He leaned over the railing. People paid no attention to him. They were like travelers on the deck of a ship politely ignoring a fellow passenger who was seasick. Five seconds later he had disappeared into the concrete darkness below the bridge.
A woman screamed. A crowd gathered. People peered down into the darkness to see if anything exciting was going on. It wasn’t. They walked on by.
Aragon stood at the railing. Beads of sweat rolled down his face, as cold and heavy as hailstones. I have a nice feeling about you, laddie. You’re going to bring me luck.
“God Almighty,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, Jenkins, I’m sorry.”
A short fat young man stopped beside him. He wore a striped serape over his work clothes, and his hair was greased back over his head so that it looked like a black plastic cap. He had a wheezy worried voice: “Did you push him?”
“Push him? For Christ’s sake, he was a friend of mine.”
“Then why were you chasing him?”
“I was trying to help him.”
“Why was he running away from you?”
“I don’t know. Now will you please—”
“Pretty soon the police will arrive. Already I hear the sirens.”
Aragon heard them, too.
“They’ll be nasty,” the man said. “They always are when such a serious crime is committed.”
“There was no crime.”
“They arrest everyone in sight, helter-skelter. They have to act fast because corpses are usually buried the next day... What story will you give them?”
“No story. Just the truth. I was trying to save him, to take him home because he was sick.”
“It didn’t look that way to me. You were chasing him and he was trying to escape from you. The police don’t like it when Americans come here to murder each other. It gives our country a bad reputation.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“And if the Americans also swear and blaspheme—”
“Okay, okay. How much?”
“Twenty dollars seems a small price to stay out of our jail. We have a very poor jail.”
Aragon gave him a twenty-dollar bill and the man disappeared into the crowd as quickly as Jenkins had disappeared into the darkness below the bridge.
The sirens were getting closer. He started walking as fast as he could back toward the Domino Club. His legs felt rubbery and the sweat was still pouring down his face.
Twelve
The back booth at the Domino Club where Jenkins had been sitting was cleaned up and smelled of disinfectant. The cleanup even included the young bartender who’d spoken to him previously. He wore a freshly laundered white jacket with the name Mitchell stitched across the breast pocket.
Aragon sat down in the booth. About three minutes later Mitchell joined him, bringing along a cup of coffee. He didn’t offer Aragon either the coffee or anything else.
“How’s your friend?”
“Dead.”
“Yeah? Well, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”
“His name was Harry Jenkins,” Aragon said quietly. “He wasn’t a bad man, just unlucky. He had the wrong kind of friends.”
“There’s a right kind? Show me.”
“What was he drinking?”
“Beer. I took the empty bottle away myself before I had one of the boys tidy the place up.”
“Your boys are very thorough tidy-uppers. Do they always use a gallon of disinfectant after each customer?”
“The booth stank of puke and whiskey.”
“You said Jenkins was drinking beer.”
“I removed an empty beer bottle from this table. I didn’t smell it to see what had been in it. I figured a beer bottle would contain beer. Anyway, that was his usual drink. He often came in and ordered a beer. He’d nurse a single bottle along for half the night, waiting around for a touch or whatever he had in mind. How come all this fuss over one little dead man?”
“I think he was poisoned.”
“You think funny. Go home. Sleep it off.”
Aragon looked at his watch. It was twenty after one. “Jenkins called me about two hours ago at my hotel. He was completely sober and in good spirits. Yet forty-five minutes and one bottle of beer later, he was so stoned out of his head that he went and jumped off a bridge. Does that make sense?”
“My business is to make money, not sense. And you know how I do it? I keep my nose clean and out of other people’s affairs. I also stay away from booze.”
“Jenkins told me on the phone that he was with somebody, an American.”
“He wasn’t an American.”
“What was he?”
“Like I said, I mind my own affairs. But I couldn’t help noticing that he was dark-skinned and wearing the usual Mexican work clothes, half native, half cowboy.”
“How old was he?”
“They never show their age. I hired one last year, thought he was about thirty, until suddenly he dropped dead of old age. It’s all that grease in their skin, keeps the wrinkles away.”
“Did Jenkins and his companion seem friendly?”
“There was no quarrel, no fuss, no nothing, until you showed up.”
“When I showed up, Jenkins was alone and you seemed pretty anxious to get rid of him.”
“I hate pukers.”
“You hate a lot of people, don’t you, Mitchell?”
“In this business you see their worst side, until pretty soon you forget they have a better one. And ten chances to one they haven’t, anyway. Any more questions?”
“What happened to Jenkins between the time he phoned me and the time I arrived?”
“Nothing happened to him. He got drunk, took a walk to sober up, fell off a bridge. Period.” Mitchell finished his coffee. “So don’t throw any wild statements around. Our club has a good reputation, the best that money can buy. When a little trouble comes along, zap, it goes away again. The police are very understanding.”
“How much are cops selling for these days?”
“They’re dirt cheap. Which is what dirt ought to be, cheap.”
“That’s not much of a tribute to your protectors.”
“I pay them, I don’t have to kiss their asses,” Mitchell said. “Now, if it will shut you up and make you feel any better, I’m sorry about your friend.”
It was the first human remark Mitchell had made. “The coffee must be getting to you,” Aragon said. “For a minute there I thought I heard the faint beating of a heart.”
“I have the hiccups.”
Aragon drove to the police station and waited around for the rest of the night. At seven in the morning he was informed that Jenkins’ body had been examined, and death was declared the result of injuries received in an accidental fall. Fifty dollars was found in his pocket, enough for funeral expenses. In Rio Seco, funerals were cheap, since there was no embalming, and quick if there were no survivors to wait for and the weather was hot. The body was removed to an undertaking parlor, a priest was notified, and Jenkins’ funeral service was scheduled for six o’clock that night.
Death was always sad, the undertaker told Aragon. “But one must be realistic. The new bridge is good for business. More than thirty people have already jumped from it.”
“The police said Jenkins’ death was accidental.”
“Such a verdict makes it easier for them. Also for the Church. The Church frowns on suicide.”
“I think Jenkins was drugged, which makes it murder not accident or suicide.”
“Oh no, no no. The bridge is a magnet for troubled souls seeking oblivion or what not. You have one like it in San Francisco, the Golden Gate. I read in the newspaper that more than five hundred people have jumped from it. Is this true?”