The Long escape Page 5

  Idaho had a boy-friend with her. He claimed her from me after the dying-turkey routine was finished. His name was Joe or Harry or Pete, and I never saw him again. But when I said good-bye to Idaho, and that I hoped to see her again before I left Chile, I really meant it. I liked her.

  Lee pushed his way through the crowd a few minutes after Idaho had gone. He w^iped the sweat off his face and said, "Let's get out of here."

  We said good night to the ambassador and shoved our way out. I was tucking Terry Ruano's card away in my wallet, next to the kid's picture in its cellophane frame, ■when Lee said, "Make any progress?"

  "I'm not sure. Maybe."

  "This isn't the States, boy. Handle her gently."

  "Who?"

  "Terry Ruano. The yum-yum you were talking to for half an hour. How did you manage to corner her like that?"

  "She cornered me."

  He wagged his head.

  "Boy, you must have something that I don't know about. What's your secret?"

  I said, "I wish I knew." I wasn't kidding, either.

  i HERE were still a lot of Ruiz's and Parkers for me to investigate in Santiago. 1 worked at it until four o'clock the next afternoon, not learning anything new, and then went calling.

  The Ruano house was a family mansion, as I had suspected from the Avenida O'Higgins address. It included eighty-four thousand dollars worth of architecture and landscaping on the west side of town. From the outside, it reminded me of some of those big old museums overlooking the bay from Pacific Heights in San Francisco, where my grandfather. Hardshell Colby, took my giandmother, a Tlascan Indian girl named SacLij, to crash society before she had learned to wear shoes. I kncAv how my grandmother had felt about it when I walked up a long curving driveway to the house, like a delivery boy, and whanged the knocker on the big front door.

  A maid swung the door open after a while. I asked for the Senorita Maria Teresa. The maid said Pass yourself in. I passed myself in.

  Somebody in the family had pesos, all right. Per-

  sonally I have never liked big, quiet, gloomy places with thick carpets, marble statues crouching in the corners, oil paintings on the walls, and uncomfortable chairs costing seven hundred and fifty dollars each, but it was pretty elegant. The maid left me in a big sala sucking my thumb for a while with the statues, and then came back to lead me off through another wing of the museum to where an archway and three steps led down to a pretty little patio, full of lawn and flower beds, with a couple of love birds in a cage hanging from a tree.

  Maria Teresa was there. So were some tea-cups, a plateful of those little turnovers called empanadas, and big brother Fito. Fito stood up to shake hands when I came out in the patio.

  Maria Teresa said, "It was good of you to come."

  "It was good of you to ask me."

  "Sit down, please. We were having tea. Would you like something stronger?"

  I said tea would be fine. She poured a cup for me and gave me an empanada.

  She was wearing one of those plain black dresses that have no decorations on them, no fancy stitching, and all the style in the world. With the dress she wore an old-fashioned gold bracelet and a pair of matching earrings. I could see that her ears had been pierced for the earrings, because she had her hair fixed up on top

  of her head. The sun shining on it made it look like a twist of the mclaza candy they sell in Chapultepcc Park, gleaming yellow streaks in lighter gleaming brown, gold and bronze run together. With the plain black dress to set off her hair and her eyes—they were honey-colored, not brown, as I had thought—she was a knockout.

  We talked about the weather, switching back and forth between English and Spanish, They both spoke English freely, although with the school-book accent I had noticed before. Fito said I spoke good Spanish for a North American. I told him about being born in Mexico and spending most of my life there.

  He said, "But you are estadounidense}"

  "Yes. My father saw to that."

  "He was estadounidenseT'

  "Yes."

  "I should like to go to the United States some day," Maria Teresa said wistfully. "My father does not want me to go. He thinks the States are uncivilized."

  She was a honey, all right. She made me want to run out and buy her a ticket, and the hell with her father. I swallowed another mouthful of tea.

  The love birds grumbled in their cage. Fito said, "You travel a lot?"

  "Some. On business."

  "What is your business?"

  "At present I am searching for a man named Robert Ruiz Parker."

