Murder on the Tropic

by Todd Downing

  “There is nothing to be done for Miguel or Maria tonight,” he said. “A doctor should be here in the morning.”

  “I’m so sorry about Miguel’s death.” She spoke with genuine feeling, wishing that she could forget the stolid-faced woman who had crouched beside the bed and stared with dry reproachful eyes at the little Virgin upon the wall.

  A pungent scorching smell stung her nostrils. Hastily putting out a hand to the tray, where the hot wax must have come into contact with something, she took out the albums and envelopes and cards. The wax slid further down. She had to lay the things upon the table in order to retrieve it. She dropped it beside the candle and bent over her treasures.

  Apparently no damage had been done. The wax had touched only the edges of some of the envelopes. She started to put them back into the tray and remembered the man who sat a few feet away from her, remembered with a stab of alarm what Mr. Falter had said about him the day before. That he was a Treasury Department agent, one of those alert-eyed men who kept a watch at the border—

  In confusion she looked at him, saw that his eyes, before they rose to meet hers, had been fixed on the albums and the envelopes.

  “Oh, pardon me,” she laughed forcedly. “I was afraid that some of my things were being damaged.”

  “Quite all right, Miss Fahn.” His tone seemed to her too conversational, as if he were trying to hide his suspicion.

  Her fingers were unsteady as she arranged the things in the tray and carried it to the trunk.

  “Let me help you.” He started to get up.

  “No, no,” she said hastily. “I can carry it.”

  As she came back he was straightening up in his chair, the light bringing out the silver on his temples. In his hand he held a dried pressed flower.

  Neither of them spoke for what seemed to her an endless time.

  “I believe,” he said as he laid the flower upon the table, “that you dropped this.”

  “Yes,” she spoke faintly, “I believe I did.”

  She took it and carried it back to the trunk, where she let it fall into the tray. She sat down and picked up the pen out of sheer necessity for something to break the tension that she felt in the room.

  “I’m rather nervous tonight,” she said. “I’m getting ready to leave tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” There was just a tinge of surprise to his voice. “I didn’t know that.”

  “I’ve just made up my mind,” she hastened to explain. “I’ve finished everything that I had to do here and would like to get home as quickly as possible.”

  “In that case I suppose I have arrived too late with your postcards.” He put a hand into his pocket and brought out a pack. “I don’t know whether I picked out the views that you wanted,” he said, laying them on the table. “I got some of them in San Antonio, with pictures of the Alamo and the Missions, and some in Monterrey—the Cathedral, the Obispado—”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she interrupted, “about the views. Any kind will do. Thank you so much. I can still use them.”

  There was silence for a moment. It was, she thought, a peculiarly in-pressing sort of silence, from which even the ordinary little noises from outside seemed excluded. It made her distinctly restive, as if there were a personal menacing quality to it.

  Mr. Rennert, evidently, felt nothing of this, for he was going on in his pleasantly modulated voice: “In view of your departure, Miss Fahn, I had better bring up a matter that I had intended to postpone until we got better acquainted. It’s about your shares in the company which owns this hacienda. Mr. Solier has commissioned me to make you another offer for them. He is willing to pay—”

  “Oh, it doesn’t make any difference,” her voice rang oddly strained and unnatural in her ears.

  “I am to understand then that you are not willing to consider any offer?”

  “What?”

  He repeated his words.

  “Oh, yes. I meant that I was ready to sell the shares. They’re in a safety-deposit box in San Antonio. I’ll give them to Mr. Solier when I go through there.”

  “Very well, Miss Fahn.” She wondered if there had been, just for an instant, a speculative look in his eyes. “And now, if you will sign a release for them I’ll give you Mr. Solier’s check and everything will be in shape.”

  “All right. What do I sign?”

  He took a paper from his pocket and laid it before her, together with an uncapped fountain pen.

  She glanced over it hastily and tried to keep her hand steady as she affixed her signature to the bottom.

