Ride the Pink Horse (11 page)

The blonde brought a big smile with the salad for Sailor. He could date her up tonight if he were looking for a blonde.

“Positive identification there. Even if he hadn’t skipped to clinch it. ‘Gone on a vacation,’” he quoted.

“Maybe he did.” The salad dressing was right. Sailor knew about dressings because he’d eaten with the Sen in good restaurants. On the Boulevard. In the swank hotels. The Sen and Ziggy were particular about salad dressings.

“He didn’t leave a forwarding address. He entertained Mr. Yost a couple of weeks ago, showed him the town. When Yost saw Jerky’s picture in an old true-detective magazine at the barber shop, he took a trip to Chicago just to tell Humperdink the kind of guy that had been in his car that night. Yost didn’t know Jerky was dead. He’d liked Humpty, thought he was a nice homey sort of fellow. Wanted to warn him before Jerky did him in, or out, of his store teeth.”

“Funny the way things happen.” Maybe Ziggy’d been wrong letting the yokel go. Maybe it was better this way. If Yost had disappeared in the city, that country sheriff might have caused trouble and none of them would have got away. As it was nobody was in a jam. Only the Sen. McIntyre was watching the Sen, feeding scrambled eggs mechanically into his mouth while he watched the Sen.

“It is funny. It’s what makes police business interesting.” McIntyre buttered bread. “You never know what will turn up next.” He didn’t take his eyes off the Sen. “Humperdink told Yost he’d found out who Jerky was the next day. In the newspapers. His story was he’d picked up Jerky hitchhiking.”

“Maybe he did,” Sailor said.

“Maybe he did,” McIntyre agreed. “Maybe Humpty is on a vacation.” He wiped his mouth with the big orange square of napkin. “But Jerky didn’t kill Mrs. Douglass.”

“I guess you’re right there,” Sailor nodded.

“Somebody did.”

That’s what McIntyre intended to find out. Who did. That’s why he was here. He must have something more than hunch to be here wearing a red sash and a toy Spanish hat Something more than a fifty-thousand-dollar insurance policy.

“I’d like to meet Senator Douglass,” McIntyre said.

“You mean you haven’t met him?” Sailor wasn’t pretending surprise.

“Not for a long time.” McIntyre smiled, a true smile. “They don’t send us department roughnecks to interview someone like the senator. The commissioner handled him when Mrs. Douglass died.”

The flowered skirts brought a painted menu. “Dessert, sir?”

He wanted dessert but he wanted more to get away. Before McIntyre asked the wrong questions, the right ones. He waited for the cop to answer. McIntyre deliberated. The Sen’s party was still at their table and Mac said, “I’ll have some peach pie and more coffee.”

“Make mine a chocolate sundae.” He might as well eat. He couldn’t tell Mac he had important business to be about Mac knew he didn’t have a thing to do but walk the streets.

The Sen said something to Iris Towers and she slanted her eyes up at him and the smile on her mouth was the way you wanted a woman to smile at you. The way you didn’t want a woman to smile at a murderer; not a young, beautiful, untouched woman.

Sailor said harshly, “I’ll introduce you.”

“I thought you might.” McIntyre was matter of fact.

“I’m meeting him here, in the Placita here, at quarter after five. You turn up and I’ll introduce you.” Fifteen minutes was all he needed alone with the Sen. If the Sen didn’t come through it wouldn’t be bad to have McIntyre show up.

“I’ll be here,” McIntyre said.

The blonde brought the desserts, wrote out the check and put it in the center of the table. Sailor took it up.

McIntyre said, “Better let me have it. I’ve an expense account.”

“Not today.” He could afford to buy Mac a lunch. Mac was helping him to get on easy street. Someday when he had a hotel of his own like this down in Mexico, he’d invite Mac down. Everything on the house. Mac wasn’t a bad guy. He wondered if Humpty and Lew were in Mexico. He didn’t want to go on with the old set-up. He wanted to be strictly on his own. No cuts. Though Lew was about the best trigger man in the business.

McIntyre said, “Got a room for tonight?”

He didn’t want that question. Mac mustn’t get a hunch that Sailor was leaving tonight. He said, “Yeah, I’m okay for tonight”

McIntyre finished his pie. He said, “Funny the senator didn’t have a room for his secretary last night. It’s almost as if he wasn’t expecting you.”

