Nets to Catch the Wind

by Dolores Hitchens

  “I’m still sort of full of tacos from Tijuana.”

  “Take your time.” She gave the girl a pat, sent her off to the other end of the lobby, the passage that led outside.

  A tall man in a gray suit came out of the hall and stood by the desk, and glanced around. He wore rimless glasses and there was an air about him as though he’d been shut up in a dim place, like a monk.

  After a moment of peering he spotted Amy and walked over. “Mrs. Luttrell? I’m Raoul Schneider.” He held out his hand. His flesh had a cold, clean feel to it; she sensed that he’d just washed—scrubbed off ink, perhaps. “May I offer my sympathy in regards to your husband?”

  Surprise obliterated the careful approach she’d planned. “You—know?”

  “Yes, of course. Your husband was the officer who died along with Tzegeti, in the train. I think I heard that his funeral was yesterday.”

  “Since you know all that,” Amy said a trifle stiffly, “you might guess my errand here with you.”

  He reached a finger tip behind one of the lenses and rubbed his eyelid as if to relieve the tension brought on by close work. He was as far from the image created by Mrs. Schneider as it was possible to be. He was young, but his youth was masked by a bookish, almost professorish manner. The impression he gave was of courteous shyness. “I think we might find a more private place for our conversation.” He touched Amy’s elbow. They crossed the lobby. “Down this way. There are some vacant rooms. No one comes here.”

  She and Robert Luttrell had once explored this Arabian Nights palace, as empty as if the court one expected to find here had been swept away by the machinations of the Grand Vizier. But she didn’t tell this to Raoul Schneider. She turned her mind from memories to present company. Schneider had just a touch of accent, of Spanish rhythm, in his speech. He’d spoken English for a long while, though. Schneider had been interested in his son only recently, Amy remembered. But perhaps the son had been interested in the father—enough to learn that other language, to perfect its use.

  Schneider turned. “In here, I think. Would you like a table near the door? I can bring a drink from the other bar, if you’d care for it.”

  The place had been decorated and furnished most elaborately as a cocktail lounge. Now it was empty, all liquor long removed. The light was soft, the long bar dimly shining. It seemed to Amy that in another moment customers would be strolling in, that a bartender would appear, that the cheerful clink of glasses, the murmur of conversation, would break the silence. But she remembered, from that time two years ago—there would never be anyone here until the ban against the casino was lifted by the government.

  “Would you care for a drink?” Raoul Schneider seemed eager to please, to be friends.

  She hesitated. “You’re on duty, I presume.”

  “No one will mind if I have a tequila with you.”

  “Something with scotch in it would taste good.”

  He went away, and came back shortly with two drinks on a small tray. The tequila he took straight, with a taste of lemon and salt, and remembering its strength, Amy flinched inwardly. Her own drink was excellent. She looked up to find Raoul Schneider’s eyes on her.

  “I would like to ask a question,” he said. “Did your husband believe that Tzegeti murdered my father?”

  She hadn’t come to be interrogated. But the way to get the truth, surely, was to give it. “No, he didn’t.”

  “What part of the evidence against Tzegeti didn’t he trust?”

  “None of it. He said that if Tzegeti had made any fight at all, he’d have been freed, or at least had a lesser sentence.”

  “Was there any official suspicion of someone else?” Behind the lenses, Raoul Schneider’s eyes had grown fixed, watchful. This answer was important to him.

  “I believe that as far as motive went, Mrs. Schneider would have been an obvious suspect.”

  “Did your husband believe she might be guilty?”

  “He didn’t say. He was always puzzled by Tzegeti’s attitude, by the man’s unwillingness to fight for his life, to answer the questions that might have saved him.”

  “I am greatly in the dark,” said Raoul Schneider, taking a sip of the fiery tequila, “as to why your husband had to die. Do you think he might have known something dangerous to the real murderer?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t have any inside information, anything that the Police Department didn’t have. There are several theories going the rounds—that he was bargaining for Tzegeti’s delivery, that he was stalling until help could arrive, and so on. I knew Robert Luttrell. He wouldn’t have bargained and he wouldn’t have stalled. He was killed to hide the identity of the man on the train. The man—or the woman—who murdered Tzegeti to shut his mouth once and for all about your father’s death.”

