The Corpse with the Emerald Thumb Read online

  I lay down on the cushioned bench in my little room and closed my eyes, releasing my thoughts to run free and form themselves into a reasonable explanation of all the facts I’d gathered and observations I’d made. The answer had to be in there . . . somewhere.

  Usually when I’m using the wakeful dreaming technique, my thoughts whirl about in no particular order to begin with, then various aspects of my findings gather themselves about a person or a place. This time, things went a little differently. I allowed the process to take the path it had chosen for itself, because, after all, that’s the whole point, but it seemed to be leading me into a world where Edward Lear had laid his hands on everything I saw, and I felt uncomfortably like a very confused Alice.

  First I saw Bud, dear Bud. He was running around in his cell with a giant watch face hanging about his neck. He looked panic-stricken and shouted, “I’m out of time, I’m out of time!” He kept bouncing off the bars of his cell, and, as he did so, they transformed into giant rose stems, the thorns cutting into his flesh until he was covered in blood. But he didn’t stop running, around and around, bouncing and bleeding. I felt sorrow, and anguish, gripping my stomach.

  Dorothea appeared next. She was a red-cloaked giant, swooshing into the municipal hall demanding that Bud be hanged. Her voice made the walls shake. She pumped her fists at the roof, which blew away to reveal dark thunderclouds. “Hang him, hang him!” she bellowed, and a gallows appeared in the corner of the hall, looming ominously, and growing by the minute.

  I saw myself pop into existence in the middle of the hall, surrounded by a group of menacingly tall men. Al, Frank, and Dean crowded around me. As they grew ever taller, I felt as though I was shrinking. The foliage on Dean’s Hawaiian shirt sprang to life and started to grow independently of the man. Sinuous vines crept across the floor of the municipal hall, which was disappearing and transforming into Margarita’s flower shop. Suddenly the vines blew apart, and the insubstantial flower shop was full of living blooms. They were singing and weeping for Margarita, who lay among them, broken into pieces, but alive. “My children, I love you all,” she was saying, as she gathered as many of the living, singing, weeping flowers into her arms as she could.

  I reached toward the woman, who I saw had a golden scar running across her face, which she stroked proudly, but she turned away from me and screamed to Al that he had to save her, he had to make her whole. Al ran to her, his chest puffed out in his glittering dress uniform, which I somehow recognized as an ancient French general’s style, and he gathered the pieces of Margarita together, but they kept slipping through his arms. He called, in French, for Frank to help him, but Frank was drinking tea with Ada. They seemed completely oblivious of everything that was going on around them, content to be in their own little world, with Ada pouring tea and Frank telling her how useless their children had turned out, but how much he loved her. Ada was pushing his hat off his head. Telling him it was rude to wear it indoors.

  I saw a cigar in Frank’s hand, but I couldn’t smell the smoke. I did smell an overwhelming scent of dampness, mold. I turned from the scene where Margarita lay to see Greg Hollins curled up on a big, moldy cushion on the floor in front of me. He was leering up at me and offering me a pack of cigarettes that I somehow knew were made of rose petals, not tobacco. “You’ll enjoy them; they are very good quality; they are exactly what I tell you they are . . . you know you want them,” he said greasily, with a sly look and a crooked smile. I pushed the packet, and him, away, and I turned again to try to escape.

  Jean George sprang out of the ground in front of me. She scowled. “We don’t want you here!” she screamed, but as she did so, her voice was drowned out by another, more piercing scream. I knew it was Serena. I would recognize her scream anywhere. She flew into the room, a bird with a giant female head and a bill that was wide open. She landed on top of Bud’s prison cell, and her claws and beak tried to reach him inside. I ran to chase the woman-bird away, but Al grabbed me, dragging me back to Henry’s house, where he pushed open the front door with one finger and said, “You should lock your door, Cait. It’s too easy for people to get inside.”

  “Leave her alone,” shouted Ada Taylor, suddenly beside me. “She’s a Canadian; she can’t have done anything wrong.”

  “She is not Canadian,” shouted Al. “Like me, she is nothing, she is no one. We have no home, people like us. We are not one thing, not another. Look,” he pointed at my face, “she has no face. No identity. Look around—no one has a face!”

