The Case of the Unconquered Sisters

by Todd Downing

  “Lucy and Monica are the sisters. Cornell’s the niece. Lucy and Monica are of a certain age, as the French say.”

  “And Cornell?”

  “Oh, in her early thirties, I think. Thanks.” Roark replaced the receiver.

  He was frowning slightly as he turned to Rennert. “Something’s wrong with the Faudree phone. Line seems to be disconnected. I suppose we might as well go on out, though. I don’t think Lucy ever leaves the house.”

  Rennert watched him fit a gray felt hat snugly onto his head. “I’m not taking you away from your duties, am I?”

  “Lord no. I haven’t any duties here as long as you require my services. To tell the truth, this assignment is more to my liking than most I draw. It’s better than escorting some visiting politician and his wife about to tea parties.”

  “I hope you’re not counting on too much in the way of excitement. I’ll probably do nothing but ask questions.”

  A glint of shrewdness came into Roark’s eyes. “I noticed your face while you were looking at those letters, Mr. Rennert. You saw something you weren’t satisfied with.”

  Rennert stared past him into the sunlight. “I saw something I didn’t like,” he admitted.

  “Nothing about them is exactly pleasant.”

  “Oh, it’s not the wording or the melodramatic blood spot. It’s the drawings, the sadism they show. Someone must have spent hours and hours on them, vicariously mutilating this professor.”

  A muscle twitched along Roark’s smooth-shaven jaw. “Voice wasn’t mutilated when you found him, was he?”

  “We only saw the skeleton. It wouldn’t show on that.” Rennert paused and said slowly, “And the figures on those drawings remind me of something. I can’t recall what. Somewhere I’ve seen similar ones. It bothers me.”

  Roark’s hand tightened on the doorknob. “I know what they remind me of. Things I saw scratched on the walls of a cell in San Juan de Ulúa. Some poor devil’d been imprisoned there, below sea level. He’d spent months making pictures of what he’d like to do to his jailers.”

  Rennert nodded. “We’ll probably find that the person who drew these pictures is in a prison, though it’s only a mental one.”

  6

  South

  A doctor at the American hospital who has grown old attending to the ills of his countrymen resident and transient in Mexico said to Rennert:

  “Mr. Biggerstaff’s condition is not serious, provided he allows himself time for recuperation. Ordinarily I should recommend that he stay here, but he is so insistent on returning to San Angel that I’m going to allow him to do so. An enforced stay would probably only make him restless. He has a strong constitution, and the injury to his head should leave no permanent effects. He seems to have a great deal of faith in you, Mr. Rennert. Will you undertake to look over the living conditions at the house where he is staying and urge someone there to see that he is subjected to no mental or physical strain for a week or so?”

  Rennert hesitated. There was no telling what might develop in that house at San Angel. “Yes,” he said finally.

  “Very well then.”

  The doctor spoke into a telephone: “Send Mr. Biggerstaff in, please.”

  He turned back to Rennert. “I don’t want to alarm Mr. Biggerstaff, but there are certain potentially dangerous possibilities in his case. The human brain is a delicate organ and a mysterious one. At an unexpected moment it may lose its balance wheel, so to speak. Do you know anything about the circumstances of his previous head injury?”

  “No. I did notice the scar on his forehead.”

  “I asked him about that, but he said he had received it in a fall years ago and that it had never bothered him. We’ll trust that such will be the case with this.”

  The door opened, and Biggerstaff came in, grip and hat in his left hand. His right was carried in a sling. The bandage which covered the right side of his head made his smile look strained. He was rather pale beneath his tan.

  “Well, Mr. Rennert,” he said eagerly, “have you convinced him that I was in my right mind on the trip down here? I’ve had the idea that someone’s been watching me all the time I’ve been here to see if I didn’t start gibbering.”

  “See here, young man,” the doctor said severely, “I’m going to let you go under your promise to obey my instructions. No working for at least two weeks. Come back in three days and let me look you over. Don’t stay up for more than an hour longer today. Take two of those sedative tablets I gave you and go to bed. You’ll sleep till morning. Is that clear?”

