station in Tulum City. Three cops were sitting around playing with their handcuffs. They didn’t speak English. I got the hell out of there.”
Probably a wise retreat, Luis thought. “Swindled by whom, when, and for what?”
“Two days ago. This condo we’re in, it’s a beauty, right on the beach. The whole building’s for sale. This salesman was by with a couple who loved it, but they couldn’t agree on price. I bought it out from under them, on the spot. I’m close to retirement. I’d been looking to invest. I should of known better. I’m service manager at a car dealership. I ought to know a phony pitch by now.”
“How much money?”
“Sixty grand.”
Luis had to think a moment. Sixty thousand pesos was only twenty dollars. “Sixty thousand U.S.?”
Bud Lamm looked at his feet, then said, “Yeah, cashed in my pension fund. Thought I’d surprise Helen.”
“Does she know?”
“God, no!”
“How did you meet Martinez?”
“I was up in Cancún City, kind of crying in my beer in this bar. His office is up above it. Funny place for a law office. Will you help me?”
“I’ll talk to Martinez,” Luis said noncommittally.
“I owe you a buck,” Bud Lamm said. “For the tour. Didn’t mean to stiff you but, well, finances are tight. You can tack it on your bill.”
Eight kilometers north on the coastal highway was BLACK CORAL. It shared its generic name with others along Highway 307. This “black coral” was a large tent, a hand-lettered sign, and, inside, tables of hematite, silver, lapis, and, yes, black coral jewelry. Luis Balam was the proprietor.
Business was slow. Tour buses drove the local economy. Luis and fellow merchants bribed drivers to stop. But in the off season buses were scarce. Between his shop and Tulum, Luis was hanging on by his fingernails until winter. Investigative work for Ricky Martinez helped some, although his assignments were often like rainbows, dazzling but ethereal.
Luis’s adolescent daughters, Esther and Rosa, were minding the store. They and his parents ran it while Luis was gone. One bus, they reported. Two private cars. A hitchhiking American hippie who wanted to use the telephone and bathroom they didn’t have. Three sales altogether.
Luis told them about Bud Lamm.
“How much is sixty thousand dollars?” Esther asked, wide-eyed. She was eighteen, of his first wife who left him when he first went to Cancún to work.
“I can’t imagine,” said Luis, who could not.
“Then it isn’t real,” Esther said.
“Mr. Martinez—” Rosa hesitated, searching for a word “—magnifies everything, Father.”
“He does,” Luis conceded to his sixteen-year-old, child of his second wife, who died of a fever during his second and last Cancún employment. “Should I or shouldn’t I?”
“Talk to him as you promised,” Esther said. “After you eat.”
Strengthened by warm tortillas and a warmer bottle of Leon beer, Luis headed northward in a VW Golf he had bought as surplus from a Cancún Airport rental agency. Its running gear was shell-shocked from potholed roads, its engine malnourished by eighty-one-octane gas. The one hundred fifteen kilometer trip to Cancún City was always problematical, not to mention the eight kilometers of dust and ruts traveled daily between BLACK CORAL and Luis’s village. He had managed to keep his car running with bicycle tools and mechanical intuition. Soon he would need magic.
He worried about his girls. Was haggling with tourists over the price of beads their ultimate destiny? Perhaps. They could clean toilets at Cancún hotels. They could stay in the village, marry farmers, and become baby machines. There was much more a Maya could not do than do. Maybe, just maybe, this time he could get his hands around Ricky’s rainbow.
He passed the airport and entered Cancún City, old Mexico, circa 1977. When Mexico City began to develop Cancún Island from nothing in the early 1970’s as a tourist mecca, the city became its bedroom and market. Luis had as a teenager left his village to work as a construction laborer on both.
Downtown Cancún’s broad avenues were named for the Yucatan’s grandest ancient cities: Tulum, Coba, Uxmal, Bonampak. Ricardo Martinez Rodriguez’s law office was located in a cement building blocks from any reference to glorious history. Low overhead was an advantage, Martinez was given to point out. As was the proximity of doctors willing to validate Ricky’s calamitous diagnoses of his injured clients.
Castanets and guitars on the bar’s jukebox serenaded. Luis walked upstairs and found Ricky available. His office smelled vaguely of plastic.
“Luis, Bud Lamm saw you, yes?”
A year ago, Luis Balam had seen an old North American television show. It was called I Love Lucy. Shave Ricardo Martinez Rodriguez’s pencil mustache and he could be the twin of Ricky Ricardo, the Cuban bandleader. Ricardo had been Ricky to Luis ever since, like it or not. “Yes.”
Martinez clapped his hands. “Wonderful! Sixty thousand Yankee dollars. Do you know how much money that is, Luis?”
“No.”
“Me neither, but we’re rich. If we find it. If you find it.”
“The money belongs to the Lamms,” Luis reminded him.
“Yes, yes, I meant a percentage. We’ll be rich on a percentage.”
“What percentage?”
“To be negotiated. You have to find the money.” Martinez gave Luis a sheaf of documents. “Don’t bother to read the papers. They appear legal. Boilerplate real estate forms completed very professionally. They’re absolutely bogus. Since foreigners have been permitted to own beach property in Mexico through a trust setup, the land and home business has been crazy. What a trust. In Lamm’s case, blind trust, I think.”
“Did you recognize Lamm’s description of the salesman?”
“No. And that’s your department.”
Luis paused, thinking.
“Please,” Martinez said. “Sixty thousand dollars.”
“Real estate salesmen are more common these days than peddlers selling junk silver out of valises,” Luis said. “The beaches are black with time-share condo sellers. Like locusts.”
“Don’t be melodramatic, Luis. You can do it.”
Music began to waft upward.
“ ‘La Bamba?’ ”
“A mariachi trio. The tourists all request ‘La Bamba.’ I’m so sick of it. The new carpet muffles it some. Please, Luis. You can call me Ricky forever.”
The plastic odor, the carpet. “All right, Ricky.”
“Good, Luis, good. Locate the scoundrel. Lamm is broke. He can’t pay me until you do.”
Lamm’s condo was halfway between Ricky’s office and BLACK CORAL. A dirt road had been cut from the highway to the sea, through half a kilometer of scrub jungle. Houses and multiplexes Luis had never before seen lined this stretch of beach. Before long, he thought sadly, the beach from Cancún to Belize will be a necklace of vacation homes.
There were four units in Lamm’s building, two up and two down. It was stucco, painted flamingo, in arched, pillared Colonial Hacienda style. Three to four years old, Luis gauged, and aging fast, subtly crumbling and mildewing, victim of tropical humidity and substandard construction. Staked on the lawn was a Paradise Investment Properties Associates (PIPA) “For Sale” sign.
Lamm was waiting in a doorway, glass in hand. “Mr. Balam. It’s cocktail hour. Can I fix you one? Boy, it’s swell you’re taking the case.”
Luis declined a drink and said, “No promises.”
Lamm shrugged, said fair enough, and led him through the unit and out the sliders to a tiled verandah facing the Caribbean. “Pretty nice, huh? Except for doors that stick and a ceiling fan about to fall down, it’s in perfect shape.”