Nipped in the Bud

by Stuart Palmer

  It was her theory that a boy is a boy anywhere. The dazed youth gave her directions, and a few minutes later—leaving Talley locked and unhappy in the car—they were inside a little botica which looked exactly like a corner drugstore anywhere. Craftily the schoolteacher waited until Vito’s straw made sucking sounds in the glass, and then over her own coffee she remarked casually, “Young man, you have guessed that I did not come down here for ice cream. I am—I’m looking for someone, and I don’t know just where to begin.”

  Dark eyes comprehended. “Your man, he run off with some pretty ramera?”

  “Er—no, Vito. I am looking for a girl, or more probably two girls. Americans, but they do not go back across the border, even to sleep.”

  “I catch. You are the mama, or the relative. You do not like that the gorls work in one of the hook shops over on Negrete or maybe do the strip tease in some cantina. You wish to find them and take them home.”

  She explained somewhat. Vito frowned. “They are hiding here, yes?”

  “Yes. At least if they are here at all they won’t exactly be advertising their presence. Perhaps a bright boy like you could help me to locate them, without their knowing.” She added, whispering, “I am something of a detective.”

  Brown eyes bugged. “A detective like Deek Tracy?”

  “More, I hope, like Sherlock Holmes.” Miss Withers went on to outline the functions of the original Baker Street Irregulars, and never did seed fall on more fertile ground. “Five bucks,” said Vito firmly. Then, as she nodded, “And five more when I find out what you want, okay?” Nor were pesos acceptable; only American dollars were legal tender here. But the boy scorned her card with the hotel address scribbled thereon. “You come with me, we find ’em now if they’re here.”

  “But how? This must be a city of at least fifty thousand—it’s spread out all over the hills and both banks of the river. There must be hundreds of apartments and auto courts and rooming houses.”

  He grinned wisely. “Maybe so. But you say they are rich gorls. They know how to cook? They make all their own meals?” Miss Withers had her doubts about that. “Then you listen, lady. Such high-class turistas would only go to extra-special place to eat, which here in Tijuana we got very few of. Let’s go!”

  Doubtful but willing, Miss Withers found herself out on the Avenida again, playing chauffeur to a big, sleepy poodle and a small, alert Mexican boy. She stopped the car outside half a dozen restaurants—Caesar’s, Chez Goldman, Nacho’s, The Original Nacho’s.

  Each time Vito would pop hopefully inside, and then come out smiling and shaking his head. “If only you had a peecture of the gorls!” he said finally.

  “No picture,” Miss Withers admitted. “But they are very pretty girls—and one of them has bright-red hair, or at least she did have. And even if it’s dyed the roots should be showing by now.”

  He nodded, and tried again at a place called Los Coyotitos, drawing another blank. “They all say maybe so, maybe no,” he confessed. “Now we try the last shot in our locket. Is the Primero Hotel restaurant, where my cousin Carlos is busboy.” They went back down the Avenida for over a mile and turned into an almost-filled parking lot in the shadow of a block-long cathedral whose pink towers and buttresses were illuminated by mammoth floodlights. It looked, she decided, as if the architect’s mother had been frightened by a Moorish pastry cook. “Don’t tell me that is the hotel!” Miss Withers gasped.

  “No, lady. That is the Fronton, where they play handball with baskets. Very fast game, much big betting. Another cousin of mine, he is locker boy in the dressing rooms, he get many hot tips …”

  “Some other time,” said Miss Withers firmly. Vito pointed out to her a small hotel across the street, a teetering, five-story building bristling with sagging ornamental balconies, whose gap-toothed electric sign spelled out “—OT— — —RIM—RO,” and beneath that the words, “Cuisine Célèbre” “I think,” said the schoolteacher, “that this time I shall join you. I could do with a bit of that cuisine célèbre myself.”

  The boy was already leading her across the street. Doors swung shut behind them, cutting off the noises of the town. She found herself being guided across a wide and almost deserted lobby, past flaking marble pillars and dusty potted palms. A desk clerk looked up from his newspaper, photographed her with one blink of his bulging, ophidian eyes, and turned away forever disinterested.

