“So maybe that is part of the game.”
“If it is, it requires that the game be played differently every time. Otherwise there is a pattern:… Hah!”
“Hah what?”
“Let me think a bit.”
He thought for about twenty miles and finally said, “I thought I had an inspiration, but I can’t make it work. It struck me that maybe he had a very good reason to eliminate Evan Lawrence, the name and the identity, along with Norma. What could that reason be? That possibly, as Evan Lawrence, the hunt had not gone too well with the victim he dispatched before he met Norma. Maybe there was a trail left which someone might be shrewd enough to follow-just as we’re trying to follow him now-and if that did happen, it would end right there when The John Maynard Keynes blew up. A dead end. Justice done. But actually, it would be a convenience to him to drop an identity. I would imagine he had another one all set to slip into.”
“He could buy identities in Miami as easy as he could buy explosives.”
“Travis, there is one thing about him we should keep in mind. He does really look like a great many other forty-year-old men. Driving around Houston I saw at least a half dozen men who, on first glance, looked like Evan Lawrence. Average height, square face, tan, standard haircut, no distinguishing marks. A pleasant expression. Bigger hands than average, thicker through the neck and shoulders. Remember, I found a great many yearbook pictures which looked as if they could have been Evan Lawrence. I am saying that he can disappear into the people pool the way a trout can rise and gulp a bug and slide back down out of sight in the depths. Money makes the disappearance easier. Money diverts suspicion. Money can give a false impression of respectability.”
“So what good are we going to do in Eagle Pass?”
“Maybe he started as Cody T. W Pittler. And if so, maybe we can find out what turned him into a hunter.”
“There we go again, Meyer. The old argument.”
“Which one?”
“You start with the assumption that everybody is peachy, and then something comes along and warps them. You start with a concept of goodness, and so what we are supposed to do, as a society, is understand why they turn sour. Understand and try to heal. I start with the assumption that there is such a thing as evil which can exist without causation. The black heart which takes joy in being black. In almost every kind of herd animal, there is the phenomenon of the rogue.”
“If he is Pittler, we’ll find something unusual about his boyhood.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Just as sure as I am that I learned some time ago what it was in your past that gives you a recurrent streak of paranoia.”
“Now hold it!”
“Don’t be insulted, Travis. That flaw is useful to you. It keeps you constantly suspicious. And thus it has probably kept you alive.”
“Up till now.”
Sixteen
FROM EAGLE Pass in Maverick County, across the river from Piedras Negras, the Rio Grande drops seven hundred and twenty-six feet in a few hundred miles until it flows into the Gulf below Brownsville at Brazos Island.
There is a deceptive illusion of lushness near the riverbanks, but for the most part it is a burned land of scraggly brush, dry hills, weed, lizard, cedar, and salty creek beds that slant down from the Anacacho Mountains to the north. To the northeast is Uvalde, where John Nance Garner lived and died in a broad and pretty valley, noted in his declining years only for his brief statement about the value of the office of the Vice-President of the United States. “It’s about as much use as a pitcher of warm spit,” he said.
Here all along the valley from Cameron and Willacy counties on the Gulf through Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, Webb, Dimmit, Zavala, and Maverick, the American citizens of Mexican ancestry have, through the exercise of their right to vote, taken control of county functions: school boards, zoning, police and fire protection, road departments, library services, county welfare, and all the other boards and commissions which spring full grown from the over-fertilized minds of the political animals. This has been a slow and inevitable process for fifty years, and it is understandable that during this time most of the Anglos have been squeezed out of participation in county government. Some of those squeezed out were doubtless of exceptional competency. But so are some of the new ones. And the world keeps turning, and just as much money finds its way into the wrong pockets as under the old regime.
Sergeant Paul Sigiera saw us on Thursday morning at nine thirty after a twenty-minute wait in his outer office. There was room in his office for a gray steel desk, three straight-backed oak chairs without arms, and two green filing cabinets. He was in his thirties, in short-sleeved, sweat-darkened khakis. He had black bangs down almost to his eyebrows, anthracite eyes, and a desperado mustache. The small window was open and a big fan atop the file cabinets turned back and forth, back and forth, ruffling the corners of the papers on his desk and giving a recurrent illusion of comfort.
“Friends,” he said in a Texican twang, “the goddarn compressor quit again, and it is hot as a fresh biscuit in heah. They don’t fix it quick, I’m gonna assign me out to patrol and ride around with the cold air turned on high. Now what was it you wanted?”
“We’re from Florida,” I said. “My name is McGee and this is my friend Professor Meyer, a world famous economist. Perhaps, Sergeant, you remember reading in the paper about Professor Meyer’s boat being blown up in the Atlantic Ocean just off Fort Lauderdale on the fifth of this month.”
“I maybe do remember something.”
“Three people died and no bodies were recovered. We have been trying to trace the person responsible, and there is a faint chance that he may have lived here as a young man before he went off to the University of Texas. He may have even been born here. His name is, or was, Cody T. W Pittler.”
He studied us. His smile was amiable. “Before I come to my senses and come back home here, I worked Vice in Beaumont, and I saw the underside of everything, and I heard every scam known to mankind. You come on very smooth and reliablelike, just like every good scam does. So you fellas just empty out all the ID out of your wallets and pockets right here in front of me. Hang onto the money and the wallets, and I’ll just poke around with the rest of it. Now if you’d just as soon not do that, you can get on up and leave and I’ll go on to the next customer.”
He took his time. He went through Meyer’s little stack of paper and plastic first. “What were you doing in Canada, Professor?”
“Giving a series of lectures. My boat with my niece aboard was blown up while I was up there. The Miami Herald called me to tell me about it and ask questions. I flew back as soon as I could get a reservation.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Myself. I give talks, do consulting work write papers.”
“What kind of address is this?”
“I have no address actually. That’s the slip at Bahia Mar where my boat has been moored for quite a few years. I lived aboard.”
“So your house got blown up.”
“That’s right.”
“When I was a little kid my gramma’s house burned up. She lost everything. For years after, she’d remember something and then start crying because she’d know it went up in flames too.”
“It is… difficult,” Meyer said.
“This credit card here. What’s the limit on it?”
“Limit?”
“How much can you charge on it?”
“I don’t really know. I think it’s five thousand.” He looked at the picture on Meyer’s driving license, holding it up as he looked carefully at Meyer. He nodded, pushed the little pile back toward Meyer, and began on mine.
He started with the license and the comparison, then read the license. “What does a salvage consultant do, McGee?”
“Advises people about how to go about salvaging something.”
“Underwater?”