“Did your firm do any work for her aside from the will?”
“Well, the specifics are confidential, but yes. We did a little background investigative work for her and for her father—mostly routine checks. We managed her estate—her father’s estate—and of course we’d been doing work for his company for many years. We work primarily with international and maritime law and his company was involved in quite a bit of international shipping. Handling Miss Arbildo’s will and so on was more in line of a . . . courtesy.”
“I see. Do you have any idea what her relationship was to Hector Purecete? The guy on whose grave the dog was supposed to be put.”
“None at all.”
“Damn. I wish I knew what she expected. This is kind of a pain in the butt. You don’t have any idea what her intentions were in the will instruction?”
“No. Like I said, the woman was very strange.”
I sighed. “Maybe if I could see the will itself we could figure this out. May I come to your office?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “You’d never get here and back before your flight.”
“I’ve already called Nan to change it.”
“No, no . . . you don’t understand—the traffic. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll bring it to you at the airport, if you have time.”
“I’ll make the time.” I told him where I was and that he should bring as much of the paperwork as he had. He said it would take him an hour to get to the bar and I said that was fine. After all, I was still waiting for Nan’s secretary to call me back.
I was thinking about ordering food when the phone went off, showing me Nan’s office number on the ID. It was Cathy with my flight change and some additional information.
“Nan’s booked you into a guesthouse in Oaxaca City—it’s one she’s used before. The owner speaks English and can help you with the records search if you need it.”
“Thanks. I only hope I’ll get there before the offices close.”
“I think you’re going to have to rearrange your schedule. The earliest flight I could get you was five fifty. I’m sorry. But the provincial offices should be open Friday.”
Terrific. My two days for research was now down to one. I’d have to hope I got what I wanted the first time or could work up some local contacts very fast. “I’ll make it work,” I said, then continued, “Umm . . . I talked to Banda. . . . Nan said he was reputable, but he seems a little . . . skittish. Is there anything I should know about him?”
“About Guillermo? I don’t know much except that he’s the biggest New York Yankees fan in Mexico. And I’m not even sure that’s unusual.”
“Baseball?”
“Yup. Baseball is big in Mexico City. A few years ago he had season tickets and flew up to watch the games—I swear that’s why he took his international courses at Columbia; so he could go to Yankees games—he even tried to take Nan out to one, but she’s not a sports fan. Don’t get him started on any conversation about baseball or you’ll miss your plane.”
I said my good-byes and started thinking while I waited for Banda. It was after one o’clock already. I’d have to get lunch at the airport and see what I could do by phone. I’d miss the open hours in person today at whatever government office might have the burial records and I’d only have Friday to do records searches before the holiday weekend hit—if they didn’t close early or not open at all. I’d have to get to that office first thing on the thirtieth if I was going to stand much chance of finding the right grave. I only hoped that whatever I could turn up about Hector Purecete in that time would help me get information from Maria-Luz Arbildo. If she showed up at his grave. Definitely no time for “Who’s on First” discussions with Guillermo Banda that afternoon—I hoped he didn’t look as much like Lou Costello as he sounded or I might lose it.
Fish called me before I could get anything done with directory assistance, saying there was not much to report on the scrapings he’d taken from the clay dog, except that the black paint was colored with crushed charcoal and volcanic sand, with just a touch of human blood. Not your average pottery glaze. No sign of dread diseases or drug residue. No unusual clay substrate, just plain terra-cotta. I mentioned that the dog had broken and dropped the bundle of hair out.
“So it is hair?” he asked.
“It looks like it. My Spanish is lousy, but I heard the inspector call it
pelo
—which I recognize from my shampoo bottle as the Spanish word for ‘hair,’ ” I replied, gazing into the plastic bag of shards. “Five or six strands here, dark brown and black, with a red thread holding them together.”
“Two different kinds of hair?”
“Two different colors, but they have the same look and texture.”
