Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen
years ago for a few months in the sun. Robbie needed it. We’ve been here ever since.” She smiled with just her mouth. “Robbie is a remittance man. I’m a remittance woman. We’re paid a monthly stipend to keep out of the family’s hair. Remittance men. The polite word is expatriate.”
“Sure,” I said, “that’s why you don’t like the Governor.”
It was another needle, but the wrong one. She drank her black coffee, cocked an ear to the flamenco wail and pretended I was three thousand miles away. I looked at the poster again and asked, because I wanted to break the silence, “Where’s Fuengirola?”
“Nine miles down the Malaga-Cadiz caretera toward Gibraltar.” She finished her coffee and added unexpectedly, “The last time I saw Robbie he was on his way there.”
“To do what?”
“I—I’d rather not say.”
“Would you rather I didn’t find him?”
“You seem very confident you will.”
“If a private detective doesn’t handle divorce cases, and I don’t, a lot of his business is bound to be skiptracing. Every Missing Persons Bureau in every police force in the States is overworked and understaffed, which is one reason the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia license guys like me. And plenty of times when a man disappears there are reasons why his family can’t or don’t want to call in the police. These cases usually form a pattern, Mrs. Hartshorn. A man turns up among the missing for two reasons basically: money and sex. So if you’re called in and you’re given the facts, you can usually see a pattern. I’m not confident, I’m hopeful. But you could disappoint me. It isn’t my spouse who’s missing. You haven’t told me anything yet which indicates you want him found. Maybe you don’t.”
“That’s pretty brutally frank.”
“You didn’t hire me. Your father-in-law did.”
“I want Robbie found. We love each other. Ours is a perfect marriage.”
“Congratulations. Why was he on his way to Fuengirola?”
“You don’t understand. We—someone else is involved.”
“Someone else is always involved. What’s the pattern, Mrs. Hartshorn? Money or sex?”
“You’re so smug. I hate smug men.”
I wasn’t smug. I was trying to establish a client-investigator relationship with her, trying to build her confidence in me even if she wound up hating me the way a patient hates his analyst in the beginning, and getting nowhere fast. “Who else is involved?”
“That’s none of your business. I wish you hadn’t come here.” She lit a cigarette. “The Guardia will find him.”
“He’s been missing how long? Two weeks? You were worried enough to write the Governor about it.”
“No I wasn’t. Robbie always cashes his remittance check on the first of the month. When he didn’t this month, the Governor wrote us. When I didn’t answer, he got in touch with the Consul in Malaga. That’s why you’re here.”
“Then you’re not worried? Has Robbie up and disappeared like this before?”
“No. We’re always together. Always. I’m worried. I’m frantic. But—” She let her words trail off. The gypsy clapping across the plaza seemed louder.
“But someone else is involved. Who?”
The other sidewalk tables outside the Club Mañana had begun to fill. There was talking and laughter. I recognized some of the faces I had seen at the Hartshorn villa.
“Party’s breaking up,” I said.
“That’s the first round. They’ll be back.”
At the table next to ours a woman’s husky whisky-voice said, quite distinctly, “I want your husband.” I wasn’t only smug, I was rude. I did some staring. Four people sat at the next table. One was the chunky woman I had met on the terrace: Mrs. Huntington. Next to her sat a tall man, solidly built but with narrow shoulders. He wore his gray hair in a crewcut and leaned his jowly face on a big soft hand. He had small, stubborn, close-set eyes. He looked drunk enough to be indifferent or indifferent enough to be drunk. I decided he was Mr. Huntington. Across from them and with their backs to us sat a man and a woman.
“I said, Marcia, that I want your husband,” Nancy Huntington repeated.
The other woman laughed. “Well then don’t let me stand in the way, dear,” she said, and her accent was north-country English. “Take him.”
The man whose back was turned laughed uncertainly and asked in Spanish, “What does she wish for? Is she very drunk?”
“She pretends to be drunker than she is,” the woman replied in Spanish.
“I resemble that remark,” Nancy Huntington said. “But I meant what I said. I want your—”
“I said you could take him, love. Please do. You’re boring me, you know. But on the other hand if he understood English better, you’d be boring him too.”
Mr. Huntington frowned. Mrs. Huntington said spitefully, “I hear you got gored by a bull before you retired. In the wrong place. I hear you can’t have children.”
“If I could have children, love,” North-country said, “and if they looked like your children, I wouldn’t want any.”
Mrs. Huntington had been drinking a gin-and-tonic. She raised her glass and hurled its contents in the other woman’s face. Mr. Huntington got up, looking pained. Mrs. Huntington got up too. North-country rose too. She was big. She wore tapered slacks and she was built mannishly and she must have been six feet tall in her low-heeled sandals. She leaned across the small table and swatted Mrs. Huntington indelicately across the chops. Mrs. Huntington went over backwards and landed across a chair, which promptly splintered the way breakaway chairs do in the movies. The gypsies went on clapping across the plaza. There wasn’t another sound.
Mr. Huntington crouched near his wife. Her eyes blinked. The left side of her face was red from hairline to jaw. “Maybe we’d better get on home,” Mr. Huntington said in a dead voice.
“I’ll get you, you Maltese bitch,” Mrs. Huntington told the lady bullfighter. The Spanish-speaking man hadn’t left his seat. “What has happened?” he asked. I realized then that he was blind.
It was over a minute after that. Mr. Huntington dropped two hundred-peseta notes on the table, helped his wife to her feet and walked off into the darkness with her. The lady bullfighter told Andrea Hartshorn, “It started at your party, you know.”
“I know, Marcia. I saw.”
“Fernando wouldn’t spit on the best part of her. But then, she really oughtn’t to have hurled her drink at me.”
Then the blind man got up. He looked about forty-five with long dark hair going gray, a handsome broad-cheekboned face, and shoulders like a weight-lifter’s. His eyes had the blank stare of the blind.
“Me gusté la fiesta,” he told Andrea Hartshorn.
“Me alegro mucho,” she said automatically. I’m very glad. Then the blind man and his bullfighter wife left, his hand on her forearm. I heard the buzz of conversation at the tables around us again.
“I like your friends,” I told Mrs. Hartshorn.
“Marcia and Fernando are nice. She was born on Malta, her parents were Yorkshire and she used to be a bullfighter at the local férias like the one in Fuengirola. She was gored, and that ended it. Fernando is a local product. He was an artist, and not at all bad. He went away for a year—let me see—about three years ago, and came back to Torremolinos blind. No one knows how. He isn’t talking. He turned to sculpture, and he makes a pretty good living at that too. Marcia married him two years ago.”