“You explained that to Charlotte?”
“God, no. I didn’t want her to know. It would have hurt her terribly, especially then, when she’d just lost her father. So let her be angry with me rather than tell her the truth.”
“Sounds like an act of love.”
She smiled wanly again. She sounded tired, like she wanted me gone.
“Yes, maybe it was.”
“Do you have any idea why Charlotte might have wanted to end her life, Miss Grant?”
“The human brain is a complex organ I don’t pretend to understand.”
“What about the human heart?”
“More simple, I suppose, when the mind doesn’t get in the way.”
“Perhaps it was the loss of her father that drove Charlotte to do what she did.”
“Yes, maybe that was it.”
“Or possibly her broken-off affair with Dr. Delgado.”
“Goodness, you have done some digging, haven’t you?”
“Then there’s the other possibility—that Charlotte didn’t take her life at all. Have you given that any consideration, Miss Grant?”
“Murder, is that what you’re suggesting?”
I nodded.
“Absurd. Charlotte was an angel. Everyone loved her.”
“You said a moment ago that she was furious with you.”
“Everyone succumbs to a moment of anger at some point. It’s human nature.”
“When was the last time you allowed yourself that kind of feeling, Miss Grant?”
A twinkle came into her mild, green eyes.
“I suppose it was a few minutes ago, Mr. Justice, when I saw you in my garden, intruding where you knew you weren’t welcome.”
“You handled it well.”
“Erica helps me with that. She’s very stable that way. I’m not sure what I’d do without her.”
“Did you happen to see Charlotte in the days before her death?”
“Not for several months, actually.”
“It must have been hard on you, having to handle the arrangements.”
“Not really. Erica shouldered most of it at this end. She called Dr. Miller—Rod’s personal physician. Dr. Miller handled everything, made the arrangements with the mortuary, which contacted Forest Lawn. That made things much easier.”
“That would be the Farthing Mortuary.”
“Yes, the same people who handled Rod’s funeral. They’re very good.”
“Charlotte was acquainted with Dr. Miller?”
“Oh, yes. Stanley Miller attended Rod right to the end, along with Rod’s oncologist. At least when she was gone, Charlotte was in good hands.”
“I understand that Charlotte died without leaving a will or a living trust.”
“Correct.”
“That seems out of character, doesn’t it? Charlotte was nothing if not organized.”
“I suppose when one is bent upon ending one’s life, she’s not in her usual state of mind.”
“That would explain it, I guess.”
The sonata ended, and the house remained quiet.
“I suppose that means you’ll inherit everything, doesn’t it? You and Erica.”
Her words became clipped, her voice brittle.
“I suppose it does.”
“Charlotte’s house, the estate in Montecito, all the other assets Charlotte inherited from her father. That should ease the financial pressure you’ve been under.”
“You’ve looked into my finances along with everything else?”
“You’ve been selling off your personal antiques to keep this cottage, which looks like it could use some sprucing up. The Bentley, too. It could use some work.”
“You have a sharp eye, Mr. Justice.”
“I imagine in better times, you would have employed a real driver, instead of asking Erica to put on a chauffeur’s uniform and play the part.”
Vivian Grant uncrossed her legs and stood.
“I’ve tried to be polite, Mr. Justice. I’d hoped you might show the same courtesy.”
A shadow crossed the bricks beneath the arbor, and Erica was there, standing with her hands behind her back, ignoring me as she faced her partner.
“It’s getting warm, Vivian. It’s time you came in for a rest.”
She stepped forward, slipped her hand through Vivian’s arm, and led her toward the house without another word being spoken to me. I waited until the door had closed behind them, then found my way back to the Mustang, although I glimpsed Erica through one of the windows, watching as I went. She made no effort to hide.
*
I sat for a while studying the house, thinking about things and fighting my exhaustion from the brutal night before. Then I turned the car around and drove back to the village, realizing that all I’d eaten for nearly twenty-four hours was a bowl of Maurice’s chicken soup. I took an outdoor table at a leafy patio cafe, where I ordered a low-fat turkey sandwich with fat-free mayonnaise and fresh alfalfa sprouts on seven-grain bread. Or maybe it was eleven, I’m not sure—I’ve never been too good at keeping count of my whole grains. I washed it down with an all-natural fruit smoothie, which left me feeling as bloated as a possum in a restaurant Dumpster, and barely able to keep my eyes open.