  Raoul Schneider—gave her a quiet, searching look. Perhaps he heard the savage bitterness she tried to keep hidden. “Do you think Tzegeti might have left some secret evidence?”

  Her thoughts thudded to a stop. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged, twirling his drink between his fingers, biting his lips absently. “I’d like to get my hands on something tangible.”

  There was something more, her hunch warned her. He was trying to draw her out.

  “I don’t know of anything tangible, if by that you mean a document,” she said firmly. The dim silent room, the cavern of the bar, Schneider waiting cool and enigmatical—this all seemed menacing suddenly, full of a meaning and a danger she couldn’t grasp. Had Schneider expected her to discuss with him the existence of Tzegeti’s diary? She clenched her hands in her lap, turning her purse this way and that. She thought of the child and the dog on the terrace, and there was uneasiness at the memory that she had sent them out there alone.

  “To be frank,” said Raoul Schneider, “I had hoped that another will might turn up somehow. I don’t think my father meant to leave everything to . . . to the woman he was married to at the time of his death.” His voice slowed, hoarsened. “I don’t suppose you know much of the background in all of this—it wasn’t in the newspapers; they just wrote up the woman as if she’d always been his wife, as if there hadn’t been anyone else.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Amy agreed.

  “And probably there isn’t anyone in Lomena who knew my father when he was young, when he lived in Mexico.”

  She remembered Pop Bronson’s remarks. There had been a hint, there, that Pop might have known Schneider in the past, the long-ago past—or perhaps she was reading something into Pop’s words that he hadn’t put there.

  “My mother was very young when she met my father,” said Raoul. His face looked tight, hard; and his eyes behind the glasses seemed fixed on some scene out of the past. “She wasn’t the simple peon Mrs. Schneider talks about—she was convent-educated, sheltered, used to luxuries. My father married her and took her to the mining country, and there were some years of hard living, and then I was born. I have a picture of the house we lived in at that time, and it was a shack, and my mother was standing by the door, and she was barefooted. I was in her arms, and I was naked. You might think that indicated that my mother had reverted to some Indian ancestor, but you’d be wrong. She loved my father and she lived that way so that he could put all he had into his mining equipment. And I think, too, that that picture was . . . well, what you’d call a gag. Partly, it was a joke—the being barefooted, the naked baby. She was still very young, not yet twenty, and my father wasn’t much older.”

  “I know what you mean,” Amy said. “They had a lot more important things to think about than appearances.”

  “My mother died when I was six years old,” said Raoul with sudden flatness, “and I was sent to her people in Guadalajara. It was a long time before I learned where my father had gone. I saw him a couple of times when I was about eighteen. He left money for my education at the university. Then I didn’t hear from him again until last year. He was in Lomena, he owned the Picardy Club, and he was married t
o . . . to this woman.” He obviously hated to give Mrs. Schneider her proper name, the one his father had bestowed on her in marrying her. There had been long years, Amy sensed, when Raoul had thought of his father as unchanged, still loyal to the dead mother they had both adored. The remarriage had been a shock, a defection. Even now the young man’s tone held resentment, a hint of outrage.

  “I hope you didn’t let her see your real feelings,” Amy said, remembering the icy eyes of the duchess, the silver head held royally.

  “I’m afraid I did. I couldn’t help it. Another thing—that brother of hers. I don’t see how my father endured him. He dictated to my father, tried to run the Picardy Club, order the household, hold the reins tight on all money affairs, just as if he—and not my father—were the boss of it.”

  “I’ve met Mr. Wyse.”

  “If there was another will, a later one, giving me a part of my father’s estate,” Raoul said bitterly, “Wyse wouldn’t hesitate an instant to destroy it.”

  “There would be witnesses to such a legal document, wouldn’t there?”

