“And what do you want from me?”
“A way to put Señor Kayd into the story, like television.”
“Hmmm. Let me see now. Staniker knows the Bahamas well. He tells Crissy Harkinson he knows where there’s sunken treasure, but if he goes after it he has to give a big share to the Crown. He can’t finance the venture. But she has a rich Texas friend with a big boat. He flies over and talks to her. Then, three weeks ago, he arrives here with the boat and takes on Staniker as captain and they go to find the treasure. When they get the chance, they sneak off. They break contact. They hide the boat in some narrow cut and cover it with boughs. Now they are bringing up the treasure.”
“And what will happen?” she asked breathlessly.
“Let me see. Oh, of course! When they have the treasure, they won’t dare try to bring it out in Kayd’s boat. They had a sailboat hidden too, and Mrs. Harkinson and Oliver are going to sneak over there and sail it back.”
She leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “Oh, you are such a very clever man, Raoul Kelleeeee! Treasure! Mystery! Dark plots!” Then she gave that hard little bark of laughter which so often preceded her infrequent experiments with the English she had picked up at the Homestead café. “Sotch a crock of sheet!” she said merrily, and, as he winced inwardly, he wondered if she had the faintest idea what she had said.
Chapter Seven
On that Monday morning after the news of the missing cruiser had been announced, two men sat waiting in a second floor office in Brownsville, in a mottled old stucco building two blocks from the old bridge across the Rio Bravo to Matamorros. The windows faced a narrow street where the mid-morning heat was increasing. The windows were closed. The noisy compressor on the old window unit set up a sympathetic resonance in the metal cover of the air conditioner and in the glass of the window, a resonance that built and faded like engines out of sync.
The wooden furniture was heavy, scarred, marked with the burns where cigarettes and cigars had been forgotten. The grass rug was scuffed thin, broken in places. Only the file cabinets looked new, three of them aligned against one wall, thick, gray, fire-resistant, with combination locks. Below the office was a small grocery store and bar, specializing in Mexican food, Mexican beer. The juke music was always turned high, but over the sound of the air conditioner only the repetitive thud of the bass could be heard.
The girl rapped at the door and came in from the outer office without waiting for a reply. She brought letters in and silently placed them in front of the older man who sat behind the desk. He read each one slowly and carefully, lips moving, before signing it. A straw ranch hat was pushed back from a scramble of untidy white hair. His moustache, thick and unkempt, shaded from white at the hairy nostrils down to a stain of yellow at the lips. He wore khakis, the shirt sweated through so many times the pale streaks of salt formed overlapping patterns at the armpits. In the frigid air of the office the sharp stale smell of him was still detectable.
He signed the last letter and the tall, frail girl picked them up from in front of him as he leaned back.
“Francie,” the old man said, “you go on over to the courthouse and get them two notorial certificates the fella over in Tulsa wants.”
“I could take the deeds along, Judge, and mail them from there.”
“You do that, Francie. And leave that door there open so as we’ll know it when Sam Boylston gets here.”
She nodded, and as she turned and walked out, she gave big Tom Dorra a sidelong, speculative glance. Tom Dorra stared at her hips and legs as she walked out. He dwarfed the oak armchair he was slouched into, a man big enough to be stared at in the street, five inches over six feet, broad as a man and a half. He added almost another foot with the heels of his western boots, and with the very high crown on the custom Stetson. He was half Judge Billy Alwerd’s age. Their skin was almost the same shade of brown, but whereas the Judge’s looked desert dry, Tom Dorra’s hide looked oiled. His tailored khakis were pressed and fresh. His belt buckle was a half pound of ornate Mexican silver.
After the outer door closed behind Francie, Tom Dorra said lazily, “Your Francie, she give me the look about one more time, Billy, even though she got no more ass on her than Fred Astaire, I’m going to purely run her over to the Orange Tree Motel and give her my message.”
The Judge yawned. “Don’t you mess with her, Tom D. I need for her to keep her mind on her work, not wobbling around all sprung and breathing hard. After Milly died, I run through four of them before I found Francie. She’s no Milly, God knows, but she keeps track. Get back to what you were starting to say when she came in.”
“Oh. Here’s the way I see it, why Boylston wants to see us both together. It figures that Bix Kayd cut him into it too, didn’t tell us he was in, but told Boylston we were. So what’s happened has got him a little jumpy too, and he wants to know what we plan on doing.”
Judge Billy shook his head slowly, contemptuously. “That kind of thinking is the best reason in the wide world you better keep checking everything out with me, Tom. First off, young Sam hasn’t got the yen for anything too tricky, and that’s why he give up doing any law chores for Bix, knowing that if he didn’t know the whole story and anything went a little sour, he could spend a lot of time in tax court, explaining. Second, that means that Bix wouldn’t be about to beg Boylston to come in on anything, because the way Bix likes it is having folks lined up and itching to let him he’p them get rich. Third off, that young Boylston is handling himself smart enough he doesn’t rightly need to come in on a little piece of a big one when he can do just as good taking a big piece of a little one and running the show himself.”
“But you said he said on the phone it was about Bix.”
“So he smelled something out, figured you and me had something riding this time, and wants to know what the hell goes on because his little sister is on that cruise, boy, or maybe you forgot.”
“Do you think we ought to tell him anything?”
The Judge chewed at the corner of his moustache. “I think I’m going to wait and see just how he comes at us, and then I’m going to make up our minds for us, Tom D. One thing to bear in mind is that young Sam don’t have a lot of real weight yet, but come a few years from now the way he’s going, you and me could find ourselves needing a favor.”
Tom Dorra looked bleak. “I sure God hope old Bix didn’t get careless about anything. It would give me a case of the shorts for some spell. And you tell me, Billy, just why in the world old Bix had to turn it into some kind of damn game, making it look like a big old family cruise, when by God, he could have fly over and got it all settled in three, four, five days at the most.”
The Judge took a half-eaten cigar from the top drawer of his desk, bit an inch off it, put it back, chewed slowly. “Now you know how Bixby Kayd is. He doesn’t like for anything to look like what it is. He wants the whole world wondering and guessing what’s up his sleeve. Besides, taking his own boat makes the transportation problem easier in one sense. Then, too, the delay would like to make that pack of limeys a little edgier and readier to deal. And being there like that would give him a chance to do some thinking on just how the whole thing should be operated once he’s got hold of it. Bix likes to put on a show, but dog knows he’s no fool.”
He stared at Tom. “Am I keeping you awake?”
“Huh? Oh, I heard what you were saying. I was just thinking back on the onliest time I ever did see that little sister, that Leila Boylston. About four years back, which would make her about fifteen then. Wally and me had flew up to Ritchie’s spread to look over some blooded stock, and that Leila was up there visiting the youngest Ritchie girl. The little Leila, she came riding along with us when we went looking for that stock. She set that roan real nice and pretty, and goddam, Judge, she was dressed like for a street parade in white britches so tight she could have set on a dime and told which president it was. Now a gallop was right interesting, and a canter was something to see, but when that roan moved at a slow walk, that little round can on her, it tippy-tilted back and forth so sweet and fine. I could have fell off my horse like the sun stroke and lay there howling and a-tearing up the sod. That roan liked to stay out in front, and I tell you that Leila was prime. There don’t one like that come along every year. I swear, we stayed there one more day, I’d have slung her under my arm and took off up into Ritchie’s high timber and never been seen since.”