Cinnamon Skin (11 page)

At what? Home and fireside? A riding mower for Christmas? A golden retriever who'd ride with his head out the car window, panting?

As the old spinach eater said, "I yam what I yam."

He found nine Rodefers, but none of them were Coy Lee or C. L. or even C. So Meyer wanted to go right down the list. "We're right near the city. Why not? Why does it have to be lanterns first when we can eliminate this one right away? Or maybe find out it is the right one."

There was no answer at the first Rodefer. As he started to call the next one, I realized I should be doing it. To his obvious relief I took the phone and placed the second call.

"Hello?" A female voice, hesitant, neither young nor old.

"This Miz Rodefer?"

"Well… the way you say it, it isn't Rod, it's like Road."

"Ro-defer. Sure, I knew that. It's just, I guess, ma'am, I haven't rightly said it in so long, I said it wrong. Mebbe you can ha'ep me, ma'am. Long long time back I went to school up to Austin with Coy Lee Rodefer, and I'm over here in a motel next to Robstown, and I was looking in the book to see if old Coy Lee was in the book and he isn't. But there is a bunch of Rodefers and I thought, Well, why not take a chance and see if he's related to them, and so they'd know where he is today. Him and me were on the same runnin' team together."

"Coy Lee, he's my husband's first cousin! What did you say your name is?"

"Travis McGee, ma'am. Just passin' through the area."

"Well, if you were up there in the college with him, then you'd know why he had to drop out."

"I just purely don't know, Miz Rodefer. You see I had to drop out too on account of bad sickness in the family, and I had to go home to take care. I've always promised myself I'd go back someday and finish up, but I somehow just never did."

"What happened was he got so tired and run down and wore out, they thought up there he had that… what do they call it? That kissing sickness. I can't think of the name."

"It doesn't come to me either right at the moment."

"Anyway, after they gave him a lot of blood tests it turned out he had the leukemia."

"That's too bad! He was such a strong fella."

"He came on back here and moved into his old room with his folks. He was in and out of the hospital I can't remember how many times. He'd go into revision… that doesn't sound right."

"Is it remission, ma'am?"

"That's it! Anyway, it was pure hell on his mama, and I think it was what really turned his daddy to drink. His daddy was my Ben's father's brother. He didn't last a year after Coy Lee died."

"Oh, he, died!"

"They both did, Coy Lee and his daddy, not quite a year to the day. His daddy died drunk, rolling the pickup over hisself at three o'clock in the morning. With Coy Lee it was pitiful. He went down to no more than ninety pounds, and he died in the hospital with his mama holding his hand and telling him everything was going to be real fine. I'd just started going with Ben, and he was broke up about it more than I realized he would be. It's sure some terrible sickness, but I hear they can do a lot more for people that get it than they used to be able to do. The thing that was so pitiful was it was the only child they had. His mama she married a man with seven grown children about two years after Coy Lee's daddy killed hisself. What I'll do, I'll tell her a fellow that was a friend of Coy Lee's up in Austin, he called to locate Coy Lee, and I had to tell you what happened to him."

"You tell his mama he was a good boy. He was a good friend, and I'm sure sorry to hear what happened. You tell her that everybody that knew him up there in Austin, they liked him just fine."

"She'll be glad to hear that, and I'll be telling her tomorrow."

"Thanks for helping me out."

"Sorry it had to be such bad news. But that's how it goes."

"It surely does. Good evenin'."

Meyer had been sitting close on the side of my bed to hear both sides of the conversation. He moved away, shaking his head, as I hung up.

No matter how many times you do it, how many times you pretend to be someone you aren't, and you get the goodhearted cooperation of some trusting person, you feel a little bit soiled. There is no smart-ass pleasure to be gained from misleading the innocent. In the country places of the Sun Belt, friendship has a lot of meaning. And when you want to know something, you find out the quickest way you can, even to trading on something that never existed.

We looked into the motel restaurant and decided to try almost anything else we could find. We drove over into the city and found a steak house where they guaranteed they would not, under any circumstances, fry the steak. Over coffee Meyer finally said, "That was depressing, talking to that woman."

