IT WASN’T THE FIRST thing I was supposed to notice about the charming colonial Mexican town of San Andreas, but I did, at the beginning and ever after. When I look back on the whole experience, it’s the memory of the high stucco walls and the glass shards embedded in them that comes too readily to mind.
Not every house in San Andreas has that kind of outer walls, of course—the Indian houses don’t have them, nor those of most of the Mexicans. The walls were designed mainly to protect the white expatriates, the wealthy ones—those who had moved to San Andreas because it was so picturesque. You had to admit that the broken glass stuck along the tops of the walls was probably more picturesque than barbed wire.
Eleanor Harrington, the woman who was renting me and Lucy her house for a week, had glass-embedded walls, but she was so used to them that she didn’t bother to comment as she unlocked the heavy wooden outer door and led us through a patio brimming with bright pots of flowering succulents. Eleanor Harrington was in her early fifties and had pinkish-blond hair, bouffant with thin bangs, milky blue eyes, and a face that was paler than her neck and arms. She wore a cotton embroidered smock, sleeveless and low-necked, over her stretch pants, and her tanned arms were ringed up to the elbow with wide silver bracelets. She’d lived in San Andreas for thirty years, she told us, and had bought this old colonial mansion and had it restored inside and out.
“I really shouldn’t be charging you rent at all,” she said with the nervous laugh that women often use when they discuss money. “It’s really more of a favor to me to have someone here while I go off to see my son in Houston. It’s something I do every year, not that I enjoy it much—his wife, you see…But I try never to leave my house unattended; it wouldn’t be safe.”
In spite of us doing her a favor, she was quick enough to take the check that Lucy held out. “Splendid,” she said. “What luck that Georgia mentioned you were looking for a place.” She glanced at Lucy, and said, “And did she tell me you were a doctor, Ms. Hernandez?”
“Yes,” said Lucy.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself enormously here,” said Eleanor. “It’s meant so much to me to be in San Andreas as long as I have. Of course it’s changed a great deal, not always for the better, but it’s always had a feeling of home to me. There’s so much to do culturally. You must look at our little English-language newspaper and see what’s going on. There are performances, readings; perhaps you might take a yoga class one day, or even Spanish. You, of course, speak Spanish, Ms. Hernandez…where did your parents come from?”
Not smiling back, Lucy said, “San Francisco. San Francisco, California.”
Lucy had just spent three months on the Mexican border to Guatemala, working in a refugee camp in a clinic there for mothers and babies. She was on her way back to her job in Oakland, but hearing that I was also planning to pass through Mexico to a conference in Costa Rica, had persuaded me to take a brief holiday with her. An acquaintance of hers, a painter, had raved about San Andreas, and had, in the end, come up with a place for us to rent.
Although I had known Lucy for many years and saw her as frequently as I could, I was struck by the change in her. Her light brown skin was matte and dusty-looking, and her hair, which she usually kept very short, was dry and bushy. She was painfully thin as well.
“I’m just tired,” she said, after Eleanor had driven off in her red Toyota for the airport in Mexico City and we were left alone in the living room of the house, with its terra-cotta tiled floor, bright cotton rugs, and shuttered windows. There were weavings on the couches and embroideries on the walls, along with black pottery and the well-known Oaxacan wooden carvings of dogs and other animals, fancifully painted. Some of Eleanor’s own sculptures stood among the folk art; they were bronze figures, in the manner of Degas, of Indians, particularly women, often seated, as if at the marketplace.
“We’ll put these away while we’re here,” said Lucy. It was not a question.
And then she went upstairs for a nap although it was only ten in the morning.
I let myself out the locked street door (“Always remember to lock up,” were Eleanor’s parting words) and went for a walk. Although I’d been in Mexico City a number of times and had explored the southern parts of the country around Oaxaca and the Yucatan, I’d never been in any of the old colonial cities that had been built by the Spanish in the silver-mining days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were cobbled streets, pastel- and white-painted buildings with thick walls and inner courtyards dripping with brilliant bougainvillea. There were numerous jewelry, crafts, and clothes shops, clearly catering to tourists and expatriates. You saw them in their shorts and T-shirts, their straw hats and sunglasses, in husband-and-wife couples, alone or in small groups, tan and well-fed, taking up the sidewalks as they passed.
