Dress Her in Indigo Read Online Free PDF Page A

good voice, husky and very personal. She got my name and came back and said,
    "Hang in there while waterboy gets the soap out of his eyes, friend."
    He came on the line, properly enthusiastic. He is a young partner in a Miami advertising firm.
    He was born and partially raised in Cuba. He is the agency expert in Mexico and doing well. I had made a good recovery for them some time ago when a secretary, unbonded, took off with enough cash out of the safe to sting them pretty good. He was delighted to learn Meyer was with me, and apologetic about having a date he couldn't break. But he said he could stop off on the way, so in thirty minutes or so he joined us at the bar in the Camino Real which he favored, named Azulejos, bringing with him the voice on his phone, a young girl at least five ten, suitably spectacular, and clad in minileather fastened with big brass chains and galoshes snaps. Her name was Miranda Dale and she had just finished a bit part in a West German motion picture they had shot at Mazatlan, on Mexico's west coast.
    I told Ron our problem, and the girl listened to it with a pretty and sympathetic show of interest.
    I asked him if he could recommend a useful and influential contact in Oaxaca, and he came up with one named Enelio Fuentes and wrote it on the back of his business card and slid it across to me. He said Enelio was an old friend, had a big VW agency and other business interests scattered around the State of Oaxaca. But he couldn't help with a name in Culiacan. He said he would phone Fuentes and tell him to take care of me if I had to look him up.
    Then I asked him how he would go about checking on the Chevrolet truck and camper with Florida plates, registered to a Walter Rockland, and he said he wouldn't even try. In theory you get car papers at the border, and they keep a copy at the place where you enter, and if you leave at some other border town, the stamped papers are supposed to go back to the place where you entered, and then the set is supposed to be sent to Mexico City and filed somewhere, possibly by Page 12

    some branch of the Mexican Tourist Bureau. But that was only theory.
    I said we'd be back in Mexico City sooner or later, but right now the most useful thing to do was get down to Oaxaca while there was still a good chance that friends of Miss Bix might be around.
    They had to leave. Went across the dim and crowded room. Those long, sweet, taffy-sleek legs, from boot leather to mini-leather, seemed to gather available light and reflect it. Three mariachi types were on the stand, one singing a ballad, and he inserted an improvisation I could not catch.
    Ron turned, grinning, and called something to the musicians, and there was laughter and applause.
    Meyer and I stayed on. He had discovered that tequila anejo conmemorativo, with sangrita on the side, is one of the world's more pleasant drinks. The anejo-the "j" pronounced like a guttural cough-means old. The conmemorativo means a very special distillation. It is drunk straight, pale amber in color, strong, smooth, and clean. The chaser's full name is sangrita de la viuda, which means for some reason I have yet to learn, "little blood of the widow". It is tomato juice, citrus juices, with several varieties of pepper and spices. It changes the taste buds, readies them for the next sip of the tequila. Meyer crooned and beamed and ordered more.
    But later his mood changed. "Vulgarity can be many things," he said. "It can be having a good time while en route to where the daughter of an old friend died. Dead young women are a pitiful waste."
    We had finished a late dinner. "Tequila shouldn't make you morose," I told him.
    "Without it, I would probably be crying," he said.
    Three
    WE WERE reserved on an early Mexicana flight. It was an elderly Douglas with four genuine propellers and a full load of passengers. Noisy engines, with oil stains on the housings, littered floor, some popped rivets, lots of vibration. My turn at the window seat. Went