Before pushing on to Tijuana, I drove south half a mile, found a residential side street near the beach where I could park without paying, put the top up and my seat back, and hunkered down for a nap that settled over me like a velvety La Jolla fog. Not quite an hour later, I came slowly awake, feeling a chill in the air and stiffness in my bones. It was close to seven and the sun was an orange orb descending in a sky filled with friendly, fleecy clouds and gulls angling across on strong wings. I took in the million-dollar view for a minute, working out the kinks and the yawns. I was about to switch on the ignition when I noticed two familiar figures making their way slowly down the hill, arm in arm.
Vivian Grant and her friend Erica had put on jackets and sensible shoes, and Miss Grant had added a floppy hat that cast her face in shadow and kept her well disguised. When they were a block or two down the hill in the direction of the ocean, I climbed from the Mustang and followed. The street below appeared to end in a cul-de-sac, with a hedge of low trees preventing access to the beach, but Erica and Miss Grant kept walking, ducking under the lowest branches and disappearing. When I reached the trees, I found myself at the top of a narrow stairway with a rusty iron railing that only a local resident would have known about. The concrete steps were sandy underfoot as I made my way quietly down to the first landing, where I stopped. Within the protection of the trees, the landing was enclosed with still more corroded rails and offered a view of a small, horseshoe-shaped cove and the ocean beyond, with lights beginning to wink on along the rising coastline to the north. With a final burst of life, the dying sun exploded on the cloudy horizon to create a heady mix of pinks and golds that cast a muted light on the silver-blue water. Half a dozen surfers carved up the waves, pulling out with their boards just before crashing on the rocks, then paddling out to wait for another set and catch another cascading ride back in, to tempt fate one more time.
The two women were forty or fifty feet below me, leaving the bottom step and making their way slowly across the cool white sand to the middle of the cove, which they had all to themselves. They stopped to admire the sunset and the darkening sea, and Vivian Grant rested her left arm on Erica’s right shoulder for support, while reaching down to remove one of her shoes. As she dumped the sand from it, silhouetted against the lovely sky, with the gulls crying their lament and the brave young men riding their slim surfboards to the edge of disaster, the two women might have been any other affectionate couple out for an evening walk, any couple at all.
I rolled across the border into Tijuana a few minutes past eight.
Mexican vendors came at me out of the shadows like zombies, pushing right up to the car, loaded down with cheap curios they hawked in fractured English before registering the hard disinterest in my eyes and caroming off toward gringos who showed more promise.
I’d been to Tijuana a few times and everything was instantly familiar. Low-octane exhaust billowed all around me from American cars of the fifties and sixties, most of them Fords and Chevys with tail fins or lots of chrome, a remarkable number restored proudly to cherry condition. Latin music, from
norteña
to salsa to pop, blared from car radios or from speakers along the roadside, where you could buy everything from eight-dollar-a-day car insurance to a cold bottle of Corona for half a buck, with a wedge of lime taken from a heaping, fly-covered bowl. Brown-skinned children with wide, pleading eyes came out of the dark with little boxes of Chiclets in their tiny, outstretched hands, hoping for a quarter but ready to accept a nickel or a dime. The official census put the population of TJ at about a million, but one heard there was another, unofficial population nearly as large—hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children crowding the city, waiting for the right moment to cross the border, waiting for their chance to go
el norte.
They lived in tarpaper shacks or mildewed motels or in the modest apartments of friends and family, trying to scrape together enough cash to pay a
coyote
to smuggle them over, or just watching the weather, or the clock, waiting for the border guards to change shifts. Entering TJ, you got the sense of a city teeming with people who survived day to day, living on the edge but without much choice, for whom the idea of apocalypse was just a worrier’s useless notion.
The moment the Mexican drivers were past the border stations they hit the gas, leaving the more hesitant tourists behind, jockeying for position as the lanes quickly narrowed and the
avenida
took on the feel of a racetrack after the green flag had dropped. Some drivers veered left, heading east into the poor, hillside neighborhood of Colonia Libertad, but most, like me, followed the rush of traffic to the right. We crossed the river into a loop that spun vehicles off in several directions—south toward the trendy shopping district of Zona Río, or on to the wealthy
colonias
beyond the Tijuana Golf and Country Club; west toward
ciudad centro
and the nightlife along Avenida Revolución, or farther on to the bullring at Playas and the beach resorts, or the toll road to Rosarito and Ensenada if the rougher public highway to the south wasn’t your cup of tea.