The central square, the zocalo, however, was predominantly Mexican. It had newspaper vendors and people with small carts offering fresh fruit and nuts and candy. On the benches sat men reading papers or in conversation. The arcades on three sides of the square were packed with more vendors, selling the tackier forms of tourist souvenirs—sombreros, T-shirts, and tin jewelry. On the fourth side of the square was a church with a pinkish baroque facade.
I picked up a copy of the Mexico City newspaper, La Jornada, as well as the small English-language weekly produced in San Andreas, and chose a cafe down a side street from the zocalo to have a coffee. Unlike some of the other restaurants I’d seen while strolling around, this one didn’t have big signs in Gringlish advertising margaritas and super-big enchiladas. The few tables were arranged around a fountain in a small courtyard. There were plenty of plants, a parrot, a simple menu.
After I’d read La Jornada, I turned to the San Andreas paper. It had a chatty local tone, much like any small-town newspaper. The comings and goings of prominent San Andreans were noted, including the departure of Eleanor for Houston. There were a couple of art reviews of recent shows, a discussion of some traffic problems in a certain part of town, and mentions of many upcoming events. Eleanor had been right: There was a lot going on here, from yoga classes, to dance workshops, to readings. San Andreas was one of the Mexican towns where people came to learn Spanish. It had at least half a dozen language schools. Over the years a large expatriate community of mostly Americans, but also some Europeans, had built up. Some were older people who’d retired where their social security and pension dollars went a lot further, but many were artists and writers or would-be artists and writers.
I’m an expatriate myself, but I had never lived any place where sizable numbers of expats of the same nationality gathered together. It had always seemed to me that that would defeat the point, which is to leave your country behind.
I was just about to get up and leave when I noticed my name in the paper. For just a second, I thought that it was another comings and goings tidbit, as in Eleanor leaves and Cassandra and Lucy sublet her place. But then I saw that it was embedded in a small piece about a mystery writer, Colin Michaels, who was giving a reading tonight at the local arts center, El Centro Artistico.
“Long-time San Andreas resident Colin Michaels will read from his new mystery, The Cassandra Caper. Featuring his intrepid private investigator, Paul Roger, this new book opens with the dead body of a woman, Cassandra Reilly, washed up on a beach in Baja California. Cassandra was a go-go dancer in the 1970s who had fallen on hard times, and it’s up to Paul Roger to find the murderer in this exciting new thriller. Colin Michaels has written ten previous novels with Paul Roger.”
“Lucy!” I said, when I got back to the house. “Somebody’s trying to kill me!”
“What?” She had gotten up from her nap but hadn’t progressed much further than a prone position on the sofa. It was as if the muscles and tendons that had been holding her upright had suddenly collapsed, all at once. She was reading an Agatha Christie mystery, in Spanish.
I handed her the local paper, and she read the short notice and began to laugh.
“A go-go dancer, hmm? Of course it’s just a coincidence. Reilly’s a common name.”
“But Cassandra’s not! Why do you think I chose it? No, the man must have somehow picked it up from one of the books I’ve translated. Those Gloria de los Angeles novels are everywhere.”
“Well, you can’t do anything now,” Lucy said. “His novel’s been published.”
“I’ll sue! I’ll figure something out. I’ll go to his reading and heckle him at least.”
It was a useful ruse, anyway, to get Lucy out of the house.
We ate dinner before the reading at a small restaurant I’d noticed near Eleanor’s house. We had salads and enchiladas verdes and Tecate beer. Lucy said she could get more authentic food in San Francisco’s Mission District, but she ate it. It gave her small comfort to speak Spanish with the waiter.
