Murder on the Tropic

by Todd Downing

  “You expect to find the gun here then?” Rennert had to ask.

  Arnhardt stopped and stared for a moment straight ahead of him.

  “Rennert,” he said stiffly, “I told you that I had suspected somebody all along of poisoning my stepfather. Well, it was Tolman. I wanted to be fair, though, and look in the other rooms first. Just on the chance that I might be wrong.” His fist began to beat a tattoo on the wood.

  “Hello, Tolman,” he said as the door was opened. “We’re looking for the gun that somebody used tonight. Your room’s next on the list.”

  Tolman stood motionless, one hand about the knob. The light, striking his face sideways, brought out the bloodlessness of his skin and the dark hollows of his eyes.

  “I suppose,” he said in a low voice, “that my assurance that I didn’t shoot you would not be sufficient?”

  “No, it won’t. I’m sorry but everybody would say the same thing, of course.”

  Tolman’s eyes went to Rennert’s face then slowly back to Arnhardt.

  “Very well,” he stepped aside, “come in.”

  Arnhardt pushed past him and began the search. He worked, Rennert noticed, more methodically this time, concentrating his attention on each article of furniture in turn. Tolman stood before the door, his eyes following the other’s movements. One corner of his lower lip was drawn in and wedged tightly between his teeth.

  Arnhardt finally finished with the dresser and the table and was passing the window to the clothes closet when he came to an abrupt stop, his eyes on the window. With a swift movement he stepped to it, stooped over and caught hold of something at the base of the vertical bar. He moved back, pulling.

  It was a string that passed over the ledge to hang outside. Rennert’s ears caught the scraping on the adobe and knew before Arnhardt gave a final triumphant jerk that a pistol was attached to the end.

  24

  One is Perturbed

  It was a colt automatic. The caliber was forty-five. The pistol which Rennert had seen in the drawer of Falter’s desk was a forty-five Colt automatic.

  Arnhardt jerked loose the string which had been tied about its butt and held it in his outstretched hand. His eyes rested accusingly on Tolman’s face.

  “Well?” his voice flicked.

  Tolman stood in the same lifeless posture. His shoulders had drooped a little and his face had gone even whiter than before. His eyes did not waver from their fixed stare at the gun.

  “I’m sorry, Tolman,” Arnhardt’s voice carried no sympathy; “I was afraid it was you all the time. I kept still when my stepfather was poisoned. When the same thing happened to Miguel and Falter it was too much. Now its self-defence with me. I say I’m sorry for Ann’s sake.”

  Tolman winced. He raised his eyes very slowly and looked at Arnhardt and then at Rennert. There was a haggard, trapped look in them.

  “You think I killed those men?” he asked in a low dogged tone.

  Arnhardt shrugged.

  “I don’t see how you can deny it now.”

  “I didn’t, though.” Tolman spoke in the same voice. “I got that gun from Falter’s desk, yes. But I didn’t shoot you.”

  Arnhardt’s laugh was ugly.

  “A likely story. What did you get it for then?” The other hesitated and his eyes wandered away to the window.

  “For protection,” he said through set lips.

  Arnhardt laughed again in open derision.

  “Expect us to believe that?”

  Rennert had been following the scene with close though unobtrusive attention.

  “We might,” he said to Arnhardt now, “examine the magazine and be sure that a shot has been fired.”

  Arnhardt fumbled with the gun then handed it to Rennert.

  “You look. I can’t manage it with one hand.”

  Rennert drew out the magazine and extracted the round from the chamber. It was half full. He squinted down the barrel, then looked at Arnhardt.

  “Are you an expert on ballistics?”

  “No.”

  Rennert put the gun together again.

  “Neither am I. There’s no telling then whether or not this has been fired recently. I suppose you noticed, however, that the barrel does not seem to be warm.”

  Arnhardt put out his hand for it.

  “That probably doesn’t mean anything. It’s had time to cool off, hanging out there in the air.” He thrust it into a hip pocket. “In the morning,” he said to Tolman, “I’m going in to Victoria for the authorities. I’d advise you to be here when I get back.”

