The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (12 page)

“We’ve got to pressure the police to solve this murder quickly,” he said. “The Mayor of San Andreas is at the coast at the moment, but his assistant agrees—the death of one American is a horrible blow to the image of Mexican tourism.”

Colin’s face was flushed a strawberry color, and his voice was shrill. “A member of our peaceful little community has been murdered,” he said. “We could be next!”

I bumped into him on purpose after the meeting. “Oh, the friend of Cassandra Reilly’s,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name. You and your friend have been staying at Eleanor’s. How very upsetting for you.”

“You knew her well, it sounds like,” I said.

“Oh everyone knew Eleanor,” he said. “She was a fixture. An absolute fixture. We discovered San Andreas years ago, both of us. We were the early ones. We had a chance to really mold it to become the place it is now. Without Eleanor, this arts center wouldn’t exist. I can’t believe, I just can’t believe she’s gone.”

“Then you know about her son and his wife,” I said. “What was that story again?”

“I always liked the girl myself,” said Colin. “It was her mother, her whole family, that was the problem. Greedy, always taking advantage of whatever kindness Eleanor showed them. The girl herself…”

“Isabella?”

“Yes. She was so young. It was her mother who had ambitions, who made sure to leave the two young people together so that the inevitable happened.”

“Isabella’s mother is local then?”

“Why yes. You must have met her. Rosario, the woman who cleans—cleaned—for Eleanor.”

I remembered Rosario’s stunned face but deep-down lack of feeling about Eleanor’s death, how her dark eyes had looked past us to something on a table or a shelf, something terribly familiar, that was now missing. “Where are the figures?” she had asked. “Señora Harrington’s sculptures?”

“I put them away yesterday,” Lucy had admitted. “I didn’t…like to look at them.”

“Ah,” Rosario had said. “
Bueno
.”

When I got back to the house I found Lucy talking with the gardener. “This is Isabella’s brother, Juan,” she said. “He has a degree in English literature but hasn’t been able to find work.”

Juan wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt and an earring in one ear. “My sister is always trying to get me to come to the States to live. I don’t mind visiting, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I’d rather live in my own country. Not that San Andreas always feels like Mexico.”

“Did the whole family work for Eleanor?” I asked Lucy when Juan had left for the day. “And if Rosario and Juan were her relatives as well as her employees, why would Eleanor feel she needed people to housesit for her?”

“I don’t know whether it was a question of trust, or of trying to make a few extra dollars. Do you remember how quick she snatched up our check yesterday?”

“But she has tons of money! Doesn’t she? She must just employ them as a favor to her son.”

Her son. Something that had been nagging at me all day rose to the surface. “And where was he in the middle of the night anyway? Away on business. Does anyone know where?”

Isabella and her two young daughters arrived that night after dinner and came straight to the house. Lucy and I were ready to leave, but she insisted we stay.

“No, you must stay, please,” she said. “Allen would want it.”

“But at a time like this—we’d only be in the way.”

“At least until tomorrow,” she said urgently.

I wondered if she were afraid to stay in the house by herself.

Isabella was an attractive woman of about thirty, dressed for travel in a simple dress and sandals. Her black hair was fashionably cut and she had a warm but slightly imposing air. I couldn’t imagine her putting up with any shit from Eleanor.

After she got her two girls off to bed, she came back downstairs, now wearing jeans, her eyes taking in the room as she descended.

“It hasn’t changed,” she said. “In ten years, it hasn’t really changed. Still the beautiful home I admired in my silly way when I used to come here with my mother to help her clean it. Everything so tasteful, so beautiful. So artistic, I thought. The home of an artist.” She laughed shortly. “But what happened to her sculptures, all those Indian women in serapes with their baskets full of tortillas?”

“I put them away,” said Lucy.

Isabella sat down, but her tiredness didn’t cause her to slump. “I’m embarrassed to tell you that I really liked them, that summer I was twenty. I didn’t have much consciousness about anything. Allen was just about as innocent as I was. ‘Oh, my mother will adore you,’ he kept telling me.

“My own mother told me different, but I didn’t pay any attention to her. She was right, of course, not Allen. When Eleanor came back from her vacation and found out what had been going on for two months, she threw me out. She couldn’t believe that Allen followed. She never believed it. Even when she came for her annual visit to Houston, she tried not to see me or the kids if she could avoid it.”