“I really don’t feel I should be here,” she said. “It was more wrenching than I imagined to leave the camp. I’d gotten so attached to the people. Cassandra, some of them have been living there for almost ten years, and they have no idea when they’ll be able to get back to their villages in Guatemala. The conditions they’re living in are tolerable, but that’s about all. Just by living in the camps, they’re losing their culture.”
“You did what you could,” I said. Small consolation.
“But I feel so guilty at having left! In three months I did so little. If I didn’t have my job in Oakland to get back to, I would have stayed.”
Two straight couples came into the restaurant and sat down at the next table. They were middle-aged Americans. Georgia’s long letter to Lucy had said, “You’ll love how easy it is to meet people in San Andreas—everybody talks to everybody!”
Apparently this was true, for our neighbors had no problems breaking into our conversation, introducing themselves and telling us more than we ever wanted to know about them. The Nelsons, long-time residents of San Andreas, knew Eleanor well. “Oh yes, she’s been a real force in San Andreas.” They glanced at each other briefly and Mrs. Nelson added brightly, “Without her and Colin, El Centro Artistico never would have gotten off the ground the way it has. People come from everywhere to take classes there.”
“We’ve only been here five years, but we just think it’s the best place on earth!” she went on. “Imagine—we’ve got a maid and a gardener—we’d never be able to afford help in the States, but here we hardly have to pay anything. Bob’s got his golf and I’m a volunteer at the library. One of the things we love about San Andreas is that we hardly have to know any Spanish. We’re trying to persuade Lois and George to move here. Even with the cost of living going up here, they’ll still be able to live so much better than at home.”
“I love it,” said Lois Palmer. “I’ve been taking a ceramics class at the arts center, and a cooking class. I love Mexican food, don’t you? But George isn’t so sure.”
“Got a problem with the old ticker,” said George. “I know there are a couple of clinics, and one is for people like us, but I’m still not convinced. What if I had a heart attack on the street downtown and ended up at the Mexican clinic?”
Lucy was too disgusted to even bother replying. And even if she had, she’d have been met by shocked surprise. “But we love Mexico and the Mexicans,” they would say, puzzled. “They’re such warm people, and their culture is so fascinating.”
I jumped up with the check. “Well, we’re off to a reading tonight,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Mrs. Nelson, “Colin’s reading. Well, you’re in for a treat!”
El Centro Artistico was a small but beautiful colonial-style structure, built around a courtyard landscaped with trees and plants. We went up a marble staircase to the second floor, where the reading was being held. It surprised me how many people were packed in the little room—a good seventy-five. Almost all of them were white, and many looked retirement age, but there were also a number of younger and middle-aged people. Many of them seemed to know each other and were deep in conversations, of which we caught snatches:
“First chapter is really coming along. Couple of good paragraphs today.”
“Did you see what the Wallaces have done to their house? That incredible ceramic work. And they hardly had any trouble with the workmen.”
Several people came up to us to chat, intrigued no doubt by the fact that Lucy was Latina (“We want the local people to always feel welcome at our events!”). For the first time in many years, I felt peculiar about introducing myself and resorted to my given name, Catherine Frances.
“Are you an artist?” a woman with thick glasses and a rayon blouse printed with—yes, suitcases—asked me.
“Not even an amateur,” I replied.
“Are you here to study Spanish?”
“No,” I said reluctantly. No use telling her I made my living as a translator of Spanish literature; that could only lead to a discussion of the books I’d worked on and the revelation of my name. And I couldn’t bear the news to spread so soon around the room, that I had become a fictional character.
“Cassandra—or what had been Cassandra—was a worn-out bundle of varicose veins, needle tracks, and bunions. Her mottled face hung slackly and even under the water you could see that she had a bad dye job.”
Colin Michaels had been reading for about fifteen minutes when I decided to murder him. A short, red-faced man in his sixties, with a silky pompadour of white hair, he wore a short-sleeved Mexican shirt open in a V that showed his tan chest and white chest hair.
His character, Paul Roger, was different. Lanky, tough, laconic. You couldn’t call Colin Michaels laconic by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I began to think he was never going to shut up.
