“You do that in Mexico, you’ll end up in jail,” I said.
“I thought Puerto Vallarta was very chic and continental,” she said.
“It’s also very Catholic.”
“So are France and Italy. The ladies in France and Italy take off their tops, Matthew.”
“If you take off your top in Mexico, they won’t consider you a lady.”
“Didn’t Liz Taylor take off her top in Mexico?”
“I doubt it.”
“Mm,” Dale said. She was quiet for several moments. Then she said, “I’ll have to practice for here then. For when we get back from Mexico.”
I looked at her.
“Why don’t you sit down?” she said. “Sit down, Matthew.”
I took the chair opposite hers. Watching me, the smile still on her face, she sat up, and then reached for the sandals, and put on first one and then the other, and then rose suddenly, uncoiling the long length of her body, the high heels adding two inches to her already spectacular height. She reached up to loosen the ribbon in her hair, pulling it free like the rip cord on a parachute, unfurling a cascade of auburn hair that fell loose to just below her shoulders. She shook out the hair. She took off the sunglasses and placed them on the chair behind her. I saw her eyes.
“Tell me if I’m doing it right,” she said.
She turned abruptly then, and walked away from me to the far side of the pool, where low-growing mangroves and taller Australian pines shielded the house from the bayou beyond. There were people living on either side of us, but the owner from whom I was renting was known in the neighborhood as “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” a sobriquet applied after she had planted more trees, bushes, shrubs, and vines on her property than could be found on the entire six acres of Calusa’s Agnes Lorrimer Memorial Gardens. Whatever Dale planned to do, she’d be afforded a privacy she could never find on any beach in Calusa. I suddenly found myself very wide-awake.
At the far end of the pool, she turned and put her hands on her hips. “I thought I’d walk sort of innocently,” she said, “like this,” she said, “so no one’ll suspect what’s coming,” she said, and began undulating toward me as innocently as Delilah must have approached Samson, hands still on her hips, high-heeled sandals clicking on the baked clay tiles surrounding the pool, her breasts, captured in the flimsy string top of the bikini, bobbing ever so gently with each long-legged stride she took. I felt a vague, distinctly adolescent stirring in my jeans.
“And then, you know,” she said, “I’ll just sort of reach up behind me,” she said, “casually, no big deal, Matthew, just reach up behind me,” she said, still moving slowly and inexorably toward me, high heels clicking, belly gently rounded above the patch of white that shielded the contradictorily blonde hair of her crotch, arms going up behind her, bent at the elbows, “and just give the string here a little tug, you know, and let them just sort of... ooooh!” she said, and glanced down at her own breasts in mock surprise as they virtually exploded free of the scanty top. “Am I doing it right?” she asked.
She stopped stock-still some ten feet away from me, approximately half a pool length away from me, and put her hands on her hips again, one hip jutting. Her breasts, where the sun had not touched them, were a pale white, the nipples surprisingly erect. She stood that way for what seemed a long time, motionless, and then began walking toward me again in that same slow, tantalizing strut, her eyes never leaving my face, her hands moving lower on her hips, her thumbs hooking into the tight band of the bikini bottom.
“And then,” she said, “if I can find the courage,” she said, “and if I can quell my natural fear of the police, why then I might just, you know, slowly lower the bottom part, Matthew, just to where” (and she began lowering it) “the blonde hair begins to show, you know, just about to here, Matthew” (and she lowered it to just about there) “where you can see the, you know, the beginning of my—”
The telephone rang.
“Shit,” Dale said.
The phone kept ringing.
She stood there with her thumbs still hooked into the waistband of the bikini, her long fingers pointed downward in a triangle that framed the triangle of the string patch, the uppermost side of it exposing the faintest hint of the crisper blonde patch beneath it.
“Don’t answer it,” she whispered.
“It might be Joanna,” I said.
“No, it’s your fucking friend Bloom,” she said.
It was my fucking friend Bloom.
“Matthew,” he said, “something terrible has happened, I hope you’re sitting down.”
“What is it?” I said.
“Your man’s out.”
“What?”
“Harper. He’s broken out of jail.”
“What?”
“Stole a sheriff’s car parked out back, knocked the officer flat on his ass, Christ knows where he is now, Matthew. I’ve put out an all-points bulletin — excuse me, BOLO, I’ll never get used to what they call it down here. That’s a ‘Be on the Lookout For,’ it means every law-enforcement officer in the state’ll be looking for him, not that I think he’ll hang on to that sheriff’s car any longer than he has to. Matthew? Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” I said.
It was raining when we got to Puerto Vallarta, the kind of torrential downpour that one expected in Calusa during the summer months; when we’d left Calusa that morning the sun had been shining brightly. My partner Frank claims to like rain; he also claims to like snow. He says that the sameness of the weather in Calusa can drive a man to distraction, this despite the fact that he has lived through many a hurricane season there. Frank would have enjoyed the wind and the water that swept in through the sides of the windowless Jeep as Sam Thorn drove us from the airport.
Sam was wearing a yellow hat and rain slicker better suited to a Cape Cod fisherman than a retired Circuit Court judge, but he obviously knew his environment and he was the only one properly dressed for the wild ride to his villa. The rest of us were wearing what we’d worn in sunny Calusa that morning; none of us had expected to step off the plane into a goddamn typhoon. Dale had on blue jeans and a green T-shirt that matched her eyes; her long auburn hair flailed wildly in the wind, her face was wet, her glasses flecked with raindrops. Joanna had dressed identically in emulation and adoration — blue jeans, green shirt, even a locket that looked identical to the one Dale had around her neck. Her blonde hair was caught in a ponytail. She kept squinting her eyes into the wind and the rain. I, too, was wearing jeans with a casual sports shirt open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up over my wrists. The shirt was soaked through even before we’d driven out of the airport and onto the road that hugged the shoreline, where the wind blowing in off the Pacific was much fiercer.
Sam explained that this was unusual for Puerto Vallarta in the month of November. Sam said that the precipitation in November was supposed to average something less than a third of an inch, and the temperature was supposed to average seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit, twenty-six on the Celsius scale. For the past few days, he said, it had been rainy and cold. Very unusual, he said. Sam was a man in his midsixties, tall and slender, with a nose like a hatchet, and bright intelligent blue eyes, and a shock of white hair that somehow made him look younger than his actual years. He spoke with the precision one might expect from a former judge, weighing his words as carefully as if he were charging a jury, measuring them out as surely as justice itself.
The villa he had purchased (or rather leased for ninety-nine years: in Mexico, foreigners are not allowed to own real estate) was located six windy, rainy, shitty miles south of the center of town, perched high on a hilltop overlooking Mismaloya Beach. It took us fifteen minutes to get there, but it seemed more like an hour. “Here it is,” Sam said at last, and we stepped down out of the Jeep and passed through a wrought-iron gate to the right of which was a tile set into the wall and lettered with the words casa espina.