I swung off onto Calle 3 until I hit Avenida Revolución, where I turned left and was swept into a flow of cruising taxis, whose drivers tooted their horns at every gringo pedestrian. I continued down Tijuana’s main drag for nearly a mile, past club after club offering strip shows and girls, and dozens of the city’s one thousand
farmacias,
where
turistas
could buy just about any drug they wanted at a fraction of the going American price, no prescription needed. Back in the sixties and seventies, TJ had been known more for its seedy sailor dives than its glittering discos—stinking joints packed back then with navy boys on shore leave and college fraternity brats who could see a woman have sex with a donkey on stage or get a blowjob from a kneeling prostitute while they watched the show from the balcony. Most of that was gone now, cleaned up by pressure from the Church or the U.S. government and by city officials who were shamed by it or who simply realized it had no economic future. Now, Tijuana was a bustling commercial center in the hidden grip of the wealthy drug cartels who bribed and murdered almost at will, and, on weekend nights and holidays, the under-twenty-one crowd that streamed into the city to drink themselves into oblivion and then get laid for thirty dollars.
This was a weeknight, still early, and the sidewalks were largely uncrowded, which meant the male barkers outside the clubs were working extra hard hustling customers, promising free drinks to females, no cover charge, the most beautiful girls on stage, which also meant in your lap. On my right, I glimpsed the once-elegant Hotel Caesar, where the Caesar salad had been invented more than half a century ago when Hollywood’s elite traveled to TJ for the bullfights and jai alai matches and the fancy clubs where margaritas took the place of martinis, and cocaine was pronounced
coke-ay-ee-nay.
The faded hotel’s legendary restaurant was still there, on one side of the lobby, but on the other, at the corner, was a Carl’s Jr. offering the usual specials with Pepsi and fries. Standing outside, tethered to a fake wagon, was an old burro painted with stripes to look like a zebra, its ears sticking up out of holes in a straw sombrero, blinking passively as a blue-eyed family stopped to shoot a photo while the children petted the animal’s furry flanks. The travel brochures called Tijuana “the window to Mexico,” but if that was true, it was a cracked prism, a tragic city that offered a distorted and distorting view. Yet it was also the city of promise, a magnet for immigrants from across the country, where the unemployment rate was an astounding one percent, where there were jobs. In Tijuana, anyone who could work did. Within its squalor, dreams lived.
*
I saw the ornate Moorish façade of the Jai Alai Palace looming ahead and made another left, then a quick right. Down the block, I pulled into the hotel I’d stayed at the last time I was in town, where the sign out front told me the room rate had risen to thirty-five a night. I checked in, got a clean, comfortable room, and was out on the street minutes later, using pages ripped from my guidebook to begin searching out the dozen or so gay establishments where I hoped to find Chucho Pernales plying his trade.
I started with Turk’s Disco in the heart of the action on Avenida Revolución, because the guidebook described it as the biggest gay club in the city, three floors of bars, dancing, and stages for
travestis
and male stripper acts. The place was as grand and glittering as advertised, but it had recently changed hands and gone straight, with a new name and bored-looking female prostitutes sitting around at lonely little tables, who looked up when I came in and didn’t take their eyes off me. It was still early, and the only other customers were clustered at a table of their own, several young men and women who looked American, tipping back their heads open-mouthed while a waiter poured tequila straight down their throats from a half-gallon bottle of Cuervo Especial.
As I emerged back onto the street the barkers came at me like used car salesmen on a slow day, asking me what I wanted, pitching me a variety of amusements, promising pretty girls, even a donkey show if I was willing to get in a cab and take my chances on a ride beyond the heart of town. I pushed past them, two blocks down Revolución and around the corner, where I checked street numbers until I found the one I was looking for. It was another big club, two floors, with huge windows and lots of chrome inside, but I quickly realized it had suffered an identity crisis like the last place and was now appealing exclusively to the homosexually challenged. The new management had painted the exterior white, added shapely, seductive lips and the word G
IRLS
written in bright red paint, to let the straight boys know exactly what they’d be getting if they ventured inside. The third club I hit had a posted sign indicating it was only open Thursday through Sunday, and only after 10 p.m. The fourth was a small, undistinguished place on a side street with no young men hanging around and a bartender who pretended he spoke no English the moment I started asking questions. The fifth looked more promising, with a new neon sign over the door and a group of nicely dressed
jovenes
milling near the curb, giving me the eye. Two military-looking cops in brown uniforms suddenly appeared, however, with scowls on their faces and guns on their hips, so I went the other way.
