Ask for Me Tomorrow

“Even if I told you, you couldn’t find her. It’s not like she has an ordinary job with a real address and maybe even a telephone. Looking for customers while dodging the police, that takes moving around, see?”

“Where are you, Jenkins?”

“I asked you not to press me, laddie,” Jenkins said and hung up.

Aragon put the phone back on the hook. It was late and he was tired. He would have liked to go to bed and forget about Jenkins for the night, but the conversation had made him uneasy on two counts. The first was the possibility that if Jenkins plucked enough feathers out of his new pigeon, he wouldn’t wait around town for Gilly’s extra two hundred. He’d be in Mexicali by morning.

The second possibility was in a sense more disturbing. Rich, drunk, gullible tourists were not uncommon in Rio Seco, but the fact that Jenkins found one so quickly and easily was suspicious. Nobody was easier to con than a con man, and Jenkins would be easier than most. He seemed to have the same kind of basic innocence he’d criticized in B. J. If B. J. believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, Jenkins believed in rainbows with pots of gold. The only thing that would protect him from being taken was that he had nothing much to take, only the fifty dollars he’d received in advance for locating Tula.

Aragon was almost certain that Jenkins had found out where the girl lived and that the reason he’d refused to give more information over the phone was his fear of not being paid the extra two hundred. For someone in Jenkins’ position it was a natural enough fear. He’d probably cheated and been cheated hundreds of times. Now that he had something real to sell he would deliver it in person, for cash and in his own time. Meanwhile, some half-soused American tourist was hearing a lot about chicken tortillas.

As he put on his coat and tie Aragon thought back over the conversation. Jenkins had not, in fact, mentioned the word “American,” only a pigeon ready for plucking. The pigeon could be an Eskimo or an Algerian, but the odds were against it. Emilia had named three places as Jenkins’ favorite hangouts because they catered to American tourists, and Jenkins had referred to two of them the previous night, El Alegre and the Domino Club.

Aragon combed his hair and straightened his tie in front of the bureau mirror. “You’re going out on the town, laddie.”

El Alegre was in a new section of town that was already beginning to look old and in another few years would be just another addition to the slums. Right now business was booming. A fleet of taxicabs was double-parked outside the entrance vying with each other for the attention of the hustlers. Jenkins had compared the girls hanging around outside the jail to a flock of starlings. That was how they looked now as they gathered on the sidewalk in front of the club, like starlings getting ready to roost for the night, twittering, fluttering, fidgeting, grumbling.

A teenager wearing a high-rise platinum wig and four-inch cork wedgies attached herself to Aragon’s coat sleeve and spoke to him in English. “Hey, gringo, you and me make fun. What kind of fun? You name it. You tiger, me pussycat, me tiger, you pussycat.”

“I’m here on business.”

“Okey-dokey, we do business.”

“No thank you.”

“No okey-dokey?”

“No okey-dokey.”

“Son a bitch cheapskate.” She returned to the flock, twitching her tail and smoothing her ruffled feathers. She was about fifteen, the age Tula had been when she’d gone to work as a maid in Gilly’s house.

Aragon looked over the girl’s companions, wondering if Tula was one of them. No, they were all too young. Tula would be twenty-three by now, young by the standards of an ordinary middle-class American, old for a prostitute in Rio Seco.

“Hey, gringo, lotsa fun. Play games. Hot stuff.”

The Domino Club was on the other side of the bridge crossing the seasonally dry river that gave the city its name. It was October and the rainy season was late starting. The rio was seco after months of drought, just as the wells in the higher sections of the city were drying up and those nearer the sea were turning to salt.

In earlier days a narrow wooden bridge had divided the slums and squatters from the residential areas of the more prosperous merchants and professional men. With the building of the new bridge over the new concrete lining of the riverbed, the two sections of town were becoming indistinguishable. Thousands of cars and pedestrians crossed the steel arch every day. The wealthier citizens resented the intrusion and escaped to the hills and the privacy of iron gates and chain-link fences. Their deserted houses were torn down for apartments or rebuilt into stores or night clubs like the Domino.