“A few times. How about you?”
“One time. But I don’t remember it.”
“How come?”
“I was a baby, I guess.”
“Where in Mexico does your dad live?”
“In a town on the water with monkeys in it. I’m going to—”
“Timmy! Timmy!”
It was a woman’s voice, calling from over by Bungalow 6. The kid cringed a little; a kind of caught look came into his eyes and he went nervous, twitchy. For a moment I thought he was going to hop off the bench and run. But he didn’t do it; he just sat there, squirming.
The woman called again, and there were thrashing sounds in a group of oleander bushes nearby. Then she came around the oleanders, saw the boy, and said, “Timmy, damn it—” before she got far enough along the path to spot me sitting on the other end of the bench.
Her mouth clamped shut and she stopped and stared at me. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing with Timmy?”
“We were just having a talk,” I said.
“Talk? Talk about what?”
“Nothing much. Are you Timmy’s mother?”
“If it’s any of your business, yes.” She was a brunette in her mid-thirties, slender, pretty enough except for the suspicious scowl she wore and some heavy fatigue lines around her eyes. A tough lady, I thought, all bone and sinew and bubbling juices. Nice at the core, maybe. And maybe not. “And you?” she asked. “Who are you?”
I told her my name and that I was also a guest at the Casa del Rey. “Timmy was sitting here when I came by,” I said, “so I sat down to pass the time of day.” I gave her my best smile. “I’m not weird, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
She didn’t have anything to say to that. She looked at the boy and said, “Timmy, what are you doing out here? Why did you disobey me again?”
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to come outside for a while, that’s all.”
She went over and took hold of his arm and urged him off the bench. If she had tried to swat him one, I would have interfered; it was none of my business, but I don’t like to see kids abused. But she didn’t hit him and she didn’t manhandle him either. Just hung on to his arm, holding him close to her in a protective way. Timmy didn’t struggle; he wore a vaguely embarrassed look now, as if it were unmanly for me to see his mother treating him this way, like a little kid.
The woman’s eyes were on me again. She said, “What did Timmy say to you?”
“About what?”
“About anything. What were you talking about?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know, that’s why. Timmy tells stories sometimes. I don’t like him telling stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“He makes things up. About... well, about me.”
Timmy said, “I don’t. Honest, I don’t!”
“Yes, you do. Now be quiet.”
I said, “He didn’t say anything about you, Mrs. — What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t say. Didn’t Timmy tell you his last name?”
“No, he didn’t.”
She hesitated as if she were going to say something else to me. Instead she turned abruptly and took the boy away toward Bungalow 6. He glanced back just before they disappeared beyond the oleanders; his face was scrunched up, the way a kid’s gets when he’s fighting back tears.
I sat there for a time after they were gone. The little episode with the boy’s mother had left a bad taste in my mouth and I didn’t quite know why. She hadn’t done or said anything that indicated she might be mistreating Timmy, and neither had he. And yet, there was some kind of tension there, something that carried the vague unpleasant smell of fear.
None of my business, I thought again; and nothing I can do about it even if it was. Forget it.
But I couldn’t forget it; it kept worrying around inside my head. I went down by their bungalow, but there wasn’t anything to see — the front windows were shuttered and hedges obscured the entrance — and there wasn’t anything to hear either.
I headed back toward the hotel. Out on the beach, some young people had started a game of volleyball and were making a not unpleasant racket. The gardens were still deserted. Nuts to the convention, I thought. I’ll go for a swim, I’ll have some lunch, then maybe I’ll come back out here and wander around some more. Not because of Timmy and his mother. Just because it’s a nice place to be.
I came around a clump of bamboo, and straight ahead there was open space and I could see most of the east side of the hotel. The tower jutting up on that corner caught my eye: it had open arches on four sides with waist-high railings in them, so that people standing up there could take in the view in all directions. I saw movement inside — one person, maybe two. I couldn’t be sure because of the angle: the inside of the tower was a blend of light and shadow.
Overhead, the droning of two or three approaching Navy planes began to build in volume. I glanced up at them briefly, then looked back at the tower.
And somebody appeared at the rail, came flying over it like a person diving off a high board — a woman dressed in something pink, arms clawing at the air, screaming.
She screamed all the way down, a death cry that was barely audible above the pulsating roar of the planes. Something moved up in the tower, a suggestion of someone there in the shadows peering down. Or maybe it was just an illusion; I couldn’t be sure of that either, because I was already running by then, with that sense of shock something unexpected and frightening always instills in you. There were fifty yards separating me and the hotel when the falling woman hit and the screaming stopped. But even with the noise of the planes I swear I could hear the sound of impact — that melon-splitting sound of bones breaking and tissue ripping that you can never forget once you’ve heard it.
I ran through some shrubs, across a square of lawn, between a couple of palms. A few people on the beach had also seen the woman fall and were just starting to come out of their own frozen moment of shock. I plowed through a bunch of tropical flowers, and there she was, lying broken on her side on a section of cobblestone path. Dead — you could see from a distance that she was dead. Part of her skull had cracked open; there were streamers of bright blood already trailing away from it.
Five paces from her I stopped, panting, feeling sick to my stomach. I had seen a guy who’d jumped from a fifteen-story window once, but it was no worse than this — and she’d only come down four stories. Several people were milling around behind me; somebody yelled, somebody else began to shriek. Overhead, more planes picked up the roar of the ones that had just gone by. All I could do was stand there staring, because I recognized the woman and that made it even worse.
McCone’s friend, the Casa del Rey’s security chief — Elaine Picard.
9: McCone
When he’d unhooked me from the polygraph, I thanked the salesman — whose name was Wally — for the demonstration, gave him my parents’ phone number so we could make a date later on, and started out toward the mezzanine. I didn’t feel guilty about planning to have dinner with him; after all, neither Don nor I was a particularly possessive individual. I liked to think that what we had together was too strong to be disrupted by jealousy.
The movie must have ended, because the room was now crowded with people looking for someone to talk to. I chatted with a woman named Kinsey Millhone, who had her own agency in Santa Teresa, then tried once again to go outside. Halfway to the door, a fellow from New York named Miles Jacoby stopped me, pointing to the San Francisco on my name tag, and asked me if I knew Wolf. It turned out Jacoby was a big admirer of his and knew all about his pulp collection, so we talked about that for a while. Finally I made my way to the mezzanine, where the crowd was thinner.