Murder on the Tropic

by Todd Downing

“Any ideas about that yet?”

  Rennert hesitated.

  “I think I have a very definite lead but I want to investigate a little more before I commit myself.”

  “All right, do as you think best. I’ll stand by the radio until nine o’clock in case anything develops. And I’ll try to get hold of a doctor as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Solier. Good-by.”

  “Say—Rennert—”

  “Yes?”

  “You have a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  Static splintered the words: “Don’t hesitate to use it if anything happens. I’ll straighten matters up with the Mexican authorities.”

  “I shan’t hesitate, Mr. Solier.”

  “Well, then—good-by.”

  “Good-by.”

  13

  Death’s Instruments

  Rennert sat for a long time, staring at the silenced radio. He was trying to sort into orderly arrangement the strands that lay tangled at his fingertips. His mind, however, kept grasping stubbornly at some illusive memory that dangled just out of its reach.

  It had been the mention of a doctor that had brought it so tantalizingly near. A tiresome discursive little American doctor with whom he had traveled one day, years before, out of the hot brooding land about Vera Cruz, where the sun and the air and the hostile tropical soil take toll of human life. The doctor, relieving his loneliness with talk while Rennert sat in drowsy inattention, had mentioned (he was positive of it) the word “yellow.”.…

  He turned around at a light footfall on the tiles.

  Esteban Flores was crossing the room.

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Rennert. I came to get the magazine that I was reading before dinner.”

  He picked it up and began to crease the paper with long dexterous fingers.

  “Mr. Falter,” he asked softly, “how is he?”

  “I haven’t any medical knowledge but he seems to be in a very serious condition.”

  The Mexican lowered himself onto the arm of a chair, carefully adjusting the knife-edge crease of his trouser legs.

  “They tell me that old Miguel Montemayor is sick, too.”

  “Yes, also seriously.”

  The young man’s face was polished granite in the weak glow of the light.

  “Do you know what the trouble is?”

  “No, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Mr. Falter’s words about the yellow light bulb—what did he mean?”

  “I wondered myself. Did it suggest anything to you?”

  Flores shook his head slowly.

  “Nothing. I thought at first that he was joking—How do you say?—kidding Miss Fahn because she was praying so long. Now, I do not know.”

  “You know this hacienda and its history. Have you ever heard of any sickness about here that had any connection with the color yellow?” (That memory, that association with the doctor’s conversation—what was it?)

  “No. Down along the coast, about Tampico, there is much yellow fever.”

  “No, that won’t do. Whatever this is, it gives its victims the strange illusion that objects they see are yellow.”

  The young man’s face was grim and his laugh sounded hollow.

  “Mr. Rennert, we of this hacienda have known little of sickness. The bullet and the machete have been our surgeons. They operate only once. Their patients are never troubled again—with anything.”

  “Your family has lived here for a long time, has it not?”

  Flores stirred on the chair-arm and laid one leg over the other. His hands held the magazine motionless and the signet ring caught and reflected the light. He fixed Rennert with the steady scrutiny of his eyes.

  “One of my ancestors came here with Francisco de Urdiñola in the sixteenth century. We have been here ever since. This house was built by my grandfather, Toledano Flores.” Something stirred in his eyes—something (Rennert would have sworn) calculating, as if he were measuring an adversary. “You have heard of my grandfather?”

  “Yes, a brave man, I understand.”

  “A very brave man, Mr. Rennert.” There was a pause and he said, his lips forming the words very carefully: “I am looking for his body, Mr. Rennert.”

  “Strange that it was never found.”

  “Yes. Shall I tell you the story, Mr. Rennert?”

  “If you wish. I thought the subject might be unpleasant for you.”

  “Unpleasant? No, it does not pain us to speak of him. We are proud that he died rather than leave his property to bandits. I shall tell you.” There was a persistence about his manner that rather puzzled Rennert. “They stole—the bandits—all that they could lay their hands on. Miguel and Maria they locked in a hut that used to stand on the hill, where the powerhouse is now. They threatened to set fire to it, if they interfered. They tortured my grandfather to make him tell where the family plate and jewels were hidden. My father and mother had taken them to the United States but they would not believe this. They thought they were hidden somewhere in the mountains. They staked him to the walls, with bayonets through his shoulders, and tortured him. The little Montemayor watched and told afterwards how the old man laughed at them and cursed them.”

  “The little Montemayor—Miguel and Maria’s son?”

  “Yes, I forgot that you did not know. He died this spring with a trouble of the intestines—helminthiasis. The little fellow ran away and hid in the hills until the bandits had gone. When he came back and let his father and mother out there was no trace of my grandfather. Miguel thought that he had been killed and buried somewhere near but could find no trace of the body. Maria was very ill afterwards. She had known of the torture, you see.”

  “Her mind was affected, they say.”

  Flores shrugged.

  “So they say, Mr. Rennert. She became very gentle and sad, like a little child. Since her own son died she spends all her time with her flowers. I think,” he hesitated, “that she feels that he is living again in them.”

  “Living again?”