  I looked around, and I could see that Al was right. No one had a face. They were just blobs, with no bodies, no faces, no identities. One blob moved, and it immediately became Greg Hollins, but a new version of the man: this version was wearing a hat with corks dangling from it, and had the legs of a kangaroo. Now, instead of holding a pack of cigarettes, he was holding a bottle of tequila toward a blob I knew to be Dorothea. “G’day Dotty, strewth, you’re fair dinkum. Have some of this . . .” he said, with a strangled Australian accent.

  Tony Booth appeared next. He was in his chef whites, but instead of a head he had a Día de los Muertos skull, like the one popularized in the etching La Calavera Catrina by José Guadalupe Posada. His body was elongated in the same style, and he was tossing pepper around his kitchen and wailing, “I am going to ride the surf forever!” Beside him appeared a weeping Madonna, who I knew, instinctively, was his wife, Callie. She showered her dead husband with yellow sticky notes as she sang, “The numbers always tell our secrets.”

  Dean and Jean George rushed by on a white horse, being chased by Juan Martinez in his blue pickup truck, which trailed blood and water rather than exhaust. His arm was hanging from the window of his truck, and I could hear him screaming the name of his dead daughter.

  Margarita magically appeared, alive and whole, filling her little white van with gas at a gas station, but the tank was overflowing, gas pouring down the hill, which was, I knew, the hill upon which the municipal hall was built. Then her white van transformed into a horse, still white because it was made of ice. It reared up and galloped away, and I was on its back. We passed grave after grave along the roadside until we reached Rutilio’s Restaurant, which was now floating on a pontoon out at sea, with fish swimming away from it in all directions. I jumped off the frozen horse and found myself behind Margarita’s flower shop, inside a tiny box that was so small I could hardly move. Rutilio stood above me, pouring tequila into the box from a tiny little bottle that seemed to pour forever. “Drink, drink, it is the good stuff—see, it is dark; that shows it has aged in the barrel.”

  “I don’t like tequila—I hate it!” I cried. I burst out of the little box and stood in front of Rutilio, who was holding a giant bunch of white roses.

  “For my dead niece, and for my dead friend.” He wept.

  Bob and Maria were now beside him, their individual faces mixed in my mind into one. They were twins, male and female. Then Miguel appeared, so very different from his brother. He slapped a big badge made of mirrored metal onto his brother’s puffed chest. “Now he is my pretty baby brother policeman,” he said. They all carried white roses.

  Dorothea, appearing as a red cloud above us all, blew at our little group like a fierce wind, scattering the others away so that only Rutilio and I remained. The roses he clenched were white, his shirt red, and he was grinning so widely I thought his head would split open. Then he began to disappear. In a series of blinks, he and I were at his niece’s grave, then at a church in Punta de las Rocas, then at a church in Puerto Vallarta, then back inside Margarita’s flower shop. As we moved from location to location he kept getting dimmer and dimmer, until all that was left was his chef hat, his teeth, and the white roses, all hanging in the air. Margarita’s store evaporated, leaving Rutilio standing in front of the rear wall of his restaurant, where his remaining features disappeared completely against the white of the wall.

  I jumped up from the cushioned bench with a start. Of course! White roses, yellow roses, red ro
ses, blood spatter, too much gas, the frozen horse, the flowers for four masses, and the Cheshire Cat.

  It couldn’t be! I was sure I knew who had killed Margarita, and why. Except it meant that they had to have been in two places at once. I was so close . . . but there seemed no way I could be right! Damn and blast!

  Time’s Up!

  I LOOKED AT MY WATCH. With the morning light streaming through the window of my cell, and rested eyes, I could make out that it was already gone 9:30 AM. Obviously my wakeful dreaming had become a full night of sleeping dreams! No wonder everything had seemed so complex and detailed—I’d been asleep for hours. Damn and blast! I’d needed that time to think.

  It dawned on me that the Federales should have already arrived. What was going on? I told myself that maybe the Mexican attitude toward timekeeping applied to the police force as well. Besides, it wasn’t as though I was looking forward to their arrival. I needed to get to the washroom.

  I popped a piece of gum into my mouth. That’s a bit fresher, but not much.