“Interesting. I wonder if the DNA matches the blood in the paint. . . . I’d love to take a look at it when you get back—if you’re game.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring it back. It might have to stay here,” I added, glancing down again at the phantom hound. Once the knot of hair had come free, so had the dog, and I wasn’t sure if it was the hair or the sculpture that had held the spirit in the clay shell, but I wanted to know more before I let any of the parts out of my hands.
The ghost dog leaned against me and seemed to doze. I envied it; the beer had made me feel more tired than ever. Resigned, I stuffed the bag of pottery bits into my purse and went back to fruitless phone calls for the next hour. Outside of Mexico City directory assistance, most of the people I talked to had no better English than I had Spanish—and my Spanish was embarrassingly poor. The dog stirred and I could feel its low growl as it pressed against my leg.
A man of medium height with short black hair stopped beside me and looked me over as I tried to make myself clear—without much success—to a clerk in a provincial office somewhere in Oaxaca. The man carried a leather briefcase. He wore a gray suit, had a bland, oval face made interesting only by a boxer’s crooked nose and basset-hound eyes. He smelled of laundry starch. The aura around him jittered and jumped in flickers of vibrant orange and blue as his eyes moved over everything, evaluating, cataloging. . . . He seemed to have a hot-sauce stain on his tie, but it could have been part of the pattern.
His eyes flicked down toward my feet and he blinked, but I wasn’t sure if he saw the ghost dog or if he just didn’t like my boots. He turned his restless gaze back to me, waited until I hung up in frustration, and said, “You gotta be Harper Blaine.”
He didn’t look at all like Lou Costello, not even a Hispanic version. He didn’t look like an international law practitioner with an advanced degree from Columbia, either. He looked like a guy who worked in an office eight to five, like an insurance adjuster or a midlevel manager in a very expensive suit.
“You must be Guillermo Banda,” I replied.
“Willy. You can call me Willy.” He hoisted himself onto the bar stool next to mine, keeping his feet away, as if I might kick him without warning.
Considering my ex-boyfriend was named Will, that particular first name didn’t sound like a good idea. “I’d rather not,” I said and wondered if he could see the ghost dog—he seemed a little wound up.
He shrugged. “I’m sorry if I offended you, Miss Blaine.” He put the briefcase on the bar and snapped it open. It held a single manila folder and a business-size envelope. Banda picked up the folder. “These are the last three versions of Miss Arbildo’s will. I don’t have to show them to you, but since a will in probate is a public record here, just as it is in the U.S., you could get most of this information by searching the district probate records—”
I cut him off. “Mr. Banda, I’m not offended with you and I’m not trying to put your back up. I’m just at a loss to understand this. I don’t know why I was named in your client’s will—I’ve never met her or heard of her. I just want to understand what I’m doing. I don’t want to be stuck with some creepy mystery for the rest of my life.” I did not look at the dog, but I could feel it still rumbling and pressing to me. “The conditions say I’m to put the dog on the grave intact. What am I supposed to do, now that the statue is broken?”
He put the folder down in the case and picked up the envelope, offering it to me. “That’s easy. You take the money and run. I’m sure Miss Arbildo won’t even know. She inherited a truckload. Thirty thousand U.S. is a drop in the bucket.”
I was sure she would mind. Very much. I shook my head and didn’t touch the envelope. “I can’t do that. Maybe if I knew why she wanted the dog put on Purecete’s grave, I could agree, but I don’t. What is with the dog?”
Banda laughed—a tired laugh but genuinely amused. “It’s a tradition. A really old one. You don’t see it around here much anymore—up in the mountains around Michoacan and Yunuen, maybe in Oaxaca, but even there it’s dying out. It’s from the Aztecs. They used to sacrifice a dog and burn the body on the funeral pyres because they believed the dog could lead the spirit of the dead to Mictlan. Now we just use a statue.
“See, the Mexican Land of the Dead is kind of like Dante’s geography of Hell—it’s got rings, only nicer. In the middle is Mictlan—where the dead live just like we do and from which they can someday be reborn. But it’s a long way for a soul to go and there’s a river you have to cross as well, so you need a guide: the dog, because tradition says dogs can always find the way home. Every year, the dead come back to visit us during el Día de los Muertos. The really traditional people put a statue of a dog on the
ofrenda
—the offerings on the family altar—so their dead relatives don’t get lost coming and going.”
