Ask for Me Tomorrow

Jenkins turned and began running toward the bridge, dodging between pedestrians and around passing cars. He was small and agile, and whatever illness he was suffering from hadn’t affected his speed. By the time he reached the bridge he was ahead of Aragon by a hundred yards or more. He started to cross the bridge, his arms flapping like the clipped wings of a chicken. Then, about a third of the way across, he suddenly stopped and clutched his stomach as though he was going to be sick again.

He leaned over the railing. People paid no attention to him. They were like travelers on the deck of a ship politely ignoring a fellow passenger who was seasick. Five seconds later he had disappeared into the concrete darkness below the bridge.

A woman screamed. A crowd gathered. People peered down into the darkness to see if anything exciting was going on. It wasn’t. They walked on by.

Aragon stood at the railing. Beads of sweat rolled down his face, as cold and heavy as hailstones. I have a nice feeling about you, laddie. You’re going to bring me luck.

“God Almighty,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, Jenkins, I’m sorry.”

A short fat young man stopped beside him. He wore a striped serape over his work clothes, and his hair was greased back over his head so that it looked like a black plastic cap. He had a wheezy worried voice: “Did you push him?”

“Push him? For Christ’s sake, he was a friend of mine.”

“Then why were you chasing him?”

“I was trying to help him.”

“Why was he running away from you?”

“I don’t know. Now will you please—”

“Pretty soon the police will arrive. Already I hear the sirens.”

Aragon heard them, too.

“They’ll be nasty,” the man said. “They always are when such a serious crime is committed.”

“There was no crime.”

“They arrest everyone in sight, helter-skelter. They have to act fast because corpses are usually buried the next day... What story will you give them?”

“No story. Just the truth. I was trying to save him, to take him home because he was sick.”

“It didn’t look that way to me. You were chasing him and he was trying to escape from you. The police don’t like it when Americans come here to murder each other. It gives our country a bad reputation.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“And if the Americans also swear and blaspheme—”

“Okay, okay. How much?”

“Twenty dollars seems a small price to stay out of our jail. We have a very poor jail.”

Aragon gave him a twenty-dollar bill and the man disappeared into the crowd as quickly as Jenkins had disappeared into the darkness below the bridge.

The sirens were getting closer. He started walking as fast as he could back toward the Domino Club. His legs felt rubbery and the sweat was still pouring down his face.

Twelve

The back booth at the Domino Club where Jenkins had been sitting was cleaned up and smelled of disinfectant. The cleanup even included the young bartender who’d spoken to him previously. He wore a freshly laundered white jacket with the name Mitchell stitched across the breast pocket.

Aragon sat down in the booth. About three minutes later Mitchell joined him, bringing along a cup of coffee. He didn’t offer Aragon either the coffee or anything else.

“How’s your friend?”

“Dead.”

“Yeah? Well, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

“His name was Harry Jenkins,” Aragon said quietly. “He wasn’t a bad man, just unlucky. He had the wrong kind of friends.”

“There’s a right kind? Show me.”

“What was he drinking?”

“Beer. I took the empty bottle away myself before I had one of the boys tidy the place up.”

“Your boys are very thorough tidy-uppers. Do they always use a gallon of disinfectant after each customer?”

“The booth stank of puke and whiskey.”

“You said Jenkins was drinking beer.”

“I removed an empty beer bottle from this table. I didn’t smell it to see what had been in it. I figured a beer bottle would contain beer. Anyway, that was his usual drink. He often came in and ordered a beer. He’d nurse a single bottle along for half the night, waiting around for a touch or whatever he had in mind. How come all this fuss over one little dead man?”

“I think he was poisoned.”

“You think funny. Go home. Sleep it off.”

Aragon looked at his watch. It was twenty after one. “Jenkins called me about two hours ago at my hotel. He was completely sober and in good spirits. Yet forty-five minutes and one bottle of beer later, he was so stoned out of his head that he went and jumped off a bridge. Does that make sense?”

“My business is to make money, not sense. And you know how I do it? I keep my nose clean and out of other people’s affairs. I also stay away from booze.”

“Jenkins told me on the phone that he was with somebody, an American.”

“He wasn’t an American.”

“What was he?”

“Like I said, I mind my own affairs. But I couldn’t help noticing that he was dark-skinned and wearing the usual Mexican work clothes, half native, half cowboy.”

“How old was he?”