  “Yes sir, I’ll take care of myself.” Biggerstaff looked at Rennert. “Ready to go, Mr. Rennert?”

  “And remember,” the doctor said finally, “that I’m empowering Mr. Rennert to send you back here if you get obstreperous.”

  “Yes sir.”

  As they walked toward the waiting embassy car Biggerstaff said, “So you’re still having to look after me, Mr. Rennert. I sure appreciate it, but you don’t need to worry about me. I’ll be all right now.”

  “Remember …” Rennert said significantly.

  “Yes, I will. But none of you realize how hard the old Biggerstaff head is.” An expression of surprise crossed his face. “Oh, hello, Mr. Roark! Glad to see you again.”

  He shook hands cordially with the attaché and at his direction gave the grip to the serious-faced Mexican chauffeur to place on the front seat. Roark moved over in the rear to let them in, told the driver their destination and sank back on the cushions as they started.

  “Some difference between my departure from San Angel and my return,” Biggerstaff laughed. “I went away in a truck, sitting on a packing case, and I come back—between the State and the Treasury departments of the United States.”

  He was patently self-conscious. His big fingers kept turning his hat about on his lap as his black eyes went from one of their faces to the other. Roark, smoking and staring almost moodily out into the sunlight, did not seem disposed to put him at his ease. His attitude almost gave the effect of hostility.

  Rennert told himself that he was being imaginative. Biggerstaff’s hips were wide, considering his slender body, so that the three of them were wedged rather tightly in the back seat.

  The atmosphere was uncomfortably warm and dense, charged with electrical portent of the storm clouds which were advancing from all sides upon the valley, trailing their dark curtains of rain. Rennert’s clothing was moist with perspiration, and the raincoat which he had folded over his knee stuck irritatingly to his fingers.

  Biggerstaff shifted his position, as if trying to give the others more room.

  “Mr. Rennert,” he said hesitantly, “I don’t suppose I ought to ask any questions, but I would like to know whether you’ve found out anything—about Professor Voice.”

  “I haven’t any objection to telling you, Biggerstaff. The principal thing I’ve learned is about those extortion letters that he received.”

  “Oh, those!” Biggerstaff started to laugh but checked himself. The thick black brows which gave his eyes such a deep-set effect drew together in a frown. “Do you think they were real?” There was a note of incredulity in his voice.

  “It looks as if they were, doesn’t it? I judge that you didn’t think so.”

  “Why no, I didn’t take them seriously at all. I remember when Mr. Roark came out to investigate them.” He stared fixedly at the upholstery of the front seat as if something were troubling him.

  “Who did you think was writing them?”

  Biggerstaff’s fingers tugged at the hatbrim. “I thought somebody was playing a joke on Mr. Voice. You did too, didn’t you?” he asked defensively of Roark.

  The latter nodded, and a slight smile broke the tension of his face.

  “A hell of detective I was,” he said shortly.

  “Did Voice have many acquaintances?” Rennert asked.

  “No, hardly any.”

  “Then it must not have been difficult for you to pick out the joker.” />
  Biggerstaff swallowed, the prominent Adam’s apple which met his collar making the action more noticeable. “I thought I did know.”

  Rennert’s silence was a question.

  “But if the person who wrote them really did have anything to do with Voice’s death,” Biggerstaff hurried on, “then I was wrong. I’m sure I was wrong,” he said almost fiercely, as if to drive conviction home to himself.

  They turned off Artes into the broad avenue of the Insurgents, which shoots southward to San Angel.

  “Listen, Mr. Rennert!” Biggerstaff turned to him and made a motion with his hand as if to catch his sleeve. “I want to help you all I can. But I’d rather not tell you who I thought it was. It was nothing but a suspicion, you see. But if you decide that those letters did have some connection with this other— I’ll tell you. Is that all right?”‘

  “We’ll let it go at that, Biggerstaff.”

  “Thanks.” The young man stared for a moment at the rococo villas and green lawns which Hank this street. The grass and the bougainvillaea climbing over blue and ocher and salmon-pink plaster walls looked unreal in the glassy air.