“Where is Allen by the way?” I put in, as casually as I could.

Isabella’s eyes shifted slightly, but her tone seemed straightforward. “He was a little hard to track down. As a matter of fact, he’s right here in Mexico. In Cancun. He’s driving up to San Andreas tonight.” She took a long breath, which made me realize she’d been holding it. “The company he works for, a hotel chain, is always sending him on the road.”

“You realize, he’s the one who did it,” I told Lucy that night when we were alone. “He must have hated his mother for what she did to his wife.”

“It takes a lot more than hatred to kill someone,” said Lucy, from the twin bed next to me. “Sure he ‘disappointed’ her by marrying a Mexican, but why would he kill his mother over it ten years later? If he really did kill her, it was for some other reason. Money, for instance. How well-off was Eleanor really, and what about Allen himself? Is he in debt? Does he have a drug habit? Would inheriting Eleanor’s money help him?” Lucy held up the Agatha Christie she was reading. “I used to read lots of these in medical school. They probably gave me a distorted view of crime—that it was all about entailed estates and hidden relatives—but at bottom they said something true—people are more likely to kill for money than for passion.”

Allen Harrington had still not arrived by the time I woke up in the morning and headed out for my morning coffee. Lucy got up at the same time and went off to the local clinic. “I’ll just have them check me out,” she said. “And then, maybe, I’ll see if they need me to volunteer at all while we’re here.”

“You just can’t keep away from work,” I teased her, but I was still worried. What if there was something really wrong with her?

As luck would have it, I discovered Colin Michaels in the cafe I’d gone to yesterday. He was drinking a large Bloody Mary and eating eggs and bacon. No wonder every capillary on his face was broken.

“Hello, friend of Cassandra Reilly,” he greeted me. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

“Tell me about Eleanor’s son,” I said, sitting down next to him and ordering
café con leche
. “You said you’d known her since the early days here. You must have known her son when he was growing up.”

“Oh, he didn’t grow up here,” said Colin, a little too quickly. “I mean, he came in the summers. But otherwise, he went to a boarding school in the States. Eleanor didn’t want him to go to school in San Andreas. She wanted him to have a proper education.”

“If Eleanor was around fifty and her son is around thirty,” I said, thinking aloud, “She must have been fairly young when she had him.”

“I suppose so,” said Colin, bending over his food.

“What about Mr. Harrington?” I said suddenly. “Nobody says anything about a Mr. Harrington. I always assumed that Eleanor had gotten her money from her husband, that she was a wealthy widow.”

“Believe the money came from her family,” said Colin. “Parents set her up here, wanted her out of Houston, I suppose. But myself, I’ve always believed that the past is past. We all have our reasons to have settled in San Andreas. Now, myself…”

“Oh, I see,” I said slowly. “Yes, of course. There was no Mr. Harrington. Eleanor’s son Allen was born out of wedlock.”

“What’s past is past,” said Colin and ordered another drink. It was only nine in the morning.

You could be a drunk anywhere, but it must be more pleasant, and cheaper, in San Andreas.

Allen Harrington drove up at noon. Did I have a reason for assuming he’d be white? Only my own ethnocentrism. He was a compact, dark-skinned man, darker than his wife, with startling green eyes.

“What a nightmare,” he said, as he paced around the room. “What a way for my mother to die. Have they found out anything more about the man who killed her? I’m going down to the police station in a few minutes. I’ll make them take this seriously.”

Don’t overdo it, Allen, I thought.

Isabella tried to soothe him. “I’m sure the police are doing all they can.”

“But what kind of a country is this, that people can’t check into a motel room without being robbed and murdered?”

“The police seem to think she knew her attacker,” I said, and Lucy stared at me to hear such a bold-faced lie.

“They do?” Allen shouted at his wife. “You didn’t tell me this. Who killed my mother? Juan? Your worthless cousin Pedro?”

For answer, Isabella turned on her heel and marched out of the house.

“That was a harsh thing to say,” said Lucy.

Allen stared at us a moment and then, unable to defend himself, he burst into agitated tears.