  His eyes flashed behind the lenses. “That’s where I always suspected Tzegeti might have come in.”

  Silence followed his words, and there was pressure behind it. He wanted her to say something, to add something to his conjecture. Did he already know about the journal? Was he testing her in some obscure way, weighing her honesty? For a moment she was tempted to talk; then she drew back. Someone had passed in the corridor outside, a dim figure that had glanced in for a moment. There was a fugitive hint of familiarity, of a likeness she should recognize, in the woman’s face and features.

  “If Tzegeti had witnessed a will in which my father had left me some interest in his holdings, and if my father had been murdered for his wealth, or even perhaps as a result of his wanting to share with me—then Tzegeti’s subsequent death must follow as night follows day. Inevitable. He kept still out of either a hope of bribery, of eventual wealth, or some terror gnawed on him. Fear for his family . . . the revelation of some secret from his past that would have caused deportation—well, we haven’t any way of knowing now.”

  Again the strange, ringing quiet closed in. He always stopped at that one point and waited for her answer.

  She saw a way out. “If the will had been drawn, an attorney figured in the business somewhere.”

  “Cunninghan? Yes, he’d fit in nicely.”

  Amy remembered the dwarfed figure, the intense air of sincerity. What was it Fogarty had said? That the main stock in trade of a good lawyer is convincingness? But something nagged her—from Cunninghan she’d gotten a strange feeling of truth. He was a superb actor, of course. And he was Mrs. Schneider’s tool—or so everyone said.

  “What about Neece?”

  “Cunninghan’s errand boy?” Raoul laughed.

  “No, he might be more than that.”

  “The tail doesn’t wag the dog, Mrs. Luttrell.”

  “Cunninghan must depend on Neece a great deal.”

  “And you think Neece might be fooling him?” Raoul Schneider shook his head. “Cunninghan isn’t the man to be fooled by anyone. I went to him after my father’s murder. He had pretended some interest in my welfare, in seeing that I wasn’t left—as he put it—in poverty. When he found out that I suspected there had been a will leaving me most of my father’s wealth, he dropped me like a hot stone. I hadn’t actually let the fact out that I did expect a legacy, but he sensed it. He pounced on the little I let drop, and in some uncanny way he instantly surmised that I believed there had been trickery.”

  Again the figure passed in the corridor, the face turned toward the open door. Amy swung on the seat cushion. The woman gave a start, a sort of frightened shudder, and hurried away. This time Raoul Schneider had seen her too.

  “He’s had years of courtroom experience. He no doubt reads people as he would books,” Amy said, trying to cover her intense uneasiness over the peculiar behavior of the woman in the hall.

  A change had come over the man facing her. He now seemed inattentive, his thoughts elsewhere; the woman must be someone he knew, someone who was perhaps seeking him. “Yes, perhaps.”

  “And he may have expected, in advance, just such a reaction on your part.”

  “Possibly.” Raoul moved the tequila glass from one wet ring to another.

  “So that what seemed an uncanny reading of your mind was just simple legal thinking.”

  Raoul Schneider seemed far away, his face a mask covering whatever his real thoughts were. He made a design by moving the little glass twice again, three rings intertwined, a clover leaf on the shining dark table. “Mrs. Luttrell—I’m afraid I’ll have to cut our conversation off. I’d like to see you later, if you’re staying down here. Say around dinnertime?”

  “I hadn’t planned to stay. I was going to drive back at once.”

  He went on making designs, smearing the rings out and starting over. “I might have further information, if you could wait. I can’t promise anything. But there’s a chance.” His eyes stole toward the door to the hall. “And if we talked further, we might turn up something. I don’t think Tzegeti left his family completely at the mercy of the people who railroaded him to jail.”