  I was watching Fito's knuckles. They tightened.

  "Why do you search for him?"

  "A business matter."

  "What kind of business?"

  Instead of answering^ him, I reached for another empanada and told Maria Teresa how good they were. She thanked me, without looking at me. I said I certainly enjoyed chileno cooking; empanadas, cazuela de ave, porotos granados, turron, the rest of it. Yes, indeedy.

  All this was to make Fito come to me wide open. I was twitching all over, waiting for him to ask his question again. For a minute I thought I had scared him off, because both he and Maria Teresa looked uncomfortably at their shoes while the love birds cursed each other. I cursed myself. Then Fito tried again.

  "What kind of business do you have with Roberto Ruiz Parker?"

  "I would have to know your own interest before I could tell you that."

  They looked sideways at each other. Maria Teresa nodded.

  Fito said awkwardly, "My uncle used that name once. His real name was Roberto Ruano Parker. He is dead."

  I damn near jumped out of my chair and kicked my

  heels. Instead, I said, Tm sorry. When did he die? '

  "Several years ago."

  "How did he die?"

  "It was ..."

  "I think it would be better if my father told you about it," Maria Teresa put in. "iCon permiso?"

  I said the permission was hers. She rang a bell. When the maid showed up, Maria Teresa told her to request the presence of don Rodolfo in the Jmlio.

  While we waited, Maria Teresa was careful not to look in my direction. We were both thinking the same thing. She had lied to me about not knowing the name Robert Ruiz Parker, and it made her miserable because I knew she had lied. I was just worried. My hunch had paid off, and I had my lead on Parker, but I didn't like the way it was being handed to me. It was too much like having the guy at the carnival li£t the left-hand shell to show me that the pea was really there in case I wanted to make a heavy bet on the next shuffle.

  Don Rodolfo, when he showed up, was right out of a picture by Velasquez. He wore an old jacket with oil paint on it, but he would have looked at home in a charro costume covered with gold embroidery. His gray hair was going white, and he had a white clipped beard and mustache. He was the Spanish grandee from Grandeeville.

  I Stood up to shake hands. He apologized, in Spanish, for his appearance. Maria Teresa said, "My father speaks very little English. If you will be so kind ..."

  "Certainly."

  The Spanish grandee looked politely from me to Fito to Maria Teresa, waiting for somebody to toss him the ball.

  Maria Teresa said, "Senor Colby has come to Chile in search of Roberto Ruiz Parker."

  The Spanish grandee lifted an eyebrow.

  "What is your interest in my brother?"

  I told him what I felt like telling him; that I was a private investigator and that I had been retained by a laAvyer in the United States to find Robert Ruiz Parker or determine that he Tvas dead. Since they had told me he was dead, I would appreciate it if they would give me further information about the date and circumstances of his death, the disposition of his body, and so forth. I would have to check the facts.

  Without any heat in his voice, the Spanish grandee said, "Do you question our word, senor?''

  "No, senor. For myself, I am satisfied. But the matter involves certain properties to which your brother held title.
The courts of my country accept no man's unsupported word."

  "What are these properties?" Fito asked.

  I didn't know whether to answer that one or not. Until I got more inlorniation, all I had to trade with was what I knew. Before I could think up an answer that wouldn't hint anybody's feelings, don Rodolfo said mildly, "You need not concern yourself too nuich with the affairs of your uncle, Fito."

  He was the boss, all right. Fito took it like a good boy. The Spanish grandee said to me, "Perhaps you would honor us with your presence here tomorrow night for dinner. Afterwards we can play billiards and discuss this matter. Do you play billiards?"

  I said I knew the principle of the game. The Spanish grandee said he woidd be honored with my company at eight the next night. I said I would be honored to attend. We shook hands all around. That was that.

  Maria Teresa went with me to the door. She was still feeling bad because I had caught her in a lie, so I told her how much I had enjoyed her hospitality and chattered away like a chipmunk until she decided I had forgotten it. In the end, I got myself a wonderful smile, said hasta mariana, and went down the driveway feeling as gloomy as any man would feel when a beautiful girl with molasses-taffy hair and honey-colored eyes smiles at him as if she meant it and he knows all the time that he is beingr suckered.