  “Yes. You see, Mr. Rennert, they buried her son under the flowers in the inner patio. But I was telling you of my grandfather. After the Revolution my father came back and searched for the body but could find nothing. There was a story among the peons that the old man had lost his mind during the torture and had run away into the mountains. Some of them even said that they had seen him at the mouth of a cave. My father went and looked. Someone had been living there recently, yes, but there was no trace of my grandfather.”

  “You think there is still hope in looking?”

  “My father has heard a story—from a man in Mexico City—about another man who died there not long ago. This man had been a peon of my grandfather’s but joined the bandits. He said that they had killed my grandfather but had not bothered to bury him. This man stayed after they left and buried him on the hillside behind this house. He put a large rock over the grave so that the coyotes would not dig into it. He was ashamed, you see, of what had been done.

  “Of course,” Flores’ eyes were fixed with a peculiar intentness on Rennert’s face, “it may be nothing but a story. One hears so many of them in Mexico. But since I am here on the hacienda I am searching. It may take a long time but,” he shrugged, “this company—Falter, Solier, and Stahl—got this land so cheap that they can afford to entertain me a few weeks without charge.”

  Rennert thought: Mexicans are poor actors. He had some purpose in telling me of his grandfather and of the torture. I wonder what it was. He said: “I understood the company paid your father a good price for the property.”

  “A mere ten thousand pesos, Mr. Rennert. Do you call that a good price? Less than three thousand dollars.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “That is what they paid. My father took it because he was in need of money at the time and because under this government it is impossible for an hacendado to live.”

  Rennert had gotten up and strolled to the door, where he stood gazing out over the flowers. The sha
de that had fallen upon them seemed to have metamorphosed them strangely. The shade, deepening their hues, or an odd chiaroscuro effect of the light that shimmered over the upper surfaces of their petals. A hummingbird poised over a scarlet “rain of fire” with a whirr of wings like breath on paper. Tiny twilight insects darted about in swift sibilant confusion, creating by their invisibility the illusion that the flowers themselves were stirring and gasping in the humid still air.

  A sea-green worm crept from between two of the paving-stones and moved with awkward contortions of its swollen body toward the shelter of the yellow marigolds and their green leaves.

  … a wor.… the yellow of the marigold.… gree.…

  Memory stirred at last.…

  Behind him the static tore at the entrails of the radio, disrupting thought, and out of the torture of metal an announcer’s voice was saying, just coherent:

  “Communication with Tampico has not yet been established so that we are unable to give our listeners any account of the damage done there by the tropical hurricane which struck the city late this afternoon. The hurricane is reported to have continued its way inland in a general southwest-northeast direction at a velocity…”

  Static drowned the rest.

  14

  White Poison

  Mark Arnhardt was leaning against the bowl of the fountain, his pipe glowing like a steadily fanned coal and lending his face in the vague half-light a sombre brooding expression.

  “Hullo, Rennert,” he said without taking the pipe from his mouth. “This weather’s fierce, isn’t it?”

  “Something does seem to be wrong with the cool desert nights one reads about.”

  “Usually it begins to get cooler as soon as the sun goes down. Tonight it seems to be getting hotter. Wonder if you’ve got the same feeling I have?”

  “How’s that?”

  “As if—well, as if you were corked up in a bottle, with hot heavy air pressing against the sides, trying to smash in.”

  “That describes my feeling perfectly,” Rennert said. (It was more than that. The glass was slowly softening into the plasticity that precedes melting and he was staring through its blurred translucence at the edges of the roof sloping up into the ominously darkening sky.)

  “Must be the effects of that storm down on the Gulf. How’s Falter?” veering abruptly.

  “Very ill.”

  Arnhardt smoked for a moment in silence, his eyes taking on some of the concentrated fervor of the smoldering tobacco. Rennert could sense a slow tautening of muscles in his solidly planted body.

  “Rennert,” he said through teeth tight upon the amber, “I’m worried.”

  “Yes?” Rennert waited.

  Arnhardt jerked the pipe from his mouth, showering his trousers with embers. He slapped them off with one hand. His voice came as if muffled by the stagnant air: “Something’s wrong here! Wrong as hell!”

  “I agree with you. Do you want to talk to me about it now?”

  A long silence ended with the sharp tapping of the pipestem against the stone.

  “Is there any special reason why I should?” It was singularly devoid of hostility or of any feeling whatever.

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  Arnhardt drew a pouch from his hip pocket and deliberately filled his pipe. He seemed to take an unnecessarily long time in cramming the tobacco down.

  “Are you a private detective, Rennert?” he asked, apparently absorbed in the movements of his fingers.

  “No,” Rennert laughed shortly, “although I’m acting in that capacity now. I am an agent of the Customs Bureau of the United States Treasury Department. On furlough, as it were.”

  “Acting for Solier?”

  “My position is not very well defined but it is my understanding that I am acting for the company of which Solier forms a part. That includes, of course, you and Falter as well.”

  “I see. Then I can talk to you frankly and in confidence?”

  “Certainly.”

  “All right,” Arnhardt looked at him over the flare of a match, “I’ll talk.” He flipped the match into the flowers and stood up. “Let’s go outside where there’s no danger of being overheard.”

