Tom said it sounded like fun.
Ah yes, it was like Paradise, she said, and her father was a highly regarded man in their barrio. Of course it was hot in summer, that was the chief drawback, a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade sometimes. Then big black clouds would pile up along the Sierra Madre Occidental, and it would rain so hard, inches in just two hours. Then it would be sunny again. Sunny, sunny, sunny! That was how life went in Sinaloa.
Tom wanted to know if her father was still alive. She replied with joy that her father lived on, past eighty now, in good health. Perez was visiting him on his present trip to Mexico.
`I'd like to visit your father.'
`Maybe you will some day.'
I opened the door. Tom was at the kitchen table, eating the last of his soup. Mrs. Perez was leaning over him with a smiling maternal mouth and faraway eyes. She looked distrustfully at me. I was an alien in their land of Sinaloa.
`What do you want?'
`A word with Tom. I'll have to ask you to leave for a bit.'
She stiffened.
`On second thought, there won't be any more secrets in this house. You might as well stay, Mrs. Perez.'
`Thank you.'
She picked up the soup bowl and walked switching to the sink, where she turned the hot water full on. Tom regarded me across the table with the infinite boredom of the young. He was very clean and pale.
`I hate to drag you back over the details,' I said, `but you're the only one who can answer some of these questions.'
`It's okay.'
`I'm not clear about yesterday, especially last night. Were you still at the Barcelona Hotel when Mike Harley got back from Vegas?'
`Yes. He was in a very mean mood. He told me to beat it before he killed me. I was intending to leave, anyway.'
`And nobody stopped you?'
`He wanted to get rid of me.'
`What about Sipe?'
`He was so drunk he hardly knew what he was doing. He passed out before I left.'
`What time did you leave?'
`A little after eight. It wasn't dark yet. I caught a bus at the corner.'
`You weren't there when Dick Leandro arrived?'
`No sir.'
His eyes widened. `Was he at the hotel?'
`Evidently he was. Did Sipe or Harley ever mention him?'
`No sir.'
`Do you know what he might have been doing there?'
`No sir. I don't know much about him. He's their friend.'
He shrugged one shoulder and arm toward the front of the house.
`Whose friend in particular? His or hers?'
`His. But she uses him, too.'
`To drive her places?'
`For anything she wants.'
He spoke with the hurt ineffectual anger of a displaced son. `When he does something she wants, she says she'll leave him money in her will. If he doesn't, like when he has a date, she says she'll cut him out. So usually he breaks the date.'
`Would he kill someone for her?'
Mrs. Perez had turned off the hot water. In the steamy silence at her end of the kitchen, she made an explosive noise that sounded like `Chuh!'
`I don't know what he'd do,' Tom said deliberately. `He's a yacht bum and they're all the same, but they're all different, too. It would depend on how much risk there was in it. And how much money.'
'Harley,' I said, `was stabbed with the knife your father gave you, the hunting knife with the striped handle.'
`I didn't stab him.'
`Where did you last see the knife?'
He considered the question. `It was in my room, in the top drawer with the handkerchiefs and stuff.'