  JjECAUSE it was obvious that I was being suckered. And even if I agreed with myself that I had a nasty, Iotv suspicious mind and probably an inferiority complex four miles wide because I suspected dirty work every time a pretty girl smiled at me, I was still being suckered. Look at it this way. I had spent two hard weeks prowling around Santiago asking nosy questions about Robert Ruiz Parker. I hadn't learned anything about him, but a lot of people had heard about old Bulldog Colby, the hawkshaw with the grim jaw, and been told what a determined little rascal he was. Old Bulldog Colby was liable to learn something if he kept at it. There were two things that could be done with old Bulldog Colby. If it didn't matter what he found out, why then let him sweat until he found it out or else get in touch with him and tell him what there was to tell. That didn't mean he had to be invited out to dinner at a home that was too exclusive for the Cabots and the Lodges, either, but if feeding him a meal seemed like the proper thing, all anybody had to do was look him up at the Hotel Carrera and say "My name is so-and-so.

  I hear that you are interested in Robert Ruiz Parker. Come out to dinner and I'll tell you about him." That was the easy way.

  But what had happened? A sweet young thing sort of accidentally meets mc at a party which every esta-dounidense in Santiago could be expected to attend. We talk. I like to talk to her. So would any one of four hundred other men at the party, all better-looking than I am, but she devotes herself to me until she learns that I am looking for a man by the name of Robert Ruiz Parker. She is not surprised to hear the name. She has never heard it before. But after she has had a chance to talk it over with her big brother, who is also at the party, she does not want me to be lonely in Santiago and invites me to her home. There it turns out that Robert Ruiz Parker is really her poor old dead uncle Roberto, about whom her father is going to explain tomorrow night, including the reason why she had denied ever having heard the name.

  There would be plenty of explanations, I was willing to bet. For my money, they would all be horsefeathers.

  That night I went to the movies. There was a crook picture at the Comedia. It was in English, with Spanish subtitles, and it "was pretty good, too, except that at the end the detective explained to the girl how he had known, ever since the clock stopped in the second reel.

  that the gardener had poisoned the soup, and I couldn't see it even after he explained it. I had a fat chance of figuring out what Maria Teresa's father was cooking up for me.

  I gave up the Ruiz-Parker angle and spent the morning checking up on the Ruanos. A lot of people had heard the name, but nobody knew much about them except that the old folks were super-exclusive and didn't mingle much. The old man sculped or painted or something:. That was all I had time to learn.

  In the afternoon I sent a cable off to Adams, asking him to hurry Parker's picture along when he got it. Then I had a siesta. When I walked up the long driveway to the museum at eight o'clock, I was in fair shape to catch whatever fast balls were coming my way.

  I should have known better than to get here on time. Nobody does in Chile, and nobody is expected to. The family wasn't even dressed. The maid showed me into a sala —not the big one with the statues, but a smaller room with a wood fire in a grate—and left me there. After I had studied the shine on my shoes for half an hour, Maria Teresa came in.

  I'm not good at noticing women's clothes, ordinarily, but I ahvays noticed hers. The way she wore them, I had to. That night she had on a turquoise-green job, an evening dress with a long skirt jimmied around

  some way to look like a pair of those harem pants the girls wear in movies about Arabia, only more ladylike. Her arms, her neck, and what I could see of her back and the rest of her was the same golden tan as her face, smooth and brcnvn like old silk. The family museum probably had a sun-deck where she spent long hours getting those streaks in her hair and earning the tan, because I didn't see any of the marks a bathing suit ^•ould have left on her. I found myself dreaming up a picture of her lying on the sun deck. It wasn't a nice way to look at my hostess, but I couldn't help it.

  She had a cocktail brought in for me, and a naran-jada for herself. We talked about the weather and prospects for a good ski-season in the mountains next winter. She liked to ski. She also played tennis and golf and rode horses. I said I played golf. Maybe we could have a game some time. She thought that would be fine. I thought it would be fine, too. Lovely weather we're having, isn't it?