"You didn't know old Coy Lee good as I did."

"No jokes, hmm?"

"No good jokes, at least."

"I was wondering what we would do. Suppose we found him in Corpus Christi? What if he was Evan Lawrence and Jerry Tobin and Coy Lee Rodefer? And we appear in front of him in these indigenous clothes, these big hats and twill pants and funny shirts. What then?"

"We try not to appear in front of him at any time."

"Just locate him?"

"And bring him to justice. Like they used to say in the series there with Marshal Dillon. Gunsmoke."

"Isn't that going to be exceedingly difficult, Travis?"

"If we never get any more evidence than we have now, which is next door to nothing at all, exceedingly is a mild word."

"So what then?"

"Meyer, for God's sake, we can't lay it all out in advance. We'll play it by ear. Maybe he has been messed up in other things. We might stumble across something that can be proved against him. He seems to like killing women. For money. Maybe he was clumsier some time we don't yet know about. Martin Eagle would like to know where he is, if and when we find him. I just have the feeling that the farther down the back trail we go, the more we'll learn. I am not going to sneak up on the ridge and dry-gulch him. As far as we know right now, he isn't wanted by anybody for anything. Maybe he didn't kill four people. Maybe somebody set the charge to kill him, thinking he'd be on your boat that day. Maybe he was on the boat. You're supposed to be the logical one, not me."

He managed a smile. "I'm not doing very well, am I? I can't seem to think about it. I want him shot. I want him dead."

Early the next day we were well down into the Valley of the Rio Grande. We went on into Harlingen, which had every fast-food chain either of us had ever heard of, and a lot we hadn't. We found a place to stop and look at the map. The likely counties were Willacy Hidalgo, Starr, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Brooks, and Kenedy. Lots of grove land down in the valley, more big vegetable farms and ranchlands as you went north.

If this was the area where Evan Lawrence a.k.a. Jerry Tobin peddled his thirty tons of Japanese stone lanterns, they were going to be right out in the weather in plain sight, if you could get close enough to the house. And that was a problem. Out in the ranch and farm country, the houses and barns and sheds were a couple of hundred yards down narrow private lanes.

We needed some kind of a cover story to avoid being shot for trespass. If we got the necessary gear to look like surveyers, we would probably be shot for surveying. Meyer finally came up with something suitable. It involved finding a specimen net for capturing insects and rigging up a specimen box.

We drove up to Raymondville and turned left on State Road 186. By the time we hit the third farm; he had the routine under control.

"Madam, we are working on a project for Texas A and I up in Kingsville. There has been an infestation of Brown Recluse spiders, or fiddlebacks as they are sometimes called. We'd like your permission to check around the foundations of your house and around your outbuildings. We don't have to go inside any building, and we will not damage any plantings. It is a small drab=looking spider with an oblong body. The bite can cause fever, nausea, cramps, and ulceration at the location of the bite. If we pick any up here, we will let you know."

The old blue van looked plausible, and soon we were sweaty enough to look plausible. There were no refusals. The people were not exactly bursting with friendship and goodwill, but Meyer's fussy professional manner seemed to allay most of their suspicion.

We wandered the little roads, country roads, 1017 and 681, and went through towns named Puerto Rico, San Isidro, Agua Nueva, Viboras, Robberson, Guerra. I lost track of the number of stops we made. No stone lanterns. We had a bad sandwich and orange pop in a place named Premont, and an hour later we came upon the first stone lantern. It stood in the front yard of a small white farmhouse just north of a town named Rios, on County Road 1329.

A little round woman with a lot of gold in her smile gave us permission. By prearrangement, Meyer went about his net work, and I said, "Couldn't help noticing your stone lantern there. I had a friend who use to sell those. Maybe you bought it from him."

"Oh, no! We are being here only seis year. Eet wass here."

"Have other people got them too?"

"Very pretty."

"Yes, they are. Anybody else have one that you know?"

She beamed and waved a chubby arm that included the whole world north and west of Rios. "Minny minny peoples haff," she said.

We headed north and turned west at the first intersection. We were in stone lantern country. At the third lantern stop, we encountered a man who had bought one.