  “Good,” he said as she handed it back to him. “And here is your check. It is made out for the amount you paid for the shares. That is right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She scarcely glanced at it as he put it on one corner of the desk. She took out her handkerchief and, regardless of delicacy, touched her forehead with it. How, she wondered, could he maintain such cool composure in that stifling hot room? “I wonder if you would mind opening the door, Mr. Rennert? This room is so close.”

  He got up and complied. As he returned to his chair he asked with what seemed to her a great deal of solicitude: “Aren’t you feeling well, Miss Fahn?”

  “Oh, it’s only the heat. I’m sure that we are going to have a storm. I have been expecting it all evening. I don’t see why Mr. Flores couldn’t have warned us. Not, of course, that it would have done any good.”

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Fahn?”

  “Why, there’s no place to go to get away from it. We would just have to sit here anyway and wait for it to come. Back in Austin we have an old-fashioned storm cellar. But here—”

  “I meant about Mr. Flores. How would he be able to give warning of an approaching storm?”

  “Oh,” her voice hovered for a moment on vagueness, “I don’t know that he could have, of course, but it’s possible, I should think. I don’t see any reason for being an astronomer if one can’t predict storms, do you?”

  “I didn’t know that Mr. Flores was an astronomer?”

  “Yes, I’m sure he is. At least he carries a telescope about with him.”

  “A telescope?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen him with it several times out in the mountains, while I was collecting specimens.”

  “Can you describe the telescope to me, Miss Fahn?”

  She wondered why he was so persistent in the matter of the telescope but grasped at it as another topic of conversation, lags in which always disconcerted her.

  “I was never close enough to see it very plainly, of course. Just a small metal telescope on a tripod. The only time I got near him he saw me coming and put it away in that black case. What he needs the spade for, I don’t know. He always carries one with him when he goes out.”

  “Have you ever seen him digging with the spade?”

  “No, every time I’ve seen him the spade has been lying on the ground and he has been watching the telescope. I don’t think he wants it mentioned for some reason. I said something about it to him one day. He just glared at me. Since then I’ve never felt like asking him about the weather.”

  Surely, she thought, that was enough about the dapper Mr. Flores, of whom she had an opinion that was perhaps unwarranted. Her eyes rested on the pack of postcards awaiting her attention. Mr. Rennert was a most pleasant man, she had decided, although a bit unpredictable in his interests. If the time were longer she was sure that his company would prove to be very agreeable about the hacienda, particularly at the dinner-table, where it was so difficult to keep things going smoothly. She was sure that he would prove to be less coarse than Mr. Falter, less brusque than Mr. Arnhardt, and more communicative than Mr. Tolman, who would get spells when he simply sat and stared at a blank wall. Still, she must fill that last album tonight.

  She wondered if he had read her thoughts because he said: “I wonder, Miss Fahn, if you have some manual here that would give me information about the botany of this section of Mexico?”

  “I am afraid that ver
y little knowledge has ever been made available before,” she stressed the word gently, “on the subject. There have been a few scattered monographs, mostly in Spanish and very incomplete.”

  “And now?”

  She tried to make her smile properly diffident.

  “I have just finished my doctor’s dissertation on the flora of Northern Mexico. I have it here.”

  “Really, I hadn’t expected this.” There seemed to be genuine enthusiasm in his voice. “Would it be too great a favor to ask you to let me glance over it tonight? I shall promise to return it the first thing in the morning.”

  “Well,” she hesitated, “I might let you have the carbon copy.”

  “That will be very kind of you.”

  She opened a drawer of the table, took out a bulky manuscript wrapped in brown paper and handed it to him.

  “Thank you very much,” he took it and stood up. “And now I won’t bother you any more tonight.”

  She rose and smiled. After all, it was foolish to have felt any alarm over those albums. The gray that touched his thin brown hair at the temples was, she felt, almost a bond between them, betraying as it did the relentless approach of old age.