I’d covered close to two miles of hard pavement in the main tourist district, crossing four clubs off my list and putting a question mark after the fifth. I was edging again toward exhaustion and beginning to wonder if coming to Tijuana in search of a hustler I’d never even seen wasn’t just a bit foolish. I stopped in a classy seafood restaurant on Calle 6 called La Costa, where I ordered king crab enchiladas and shrimp soup, and when I was done, I thought seriously about returning to my hotel to test the bed. I was headed in that direction when, almost by accident, I happened on El Pequeño Palacio.
It was located across from the Jai Alai Palace on a side street where a woman huddled on the sidewalk under a shabby blanket with her two babies. The words
EL PEQUEñO PALACIO
stretched across the front of the club in proud but pale neon, and I recognized the name from my guidebook as I passed. When it registered, I doubled back, brushing by a dark-eyed hooker in high heels and a short skirt who needed a closer shave if he expected to do much business.
When I stuck my head through the door curtains, The Little Palace proved to be a modestly sized club with walls painted flat black and a couple of dozen small tables marred by cigarette burns and messages carved with pocket knives. The place was nearly empty, and the lights were still up. Behind the long bar, a good-looking bartender with solid shoulders and a nice profile checked his bottles, while a blind sound man with glazed eyes tested equipment up on the stage, and two
travestis
at a corner table ate tortillas and beans, turning instantly flirtatious as I stepped inside. One was blond, the other brunette, both in high heels and tight, shimmering gowns that accentuated their breasts and curves, though I couldn’t tell if the breasts were the real thing or not.
I greeted the bartender in the best Spanish I could muster and he swung around to face me across the counter, asking me in decent English what I’d like to drink. He had a square, masculine face with a thick, dark mustache and heavy brows over dark, unassuming eyes, and he smiled just enough to be friendly but not obsequious. I told him I was looking for a
joven
named Chucho Pernales, who might be calling himself Prettyboy. The bartender shrugged, shook his head.
“Slim kid,” I said. “Seventeen, maybe eighteen.”
I pointed to the upper portion of my left arm.
“He has a tattoo here—Lourdes,
el nombre de su mamá.
”
The bartender shook his head again, losing most of his smile along with his interest. I felt a hand being draped on my shoulder, saw the blond
travesti
just behind me to my left, reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. She was nearly as tall as me, at least five-ten, slender in her slinky satin dress and gorgeous in the manner of cross-dressing entertainers, for whom perfect hair and makeup is a religion, no matter what the pay. Her eyes were brown and playful under long, dark lashes, with a layer of turquoise on the upper lids.
She pursed her glossy red lips into a kiss, batting her lacquered lashes.
“Wha choo need, bebby?”
I repeated: I was looking for Chucho Pernales, one of the
jovenes
who worked the bars around town. The transvestite took a step back on spike heels and with great drama fanned her long, painted nails down the length of her almost womanly body.
“Why you need Chucho whan you can have thees?”
“I need to talk to him, ask him some questions.”
She glanced curiously at the bartender, who translated.
“Cuestiones, preguntas.”
The transvestite raised her plucked brows.
“
Preguntas?
Thees Chucho, thees Prettyboy, he ees in trouble?”
“I didn’t tell you his name was Prettyboy.”
“Yes, I think I hear you say.”
“Not to you, I didn’t. To the bartender. Before you arrived.”
The bartender glanced from her to me, looking bemused, then turned away to tend to business. I kept my eyes on the showgirl.
“So, you know Chucho?”
She pouted prominently, shaking her head.
“Maybe Carmelita know heem, maybe she not.”
“If Carmelita did know him, would she be interested in helping me find him?”
Cannelita traced a finger down the side of my face, sly and coquettish.
“And what is there for Cannelita if she help in thees way?”
“Say, twenty dollars.”
She puckered the lower portion of her face dismissively.
“Twenty
dolares,
that ees all?”
She raised both palms upward, thrusting out her breasts at the same time.
“I am not some cheap beech, you know.”
With a great flourish, she fanned a hand across the stage and the roomful of empty tables.
“I am Carmelita, thee star of El Pequeño Palacio.”
“Twenty-five.”
She glanced around, put out an open palm, wiggled her fingers.
“Show me the money, bebby.”
In a place like Tijuana, you don’t carry a fat wad of cash if you’re smart, and you never show all your money at once. You carry plenty of small bills, though, accessible in one pocket, enough to payoff cops quickly and economically if they put the arm on you, or to make small purchases without showing off a roll that invites a higher price or a knife in your belly if you happen to turn down the wrong street. From my left front pants pocket, I pulled a tangle of singles, fives, and a couple of tens, counted out twenty-five bucks so that Cannelita could see I didn’t have much left, handed the twenty-five to her, and shoved the rest back where it came from.