Nine Times Nine

by Anthony Boucher

  Jesús grinned broadly and made an expressive gesture of thumb and middle finger. “Hokay, Señorita Pelayo.”

  Then they were out the back door of the shop and crawling through a maze of water pipes and out a minute wooden door into an alley. There Concha paused a second to wipe the blood from Matt’s face, then tucked her arm under his and led him out onto Main Street. She dragged him along, as fast as one unsuspiciously could, past the Plaza, across the street, and into the church of Our Lady Queen of the Angels.

  The interior of the old church was a dark setting for the white radiance of the main altar. No service was going on now, but the blaze from the altar shone on quiet forms huddled in kneeling devotion about the dim pews.

  “Sanctuary,” Concha whispered. “Ancient and honorable tradition.” She dipped her hand in the font by the entrance, crossed herself, and went on to the main aisle, where she knelt on both knees and was still for a moment. Matt stood beside her awkwardly, not knowing what was expected of him.

  “It’s all right,” she murmured as she rose. “You don’t have to do anything.”

  Matt said nothing but followed her down the aisle. She knelt again at the altar rail. Matt slipped into an empty pew and sat there looking around. There was a certain peace, a dim quietude about this old church—old, that is, as the West reckons age. He was beginning to understand something indefinable, something that he had not gathered in all his historical research on the church for the Project or even from his visit here on Good Friday.

  Concha rose at last from the rail. Before the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, she paused and lit a vigil light. Her lips barely moved. Her face was grave as she turned away.

  “Do we go now?” said Matt.

  Concha’s feet loitered toward the door. “I guess so. They won’t be looking for you any more. We can get to the car …” She paused, her hand suspended halfway to the font. “No. Please. Sit down. Back there.”

  Puzzled but obedient, Matt took the pew underneath Saint Emigdius. Concha knelt in the aisle, then slipped in beside him. There was no one else in this dark back part of the church.

  She took his hand and held it in a clasp warm even through her glove; but there was nothing amorous about the gesture. It was rather one of ease and trust. “There’s peace here,” she said. “I’m not in the world any more. I can feel the things that count, and the things that don’t count I can just look at and not have to feel.”

  “And what counts?”

  She nodded toward the altar. “That. That and the way it makes me feel. And you a little—knowing I can talk to you. You’re all right here, Matt. I hadn’t expected that. I thought bringing you here would tear me, but it all fits together. And so now I can talk.”

  Matt stroked her hand in encouraging silence.

  “Oh, God,” she said (and it was not an oath), “let my father’s soul rest in peace.” Then she was silent for a long time.

  “I’ve been trying,” she said at last, “to build it up gradually so that you could see why, but there’s no making sense of it. It gets even worse when you try to be logical about it. So I’ll just have to blurt it out. It’s the why of everything—why I wanted to go into a convent and why I’m all jerky, as you said, and why I have to know who was in that room and why. It’s … Oh, you won’t believe me, but … You see, Matt, I think maybe my father killed my mother.”

  There was nothing you could say to that. Matt sat numb, still holding her tense hand and waiting for her to go on—for some cue to come that a man could answer. The sense of the statement hardly reached him; it was too sudden, too shocking for quick comprehension.

  It was Concha who broke the silence with a sharp, high, instantly stifled laugh. “It sounds so funny when you say it like that and all of a sudden I know I’m wrong. You can’t say it here and believe it. You say it and you know you were mad ever to think it. But still …”

  “What made you think it?”

  “I was away when she died—you knew that? I hadn’t seen her for months, and then I had the wire and I came home and she was dead. And they never told me what she died of—just how sick she’d been, her eyes and all, but never anything certain. So I worried. I loved my mother, Matt. You don’t know how much she meant to me, how much more than all the others, even Father. And then one day I was looking for a book in Father’s study and I accidentally knocked down that book about drugs and it opened at—where you saw. At about hyoscine. I was just curious. That was all then. I read about hyoscine and how you can poison people by dropping it in their eyes and I remember how Mother had eyedrops. You could put things in eyedrops if you knew what to put, and then there wouldn’t be any suspicion and you wouldn’t have to be even around when it happened.”

  “But your father! How could you think that he …?”

  “They weren’t happy. I wasn’t supposed to know that, but I did. Children know things. They loved each other and they were both wonderful people and they weren’t happy. Abuelita—that’s Mother’s mother—she hated the Harrigans and everything about them. Grandfather Rufus was hard and cruel, and all his fortune came because he was smart and made money that should have been the Pelayos’. While Abuelita was alive, Mother used to defend Father and say he couldn’t be blamed for what Grandfather Rufus did; but after Abuelita died, Mother began to talk that way herself. It was as though her mother’s spirit had gone into her. She couldn’t help it She loved my father, but sometimes she hated the Harrigans. And so they weren’t happy, even if Father was very patient, and I thought that if sometime she had goaded him too far …

  “It was an awful thought I didn’t want to think about it but I couldn’t help it It grew like a cancer or something. It just went through me and it was part of me and there I was thinking that my father was a murderer. And I began to feel—oh, I don’t know—like Hamlet I guess. That was the same thing you know. I mean juice of deadly hebanon in a vial—that’s henbane, hyoscine. Oh, I looked it all up, everything, only you couldn’t through the ear, it would have to be the eye and that’s where you could with her.”