Sailor put a fiver on the check. Then he had to wait for change. Wait and try to think up answers for McIntyre. The cop was closing in. If he said the Sen wasn’t expecting him it was like telling Mac he’d come running to bring the Sen the news about Jerky. If he said the Sen was expecting him, there would have been a reservation for him unless he and the Sen were split. That would mean the Sen expected him to bring trouble.

He laughed it off, repeated the old gag. “I didn’t come on business. I came for Fiesta.” He lit a cigarette, drew on it passed the pack to McIntyre who shook his head. “I didn’t know you had to make reservations in a one-horse town. I wasn’t as smart as you.”

The Sen and his party were still at the big table when he and McIntyre went out. They passed so close behind him you could see the hairs on the back of the Sen’s neck prickle. The Sen was scared. He should be.

They left the Placita, walked through the empty bar into the lobby. Sailor said, “See you at five-fifteen, Mac.” He didn’t want to carry the cop with him all afternoon doing nothing. He left McIntyre standing there and walked out of the hotel like he had some place important to be in five minutes. When he got outside he slowed down. It wasn’t two o’clock. He had more than three hours to kill. And nowhere to go.

The sun was baking hot on the little street. He walked slowly across to the Plaza. Into Fiesta.

The street that fenced in the square was littered with papers and the remains of food and horse dung and children dragging bright costume skirts. There were kids riding burros and other kids tagging after for their turn. There were two ragged boys in jeans selling rides on a big roan horse. Enough kids waiting on the curb to keep the horse busy till day after tomorrow. The merry-go-round was whirling full speed, the tinkling music lost in the clattering mass of kids pressing against the palings, shouting to be next. Over the heads of the crowd he could see Pancho’s muscles bulging, his back aching, sweat bathing him as he endlessly turned the windlass. The counters of the little thatched booths were all jammed. On the bandstand a Mexican band blared through big metal loudspeakers. It wasn’t all kids jamming the square, old and young, babies squalling in arms, white beards spitting tobacco on the walks; old women, middling women, younger women gabbing Spanish at each other; gangling youths and painted girls eyeing each other, exchanging provocative insults, working up to night and the lawn of the Federal Building.

There wasn’t a place to sit down. Every inch of curb, the concrete wall around the small memorial shaft, even the corner steps that led into the square were packed tight with people. You had to step over them to get back into the street. Sailor stepped over a woman with a baby sucking at her breast, to get out of the stifling square into the street again. To escape the trap of Fiesta. He escaped and he looked back at the box.

At Fiesta. At the crowded little park, hung with faded banners and grotesque masks and colored electric-light bulbs strung on wires. Smelling of chile and pop and dung and cheap perfume and sweat and diapers; chaotic with music and laughter and screams and insults and jabber and crying kids. For this Zozobra had burned. So these people could believe that this tawdry make-believe was good. He slanted through the jostling, careless street strollers and reached the opposite curb, stepped over more people to stand under the portal of the museum. This too was crowded, too crowded to fight through. The costumed and the city visitors, uncostumed—he’d been here long enough to spot the stranger—were blocking sidewalk traffic, bending over the Indian wares spread on the walk.

The Indians alone were not a part of the maelstrom. They sat against the wall, their bright calicos billowing about them, their black eyes inscrutable, ironic. They sat in silence, not speaking unless spoken to, not offering their goods, selling if asked, their brown hands exchanging goods for money with amusement if not scorn. Because they knew this to be make-believe; because in time these strange people did not exist. Pila was once a child sitting here with almond black eyes, inscrutable as her elders and as aloof. Sailor couldn’t push through the crowd, he managed to twist back to the curb, to step over the heads of the curb squatters into the street.

He couldn’t spend three hours fighting this Fiesta saturated mob. He couldn’t spend three hours on his feet. The sun and heat and the lunch he’d put away combined to hit him with the full weight of his weariness. He wanted only to lie down and sleep.

He knew it was hopeless but it was something to do. There was always a chance. He made the rounds again of the hotels. It was to no avail as he’d known it would be. There were no rooms. There wasn’t even a vacant chair in a lobby or on the Cabeza de Vaca porch. The only thing the round trip availed him was, for a brief spell, to get him out of the stench of Fiesta. But he returned to it. With a hopeless kind of fatality, because there was no place else to go, because all directions led to the Plaza.