Finally he finished reading and it was time for questions. In order he got: “Do you use a computer?” “How old were you when you started writing?” “How do you get an agent?” and “Have any of your books been made into films?” and then came one of those long-winded questions that isn’t really a question but more a statement—if only you could figure out about what—on the part of the questioner.
Eventually it was my turn.
“I’m curious about where you came up with the name Cassandra Reilly for your victim.”
“It’s a great name, isn’t it?” he said happily. “I have an Irish background myself so Reilly was obvious, but I think the choice of Cassandra was really quite inspired. Cassandra was the daughter of the King of Troy, who had the gift of prophecy, but not of being believed.”
“I know who the mythical Cassandra was, thank you,” I interrupted. “But did you realize that Cassandra Reilly is the real name of someone—someone I know quite well actually—yes, a very esteemed translator, the translator of Gloria de los Angeles’s magic realism novels. I’m sure the real Cassandra Reilly will be horribly upset when she hears that her name has been stolen and appended to the name of some dead go-go dancer!”
I sat down with a thump.
“Well, if I’m any judge of character,” said Colin Michaels with a genial wink, “your friend will be flattered, not offended, to have her name appear in print.”
A wave of mild laughter, meant to support Colin and dismiss me, flowed through the room, and he went on to the next question.
“I’m writing a mystery,” a man said. “And I know I need to know about guns. I’ve read up on them, but I feel like I need to actually see one, to hold one, to fire one…”
“To murder someone…” a voice added and everyone laughed.
“Do you have a gun?” the voice persevered. “Have you used one?”
Colin gave his genial smile. “Haven’t you heard?” he said, “We mystery writers are the least violent people around. We keep it all in our heads!”
Sometime after midnight that night there was a loud banging on the outside gate. Lucy was up and ready for bad news before I’d gotten my bathrobe on. When I finally managed to get downstairs, I saw her leading two uniformed policemen into the house.
“They found Eleanor off the highway to Mexico City,” said Lucy in a flat tone. “In a motel room.”
“What do you mean, they found her?” I stumbled and sat down on a woven footstool. “You mean, she wasn’t really going to Houston at all? She was having a tryst?”
“When they found her she was dead,” said Lucy, still trying to take it in. “Someone shot her through the heart.”
The police grilled us for an hour or two, not because they believed we were particularly guilty of anything, but because we might be able to give them information about Eleanor that would explain her death.
According to the police, the motel was a cheesy but not completely down-and-out place on the outskirts of Mexico City, near the airport, about four hours away from San Andreas. Had Eleanor just gone there to rest before her flight? It seemed likely, because she’d asked the reception clerk to give her a wake-up call at 10 p.m. When she didn’t answer after several attempts, he knocked on the door, and finally, worried, let himself in. She’d been dead for several hours then. Had it been a random murder? A robbery as well? The police were inclined to think so. Her bags had been rifled through; so had the glove compartment of her car. It looked as if some jewelry might be missing. The Mexico City police were questioning all the motel’s employees.
We couldn’t help the police other than to let them look around Eleanor’s house and take her address book. One of them, Officer Delgado, called her son’s house in Houston. He began by speaking English but switched to Spanish in a minute.
When he put down the phone, he said that her relatives would be flying in tomorrow.
“He spoke Spanish to you,” I commented.
“No, her son was away on business,” said Delgado. “That was his wife.”
At seven the next morning, Eleanor’s housekeeper Rosario let herself in. She hadn’t heard the news yet, and had to sit down at first when we told her. “What a terrible death,” she said, making the sign of the cross. Rosario was about Eleanor’s age, perhaps a little younger. She had smooth black hair in a bun, and a sturdy, slow-moving body. We thought she would want to go home, but instead, after a glass of water, she rose and began the work of dusting and straightening, all the while murmuring, “How terrible.”
We watched for a moment, unsure whether she was mourning Eleanor the person or just reacting to the horror of the situation. “I’m not sure you need to do anything now,” Lucy told her gently.
“But people will be coming,” Rosario said. “Her son will finally come back now, and Isabella.”
“Isabella?” I asked. “Is that his wife?”
