I was too tired to go down that night, and instead I slept early and got up likewise. As I was taking a pot of café de olla on the porch of the hotel, the promised policeman appeared on foot, in civilian dress and coolly elegant in an open white shirt. His name was Homeros Nervos, a fifty-something detective from Lázaro, a man of smooth cheeks and faint aromas (some brut I didn’t recognize even after years of acquainting myself with scents) and sober alligator shoes that didn’t seem inappropriate on a detective at the beginning of a working day. He simply walked up to the porch and asked if I was the Mr. Marlowe who had asked to see a detective the previous evening. I asked him if he’d like something to eat. He spoke in English, and he spoke it as well as I spoke his language, so we settled on that.
“No, I’m all right. I might take a coffee with you, though.”
He joined me at the table and we found ourselves close together in that wonderful early-morning shade, with the wind fresh off the sea.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky that day.
“You’ve come a long way,” he began.
I explained everything to him without altering any of the details. It was best to be honest.
“I see,” he said.
“I just wanted to verify the story, as it were. It says on the certificate that Zinn drowned in the bay.”
“That’s correct. We did the autopsy in Lázaro.”
His eyes were level and the color of freshly turned earth.
“What were the circumstances?”
“As far as we could see, he came in from a yacht moored in the bay. It must have been in the middle of the night, but the body wasn’t discovered until the early morning. It had washed up on the beach.”
I asked him what Zinn had been wearing. Nervos smiled at this and it was not just at the trivial memory of Zinn’s costume in death.
“It’s funny you should ask. He was in shorts and a linen shirt. It’s possible he just fell off the boat in the night and drowned. He had been drinking heavily—there was a lot of alcohol in his blood, anyway.”
“Why does everyone say he was swimming?”
“Who says so?”
But now that I thought of it, it was merely an assumption.
So he maybe wasn’t swimming, I thought.
“How much alcohol did he have in his system?”
“More than enough to knock him out. You’re going to ask what the people on the yacht said. But when we got here in the morning there was no yacht. It had slipped away the same night.”
It was half-true, and the smile held steady for a few moments and then melted away. There is an art to the mask, and he had practiced it long and hard until it was perfect. I asked him what the yacht’s name had been, and he admitted that no one knew or could remember. It had flown a Mexican flag, but no one had known the people on it. Had the passengers, I asked, come onto the beach for dinner? He said that the palapa owners claimed that they had not.
He went on: “But unknown boats show up here all the time. I wouldn’t say it was unusual.”
“And you couldn’t trace the yacht the following day?”
Wearisome, the persistent foreigner: Nervos stretched a little.
“We put out a search, but it came up with nothing. As you can see,” he motioned with his hand toward the road, “we’re busy with other matters. So we never found it. We have no idea who was on it at the time or who it belonged to.”
“But Señor Zinn must have known them.”
“Indeed he must have. But it’s too late to find them now. I had a feeling—well, let’s say that I had the feeling that the locals here knew them. But they’re too frightened to tell us anything. They knew Señor Zinn quite well, but his circle of people—they’d rather not get involved.”
“I had a feeling that would be the case. Do you think Señor Zinn was dealing drugs with the men in the hills?”
“Probably not. But I couldn’t say. I think myself he was just a good-time boy who fell off a boat and died. The owners panicked and vanished. You can see it from their point of view.”
“They ran from the scene of an accident. I can understand it. But then, they were not friends of his, were they?”
“I suppose not.”
He turned his mild eyes on me and there was a great distance in them, as if we had walked away in opposite directions from one moment to the next.
“I also have to say,” I went on, “that it was curious that the authorities here decided to cremate the body on the spot. Didn’t you contact his wife and ask her what she wanted to do?”
“Who says we didn’t? Of course we contacted her. She said the best thing would be to cremate him in Lázaro. It’s a huge expense to fly a body to the United States. We confirmed the identity ourselves and sent the papers to the embassy.”
It was extraordinary, but I said nothing—not even my eyelids moved.
“So she was all right with it? She didn’t fly down to identify the body?”
“Again, I never said she didn’t. She did indeed. She identified him in the morgue and we proceeded from there.”
“I guess she must have been very upset.”
“You can imagine. She stayed at the same hotel you’re staying at here. Didn’t you know that?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
“Ah, so you’ve met. A very pretty woman, wouldn’t you say?”
And the distance in his eyes suddenly disappeared.
“I would say, yes. Too pretty for Donald Zinn probably. Normally it’s dangerous having one of those.”
“That’s what I thought at the time, too. We know how it goes. I hear he had a rather large insurance premium on his head. It almost seems a cliché—but human nature doesn’t vary much.”
“No, Nervos, it doesn’t.”
I wondered which room Dolores had stayed in. He said that she’d wanted to stay close to where her beloved Donald had died. But she had probably had other reasons of a more practical nature.
“How long was she here?” I asked.
He stretched out his legs and eyed the cluster of tanagers that had come down to investigate the churros standing in a glass jar on our table. I wondered if he knew about the hummingbird god, Huitzilopochtli, or how Aztec warriors were believed to be reincarnated as the little birds. He watched them warily in any case, even though they are the most harmless animals ever evolved to torment breakfast tables. He said she’d been there for a week while matters were wrapped up with the body, and that she had been the model of somber propriety. She had signed all the necessary papers and authorized the cremation. She had taken possession of the ID that had been found on the body—yes, he had carried it with him even in the water—and which they had used to finger his name in the first place.
“So they found his ID on him?”
I smiled a little too brazenly, and perhaps he was momentarily offended.
“That’s the way it was,” he drawled. “Convenient, but true all the same. It’s not me who decides how people fall into the water!”
It was a scene to imagine in the morgue: Dolores standing over the bloated body of her husband trying to be cold and functional as she issued a yes to the question about his identity. Few further questions had been asked. Old white men dying on vacation or business were too common to fret about.
And the widow? She had gone back alone to California with the ashes.
“I felt rather bad for her,” Nervos said. “I took her to the airport in Guadalajara myself. She said almost nothing the whole time. The paperwork went on for a while and she took it well, but she never asked me any inconvenient questions. I was quite surprised by that. I thought at the time she must have been in shock and that was all there was to it.”
“It must have been an ordeal, all right.”
Nervos gave me a look that at first seemed understanding but which, when I lingered over it, felt like contempt. But it was not a contempt that could be overtly spoken—it hung back in the shadows formed by the corners of his handsome mouth.
“Well,” he said then, “I suppose that wraps it up for you. Are you going to stay on for a beach holiday? You can’t find a better spot than this. Just don’t go swimming in the bay. I hear there’s a shark patrolling the waters right now. A tiger.”
“I’ll stay on dry land. I always do.”
He slapped his thighs and the tanagers suddenly dispersed.
“You have a great job,” he said brightly. “I envy you. Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I’ve retired. Get paid to sit on a beach.”
“It’s a con if you ask me. Thank you for coming up to see me. If I need anything more—”
“Just call me. But I don’t think you will. This was one of the more straightforward cases we’ve dealt with in recent years. I just feel bad for the people of Caleta. The gossip about things like this can damage their business. I’ve noticed the place is a little quieter since Señor Zinn’s death.”
Some men seem to materialize and dematerialize out of nowhere. Nervos was one of them. The shimmer of his lies was fine and pleasing, but beneath this surface lay all the knowledge and suspicion that he would never reveal to a man like me. So we are forced to read the puzzling codes that other men devise for us. I resented it—who wouldn’t. But then, I had expected nothing else. It was Dolores who was the greater operator. She had acted well and picked up a life-defining fortune.