  “It has been altogether a pleasure, Mr. Rennert. If there is any information I can give you about the plants, you must let me know.”

  “I shall probably do that, Miss Fahn. Good night.”

  “Good night, Mr. Rennert.”

  She sat down at the table and listened to the sound of his feet die away on the stones. Somewhat to her surprise she realized, now that he had gone, how pleasurable a sort of excitement she had derived from his visit. She gazed for a moment at the chair into which his body had fitted so compactly. If there should happen to be any trouble at the border she might even be able to turn to him for assistance.

  As she went over to the trunk for the albums she began to wonder what he had wanted with her dissertation. One wouldn’t have expected a man of the world, such as he obviously was, to be interested in plants and flowers.

  20

  Miss Fahn is Frightened

  “… An indigenous perennial plant,” Rennert re-read the lines, “with an herbaceous, erect, branching, furrowed stem, which rises from two to five feet in height. The leaves are alternate or scattered, sessile, oblong lanceolate, attenuated at both ends, sinuated and toothed on the margin, conspicuously veined, of a yellowish-green color, and dotted on their under surface. The flowers are very numerous, small, of the same color with the leaves, and arranged in long, leafless, terminal panicles, which are composed of slender, dense, glomerate, alternating spikes.”

  He inserted the sheet of yellow copy paper in its place in Bertha Fahn’s work on “The Flora of Northern Mexico,” lit a cigarette and rested his head on the back of the chair.

  He stared thoughtfully at a gray moth that had sailed out of the night to beat frantic wings against the unshaded light bulb.

  What he had just read offered, he knew, a possibility that it would not do to neglect. In view of the knowledge that he had acquired in the last few hours he had almost discarded his first theory—that the dark soil about the hacienda had lifted the means of destruction toward a calculating murderer’s hand. Now (his eyes followed the erratic course of the moth) he was faced with that theory again. And the inference that of the individuals under that roof only two—both of them women—possessed sufficient knowledge to look for and find in the patio itself or in the sparse vegetation of those rocky slopes certain yellowish-green flowers arranged (What was that description?) in “long, leafless, terminal panicles.”

  So absorbed was he in the unpleasant implications of this train of thought that his cigarette fell from his fingers when a woman’s scream, scaling into a high, terror-filled note, cut through the enveloping stillness.

  The patio was impossibly still in the reflux of the scream, oppressed by the black lid of the sky, as he ran along the stones toward the light that flooded from the open door next to his.

  The scene inside halted him by its unexpectedness. Bertha Fahn stood by the window, with a chair held protectingly before her.

  In front of her was Lee, the Chinaman. He still wore the blue serge trousers and the sweater but his sleeves were rolled up, exposing thin wasted arms. In his right hand he held a long carving knife, with which he was gesticulating wildly as with his left he grasped the table. Wadded under his fingers was a white apron. He was swaying drunkenly to and fro and talking in an unintelligible singsong voice.

  Rennert came up behind him, grasped his right arm and twisted. The knife clattered on the tiles.

  He swung the man around. Lee lurched forward, his lips curling back over his teeth, and struck out blindly.

  Rennert hit him neatly on the point of the chin. Lee fell backward, struck the edge of the table and collapsed on the floor.

  “Did he hurt you, Miss Fahn?” Rennert was at her side.

  She lowered the chair, moved toward the bed and sank down upon it, covering her face with her hands.

  “No, no,” she spoke through interlocked fingers.

  Rennert glanced about the room. On a dresser he caught sight of a small flask that must contain, if he remembered his boyhood days aright, smelling salts. He walked over, uncorked it and held it to his nose. Just what, he demanded of himself with an irrepressible surge of mock gravity at the anticlimax, did one do to revive prostrated females now that smelling salts were out of date?

  He sat down on the bed and extended the bottle.

  “Just take a breath of this, Miss Fahn, and you’ll feel better.”