  They passed the wide arched entrance to a bar—obviously a respectable bar, for there were more women than men in the place, young women in sedate black gowns whose eyes were intent on the small glasses of vermouth before them. Then on into the dining room, a vaulted space somewhat smaller than Grand Central Station, filled with white empty tables and lined with booths, some filled with family parties. A few waiters hovered about, like seagulls looking for a place to light. There was a patina about the place, an ancient, mellowed odor of oil and garlic and spices like that of a fine old salad bowl.

  Vito led her to a booth at the rear of the room. “Better I talk to Carlos alone,” he said softly. “My cousin has not much of the English. Order the family dinner. And lay off the Peruvian wines, they’re sour.”

  He left her, and Miss Withers tapped her toe impatiently for some time. The family dinner, when it arrived, turned out to be a superb venison steak with an odd orange sauce, browned potatoes, new asparagus, and a mammoth romaine salad. The schoolteacher, who had resigned herself to the usual steaming platter of traditional Mexican dishes consisting mostly of chili peppers, set to with a will. The cooking, she decided, would compare with the best Manhattan could offer. So, unfortunately for her peace of mind, did the check when it came.

  Yet even that shock was forgotten when she saw Vito slipping back across the long room, arriving at the booth at the same instant as a smallish, worried man with buck teeth, who immediately set about cleaning up the table with considerable clattering of china and glasses. “My cousin Carlos,” said the boy proudly.

  Miss Withers nodded, and Carlos burst into a flood of sotto-voce Spanish, of which the schoolteacher caught not one word in ten. “He says yes,” Vito translated.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, he knows the young ladies. You want to give him something?”

  The schoolteacher produced another five-dollar bill. “He says,” continued Vito, “that they are a Miss Jones and her companion. They eat here almost every night. One very sweet and simpática, one very proud and haughty and difficult to please. He noticed them particularly because of what he calls the peenk hair—color de rosa.”

  “Eureka!” gasped Miss Withers. Never until this moment had she actually believed that her hunch would come true. “And does your cousin know where they live?”

  Vito shrugged. “No. But he will try to find out for us later, perhaps. Anyway, there is nothing more to be done now. Nobody would be at home on Sunday night. They would be at the jai-alai, or the greyhound races, or …”

  “We’ll look for them!” decided the schoolteacher, picking up her pocketbook. Vito looked pleased at the evidence that this oil well was not going to run dry on him, but Carlos’ worried face brightened even more. He spouted Spanish again.

  “He says,” translated the boy, “that when the young ladies were having dinner here earlier this evening, he happened to notice that they were studying the list of entries for the corrida de lebrel, the greyhounds. It is only two small miles, lady—”

  “Off to the races!” decided Miss Hildegarde Withers. It would, she felt, be most valuable to have a quiet look at her quarry while they were still unaware of her interest. She followed Vito out of the place, at the doorway giving a quick backward look toward the busboy. Carlos still stood by the booth with his tray of dishes, smiling an odd smile. Probably, she thought, the poor little man was dazed with his sudden wealth.

  Coming back to the car, the schoolteacher found Talley the poodle howling softly, in a way he had of indicating that he was at the end of his patience. She placated him with a paper
napkin filled with the remains of her dinner, and ten minutes later was pulling up toward the Agua Caliente race track, which at night rather resembled one of the country clubs in the Los Angeles area.

  “The fifth race just comes up,” Vito advised her. “We hurry.”

  As they stopped at one end of the parking lot, Talley made it very clear indeed that he was having no more of playing prisoner. It might have been different if he had had his beloved rubber rat along for company, but he was all for getting out of the car and staying out.

  “No, Talley,” said Miss Withers. “Be good for just a bit longer, and I’ll bring you a hamburger or something.” Hardening her heart, she pushed the eager apricot-colored face back inside and slammed the door, leaving the windows down on each side enough to give the dog plenty of air. He whined softly, then subsided and fell to worrying the paper napkin.