  Fito, the old man and Maria Teresa's ma came in together. Fito and don Rodolfo were in evening clothes. Don Rodolfo looked like a Grand Duke. We both started to apologize, I because I didn't have any evening clothes and he because he had been stupid not to realize that I wouldn't have brought them along on a business trip. He and Fito would change right away. I talked

  them out of it, after an Alphonse-and-Gaston argument.

  The old lady was another character. Her name was dona Maria. I supposed that Maria Teresa had been named after her. She was old-school Latin, dark going gray, with a faint mustache and maybe a little dumpier through the hips than was stylish but a very nice old dame. She welcomed me to her home with four or five words of pretty bad English. I came back in Spanish, she commented on my castellano, and I had to explain all over again about being born in Mexico, a very nice country but nothing to compare with Chile. We "tvent on from there, tossing chitchat and compliments around the circle at each other, drinking cocktails poured from a silver shaker, as cozy as a family of worms in a knot.

  All this about clothes and cocktails and chitchat is to show what a smooth shell game they had rigged up for me. It was perfect. I couldn't have felt more at home in my mother's lap. They laughed at my jokes, poured cocktails into me, kept the conversation pointed my "vvay, and managed to make me feel that the Ruano household had just been holding its breath waiting for me to come along. When dinner was served, they sat me on don Rodolfo's right, the place of honor. Fito was next to me, Maria Teresa across the table, doiia Maria at the end. I think a more customary eating arrangement would have been to put me next to Maria Teresa, but

  as it was I had to look at her, watch the light of the candles on the dinner table gleam on her golden skin and bring out the flecks in her honey-colored eyes and glints on her teeth when she laughed. She laughed a lot. Everybody did. There was plenty of good food, with good chileno wine to wash it down, and when the Ruanos weren't showing mc what a swell guy they thought I was, they were doing the same thing for each other. That part, at least, was the real McCoy. The family was a mutual-admiration society. You could tell just by watching them that they thought their old man was the nicest old man, their old lady the nicest old lady, and the two kids the nicest brother and sister eve
r born. After a few copitas of wine, I began to agree with them. It was good to meet a family like that. Until then, the job had been too full of people like Molly Jean Mendoza and Parker's slut of a wife in Pasadena.

  Thinking about Parker snapped me out of my rosy glow. I would have to watch myself.

  Parker's name had not been mentioned once. I knew it wasn't good manners to discuss business matters when the ladies were present, so I waited. After coffee, don Rodolfo and I excused ourselves and went downstairs to the billiard room. Fito wasn't invited to play.

  There were a number of paintings on the wall of the billiard room. They were all small, mostly still-lifes

  with a lot of fine detail, but one was a pretty good picture of the patio where I had had tea the day before. A lot of work had gone into that painting. You could even see the tiny lovebirds in their cage.

  I said to don Rodolfo, "These are your own?"

  "My own poor efforts, yes."

  "They seem very good to me. That of the patio is excellent."

  "It is yours."

  He Tvent o^ er to the wail to take it down.

  It had been a long time since I had met anyone ^dio still observed the old tradition which requires a Spanish caballero to offer to his guest anything which the guest admires in the caballero's home. But I still remembered the answers, so I got out of it. The picture stayed on the wall where it belonged. I ^sas careful not to admire the billiard table.

  AVe shucked off our coats and rolled up our sleeves.

  "Do you play three cushions?" don Rodolfo said, offering me first crack at the cue rack with a vesture Don Quixote would have used handing somebody a sword.

  "Not well."

  "Then we will play straight rail."

  He chalked up his cue as I made the break.

  I would not like to have played the old boy for money.

  He ran cit>lu billiards together on his first string. After he got warmed up he was putting strings of twelve and fifteen together as easily as I made two. He was too good a player to miss a shot deliberately, but I saw him try several four- or five-cushion shots that could have been made an easier way, and I knew he was going easy on me. While he was chalking his cue for a particularly tough one, he said, "How much do you know of the man who called himself Robert Ruiz Parker?"