  Tolman maintained his silence.

  Arnhardt turned to the door.

  “And remember there’s nothing but desert and mountains around this place. It’s a hell of a long ways to a railroad.” He turned and tramped heavily out of the room.

  There was a long strained silence in his wake. Tolman’s breath began to come and go audibly. He moved toward the bed, as if blindly, and sank down on it. He held his hands loosely folded and stared at the window.

  “Arnhardt didn’t shoot himself, you know,” Rennert said quietly. “There were no powder burns on his clothing.”

  Tolman looked up slowly, as if just aware of his presence.

  “There weren’t?” he said blankly. “No, I suppose not.”

  “I think,” Rennert said, “that you had better confide in me.”

  “About what?”

  “Why you took that gun. Why you hung it out the window, so that it couldn’t be seen in this room. You must realize as well as I the situation you’re in.”

  Tolman looked away.

  “I haven’t anything to say, Mr. Rennert.”

  Rennert regarded him for a moment, recognized the indomitability in the voice and in the indrawn look on the stiff white face.

  “If you change your mind,” he said quietly, “come and talk to me at once.”

  “All right.” Tolman’s thin lips scarcely moved. Rennert left him, walked across the patio and tapped lightly on Falter’s door.

  Ann Tolman opened it.

  “Come in, Mr. Rennert.” She closed the door and faced him. Her eyes were red and deep lines about the corners of her lips showed how tightly she was holding them in control. “Mr. Falter is dead,” she said tonelessly. “He died a few minutes ago.”

  Rennert went into the other room and approached the bed. He looked down at the still face, its skin under the blotching tan as white as the coverings. His fingers found the pulse and released it. He took out his watch and held the crystal close to the half open mouth. He pulled a sheet slowly over the body and left it.

  Ann Tolman was standing in the other room. She had not moved. She looked at him and said tonelessly: “There’s no doubt, I suppose?”

  “No, there is no doubt.”

  She half-closed her eyes and let her head sink. “It’s so terrible,” she said, “to think that we knew he was dying—and couldn’t do anything.”

  “Now, Mrs. Tolman, there is something else you must do.”

  “What is it?” She raised her head listlessly.

  “You knew that Mark Arnhardt and I have been looking for the gun with which he was shot?”

  “Yes, I supposed that is what you were doing. I went to your room but you weren’t there.”

  “We found a gun in your husband’s room, Mrs. Tolman. Did you know it was there?”

  Her eyes widened and she put out a hand to grasp his sleeve.

  “A gun?” her voice was stripped of everything save sheer fright.

  “Yes, a Colt automatic.”

  “No, no!” she shook her head wildly. “There must be some mistake. Steve doesn’t have a gun.”

  Rennert said evenly as his eyes searched her face: “He took that gun from the drawer of the desk here. This evening.”

  “But—” She faltered. Then, swiftly, “Did he say that?”

  “Yes.”

  Her face might have been of frozen dead flesh.

  “I think that you had better go
to him, Mrs. Tolman. He had a purpose in taking it. I suppose you realize that?”

  She nodded numbly.

  “Go now, Mrs. Tolman. I’ll stay here for the rest of the night.”

  He opened the door for her and she went out, walking with the steps of an automaton.

  Rennert stood for several minutes under the eaves, smoking. Then he walked to Arnhardt’s door and knocked.

  It was unlocked and thrown open and Arnhardt faced him. He had removed his shirt and his muscular arms and shoulders were dark bronze in the light that came from behind them.

  “Oh, hello, Rennert,” he said flatly. He raised his chin. “If you don’t mind I’d rather not talk about it any more tonight. My mind’s made up and I want to get some sleep.”

  “I wasn’t intending to talk about Tolman. I wanted to tell you first that Falter has just died.”

  “Oh,” Arnhardt stared past him. “I suppose,” he said inflectionlessly, “that you weren’t surprised?”

  “There’s nothing to be done tonight, is there?”