  “Al. Al? Any chance of using the washroom, please?”

  Al was outside my door immediately. Good grief, he is always so stealthy!

  “I wondered when you’d wake,” he said thickly. “Though I don’t know how you could sleep at all. You and . . . that man . . . have no shame. You don’t seem to feel the weight of your guilt at all.”

  A riposte of any sort was beyond me, let alone one as acidic as I’d have liked, so I just contented myself with heading toward his bathroom as fast as I could.

  When I was as cleaned up as I could be, I opened the bathroom door and said, “Is there any chance I could use the brush that’s in my purse? And maybe the lipstick . . .” Al was about to explode, I could tell. “I don’t want to use the lipstick to make myself look better. I don’t think that’s possible. But my lips have dried out, and they are cracking.” I licked them as I spoke. “It would help. Please?”

  Al tutted loudly, slammed the bathroom door, and shouted, “Don’t move!” as he stomped away.

  What was I going to do? Where could I go? How would I get there? I looked at the woman in the mirror, and my mother looked back at me. I shook my head at my mirror-self. When had I become my mother’s age? I didn’t have my glasses on, but my eyes were rested enough that I could see many wrinkles. Most from laughter, some from frowning at students, or worrying over grading. Probably many of them from smoking too much for too long. As I chewed my nicotine gum and thought about how I yearned for Bud and I to be together, I promised my mirror-self that if we got out of this, I’d never smoke again, I’d stop drinking, and I’d lose fifty pounds. It would be a new beginning. I could do it.

  Al knocked on the door and opened it a crack. I wonder what he thinks I’m doing! He’s not like a real cop at all. “I’m passing things to you,” he announced. He handed me my hairbrush and my lipstick.

  “Can I have my specs too, so I can see what I’m doing?” It seemed reasonable. I could hear Al rooting about in my purse, and my glasses appeared. “Thanks,” I said.

  Five minutes was all it took, but I felt like a new person when I emerged—ready to face my accusers and the rest of the world. Which was just as well, because when Al and I walked back into the municipal hall, the FOGTTs were there.

  “Good,” said Al, unsurprised. “You’re early.”

  I was puzzled. My watch had clearly said 9:50 AM in the bathroom. If the Federales had been due at 9:00 AM, what was it that the FOGTTs were early for? I couldn’t help but speak up. “What’s going on, Al? Why are these people here, and what’s happened to the Federales? They should have been here nearly an hour ago. Are they not coming?” I could hope.

  “They have ten minutes yet,” said Al abruptly. “They’ll be on time.”

  Am I losing my mind? “But my watch says it’s 9:50.”

  “Haven’t you changed it?” interrupted Dorothea in her booming voice.

  I knew I was in a terrible situation, but I wasn’t going to take that from her. “Yes, Dorothea, I have changed my watch. I changed it on the airplane when we arrived in Puerto Vallarta. They announced the local time before we got off. We’re two hours ahead of Vancouver here.”

  “No, we’re not,” the horrid woman snapped. “You don’t know anything, do you? You come here, poking your nose into our business and doing terrible things, but you have no idea.” She puffed up her chest, encased this time in magenta, and said, “Here in Punta de las Rocas, we’re in Nayarit. And Nayarit is an hour behind PV. Everyone knows that!”

  I could see Ada and Frank Taylor, and Dean and Jean George, nodding in agreement with the annoying Dorothea. Greg ignored her. I sensed that something had happened between him and Dorothea—something had made him angry with her. Not unusual, in all probability.

  At least now I understood why Dorothea had said that Margarita’s murder had taken place at 11:00 AM. I must have heard a clock from outside Nayarit chime twelve that day.

  “Whatever the time, why are you all here?” I snapped out of my thoughts and asked an obvious, if somewhat rude-sounding, question.

  “I invited them,” replied Al gruffly. “I want everyone who has been touched by the death of Margarita to be here when the Federales come to take him, and you, away.” More like you want an audience so you can show off, I thought.

  “You can wait in your cell until the Federales arrive. I have put some bread and some coffee there for you. I must make myself ready.”