“Yes,” said Rosario, “She comes from San Andreas.”
Eleanor’s death sent a chill of fear through the expatriate community. In whispered conversations in the expensive restaurants and shops, they told each other that they weren’t surprised. The flip side of their belief that the Mexicans were warm and happy people was their conviction that the whole country seethed with thieves and murderers. That afternoon Colin Michaels called a community meeting at El Centro Artistico, and the room was packed.
“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.”
I found Allen with Isabella in the house, where they were packing up Eleanor’s things. “Yes, I know about the bequest,” he said. “The house is mine though. We’re giving it to Rosario.”
I asked him if his mother ever talked much about Colin Michaels.
“Oh, old Colin,” said Allen. “They were lovers all during my childhood. They had a terrible fight sometime during the seventies. They’d helped create the arts center together, you see. But they couldn’t agree how to run it. The last I heard, Mother was going to pull all her money out of it. She told me she’d been talking to a lawyer in Mexico City. I didn’t believe that she really would. It was just something she used against Colin. Her feud with him had been going on for years. But the arts center really meant something to her. And judging from her will, she really did want almost everything to go into expanding it.”
I didn’t know how to ask for the name of the lawyer, but he gave it to me anyway as he went on, “One of the maids at the motel where my mother was killed says she saw a man with a black mustache and dark hat slipping down the corridor sometime late in the afternoon that day. I thought maybe it could have been my mother’s lawyer, Jorge Salinas, because he has a big black mustache, but his secretary confirmed he’d been in his office all day. It was probably just something the maid made up to make herself sound more interesting.”
When I called Jorge Salinas, he admitted that Mrs. Harrington was his client, and that she had talked to him recently, but he couldn’t tell me about what. They’d had no appointment the day she was murdered, he told me. His records could confirm it.
I pressed further. “I know you can’t tell me what you and Mrs. Harrington discussed. That’s confidential of course. But let me pose it this way, so that you can just answer yes or no. If there was someone who had an interest in keeping El Centro Artistico alive and that person found out that Eleanor Harrington planned to pull her money out of it…”
“This does not sound like a simple yes or no question, but go on.”
“Wouldn’t it have been in that person’s interest, given the will, if Mrs. Harrington died before she could financially withdraw or change her will?”
He was silent.
“Let me put it this way. Given the circumstances, and given what you may know about the people in her life, did Mrs. Harrington’s death come as a complete surprise?”
“No,” he said finally. “No, it did not.”
It was time to go to the police. Delgado was skeptical. “Señor Michaels has an alibi for the time Mrs. Harrington was murdered. He was here in San Andreas, reading to a large crowd, in a program that had been arranged for weeks.”
“Mrs. Harrington left San Andreas at ten in the morning. At a little before two she checked into the motel. You think she died around six. But what if she died earlier, at three? That would have given him four hours to get back to San Andreas.”
“It’s a possibility,” Delgado allowed. “But there are no witnesses.”
“Get a search warrant,” I said. “It can’t do any harm. If Colin is the mystery writer Dora James says he is, he will have made a mistake in his plotting and forgotten some crucial little element. He’s no Agatha Christie.”
At first I thought I’d made a bad mistake. The police searched Colin’s house and car for four hours and found nothing incriminating. No weapon. None of Eleanor’s jewelry. No telltale copy of a will that she was carrying to her lawyer. It was only by chance that one of the cops happened to open the freezer. There, back in the corner, was a false black mustache, that for reasons of vanity or foolishness, Colin had not been able to bring himself to throw away.
The maid identified him and even though he never confessed, insisting that the mustache was a joke left over from Halloween, Colin soon found himself in the courtroom and then in prison, a place he’d always described from the outside. The Harrington Arts Center expanded without him, though apparently he continues to write murder mysteries from prison while appealing his life sentence.
I heard all this from Lucy, who made a fast friend of Dr. Antonia Rodriguez, the doctor at the San Andreas clinic. Lucy visits her regularly, on her way to and from the refugee camp on the Guatemala border, where she now spends three months every year.