  “Very well.” Rennert said with deliberate intent: “I have in my room some whisky that I brought from Monterrey, in case you’d like a drink.”

  “No, thanks. I never touch it.” Arnhardt laughed. “I suppose you think it strange to find an American in Mexico who doesn’t drink?”

  “Not at all. My ideas about Americans in Mexico aren’t based entirely on observation of the American colony in Mexico City.”

  “I’ve heard they’re a bunch of sots. Well, it makes no difference to me one way or the other. I just don’t, that’s all.”

  They walked side by side through the doorway into the open grounds, flooded by the last of the day’s sunlight.

  “The reason I suggested a drink,” Rennert said, “was because I saw a whisky bottle in the wardrobe of your room—the room, that is, that I dispossessed you of.”

  “A whisky bottle? Oh, yes, that’s been there a long time. It was there when I moved in. I never touched it, though.”

  “It’s empty now.” Rennert slowed his steps.

  “Well? I’m not a detective but I should say that somebody drank it then.” It was an ineffectual attempt at humor, seemingly.

  Arnhardt led the way to a stone bench under a tall yucca tree a few feet from the southeast corner of the house.

  Over the tiled roof behind them the sky was clear, shot with purple ultramarine, but ahead of them clouds were banked low on the horizon, indistinguishable from the ranges that extended gulfward.

  “Clouding up, isn’t it?”

  The palette of the sky was lost for the moment on Rennert. He asked: “When was the last time you were in that room before I arrived?”

  “Early this afternoon, soon after lunch. I went into the sala to listen to the radio. There was so much static I turned it off. I went to sleep, must have slept an hour or so. When I woke up I went out to the powerhouse. I must have been there when you came.

  “Could you tell me when was the last time you saw that bottle with whisky in it?”

  Arnhardt clasped a knee between his hands and frowned in thought.

  “I wouldn’t swear to it, because I’ve gotten so used to seeing the bottle there, but I’m fairly sure there was whisky in it when I left. I kept a box of matches up on that shelf. Before I went out I got a handful. I think I would have noticed it if the bottle hadn’t been just as it always was—about a fourth full.”

  He held the pipe tightly gripped but was not drawing on it.

  “I see what you mean,” he said in a constrained far-away voice. “Someone drank that whisky after I left. Falter or Miguel. They’re both sick now.”

  “Falter had whisky of his own in his room.”

  “Miguel, then. He moved my things out.” Arnhardt bent forward in a hunched attitude and stared straight ahead of him. “Poison!” it had an ugly sound, the way he said it, as if he were putting into the syllables the essence of his antipathy.

  “Yes,” Rennert said, “I have no doubt that is what it was.”

  “So,” Arnhardt said slowly, “I’m the logical suspect. I poisoned the whisky, knowing that Miguel would probably take a drink of it when he saw it there. I also poisoned Falter. Probably the same way. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t jump at conclusions that quickly.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did. All I can say is that I didn’t do it. You can believe me or not.”

  “Don’t you think you might be a little franker with me than you were this afternoon, Arnhardt? Remember that your stepfather’s death is linked up apparently with the illness of these two men.”

  “Because of the symptoms—the recurrence of the yellow vision?”

  “Yes.”

  “That, of course, might be a coincidence.”

  “It might, yes.”r />
  “But you don’t think it is.”

  “No. Do you?”

  “I wish to God I could!” It was suddenly a young voice stripped of defensive hardness and, perhaps without being aware of it, seeking companionship. “I’ve got to have someone to talk to, Rennert. Some one I can trust. I’m going to trust you.”

  Rennert said nothing. There was no necessity and the utter hush that lay on the desert and the mountains and the leaves above them made words momentous things.

  “This is the first time I’ve admitted to anyone that my stepfather, George Stahl, was murdered.” Arnhardt’s voice quickened. “At first I took it for granted that it was sunstroke. There wasn’t any reason to think otherwise. His talk about things being yellow-well, I didn’t think anything about that. I supposed it was the sunlight he was talking about. I took his body back to Amarillo, Texas, as you know. It wasn’t until I was on the train coming back that I had time to think. I still remember it as vividly as if it had happened last night.” He held his chin propped upon his hand so that the words came slightly distorted. “It was one night while I was lying in my berth wide awake. It came over me all of a sudden that I wasn’t satisfied with the sunstroke explanation. It was too simple. And a man who is suffering from sunstroke doesn’t have the symptoms that Stahl showed.”

  “What were they?” Rennert asked quietly.

  “Pains—terrible convulsive pains—in the stomach and intestines. Vomiting. Fever. And—that illusion about things being yellow.”

  “That passed, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, after a while. Why?”

  “It did in Miguel’s case. But go ahead.”

  “Well, I began to think then about the circumstances. I remembered that Stahl had eaten lunch with the rest of us and hadn’t touched anything we hadn’t. Except afterwards. I’d gone to his room with him and he’d eaten some candy. Caramels. He had always liked them, especially this kind made by Wong’s in Mexico City, and had brought a box of them from Monterrey. He offered me some but I was smoking and didn’t take any. I left him then. About an hour later I found him in the patio. He died that night.”

  “There was no post-mortem?”