  She took away her hands and stared for an instant blankly at the green glass. He raised it and she drew a deep breath. Her nose contracted and tears started to her eyes.

  “That’s better,” she pushed away his hand. “Thank you.” She drew out a handkerchief, removed her glasses and daubed at her eyes. In a moment she dropped the handkerchief and her gaze sought the still figure on the floor. She made an attempt to swallow.

  “Now,” Rennert said, “do you feel like telling me what happened?”

  She looked at him.

  “He just—just came in,” she said unevenly. “I was there at the table working. I heard someone behind, me. I turned around and there he was. With that knife. He said something that I couldn’t understand. I thought he was drunk and told him to go away. Then he started toward me, waving the knife and that apron. I screamed.” She said simply, “That’s all.”

  Rennert got up. He restrained just in time an impulse to pat her on the shoulder.

  “I’ll get him out of here. Don’t worry. He won’t bother you any more tonight.”

  He walked across the room and started to bend down. As he did so his eyes swept the top of the table.

  The album lay open by the unflickering flame of the candle. On the right-hand side three postcards had been put into place. In the center of the lower space, sharply outlined against the dark green paper, was a dried yellowish flower.

  He stared at it thoughtfully for a second or two then straightened up.

  “By the way, Miss Fahn,” he said, carefully casual, “I have been interested this evening in reading your dissertation. I see that you mention worm-seed, or Mexican tea, among the flora of northern Mexico. Have you ever found any specimens near by?”

  She was pushing back the knot of hair that had slipped down, giving her face a grotesque appearance. She stared at him as if in incomprehension.

  “Chenopodium anthelminticum, you mean.”

  “Yes, that’s the scientific name for it, I believe.”

  She adjusted the spectacles more firmly upon the bone-bridged nose and gazed through their lenses with a slight forward movement of her head.

  “No,” she said, her voice normal again, “I’ve never seen any about here, although it does grow in parts of northern Mexico. Farther to the south, too. Mateo Battieri took specimens back to Europe from near Orizaba, unless I am mistaken, in 1850—”

  “But you are certai
n that there are none near this hacienda?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, I’m positive. I’ve been all over these mountains this spring and I’ve never seen any.”

  Rennert picked up Lee’s body, held it lightly in his arms.

  “Do you know,” he asked over it, “what medicinal uses Chenopodium anthelminticum has?”

  “It’s used as a vermifuge, Mr. Rennert.”

  “Thank you, Miss Fahn. Good night.” He started toward the door.

  “Good night,” came from behind him after a full six seconds.

  “Want me to help you?” Stephen Tolman, clad in a dressing-gown, faced him on the threshold.

  “I can carry him,” Rennert said. “You might get the knife.”

  As he stepped into the patio he heard over the Chinaman’s stertorous breathing Ann Tolman’s low frightened voice: “Mr. Rennert? What has happened?

  “Nothing to be alarmed about.”

  Before he could go on Tolman was at his side.

  “Just Lee on another drunk,” he said in a voice that was, Rennert felt, too light.

  He made his way into the inner patio, leaving husband and wife conversing in low tones.

  The door of Lee’s room next to the kitchen stood ajar. He pushed it open with his foot. A dim light illuminated the interior.

  He laid the man on a cot, ascertained that the blow had done him no serious injury, and stood looking about the bare quarters.

  On a chair beside the cot were three unsmoked cigarettes. The stub of another had burnt itself out against the varnished wood. Two more lay crushed upon the floor.

  Rennert picked up the cigarettes and examined them. They were of coarse, stringy dark fiber rolled in yellowish brown paper. He held them one by one to his nose, extracted a bit of the fiber and tasted it. He spat it out quickly. Thrusting the cigarettes into his pocket he turned off the light and left the room.

  Stephen Tolman stood outside, holding the knife uncertainly.

  “Want this?” he asked.

  “I’ll take it to my room,” Rennert said. “It’s a rather dangerous plaything to leave lying about.”