  “I suppose you’ll talk to everybody out at the Faudrees’?” he asked.

  Rennert smiled. “I should prefer, of course, that they talked to me.”

  “Yes, surely. But what I was thinking was—” Biggerstaff hesitated and went on in some confusion—“that maybe I’d better tell you something about them. The Faudrees, I mean. So as to sort of prepare you.”

  “I’ll be glad to hear anything you want to tell me.”

  Biggerstaff passed his hand across his forehead as if it pained him.

  “They’re awfully nice people, once you get to know them. A very famous family. There are these sisters, Lucy and Monica, and their niece Cornell. Cornell’s mother and father were killed in an accident when she was very young, and she made her home with her grandfather. Since his death she has continued to live with her aunts. Tindall Faudree, the founder of the family in Mexico, was a cavalry leader in the Civil War.”

  He talked on, with a didacticism which gave way to his enthusiasm, about Colonel Faudree’s participation in the war and in the events which followed, when he and men like him turned their eyes southward to drown the bitterness of defeat in mad and grandiose plans for new commonwealths. When Kirby-Smith held the border and Maximilian’s empire flickered out in a rain of blood. Biggerstaff was well grounded in history, Rennert realized at once, and had caught the romantic spirit of the time….

  It wasn’t until they were passing through the streets of Mixcoac that he fell silent.

  The driver had moderated his speed, and Rennert could see the tops of eucalyptus, ash and laurel trees above the glass walls of the Botanical Gardens. From a slope there, he remembered, one could gaze without obstacle at Popocatepetl and his White Lady, at Mount Ajusco and the orchards of San Angel. That is, if one’s business in Mexico weren’t to hunt down a murderer….

  “You have to understand that background,” Biggerstaff said judicially, “to understand Lucy and Monica. Especially Lucy. She’s terribly proud and lives in the past. The other families who came down here from the South have given up their isolation and intermarried with Mexicans or other Americans. But not Lucy! ‘Unconquered’ is the motto on the Faudree coat of arms.” He smiled. “She’s still waving the rebel flag.”

  The smile lingered, and his voice took on a gentler note. “Cornell, now, is different. She says that she’s not going to be bound by a lot of musty traditions. She’s sensible. She’s independent. She’s enterprising. She’s—”

  He broke off and asked, “Do you know about the Mexican custom of willing the rooms in a house to different children?”

  Rennert nodded. “I know how it complicates the buying or the leasing of a house.”

  “Well, that’s what Mr. Faudree, the father of Lucy and Monica, did. He wanted to make sure the house would stay in the family. He left the downstairs to Lucy and divided the upstairs between Monica and Cornell. He treated Cornell as one of his own daughters, you see. Each has full title to her part. And the house can’t be sold without the consent of all three. Well, when Dr. Fogarty and Weikel and I came down last October we got permission to excavate on the grounds at the rear. The house being so handy and so large, we asked if we couldn’t rent rooms there. Lucy and Monica wouldn’t have dreamed of letting us, I know, but Cornell said we could have the three rooms which belonged to her. She fixed up the attic into an apartment for herself. It’s a good arrangement, although Lucy—” his mouth twisted into a wry smile—“doesn’t approve of us archaeologists. Or of Cornell’s bringing us into the house. All modern scientists, to her mind, are a Godless crew.”

  He stopped abruptly and said into space, “I wonder what’s wrong with their phone? I called from the hospital but couldn’t get any answer.”

  They were whirled through the shaded plaza of San Angel, and turned to the south between walls of black volcanic stone almost hidden by bougainvillaea. Iron gates gave kaleidoscopic glimpses of painted doorways and flowers in a tropical profusion of color. They passed the crumbling towers of the Carmelite church.

  Had he been transported there blindfolded, Rennert thought, he would have known that he was in San Angel. The smell of the place would have told him. For, more pervasive now through the cloying aroma of the flowers, his nostrils recognized the dank odor of decay. It is no gardener’s skill which fills San Angel with flowers. Here, perhaps longer than in any other spot on the continent, man has lived and died and with his disintegration given additional fertility to the dark soil. The cycle goes on, and each year the flowers of San Angel take on brighter hues, fill the air with heavier perfume….