When he calmed down, he said, “I loved my mother. I know she wasn’t a particularly good person. In some ways, I admit, she wrecked my life. But she was still my mother.”

“Who was your father, Allen?” I asked.

“I don’t know. My mother may not have known herself. She came down to Mexico when she was nineteen or twenty for a few weeks of partying, and ended up getting pregnant. By the time she realized it, she was too far along for an abortion. The Harringtons are a prominent family in Houston. The agreement was that if she stayed in Mexico, they’d set up a trust fund for her, and she agreed. It was a crazy mix of shame and pride that kept her here. She loved Mexico and she hated it. The only way she could stay here was to stay separate and to bond with the other white expatriates. She never felt quite accepted here though—that’s why she sent me away to school.”

Allen looked at his arm, which was the color of walnut. “She couldn’t ever really see me, see who I was. When I wanted to marry Isabella, she said, ‘You can’t marry a Mexican.’

“‘Mother,’ I said. ‘I
am
a Mexican.’

“‘No you’re not,’ she said. ‘You’re white. You don’t even speak Spanish. You have dual citizenship. You belong in America.’

“I didn’t speak much Spanish then. Meeting Isabella changed me. I learned Spanish and found a job that would let me travel in Mexico.”

“Isabella said you were in Cancun.”

He looked at me oddly, and almost aggressively, with those brilliant green eyes. “You need proof? You think
I
was somehow involved in this?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” broke in Lucy calmly. “Cassandra was just asking a question.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, calming down. “I apologize. And now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said. “I also need to apologize to my wife.”

Dr. Rodriguez, Antonia Rodriguez, the head doctor at the local clinic, had said Lucy seemed to be suffering from exhaustion and a slight case of anemia, nothing more. But she had sent a blood sample to Mexico City anyway. Meanwhile she didn’t exactly say no to Lucy helping her out a couple of hours every morning. The clinic was seriously underfunded, unlike the private clinic that the expatriates all went to.

“It makes me feel better to do something,” Lucy said. “Otherwise I’d go crazy here.”

But even working two hours was tiring to her, and when she came back to the small hotel where we’d moved after Allen arrived, she usually lay on the bed reading Agatha Christie.

I kept waiting for the police to announce that Allen Harrington had killed his mother. Who else would have known she was stopping at that motel? Who else would have persuaded Eleanor to open her door to him?

But days passed and no murder suspect was named.

The next issue of the local English paper came out with an angry editorial by Colin Michaels and with letters to the editor that bemoaned the days when San Andreas had been a safe little town. “I left Los Angeles because of the crime…and what do I find here?”

There was a small notice near the back of the paper that made me pause. It said that the bulk of Mrs. Harrington’s estate would go toward expanding the arts center. An auditorium for readings would be added, and a new library specializing in English books. Colin Michaels, president of the board of El Centro Artistico, expressed his pleasure and said that, in honor of Eleanor’s bequest, the new center would be named after Mrs. Harrington.

I decided to visit the little newspaper office and asked for the managing editor.

“I don’t know what their relationship was,” she admitted. “I’ve only been here a few years, and Colin and Eleanor went back thirty years. You might talk to one of the past editors. Dora James started the paper in the early seventies. She remembers everything.”

“Oh, they had quite the feud going once,” Dora James said. “Eleanor had the money, but Colin had the name. He was one of the biggest names to settle in San Andreas. Not that he was so incredibly successful anyplace but here. But that’s one reason people settle here, you know. In the States, Colin was just another mystery writer; here he was famous. They both wanted to control the arts center. This year Colin was president, but last year she was. It was essentially harmless, their bickering and wrangling. Though I must admit, I’d heard that the victim in Colin’s latest novel,
The Cassandra Caper
, was an unflattering portrait of Eleanor. He must feel terrible now. Especially since she left the arts center all that money.”

Well, at least I knew now that Eleanor really had been rich. But where did her giving most of her money to the arts center leave Allen?

Dora James shook her head. “Have you ever read any of Colin’s mysteries? They really don’t improve. I always end up feeling as if I’ve missed something crucial in understanding the plot. But it’s usually because Colin has forgotten it himself. What he needs, you know,” she smiled, “is a good editor.”