  “Nothing. There is, however, a question I want to ask you.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s about Miguel and Maria Montemayor’s son. Were you here when he died several weeks ago?”

  “Yes,” surprise was in the voice.

  “There was a doctor in attendance on him, I understand.”

  “Yes, a doctor from Victoria. Maria didn’t want him but when the boy kept getting worse Stahl insisted on getting him. I don’t think she ever forgave him for doing it. She had been dosing him with herbs. Probably caused his death herself.”

  “It was helminthiasis—worms—wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what medicine the doctor gave him?”

  “No, I haven’t any idea. I remember that he left some, though, with directions for us to see that Maria gave it to the boy.”

  “Do you know what became of that medicine?”

  “No, I don’t. I suppose it was thrown out.”

  “That’s all, then, Arnhardt. Thank you.”

  As he crossed the patio he glanced from room to room. All were dark save Falter’s office, Arnhardt’s, and Tolman’s. Before he walked on, however, his eyes had detected a thin pencil of light that came from Flores’ window, where a cloth had been fastened over the bars.

  Esteban Flores was sitting upon the edge of a chair, very still, and staring at the door through which Rennert and Arnhardt had gone. At his feet stood the alligator-skin grip and the black leather case. Half-opened drawers in the dresser still bore testimony to the futile search that had destroyed the tidiness of the room. The air was stale, faintly pungent with the odors of the flowers that crept in through the blankets that covered the window, and mephitic with the clouds of tobacco smoke that hung motionless between him and the ceiling.

  Fear verging on panic ran through him coldly, giving an iciness to the trickles of perspiration that made their way from the border of his pomade-sleek hair down the side of his head and under the collar of his green silk pajamas. He wanted desperately to leave that lonely hacienda that was for him again a place of vague, uneasy misgivings. As it had been in the days of his childhood, when he had sat very still, just as he was sitting now, and had listened to relatives, pompous and unapproachable in brocade and unbendable starchiness, talk of their elders who had died there and relate with arrogant smiling lips tales of the tecolote that the peons claimed to have heard wailing in flight over the roof. Their eyes, he remembered, had never smiled.

  He thought with sudden terrible loneliness of Madero Avenue in the capital, with its electric beer signs and honking taxis, of Prendes’, filled with alcoholic after-the-theater chatter. The aroma of some flower in the patio was insistent, as it was every night, with memories of the musky perfume that clung to soft pink silk in a certain bedroom off the street of Isabel the Catholic.

  His eyes pierced the visions and came to rest on the black leather case. For the first time skepticism edged itself into his mind. Perhaps, after all, this instrument acquired with such secrecy in that Mexico City shop and invested with such anticipatory dreams was—as he had heard it hinted—a fraud, believed in only by fools.

  An idea brought him to his feet, his breath coming and going more rapidly. He stared at the thermometer which hung on the wall beside the door. There had been all the time the possibility of proof—definite proof easily obtained.

  He unlocked the case and took out the instrument with careful eager fingers. He felt the need of haste now. Anything to end the uncertainty that was tormenting him.

  He set up in the middle of the floor the tripod that supported three metal bars in the shape of an equilateral triangle. He straightened the two gossamer-thin wires that hung from the top bar and came together to form the vertex of another smaller triangle. He touched with his index finger the slender piece of wood, stripped of bark, which was suspended from this second triangle like the base of a Y.

  He took down the thermometer and regarded the mercury speculatively. It stood, he noticed, at 92 degrees. Strange that it should have risen in such a short time while the air in the room had grown steadily hotter and closer. Then he remembered the blankets at the windows. They, of course, accounted for it.

  He came back and waited until the wood had stopped swaying, was entirely motionless. Then he got down on his knees and laid the thermometer flat on the floor, a foot or so away. His eyes stayed on the wood as if attracted by a magnet.

  He moved the thermometer nearer, a few inches at a time. At last he picked it up with tight fingers and laid it directly under the tip of the wood.

  His eyes remained fixed for sixty full seconds, ticked off mockingly by his wrist-watch.