  As they approached the turnstiles, Vito gallantly produced a pair of passes to the track, explaining that they were given away in Tijuana with any purchase of five cents or more. Late as it was, people were still hurrying in. Miss Withers and her young escort moved along with the current, winding up on a lower level of the sparsely filled grandstand. The wide slope between stand and rail was filled with a few thousand spectators milling thither and yon, people of all conceivable colors and conditions. There were whole Mexican families, from the proud papacito to the smallest niña sucking a dulce; there were impassive Chinese with fistfuls of pari-mutuel tickets; there were groups of well-dressed Negroes obviously enjoying themselves, and a great many white norteamericanos—most of them in uniform—who were feeling no pain.

  It was not the easiest place in the world to locate two girls, as Miss Withers observed to her companion. Vito grudgingly tore his attention away from the track—a smaller oval which had somehow been mysteriously superimposed upon the larger hipódromo in the hour or two after the horse races wound up this afternoon. Out there the greyhounds were being paraded around the track at a pace slow enough to permit every last yanqui dollar to pass into the mutuels before they were locked into the starting gate. Each starved, humped-looking beast was led by a handler. Ahead of them waltzed a dapper zoot-suited clown in straw hat and spats, swinging a cane. From the public address system a record blasted “Good Night, Irene.”

  “I like Number Three,” said Vito. “His tail has just the right curl.”

  Miss Withers sniffed. “I don’t believe either of the young ladies we are seeking is running in this race. Get busy, young man.”

  He sobered at once. “We never find them just wandering like this. In the stands there is a man; he rents binoculars. If we had them, and stood down there by the rail—”

  “An excellent suggestion.” Miss Withers nodded. “With all the lights blazing, it would be an easy thing to sweep the entire grandstand and the betting area.” It was no sooner said then done, or very little sooner. While every other person in the throng watched the parade of dogs, the posturing master of ceremonies, or the odds board, a maiden schoolteacher and a Mexican school boy stood against the rail near the judges’ stand and watched them, face by face, row by row.

  They were so engrossed that they did not see their doom until it was upon them.

  Outside, in the parking lot beyond the turnstiles, Talleyrand had long since finished with the paper napkins in which his meager lunch had been wrapped. He had searched both front and back seat of the little rented coupe without finding anything of interest, not even any comforting belonging of his mistress. The small prison was narrow and chilly and lonely—and the sound of the crowd so near and yet so far set the big poodle’s heart to beating strangely.

  Talley was an unusual poodle, who had led an unusual life. It would not be fair to say that he was a spoiled poodle, since he was usually more than willing to meet humans halfway. But he was a gregarious dog; moreover, a dog who had inherited certain mental traits and physical abilities from a long line of theatrical ancestors. A few minutes of careful research told him that the door latches were beyond his best efforts, but something might just possibly be done about the narrow space at the top of the window….

  He went up, got head and paws out, and wriggled through, landing handily on his forefeet like a tumbler. Then without hesitation, without any stupid bloodhound’s sniffing for tracks, he was off. His hot brown eyes had seen his mistress pass through a certain gate. Like an apricot-colored streak of lightning he was after her. The gateman glimpsed only a moving shadow, the merest ghost of a dog, swore softly and then crossed himself. No more pulque tonight.

  Inside the enclosure of Agua Caliente’s racetrack the stentorian voice of the announcer had just called the attention of the crowd to the fact that the greyhounds were nearing the starting gate. There was a rush of last-minute betters toward the pari-mutuel windows, and an equal rush outside to see the final odds. Of course there were guards and other track employees about who should have seen and headed off the determined poodle, but their attention too was in the other direction, toward the odds board or the starting gate.

  Through the ramp, through the clubhouse building, out into the crowd Talley trotted, sniffing now for all he was worth. He worked his way up into the grandstand, along past the mezzanine boxes, and down the other side. Once on the stairs a man in uniform did cry after him, but Talley neatly reversed his field and darted back down the slope toward the fence, under and sometimes between the legs of the crowd, causing mild hysteria here and there in his abrupt passing.

  And then the judge on the platform waved his program and crossed over the track to the other side. The grandstand lights went dark, and far across the oval a white bouncing object—a mechanical robot which could have suggested rabbit only to an animal like the dog whose eyesight is his poorest faculty—started its bouncing trip around the track.

