“So the beads and the Honda and the goatee are just a disguise, so they won’t try so hard to put you on?”
“Oh no! It’s more sincere than that. I mean they’d see through that in a minute. Why, last night there must have been thirty or forty kids milling around this porch at midnight having a good-by party. Most of them went out this morning. And I was genuinely part of it, Trav. They talked to me freely. They knew I was trying to find Jerry Nesta, and one girl told me that he was in bad shape and living in some Mexican hovel in Mitla, hitting up the tourists for money to live on. But I thought he might have some crumb of information about where my Minda is and what day she planned to come back here. Do you think they would let me talk to him at the jail?”
“Why not?”
“But isn’t he in isolation or anything?”
“No. He was able to prove he was here in town when it happened. He came back in the jeep and found the three of them dead.”
“Then why would he be in jail? Answer that, will you?”
“Because his tourist card ran out and he’s an indigent, Wally.”
“Oh. Then what everybody is saying about him-”
“Is inaccurate.”
“How do you know so much about it, McGee?”
“I dropped in. A social visit, but I got there too late.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose I better try to see Nesta then. Well… thanks again.” He got up. “And if you happen to hear anything about my Minda, anything at all, I’m right here in the hotel. Room twelve. You can leave a note in my box. I would appreciate it so much.”
He’d been gone maybe two minutes when Meyer, with a straw bag full of little gift-wrapped items, sat down at the table and said, “Guess who nearly ran me down?”
“Wally McLeen on his Honda.”
“If I didn’t like you, McGee, I’d find it very easy to hate you. So you saw him. Okay, what struck me about him? What item?”
I tried the beads, then the goatee, but he smugly said no. “The best thing, the unforgettable thing was what I saw as he thundered by, jaw clamped. They glittered in the sun. Old-fashioned bicycle clips, by God, with his trousers neatly furled and held in place thereby.”
“I envy you that vision,” I said. I reported our conversation. I found that Meyer wanted to know more than I thought worth telling. He made me go back twice to the fellow who had conned Wally with the wild tale about Minda, and try to tell it in Wally’s words.
“Whoa! Let me up, or at least tell me what you’re after.”
He gave me his most infuriatingly smug Buddha smile. “I would hate to think that a certain lady of noble blood romped you into permanent semiconsciousness, old friend. Nor would I like to believe that yesterday’s lazy sun cooked the protein in your head. So why don’t you take it from the top all by yourself, with one little clue. Just imagine that the fellow who wanted to peddle Minda to her father was named Rockland.” And when he spoke again, several minutes later, he said, “Your face is all aglow with a look of rudimentary intelligence. Now try it out loud.”
“McLeen said he’d been here since the first. So he could have arrived on the last day of July. That was a Thursday. It was the day that Rockland stayed away from the little nest on Calle las Artes all day long and part of the evening, and came back and asked for a loan of three thousand and made Bruce Bundy suspicious by not being sour about being turned down. So all of Rockland’s troops had deserted him, and he had been tossed out of the trailer park, and he was trying to hustle a sizable piece of money anywhere he could find it. So maybe he spent a lot of time that same Thursday trying to establish contact with Minda McLeen. He would know where she was, but that house is a fortress, the Vitrier house. And neither girl would be very anxious to see Rockland for any reason, I’d assume. But let’s say he did get in touch, or find out how he could get in touch later.”
“You’re recovering nicely.” Meyer said.
“So Rockland had written off Bruce Bundy, at least as far as any willing donation is concerned. So he decides to leave with the things that look most valuable, going on the basis that the Bundys of this world seldom blow the whistle. They would rather write off the loss than make it police business. But Bundy was too cute. And when Rockland tried to jump him, Bundy was too rough. Rockland got black-belted all to hell. It probably made him pretty sick. But he had to get out of there on Saturday to meet Minda.”
“What would he be most worried about?” Meyer asked.
“I guess he would realize that if Wally McLeen located his daughter, that would end any chance of selling the information and delivering the girl to him for a price.”
“So we have a gap in the sequence. Better than twenty-four hours, and we have Bix and an American up on that mountain Sunday afternoon, parked and both out of the car and talking. Because it was Bundy’s yellow car, we can assume it was Walter Rockland with Bix. He had to have a way to get down off the mountain. He could walk it after dark. But it would be full daylight before he could get down to the valley floor.”
“Or somebody picked him up, by arrangement.”
“He’d run out of people,” Meyer said. “And if it was by arrangement, then there would have to be the assumption that he knew she would take off with the car and wouldn’t make it all the way down. How could he be sure she wouldn’t? What would the motive be?”
“Then there’s the next gap until Tuesday morning, when he took the camper out of Bundy’s shed.” Meyer shook his head. “It doesn’t fit together: None of it. We just don’t have enough of the missing pieces to even be able to guess how many other pieces are missing. Unless Jerome Nesta is willing to talk freely, we might as well go home. And maybe even if he does talk it won’t be helpful.”
Just then the Guadalajara sisters came clattering and squealing down upon us, laden with purchases, and there was much arrangement of girls and packages. They were still avid with the lust and fury of shopping, and they made expensive burlesques of total exhaustion, then dived into the bags and bundles to open the small ones for the reassur ance of our admiration, and pluck open the corners of the big ones to show the pattern and texture of bright fabric.
And where is Lita? Ah, there was someone here in this city she had to call, an odd couple who were friends of her mother, and she had been putting it off, so at last she called and they had asked her to come to have lunch with them, and it seemed as good a time as any, so she had phoned Enelio and informed him and had gone to meet the old couple. So Enelio would not join us either.
The sisters were both thirsty and famished, so as soon as a drink came they ordered lunch, and then went chattering on up to their little hotel suite to drop their purchases and freshen up.
They had made crackling inquisition of the waiter, and so we had ordered what they had ordered. It was very, very good indeed, and not at all heavy.
After lunch Margarita, the one with the best command of English, said, “Meyer, I wish to ask of you one great favor, a very selfish thing, a very dull thing for you. I am silly. You can say no, please.”