"Hell, it must have been fifteen, seventeen years back, she got me to buy that sucker. Young fellow selling them from an old pickup. Real nice young fellow to talk to. The big ones were forty-two dollars cash money, and the little ones were thirty-five. She had to have the big one, naturally. She loved that fool thing. She'd run out on warm nights and put a candle in it, then stand inside and look at it through the screen. It made her happy to see it out there. I used to kid her, saying you could buy a lot of oil lamps and light bulbs for that forty-two dollars."

He was a stringy man in his fifties, baked dry, straw hat tilted forward, his eyes the same washedout blue as his work shirt. His big hands were permanently curled by hard labor, and the veins in his leathery forearms were fat and blue.

"Do you think she'd remember the salesman's name?"

"Allie died six years ago, friend. On a rainy June day just one day after her forty-fourth birthday. I took her a present but she didn't know me. She didn't know anything at all by then. She was never real well. She didn't have a good heart or good kidneys or good lungs, and they all seemed to go bad at the same time. Don't know why I go on like this. Man doesn't see people all day, he tends to talk their ear off."

"Did you happen to see the salesman?"

"Not up close. Saw him standing there when she came to me to get the money. I thought you fellows were after some kind of spider, but you sound like you're after that lantern salesman."

I laughed in a jolly hollow manner and said, "Two birds with one stone." At that point Meyer came trotting up to us, holding a twist of the netting with great care.

"This is a fiddleback," he said nervously.

"It sure is," I said, and we transferred it to our improvised specimen box. It seemed slow and lethargic. Meyer took out his notebook and wrote down the time and place.

"Could you describe the lantern salesman?" I asked the man.

"Hell, he looked like any other young Anglo around here. But he sure could talk Mexican. I heard him and Allie jabbering away like crazy. I met Allie when I was working down in Vera Cruz a long time back. Prettiest thing I ever saw in my life. I never could get my mouth around that Mexican talk. God knows I tried. She was a real smart woman. Trouble was, I had things to say to her that I never really could say, because she just never did get to have that much American."

"Where did he work out from?"

"I can tell you that. The one she wanted, it had a kind of a gouge in the top of it, into the stone. So he went right away and got a new top. Very obliging of him. He said it was a little less than a fifty-mile round trip. He had his stock at a place north of Freer, off State Road Sixteen."

Meyer said, "You have a remarkable memory, sir." The man smiled and shook his head. "Not really. Out here there aren't so many stopping by you can't remember them all. And Allie did talk to him a long time. I guess it made me kind of curious-to look him over good."

We told him how much we appreciated his help. He seemed a little disconsolate at having us go. It meant company was leaving. The land around his buildings looked reasonably tidy, but the quick glance I had at the interior showed a fat brown dog stretched out on a welter of newspapers, and a young turkey pecking at something on the floor beyond it.

A couple of miles down the road, I stopped and Meyer dumped out the Brown Recluse. When he got back in, I asked him if he'd stomped it. He said that he had thought of it but decided that the spider had its rights, and had played its part in a charade reasonably well and at the right time, and anyway it was part of the scheme of things, just like the snail darter, the snow goose, and the ACLU. I reminded him that they were poisonous, and he said that you usually have to provoke something in nature to get it to bite. You have to threaten it or make it think it is threatened. Western sheep ranchers are poisonous, he said, because they believe they are threatened by coyotes, when all scientific data from reliable sources indicate otherwise. Wolves never chased the Russian sleighs, he said. A tarantula bite is less bothersome than a bee sting, he said. The more precarious the existence of all living creatures on the planet becomes, he said, the more valuable is each individual morsel of life. I told him he seemed to be getting one hell of a long way from stomping or not stomping a little brown insect, and he told me that the spider is not an insect at all but an eight-legged predacious arachnid of the order Araneae. I asked him if his veneration for life extended all the way from brown spiders to Evan Lawrence; he too was part of the scheme of things. Meyer told me that I had a tendency to put discussions on an emotional basis, thus depriving them of all intellectual interest. I told him I was sure lucky to have him along to straighten me out on all these things.