The streets were whirling louder, faster; on the bandstand a fat black-haired singer blasted the microphones and the crowds screamed, “Hola! Hola!” as if it were good. A running child with remnants of pink ice cream glued on his dirty face bumped into Sailor’s legs, wiped his sticky hands there. Sailor snarled, “Get out of my way.” A balloon popped behind him and the kid who held the denuded stick squalled.

He had to get out of this. His feet burned and his eyes ached and his nose stunk. If he could reach Pancho, the brigand would know somewhere he could rest. He’d know a cool quiet bar that opened its back door on Sunday. A bar with cold beads on the beer bottles and without any Spanish music. He rammed through the revelers until he was on the outskirts of the solid phalanx surrounding Tio Vivo. Twice as many as before. He was stopped there. Kids were unyielding in mass. Or too fluid. If he advanced past one child, six more cut in front of him, jabbing elbows and knees in him, wiping the dirt of their hands and feet on his neat dark suit The kids were like ants. They multiplied as he stood there. They were terrifying; he knew if he should be knocked over in their rush, they would swarm over him, devour him without knowing or caring what they did. Pancho was as far away from him here as if he were marooned on the Wrigley Tower.

He turned away, more frightened than angry. If he didn’t find a place to rest, he wouldn’t be fit to face the Sen at five. And without warning his eyes came against the eyes of Pila. He had the same shock he’d had last night when he first looked upon her. The same remembrance of terror, of a head of stone which reduced him to non-existence. His first quick reaction was to turn away, not to recognize her. But he could not. She was there. She existed. He was the one without existence, the dream figure wandering in this dreadful nightmare.

She was there, in the same bedraggled flowered skirt, the same blouse in which the embroidery had run in savage purple and red streaks. Her black hair hung straight down her back and the red flower was falling to her temple. She stood motionless. She didn’t speak to him. But her eyes, black and empty and wise, were on his face as the blind stone eyes once had been.

He said roughly, “Hello.”

She said, “Hello.” Her mouth had been painted like the mouths of Rosita and Irene but she’s smeared it somehow, pop or hot dog or chile, not man; it stained her face as the embroidery stained her blouse.

He said, “Want another ride on the merry-go-round?”

“No,” she said. She didn’t offer any explanation but the flicker of her glance at the churning, pushing children was Indian. It was the look in the eyes of the fat calico women sitting silently against the museum wall, aloof, disdainful of the vulgarians who pushed by.

Pila didn’t say any more and he started past her, wanting to get away, away from the nightmare and the recurring figure in the dream of this girl woman, of stone made flesh. And then he laughed, laughed harshly at himself for letting a hick carnival get him down. Him, a Chicago mug, getting nerves because a dumb Indian girl didn’t know how to talk slick. She wasn’t a spook, she was a gift from Heaven.

He went over to her and he grabbed her arm. “You’ve got a room, haven’t you?” he demanded. She looked up at him blankly. “You’ve got a place to sleep, haven’t you? A bed?”

She said, “Yes.”

He tightened his hold on her arm. “We’re going there now,” he told her. He began walking her through the crowd, not caring who he bumped or shoved. “How far is it?”

She said, “About a mile.”

“We’ll take a cab.” He pushed her out of the Plaza and Fiesta, towards the frame shack where the pink neon sign had flashed taxi last night.

They were in luck. An old black sedan, dented, scaling, loose-jointed, was pulling up in front. Sailor knew it was a taxi because the word was stenciled on the door. “Come on,” he said.

She wasn’t pulling back but he could feel the reluctance pressing through her arm. He repeated, “Come on,” and she spoke then. “I cannot take you to this house.”

It was he who was stopped cold. Before they reached the cab. He didn’t know how much he’d counted on that hour in bed until her refusal sharpened his want. “You can’t, can’t you?” His demand was ugly. “Why not?”

She stood unmoving where he had released her. Like a sack of flour; like something hewed from stone. She wasn’t moved by his anger, neither troubled nor embarrassed nor curious. She repeated without any inflection, “I cannot take you to this house.”

“Why not?” he demanded again. “What’s the matter with ‘thees house’? Don’t you think I’m good enough—” He began to laugh then. He thought what she’d probably been thinking since he’d grabbed her in the Plaza.

He laughed, “For God’s sake, Pila. I don’t want you. I just want a place to sleep for a little while.” She was as safe with him as she’d be behind the convent wall. He didn’t knock up fourteen-year-old kids. He didn’t want her; he wanted her bed.