  It circled and came closer, past the racing greyhounds trapped in their wire cages, on and on in its first trip past the finish line. “They’re off!” cried the announcer’s voice, magnified a thousand times, and the crowd tensed as gates snapped open and eleven greyhounds poured forth.

  Talley, having viewed the entire procedure from between the legs of an excited man at the front of the crowd, poured too. It was not that he mistook the robot mechanism for a real rabbit—indeed, he had seen rabbits only in dreams. But with a poodle’s quickness he caught the general idea and decided to enter into the spirit of the game. Over the fence he went, in the effortless leap of his loose-limbed breed. He was out on the track a stone’s throw ahead of the field, even ahead of the rabbit. But he angled cleverly toward the other side, to head off the quarry.

  The excited screams of the crowd died suddenly into a mass gurgle, above which the announcer’s mechanically charged voice boomed, “At the start it’s Five, Two, and—urp!” There was nothing for anybody to say. Out on the track a comic, fantastic interloper was sprinting, timing himself so cleverly that he met the rabbit almost head on. Talley even managed to get a mouthful of cloth before the momentum of the thing flung him tail over applecart. Nothing daunted, he collected himself and set out bravely after it at a full gallop. Behind him, unnoticed in his joyful excitement, came the eleven frenzied hounds….

  “Oh, no!” screamed Miss Hildegarde Withers, dropping the binoculars and pressing both hands over her face. She was speechless for perhaps the first time in her life, having momentarily forgotten how to pray and never having learned how to swear.

  “Jesús, María y José!” cried Vito helpfully. “Lookit the sonofabeech go!”

  Peering through her fingers, Miss Withers saw that Talley was still in there trying, but falling off the pace. Head down, brown legs flying so fast that they blurred in the white floodlights, the poodle stuck to the inside rail, waiting for that rabbit or whatever it was to run itself out.

  He was still driving when suddenly he was rammed from behind by eleven greyhounds, was overcome and trampled and submerged in a mad flurry of entangled dog. The rabbit forgotten, a number of the leaders set upon Talle
y as the next best thing, and suddenly the night was rent by horrid sounds. It was a free-for-all, with the poodle underneath.

  “I can’t bear to look!” moaned Miss Withers. “Vito, tell me—”

  “Is okay,” the boy told her. “Four of ’em still running. I think number Three is in the lead—yes!”

  “But—” The schoolteacher opened her eyes. There was still pandemonium out on the track, with the handlers rushing back to try and separate the dogs. No sign of Talley anywhere, not even when the fracas had been resolved. She sagged back against the fence. “They can’t have eaten him whole!” she protested. “There should at least be some brown fur—”

  “Three wins!” observed Vito happily. The four dogs who had managed to avoid the melee had circled the track and crossed the finish line, “And I put the five bucks you paid me right on the nose!” he added.

  “Not even his collar left!” Miss Withers was saying. She remained disconsolate, even when Vito pointed out to her that racing greyhounds run in leather muzzles, and that with his teeth and fuzzy protective coat Talleyrand had had rather the best of it.

  She shrugged. “‘Life must go on …’” said Miss Withers dully. She had suddenly lost all interest in the proceedings, though she waited while Vito returned the rented binoculars and cashed his win ticket. They passed out through the turnstile.

  “Perhaps if we wait here, and watch while people come out?” the boy suggested.

  “Very well, but I feel in my bones that it won’t do any good,” the schoolteacher told him. They waited, and it didn’t. After the last race was over, and the last of the crowd had trickled forth into the parking lot and the waiting taxicabs, Vito had to agree with her. No pair of pretty young Americanas fitting the description of Dallas Trempleau and Ina Kell had been at the greyhound races this night.

  Slowly the schoolteacher and the Mexican boy went back across the almost-empty parking lot to the little coupe parked at the far end. “He was only a dog, after all,” Miss Withers was saying, mostly to herself. “Companionable enough, in his way. But often a nuisance, and a considerable expense with meat prices as they are. I should have a cat anyway, or perhaps go back to tropical fish….”