  Amy was puzzled by Schneider’s desire to have her remain in Ensenada. He kept hinting about Tzegeti’s secret, hidden documents and evidence, and perhaps that was back of this invitation to stay until dinner—he wanted another chance to try to pry that information from her. Of course, for him, there was a great deal at stake. If another will could be found—say in Tzegeti’s hidden papers—Schneider would be a rich man. It was possible that he, and not the widow, would own the Picardy Club, the golden fountain of sucker dollars that bubbled away every night in the week, the gambling den that wasn’t legally a gambling den at all but a place where the city fathers of Lomena permitted a game of skill among not-too-skillful players.

  “Very well,”, Amy said. “I’ll stay.” They rose from the table together.

  Raoul Schneider’s glance studied the gloom beyond the door. Evidently the woman was someone important; he had to go at once. “I’ll see you here at seven.”

  He took her hand with an old-fashioned courtliness, bent over it for a moment, then hurried out. Amy walked to the other end of the long room, to a door that she judged might open in the direction of the terrace. She touched the knob and then stood quiet, not moving, letting some stuff run through her mind The woman who had peered in from the hall reminded her of another incident, a fugitive item—the appearance in her mirror of the reflection, the trick of light, or whatever it was—the thing shaped like a head made out of silk. For some reason, then, she recalled the actions of Cunninghan’s secretary as she had sat on the side of Mrs. Tzegeti’s big bed and torn holes in her stockings.

  Like the jerky unwinding of a reel of film, the scenes supplanted each other. The woman who had glanced in at them a few moments ago had had a teasing familiarity, and no wonder.

  She was Cunninghan’s black-and-gold girl. Miss Leopard. The perfect secretary who so fitted the office furnishings that she was practically a part of the wallpaper.

  Amy felt a flush of anger. She turned, recrossed the long room, and went into the corridor. When she reached the lobby she stopped, then drew back into shadow. Raoul Schneider and the girl stood over near the desk. The girl was quite close to him; he had his hands on her shoulders. As Amy watched, he bent and kissed her on the lips.

  There was no one to see it, except her. The desk clerk was fitting mail into pigeonholes. The rest of the lobby was empty.

  A trembling seized Amy, a shivering anger that ran from between her shoulder blades down into her knees, a bone-racking convulsion. She hated Schneider in that moment; she could cheerfully have killed him. It was all quite clear. He was in with Cunninghan, with Mrs. Schneider and Vernon Wyse. They’d bought him over, coached him in what he needed to say. The stuff about a missing will, about his feeling defrauded, was all an act, a fake.

&nbs
p; Here he was kissing Cunninghan’s secretary; and probably they were laughing together at the stupidity of Amy Luttrell.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AT SEVEN there were lights in the bar, wall brackets casting a mellow glow, but the long disuse of the place gave it an unmistakable air of desertedness. Amy tried to analyze the impression. It was partly, she thought, a matter of odor. There hadn’t been any liquor served, any cigarettes smoked, for a long while here, and now the place smelled of varnish and wax. No good bar should smell like that. It was an odor like a museum’s, sterile and lifeless. She looked at the careful work, the carving over the bar, the paneled walls, gray wood pickled and polished, and thought of the workmen long ago who’d done such a good job, of the crowds who came briefly to admire and then vanished. It was funny, she reflected—the case had the gambling angle in Lomena, the poker parlor all legal and aboveboard, and down here in Mexico, Schneider’s son worked for a hotel whose space was half dead weight, a dream casino no longer permitted to operate.

  She walked over to the table where she and Raoul Schneider had sat earlier. Someone had removed the glasses, polished the dark wood.

  She turned at the sound of a footstep on the tile floor. Raoul had just come in. He had changed into a black suit, starched white shirt, small bow tie. He looked like a young professor on his way to a faculty dinner.

  “I’m so glad you waited,” he said, coming forward.

  “We did some sight-seeing. Then I rented a motel cabin and left my friend there to rest a bit. She’s tired. We have a dog with us. He’s quite obstreperous.” All the time she watched the man, studied his expression and his gestures. He was a fake. But Amy forced a smile.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were alone. Could your friend have dinner with us?”

  “I’m afraid not.” She waited, wondering if he would betray the fact that he knew she had Tzegeti’s child with her.