“OK, I get the dog, but why me? Why would your client want a perfect stranger from two thousand miles away to take the dog to Purecete’s grave?”
Banda shrugged again and dropped the envelope back into the briefcase, glancing down. “I don’t know. Before you ask, I don’t know who Purecete was or what his connection was to Miss Arbildo, either. You want to see the will for yourself?” he asked, looking back up at me.
I nodded. He pulled a draft copy of the will from the folder and handed the long pages to me. He pointed as he talked.
“See how she left her money to all these charities? That was pretty much unchanged from the first version I ever saw—one Jimenez, my partner, drew up for her. You can tell she was kind of an oddball when you look at the list.” He pulled out another version of the document. “In an earlier draft of this will, she’d designated Jimenez’s grave as the recipient of the dog, as you can see. She did it right after he died and she was very upset with him. Then she changed her mind—out of the blue—and named Purecete. Just a few months ago, she marched into the office and she handed me this.”
He fished a creased scrap of paper out of the file. It was the hard white of a cheap notepad, torn along one side to make a ragged square from a longer piece of paper. The handwriting was similar to the signature on the will, but more crabbed and wandering:
Harper Blaine
Seattle Wash USA
The letters were cramped up against the left edge, but became more expansive and arched as they moved to the right, as if she hadn’t thought she’d have enough space when she started and tried to stretch the words out to fill the page as she finished each line. It looked odd.
“She just held it out to me and said ‘this is the one’ and I knew better than to argue with Maria-Luz. So I wrote you in.” He offered me the collection of drafts. “Take a look, you can see she had pretty definite—if crazy—ideas about her money. The woman was kind of loopy.”
I glanced at the will again, making mental notes of the recipients of her bequests. They were mostly church charities for the unfortunate, the homeless, the poor, the dispossessed. There were a few odd animal charities as well, such as support for retired racing greyhounds, a rabbit shelter, llama farms, and care for retired circus elephants. None of them had conditions. And there were no individuals named other than me and Purecete.
“Didn’t she have any family, or friends . . . employees even?” I asked.
Banda laughed and pretended he was coughing. “Miss Arbildo? No. She was the last of a literally dying breed—the Arbildo family died with her. And as I said, she was pretty strange and she wandered around a lot, didn’t settle down much after a certain age, didn’t make a lot of friends. She was kind of fond of Jimenez once—like I said, she put him in the will at one point—but about the time he died she was furious with him. She stormed into the office screaming about it: ‘Why did he do it? Why, why?’ I almost thought that she would have dragged him back out of his grave and killed him if she could.”
“What was she so mad about?”
“Well . . . his dying on her. She worked Jimenez pretty hard—he used to say if he died suddenly it would be her fault. His death shook her up. She was irrational. You know how some people get mad instead of grieving. . . .”
I nodded; I was familiar with that phenomenon. Arbildo sounded like a difficult client, and I could understand not wanting to argue with—or console—one like her. But there was something incredibly strange about both the wills and Banda himself. I just couldn’t pin down what was bugging me. . . .
As I pondered the problem, under cover of checking the wills, the ghostly dog at my feet began whimpering and moving restively, then it got up and walked a few feet away from the bar, toward a column of thick mist that was forming in the Grey between the bar and the doorway. I adjusted my position on the bar stool so I could watch the dog and still seem to be reading the documents. The dog stopped near the smoky mass, then looked back at me with that pleading look dogs have. It looked at the ill-defined shape, whimpered, then glanced back to me.
The form that interested the dog was vaguely human in size and shape, but it had no features. There was no face, and after a few moments the dog turned and trotted back to me, whimpering and scratching at my legs with its cold, incorporeal paws. The specter drifted out the door. I didn’t know what it was or where it was going, but the dog seemed to be urging me to follow it—or at least humor the dog’s desire to do so. Banda would still be in Mexico City in a day or an hour, but whatever the ghost dog was after might not last another five minutes.