  After Al locked me into my little room once again, I consumed my breakfast with gusto. Still glugging coffee I peered into the hall, where I could see Ada and Frank with their heads together. Poor things, they were obviously feeling very uncomfortable about the whole situation, and I wondered if they’d stick it out. Meanwhile, from my vantage point behind the grille, I could see Dean and Greg hauling chairs into a semicircle facing the end wall of the municipal hall. Ada shooed Frank away to help out, and sidled toward the door to my personal prison.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “Not too bad, thank you, Ada,” was what I said. How on earth do you think I’m doing? was what I really felt like saying. But it wasn’t poor Ada’s fault that I was in this state. I couldn’t take it out on her. That wasn’t fair.

  “I talked to Frank last night about whether we should get in touch with the Canadian embassy—or someone like that—about you being arrested. I even talked to my son about it, you know, on the internet. They both said I should leave it up to Al. But I’ll do it if you like. I could go outside and phone them now. I put the number into my cell phone. Would you like me to do that?”

  My heart softened even further toward the woman. “Let’s see how things go. If I shout out to you for help as they drag me away, maybe you could make that call?”

  Ada nodded and scuttled away. I wondered, just for a fleeting moment, if she was the operative in the area that Jack had referred to. He would likely know her, and if she was undercover, she was making a good job of it. I could tell from Ada’s body language as she made her way back toward Frank that she hoped no one had seen her, but I also noted that Al’s eagle eyes hadn’t missed a thing. He cast a suspicious glance toward Ada as she began to help out with the chairs. While the seating arrangements were being made in the hall, as if for a civic meeting, the rest of the gang showed up. By the time the Federales arrived, everyone was there: the FOGTTs had been joined by Bob and Maria, Rutilio, Serena, and, of course, Miguel and Juan, who arrived together. Nobody looked as grim as the Federales.

  I hadn’t been sure what to expect. What I saw was an intimidating sight. As Al greeted their arrival by saluting and fussing about them, I could see him, more clearly than ever, as a relatively young man, with the softness and eagerness of the graduate student who loves art, literature, and poetry etched on his face. His federal colleagues, however, were a different breed altogether. Militaristic in appearance, they were dressed in black, wearing ball caps, Kevlar vests, and gun belts that dwarfed Al’s. Severa
l of them had automatic weapons slung over their shoulders as well as pistols in holsters. They were all business. Five of them surrounded a shorter man, who looked as dapper as he did forbidding in a more formal, but still highly militarized, uniform. If the number of gold stripes on his uniform, and the uprightness of his stance, were anything to go by, this man was pretty high up the food chain. I guessed he was in charge, and the way that Al, Miguel, and the other cops were deferring to him made that clear.

  What was also clear was that Al was setting the stage in such a way that he would be the star. The body language among the Federales told me that they were being faced with a situation they had not expected. They’d marched through the main entrance to the municipal hall, so they hadn’t seen Bud in his cell, and no one seemed to have noticed the room I was in, let alone me in it. Unfortunately I couldn’t hear anything that was being said, because everyone was way down at the far end of the hall. I didn’t have to wait long to know what was going to happen.

  Al came to the door of my little room, unlocked it, and said pointedly, “They are here. Don’t make a fuss, or they’ll probably shoot you.” Nice!

  He put handcuffs on me, with my hands in front of my body, led me to a chair set to one side of the main group, and sat me down. Miguel was next to me, so close I could smell the tobacco on his clothes. I chewed my gum and wondered if I usually smelled that bad.

  Al brought Bud from his cell. Upon Bud’s arrival, two of the Federales stood beside him, one on either side, as he slumped onto a chair. Their automatic weapons were ready for action.

  I looked at Bud, now no more than ten feet away from me. He looked awful. Al stood and cleared his throat. This was obviously an important moment for him, and he looked nervous. He began in Spanish, translating into English as he went.

  He introduced the cop with all the braiding on his jacket as the man who’d been heading up the Rose Killer case. He also introduced the head guy’s right-hand man, who looked pretty evil to me. Of all of them, he was the slyest looking. With this guy by his side, his boss could afford to sit and look imperious, which he did very well. The man with the most stripes was Captain Manuel Enrique Herrera Soto. The way Al introduced him made it quite clear that being a captain in the Federales was quite a different thing to being the captain in a tiny municipality. Context!