The taxista insisted that he knew where he was going when they started. And after stopping at three dirty little buildings where the main source of income was the selling of women flesh, he was still muttering, "Calma, senor! Calma, por favor! I find pretty quick."
Alex settled back in the cab and let him try. That was all he could do.
The next building was a squat, dirty green two-story with grimy windows and a smell half-way between second-hand semen and a spilled bottle of cheap perfume, the sort someone might use to disguise a cesspool.
Two or three Mexican women with furtive eyes were stringing fresh-washed sheets on a line.
The taxista went up to one of them and asked if this was La Casa de Los Angeles.
"Si." The woman, swarthy with the high cheekbones that revealed much Indian blood, walked away and began to hang laundry on the next line.
The taxista followed her, spewing a voluble stream of Spanish apparently designed to get her talking again. She spat on the ground and turned her back.
Saying something clearly obscene, the cab driver grabbed the woman and turned her, raising his hand to strike her across the face.
"Hit me," she said, "pig! Then I tell Manuel Ramos and he will fix one pig of a taxista!"
The cab driver's olive complexion paled visibly. "Perdoname," he said, backing off.
The Indian woman laughed at him. "Come back tonight, pig! When we are open. We do not work day and night like some animals!"
"No!" the taxista snapped back. "Just at night, like all animals!" Hastily he dodged a clod of dirt one of the women threw at him, and then he was pushing Alex back into the cab as the women screeched insults after him to the effect that he was the result of a coupling between his mother and a scabby dog.
The prostitutes were still in the dusty dirt road making obscene gestures when they were more than a block away.
"Whores!" the driver said in disgust, hawked and spat out his window.
Alex dodged back in time to escape the backlash. "Yes," he said.
"It's no good talking to them. What can a man say to a woman who makes a living on her back. They are only good for one thing." The driver took both hands off the wheel to punctuate his words with a short, vicious gesture. "Putas! They say they are too busy to take you now. That they are too good to wipe their shoes with you. Come back tonight, they say." The driver unleashed another stream of disgusted spittle out the open car window.
"It's all right."
"Bueno. We go someplace else. I know a nice girl in the hills. No casa de putas. Clean. Better for you than those whores. Si?"
"No," Alex said. "Take me to the border for now."
The driver shrugged. "You are loco!"
"Yes. I am that!"
Alex went to his apartment where he changed his clothes. Then, making a face at himself in the mirror, he went to the San Diego Police Station, a rambling Spanish style building that sprawled on the edge of the waterfront across from the Coronado Ferry.
At least the Mexican police had listened to him. But the American version was so much more precise, logical.
Did he know the women's names? No! Just Fran and Renee.
Did he know where they were staying? No! He thought it was a hotel in San Diego, but he wasn't sure. That brought a chuckle and the question, "You know how many hotels there are in San Diego, buddy?"
Where were they from? That was easier. They were schoolteachers from Eureka, Montana. ("Jesus Christ, where's Eureka, Montana?" And they all had to search a McNally Atlas to prove there was such a place.) Then the cops gave him a funny look after he described the way the two women hall picked him up and taken him to the whorehouse. In fact, the way they were trading looks gave Alex the impression he was going to see the inside of a psychiatrist's office if he hung around too long.
He broke off the conversation and said, awkwardly, he had to go.
"Sure, buddy." The detective leaned across the desk to look at him more carefully, as if memorizing his face. He was a clean-cut young kid. The sort they put on police recruiting posters. "We'll check," he said. "We'll let you know what we find."
The look he gave Alex promised that wasn't all he was going to check. "Besides," he added, "there's not much we can do in Mexico anyway."
Alex tucked his tail between his legs and retreated as gracefully as he could.
There was something to be said about unshaven Mexican cops with fat guts, he had to admit. Maybe they didn't get all the job done – but at least they did part of it.
Anyway, Alex knew where he stood, now.
Alone. Completely and irrevocably alone. If anything was going to be done he was going to do it.
Alex Benson, he thought, boy detective. He wished that he had passed out in that bar before the two women found him. Traveling salesmen, he thought bitterly, should stick to traveling and not Galahading around in foreign countries. Not even in this country.
Rubbing his eyes wearily, he decided there was time for a nap before he headed back to Tijuana.