  Biggerstaff sat forward, his free hand grasping the rear of the front seat, and gazed ahead. His eyes sparkled with excitement, and Rennert could hear his breathing quicken.

  They left the paved street and turned onto a narrow, rutted causeway which paralleled a shallow stream of running water. The thick grass almost concealed the ancient flat stones with which the path was flagged.

  Suddenly Biggerstaff gestured ahead and to the left.

  “There’s the Pedregal,” he announced.

  Through a breach in a wall Rennert had a glimpse of it: a stormy sea whose black viscous waves had been halted suddenly by petrifaction. Sunlight bathed it near at hand, lending a certain wild beauty to the dead surface torn by chasms and queer whirlpools where the impotent fury of the cataclysm had vented itself. Its confines were lost in the mists which were gathering about Mount Ajusco, fourteen miles away.

  Biggerstaff’s young homely face wore a rapt expression, and his voice had a possessive quality, as if he were displaying some domain of his own to these visitors.

  “There’s the volcano, extinct now, of course. It erupted over two thousand years ago. And there’s the lava, just as it cooled. Grand, isn’t it! Somebody has said it’s like seeing the surface of the moon through a telescope. And sealed down underneath are the bones of the people who lived here then, their pottery and weapons, their pyramids and cemeteries—”

  He hit the driver’s shoulder.

  “Stop, will you? Stop!” It was almost a shout.

  Ahead of them a girl, going in the same direction as they, had turned aside at the sound of the car. She was a slender girl in a blue knitted skirt and suede jacket. Her head was bare, and the sunlight brought out the golden tints in her loose chestnut hair. She was carrying a number of packages.

  Biggerstaff had clambered over Roark’s feet and opened the door almost before the driver brought the car to a standstill.

  “Cornell!”

  The girl whirled about, her lips parted by surprise, and when she saw who it was gave a little cry:

  “John!”

  Her face went pale as her eyes rested on the bandage about his head. “John, what’s happened?”

  Biggerstaff sprang to the ground and went to her. He held his left hand raised, awkwardly, as if
he didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Turbans are in style up in Texas, so I thought I’d get me one.” He laughed and poked the white cloth with a finger. “How do you like it?”

  “But, John, be serious—tell me what’s happened to you.”

  “A little train wreck, that’s all. I tried to ram my head through a wall but couldn’t quite make it. Nothing to be worried about.”

  Her eyes stayed on his face for a moment, searchingly, as if she wished to assure herself that each feature was as before. The color began to come back into her cheeks, and she turned to the car.

  She looked straight at Roark, and Rennert had the fleeting impression that she steeled herself.

  “Hello, Delaney. It’s good to see you again.” Despite the casual friendliness of her manner there was some undercurrent of emotion there which she could not entirely repress.

  “Hello, Cornell.” Roark’s voice was perfectly steady, his eyes meeting hers without a flicker to disturb their cool, tired gaze. But on the side of his mouth turned to Rennert a muscle twitched before his lips took on a hard, almost cynical set.

  The whole incident was as intangible as the faint humming of a tautened wire. It was probably as unimportant. Rennert wasn’t sure that he understood it.

  Biggerstaff didn’t seem to notice it. He was like nothing so much as a healthy, happy puppy, full of meat and irrepressible spirits. His face was beaming as he caught Cornell’s arm and drew her up to the side of the car.

  “Miss Faudree, I want to present Mr. Rennert. He’s of the United States Customs Service. He’s been—well, a kind of nurse-maid to me. Brought me down in the plane with him. I know you’ll like him.”

  The girl’s eyes rested on Rennert’s face for the first time. They were of deep hazel, their gaze clear and penetrating. The high bridge of her nose, and her eyebrows, a shade darker than her hair, gave them a certain boldness.

  She extended a hand, and her clasp was as forthright as a man’s. “I’m sure I shall. Tell me about John, won’t you, Mr. Rennert? Is he really all right?”

  “As he says, there’s nothing to worry about. He is going to have to take a rest, that’s all.”