After a long time he sighed. Then he groaned. I knew he could see my cigarette end, glowing in the darkness.
“Whassa marra?” he asked. “Whassa idea?”
I didn’t answer him. He was silent for a long time. He said, “What do you want?” Panic crouched behind the level tone.
I watched him and let him sweat. To him, I was just a dark shadow sitting on the front fender of the car.
“What are you going to do to me?” he asked. His voice shook.
A farm dog howled at the moon far away. A sleepy rooster crowed in a half-hearted way. Down the line a diesel hooted at a crossing.
“It was all Joe’s idea,” he said. “I’m not in on it. He met her in the hotel. She got tight out at the place. She hinted about Torran. Just little hints. So Joe pried it all out of her. She told him how she was waiting for word from Torran when he got ready to make his run for it. She didn’t know where or when Torran was going to run. She had five thousand he’d given her in Chicago right after the job, when they split up. She was to buy a car and get it registered under her own name.” He stopped talking and waited for me to say something.
He started again, his voice pitched higher than before. “Joe started thinking about all that cash. All that money, and he worked the girl up to where she was thinking of crossing Torran, because Torran had been pretty rough with her. The more he thought about getting his hands on that dough, the better he liked the idea. He talked it over with me. The idea was to get Torran to run with the girl to right where Joe wanted him to run. It had to be done delicate because if Torran felt maybe the girl was steering him some special place, he’d smell a cross.”
Again he waited and again I said nothing.
“What are you going to do to me? I’m telling you everything I know.” It was half wail and half whine. “Joe fixed her up with the car and figured that because of the dough in serial sequence and the bearer bonds, Torran would want to get out of the country to where maybe he could buy a banana citizenship and get a better percentage than trying to fence the stuff here where it’s too hot to touch. And if Joe got the dough here he’d be in the same trouble. Mexico has an easy border to cross, even with them looking for you. So Joe figured help him get into Mexico through the girl, and take it away from him down there.
“Joe goes to Mexico a lot because if you spend too much here, the tax boys get curious. He’s got a house down there he rents by the year. In Cuernavaca. As soon as the girl got the word from Torran she told Joe and he flew down to set it up. If Torran goes to Canada or flies out of the country some other place, Joe is licked. The girl was supposed to get away from Torran for a couple minutes and wire me so I could phone Joe. The wire hasn’t come yet.”
I flipped a cigarette away, stood up, walked over to him. I said casually, “If I kill you, Brankis, you can’t phone Joe and tell him about this, can you?”
“Now wait a minute!” he said in a voice like a woman’s.
“Or maybe I’ll tip Joe Talley that you opened up like a book.”
“A deal, mister,” he said breathlessly. “I keep my mouth shut and so do you. Honest.”
“And I get word on that wire the minute you get it.”
“Yeah. Sure!”
I untied him and slapped him around and took him back and left him. I went right to Western Union. A bored night man looked at my credentials without interest, sneered at a twenty-dollar bribe and told me the only ones to see telegrams were the persons to whom said telegrams were addressed. There was no time to arrange a tap on the Talley Ho phone. I added two more twenties. He ignored me. I added two more. One hundred dollars.
He yawned and picked up the money. “It was marked deliver,” he said, “and I sent it out twenty minutes before you came in. It was from National City, California, and it read: Plan to take cruise to Acapulco starting tomorrow. It was signed Betty.”
He pocketed my money and shuffled back and sat down and picked up a magazine.
Thirty-one hours later I was sitting by a window on the port side of the Mexico City–Acapulco plane as it lifted off the runway at seven in the morning. There was a wad of traveler’s checks in my pocket and a bad taste in my mouth. I had wasted too much time getting the turista permit, making travel connections.
We climbed through the sunlit air of the great plateau, lifted over the brow of the mountains near Tres Cumbres and started the long, downhill slant to Acapulco on the Pacific. It was hard to figure just how quickly Torran and the girl would get there. My phone calls to California had established that there was no scheduled cruise to Acapulco at the date the wire had indicated.
Probably Torran had made arrangements to have a boat pick him off the lower California coast and smuggle him down to Acapulco. The odds were against his tarrying in Mexico long. Extradition was too simple. The same method of travel would take him down the Central American coastline to some country where an official would listen joyfully to the loud sound of American dollars.
One thing I could be certain of. Joe Talley would be there. And I would know Joe Talley. I’d memorized a recent picture of him – a beefy blond with a rosebud mouth and slate eyes. I knew Torran’s face as well as I knew my own.
Traffic wasn’t heavy as it was the off season for Acapulco, the summer-rate season. The air was bumpy. A large family across the way was airsick, every one of them. We flew to Cuernavaca, over the gay roofs of Taxco. Brown slowly disappeared from the landscape below us and it began to turn to a deep jungle green.
At nine o’clock we lifted for the last low range of hills and came down to the coast. The Pacific was intensely blue, the surf line blazing white. The hotels were perched on the cliffs that encircled the harbor. The wide boulevard ran along the water’s edge.
There are hunches. All kinds. This was one of those. I looked at the city as we came in for the landing. I looked at it and I didn’t feel anything and then all of a sudden I felt confident and good. I felt that whatever was going to happen, it would happen right down there.
We made a bumpy landing and as soon as we were down I knew why Acapulco was not at the peak of its season. The heat was like when a barber wraps your face in a steaming towel. It was heat that bored a hole in you and let all the strength run out. It was heat that kept your eyes stinging from the sweat running into the corners.
I stood in the shadow of the wing as they untied the baggage and handed it down. I took my bag and walked across the runway, and it was so hot the soles of my feet began to burn. I took the sedan which had HOTEL DE LAS AMERICAS on the front of it, remembering that it had been recommended to me in Mexico City. No one else was going to that hotel. The airsick family piled into a shabbier sedan labeled HOTEL PAPAGAYO.
The hotel was something right out of the imagination of an assistant to a Hollywood producer. High on the cliff, with cabañas, shops, pools, outdoor cocktail lounges, outdoor dining room and dance floor. I registered, took a cabaña, took a shower and put on the Acapulco clothes I’d bought in Mexico City. Protective coloration. I wanted to look like an American tourist. The shirt had a pattern of tropical parrots. The shorts were lime yellow. The sandals had straps that hurt me across the instep. I topped it off with a white mesh cap with a ballplayer’s bill, oval slanting sunglasses.
I told my troubles to the desk clerk. “I’m trying to find a friend here in town. I don’t know what hotel he’s at. How would I go about it?”
“An American, sir?”
“Yes.”
He gave me a list of the six most likely hotels. The flaw was that Joe Talley might not be using his own name. But there was no real reason for him not to do so. His name would mean nothing to Torran. Torran was big time. Talley was a small town crook. And just before lunch I found him. He was at the Papagayo. It was one of those breaks you get. I was just getting out of the taxi in front of the place when I saw him coming across the road from the beach. He had a dark pretty girl with him. Both of them seemed a little unsteady on their feet. They passed right in front of the cab and went into the hotel grounds. Joe was speaking Spanish to the girl. She was giggling. I don’t know how good the Spanish was. It sounded good and she seemed to be enjoying it. The black hair on the girl wasn’t a dye job. Of that I was certain.