“The thing I like best about being here is the utter sense of serenity,” he said. “Nothing disturbs it, unless you want to call the flock of green parrots that flies past the terrace at precisely nine each morning a disturbance. I can remember being back in Calusa, Matthew, that damn phone ringing every ten minutes. I’m happy to be away from it all. I’ll never go back.”
I, too, was happy to be away from it all. But, unlike Sam, I had to go back on the fifth of December.
On Sunday morning Sam awakened us at 7:00 with the announcement that we would have an early breakfast and then take a boat to Yalapa — a beach accessible only by boat — some two hours away. We boarded the boat — a ferry, really — at 9:00 A.M. and were in Yalapa before lunch, which we ate at a beachside restaurant called Rogelio’s, where a wandering peddler tried to sell Dale the identical abalone barrette she had bought in Puerto Vallarta for forty pesos less. On the beach after lunch, I met a man who suddenly reminded me again of what was waiting for me back in Calusa.
He and his wife came wandering up the beach, and spread a blanket beside us. She was the thinnest woman I’d ever seen in my life, with contradictorily enormous breasts swelling in the top of a brown bikini almost as dark as her tanned skin. Her hair was black. She smiled as she made herself comfortable on the blanket. Her husband smiled, too, and soon we were chatting. He told me he had worked for an advertising agency in New York before coming to Mexico eight years ago. He told me he had been accused of killing his wife in a fit of rage one night, and had been acquitted of the crime after a trial that had lasted almost two months. He told me he had quit his job soon afterward, selling all his worldly possessions, and moving down here to Yalapa with his former secretary — the wife who now lay smiling beside him on the blanket, her enormous breasts bulging in the scanty top of the bikini — where together they had found a happiness they had never known before. As he told all this to me, his eyes were twitching, and his mouth was twitching, and I sensed in him a loneliness so deep and so pathetic that it almost caused me to weep. We shook hands when the ferry blasted the signal for departure. I waded into the water beside Dale and my daughter, and as we boarded the waiting motor dinghy I thought of George Harper, who had broken jail and stolen a sheriff’s car, and I wondered what sort of loneliness he might be feeling just then.
The ferry left at 4:30 P.M. and we were back in Puerto Vallarta by 7:00. We ate dinner at a restaurant in town, and during the meal Joanna informed us that tomorrow was the big day, tomorrow she would wear her bikini for the first time anywhere in public, and she exacted from all of us the promise that we wouldn’t laugh. When we got back to the villa, all the womenfolk, as Sam called them, went promptly to bed, leaving both of us in the living room with cognacs and our chess pieces. Sam was white, I was black. Within ten minutes, he had me checkmated.
“What’s troubling you?” he asked.
I told him all about the Harper case. I told him about my conversations with Lloyd Davis and his wife, and Sally Owen and her former husband; I told him about having talked to Harper’s mother and the woman who lived next door to her; I told him about my unsatisfying conversation with Kitty Reynolds and my conviction that almost everyone I’d spoken to had been lying to me.
“Nobody lies unless there’s something to hide,” Sam said.
“But everybody? Does everybody have something to hide?”
“In a conspiracy, yes.”
“Come on, Sam, what the hell kind of conspiracy?”
“Dope?” Sam asked.
“No, no.”
“Florida’s second-biggest industry next to tourism. You say some of these people live in Miami?”
“Yes.”
“The local drug trade there is estimated at seven billion dollars annually,” Sam said. “Seventy percent of the cocaine, eighty percent of the marijuana, and ninety percent of the counterfeit quaaludes coming into the United States pass through the port of Miami from South America.”
“I don’t think Harper or his wife were involved in dope traffic.”
“How about their friends?”
“I didn’t get any indication of that, Sam.”
“Then why are they lying?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, what else?”
I told him I’d asked Karl Jennings to track down the garage attendant who’d sold Harper the gasoline can and then filled it with five gallons of gas, told him I’d asked Karl to find out why Loomis’s prints weren’t on that can, and then admitted I was concerned over the fact that Karl hadn’t yet called to let me know what he’d found out.
“Did you leave the number at the Garza Blanca?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this is Sunday,” Sam said. “Thursday was Thanksgiving Day, and your office was probably closed on Friday...”
“It was.”
“You can’t expect him to have worked over the weekend, Matthew. Besides, he knows you’ll be back on the fifth, so even when he does have the information you requested — which, by the way, is sound prepar—”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I said. “Jim Willoughby put me onto it.”
“Is he the lawyer you’re working with?”
“Yes.”
“A good man, but a bit on the paranoid side. Skye Bannister’s the best state’s attorney Calusa ever had, and I’ve seen plenty of them, believe me. The way Willoughby bad-mouths him, you’d think...” Sam shook his head. “Anyway,” he said, “you’ll have the information on that can when you get home, I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose.”
“What would you do with it if you had it here?”
“Well — nothing.”
“Exactly. Relax, Matthew. Enjoy being here, enjoy Mexico City when you get there. You’ll be back in the Calusa salt mines soon enough.”
“Am I handling it right so far?” I asked.
“Your approach cannot be flawed,” Sam said, and grinned.
We finished our drinks. Sam rose and yawned, and said we might as well sleep late tomorrow since nothing was planned but a leisurely day of flopping on the Mismaloya Beach. Dale was still awake when I got to our room.
“What’s going on here?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Why is Toni tiptoeing around like a spy?”
“I didn’t notice her tiptoeing around.”
“You haven’t noticed all those secret whispered conversations in Spanish with Carlos and Maria?”
“No.”
“What’s going on?” Dale asked again.
We did not find out what was going on till Monday night at eight o’clock. Sam, Toni, Dale, and I — Joanna had finally got back from the beach and was downstairs frantically packing — were sitting in the living room drinking the piña coladas Carlos had made for us, when suddenly we heard the sound of several automobiles outside, car doors slamming, voices calling to each other, laughter, and — all at once — music. Toni was grinning from ear to ear as a dozen or more people, followed by a mariachi band, came down the steps from the main level and into the living room, all of them singing “Happy Birthday to You” at the top of their lungs, while the band played a distinctly Mexican accompaniment behind them.
“I’ll be a son of a gun,” Sam said, and embraced first Toni and then Dale and me, and then all the guests Toni had invited to celebrate Sam’s sixty-fifth birthday. Carlos and Maria — in on the secret, of course — had informed us earlier that dinner would not be served till nine o’clock, and they now paraded down from the dining level carrying pitchers of margaritas and piña coladas, followed by Maria’s sister Blanca, hired especially for the occasion and carrying a platterful of hors d’oeuvres. The mariachi band consisted of two guitarists, a trumpet player, a violinist, and a man shaking maracas, all of them wearing ruffled white shirts with blue silk scarves tied at the throat, sombreros large enough to float the owl and the pussycat out to sea, and shiny black suits, the trousers of which were decorated with tiny silver bells along each outside leg. They set up shop near the fireplace, and — encouraged by the margaritas Carlos served them and the general high spirits of the guests — launched into a medley of Mexican hits they knew far better than “Happy Birthday to You.”