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alone to do your own thing. Mike is a painter."
    "Wants to be a painter," he corrected.
    "And he doesn't want to talk about it. He gets up early and he works all day and he goes to bed.
    And I prowl around driving hard bargains for tortillas and beans and rice and thinking up new ways to cook them. So today I got a little check from my sister in Detroit. So we're living it up. I mean we aren't here much, so we don't keep good track. Anyway, she's dead. What are you after?"
    Mike Barrington said, "If old dads wondered if somebody pushed his baby darling off the mountain, he might send somebody like Mr. McGee to come and snuff around."
    "Oh, he doesn't doubt that it was an accident. It was a pretty good police report. They were out of touch since last January, when she came to Mexico. He wants to know what the last six months of her life were like. How she lived and what she thought and how she died."
    "And," said Della with an acid sweetness, "I suppose she was always a very good girl."
    "Kept her room neat," I said, "got good grades, remembered names, thanked the hostess, brushed her teeth, and said her prayers. I guess he'd like to know who the hell she was."

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    "None of them know who we are," Mike said. "Or care much, really. Hang in there with an image they can live with, and they love it. You don't know who they are, and they don't know who you are."
    "So who was Bix Bowie?"
    "A girl who died young," Della Davis said.
    "If I had to guess why," Mike said, "and understand I'm not knocking her, I'd say she was probably turned way on. She was high and she was flying, and she was coming down the mountain without knowing if she was there or she was dreaming it, and it turned out she wasn't dreaming it. In a dream, when you hit bottom, you wake up. The thing about Mexico, the stuff that's on prescription in the States, here you can buy it in any drugstore. All you have to know is the name of what you want. Little lists circulate. The right names for Thorazine, Compazine, oral Demerol, Doriden, reserpine. Mardil, Benzedrine, other amphetamines. And in the public market, at the herb stalls, you can buy a kilo brick of very good, strong pot. It's all a big lunch counter. You mix them up in brand new ways and wait and see where and how it hits you. If you like it, you try to find the same combination again."
    She put her wiry black hand on his and said, "That used to be the name of your game, sweetheart."
    "There's a better high," he said, smiling into her eyes. "I don't ever have to come down off this one." She gave me a bawdy wink, which somehow was not bawdy at all, and said, "Like the old saying, man, I changed his luck."
    "It needed changing," Mike said.
    "Was she any kind of hooked?" I asked them.
    "I wouldn't know," Mike said. "I didn't know her. It's unfair to make guesses. Maybe one of those damned cows came clumping onto the road and she swerved and lost the car. But it's fair to say she was some kind of user, because it was users she was with, mostly, but I don't know how much or how often, or even what."
    "Those seven over there at that table. Would any of them know more about her?"
    Uella leaned back and made a careful inspection. "I just don't know. If any of them, it would be the girl facing this way, with the round face and the reddish hair and the big sunglasses, and the skinny follow sitting on her left. I think they've been here the longest."
    "Got a name for either of them?"
    "Mike, isn't that the girl they call Backspin?"
    "Yes. God knows why."
    I used my little notebook to refresh my memory. "liere are the names of the ones she came into the country with back in January. Stop me if I come to anyone you know. Carl Sessions? Jerry Nesta? Minda McLeen?"

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    "Whoa," Della Davis said. "Little bit of a darkhaired girl. She and that Bix were usually together.
    Strange-acting girl. Haven't seen her around lately. But that doesn't mean anything. Mike, darling, that horrible bore of a man with the funny hat.