  He got up then and a great weariness went over him. It wasn’t from any exertion of that day but the cumulative effects of weeks of suspense, buoyed up by a hope that now had crumbled to fragments. The scent of musk and silk-soft flesh faded. His mouth felt bitter.

  25

  Valkyries Ride North

  The wind awoke Rennert. It came through the open window, not in intermittent gusts, but as a steady relentless current propelled by the blades of a gigantic electric fan whose dynamo emitted the droning crescendo hum that was its accompaniment. Once inside it abandoned pretense of innocence and swirled madly in eddies that ripped across the floor, raising the dust in tiny staggering columns to break against the walls and reform in other smaller spouts moving ever toward the window again.

  He got up from the chair where he had succumbed at last to fitful uneasy sleep, broken by vague stirrings of alarm at unaccustomed sounds that had been, he knew now, the scouts of the wind, testing the adobe walls with exploratory fingers. He stretched wearily and went to the window.

  There was no sun. They were imprisoned beneath a lid of watery-gray lead, solidly convex, obscured by scudding fragmentary clouds of lighter dirty gray that tore themselves like steam from the boiling mass that bulged the southwestern horizon.

  The yucca tree at the corner was stripped of its blossoms and its sharp leaves were bent toward the northeast. On the stone bench under the tree a figure was huddled as if dropped there inanimate by the wind.

  Rennert stared at it for a moment then went outside. The patio was filled with swirling petals and leaves that mingled in rainbow hues to be separated and drawn together again by irresistible suction and sent upwards over the walls. The branches of the frangipani tree were whipping the eaves and its white flowers were sailing, like lost parachutes, in the crosscurrents.

  He made his way out the door and had to brace himself as he walked into the face of the wind. He stood and looked down at the man asleep on the bench. It was Lee. His mouth was half open and he was breathing in long gasps.

  Rennert leaned over and prodded him. Lee wriggled and turned his head. Rennert shook him. Lee opened his eyes and looked at him dazedly.

  “What’s matter, boss?” he asked thickly.

  “Get up,” Rennert told hi
m.

  Lee sat up and rubbed his fists across his bloodshot eyes. He gazed about him.

  “What the hell? I been sleep out here?”

  “I should judge, Lee, that you slept here all night.” Lee shook his head.

  “No lemember, boss, no lemember. Head hurt like hell. Jaw hurt like hell,” he ran a doubtful finger down it. “Think I’m sick.”

  “No, you aren’t sick,” Rennert took him by an arm and got him to his feet. “Move around and you’ll be all right. You might fix some breakfast now.”

  Lee started toward the door, mouthing a jumble of sounds that were lost in the wind. Rennert accompanied him in silence through the patio and into the kitchen. He took a cigarette from his pocket and held it on his palm.

  “I found some of these on a chair in your room last night,” he said. “They are yours?”

  Lee came nearer and peered down. He shook his head emphatically.

  “Not mine. Somebody leave’em in my room. I smoke some last night. Get sick like hell. Head go like this,” he waved a hand furiously around and around.

  Rennert returned the cigarette to his pocket. “First time you ever smoked marihuana, Lee?”

  Lee paused with his hand still in the air.

  “That marihuana?” he demanded

  “Yes.”

  “You keep’em and smoke’em, Mistah Rennert. You get sick too. Sick like hell.”

  “Tell me what you remember after you smoked the cigarettes, Lee.”

  “All gone, all gone,” he tapped his forehead lightly. “No lemember much. Think I tell Miss Fahn go to hell.”

  “You mean you told her last night?”

  “Yes, think so. Tell her too damn hot to wear goddamn jacket.” He shook his head. “All dark then. Don’t lemember nothing. Out in dark. Go to sleep on bench. Miss Fahn run out looking for me. I too sleepy to tell her to go to hell Go back to sleep. You wake me up.”

  “You say that Miss Fahn came out of the house?” Rennert was alert.

  “Think so. Looking for me. Mad like hell. Always mad like hell.”

  “Could you see her in the dark?”

  “Not see her, no. Hear her running. Big feet made lots noise on glavel.”