  “But couldn’t you have found out for sure?”

  “How? Whenever I tried to ask more about Mother’s death, everybody shushed me. It was one thing even Arthur wouldn’t talk about. And that was Janet’s day off so she didn’t know anything and that made it look even worse. It was terrible, Matt. I even began to wish … No, I didn’t really wish my father would die. I only wished that if my thought was right he would be punished. And things weren’t the same with us any more. Even before I had the thought It was as though he had a wall just high enough so I couldn’t peek over and he’d look out over it and smile at me but I knew it was there and it was hiding something from me. And then when he did die … It was almost as though I was responsible. You see, I’d wanted it … almost; and then when it happened … Don’t you see?”

  She gave up talking and burrowed her face into Matt’s shoulder, her whole body given over to sobs. He patted her back and looked at the monstrance on the altar and up at Saint Emigdius and knew that he would never find the words he needed.

  Two ancient Mexican women, dressed in shapeless black with black shawls over their heads, paused in crossing themselves at the entrance and looked back toward the sobs. “Habrán perdido a su niñito,” said one, compassionately regarding the young couple.

  “¡Dios los tenga en su bondadl” murmured the other.

  Concha straightened up and made dabs at her eyes. “There. Now you know why I’m funny. No. Don’t try to say anything. There isn’t anything to say. Take me home now, please.”

  “Take him back to his cell,” said Lieutenant Marshall.

  The Swami Mahopadhyaya Virasenanda, limp and sweating, smiled with mock courtesy. “You are most kind, Lieutenant.”

  “Take him away.”

  They took him away.

  “I know,” said Marshall to the police stenographer, “that I’m right on this burglary angle, but what the hell can I do about it? He’s got
the wind up so bad about the murder that there’s no getting a word out of him. It ties up—no question about that. But who was his accomplice?”

  The stenographer shrugged. “He’ll wear down in time. They all do.”

  “Time. … Sure, time. But I’d like to know.”

  Sergeant Krauter came in with a sheaf of papers. “Here’s the last of the reports, Lieutenant.”

  “No soap?”

  “Not a bubble.”

  Marshall leafed through the papers. “This covers every man and woman that Harrigan was investigating?”

  “Everyone, and all accounted for. All nice, ordinary accountings, too—no phony business in the whole lot but Ahasver and the Swami. If you ask me, it’s between them.

  “In their class. Krauter, this case is a toss-up between the amateur and the professional. There’s motive either way—the estate or silence. Now our professional group has narrowed down to Ahasver (whoever he is), his sweet little Robin, and Sussmaul; and the will seems to limit the family to Arthur and the girl.”

  “My money’s on the Swami,” said Krauter feelingly. “I know these fortunetellers.”

  Marshall read the reports through more carefully and laid them down. “Routine. It wouldn’t make good reading, but it had to be done. Now that’s out of the way.”

  “What do we do next?”

  “You might try to figure out how a man in a yellow robe slips through a rat hole; or alternatively how you can make a pillar of the church break down and admit perjury. If you can solve either of those problems, Krauter, I’ll pin my Lieutenant’s badge on you.”

  “The Civil Service Commission wouldn’t let you,” said Krauter practically. “But what are you going to do tomorrow?”

  The Lieutenant stood up and stretched. “God, I’m tired. Never try to catch up on your sleep with a two-year-old in the house. As for tomorrow—for my own poor part, look you, I’m going to get me to a nunnery.”

  “Huh?” said Sergeant Krauter.

  “You wouldn’t like to stop off someplace?” Matt asked as they crossed Vine Street.

  “No, thanks.”

  They were at Highland before Concha spoke again. “Fm glad Greg showed up.”

  “Glad? Of all the low tricks!”

  “Yes, I know it was nasty of Arthur to set him spying on us—it must have been Arthur, mustn’t it?—but still it was a good thing. It made us go into the church to get away, and that made me come out right somehow.”

  “All is for the best,” said Matt. “And so forth.”

  “And so the evening didn’t go the way I’d planned.”

  “What had you planned? Fun and games with your friends on the Pelayo side?”

  “No.” Her voice was small and she kept her face turned away. “I had different plans, Matt, before we—went in the church.”

  “So?”

  “We were going to go some place to dance and you were going to have some drinks.”

  “Sound thought. It isn’t too late for that now.”

  “Yes, it is. Much too late. We were going to dance and you were going to drink and then—then you weren’t going to take me home.”

  “A fine escort! Expect me to pass out on you or—Whoa! What do you mean, not take you home? Where should I take you?”

  “Some place. You know. Some place where you take” (she choked a little) “a woman.”

  Matt slowed up and turned to stare at the girl. “You mean that you …?”

  She looked up at him defensively. “It’s the way I felt. Everything’s gone to pieces. My mother, my father, the newspapers, all the suspicion and hatred in the house … I felt I had to …”

  “To go to hell,” Matt exploded. “Look, honey. You’re a sweet child. You’re a lot more than that sometimes. But if you think that I’d be such a heel as to—”

  “I know. That’s why you were going to drink.”

  Suddenly Matt burst out into loud laughter. “God, it’s marvelous! Weaken my resistance? Render me helpless in my innocence and simplicity and then—Damn it, Concha, I ought to stop this car here and now and spank some sense into you. What on earth made you think of such a wild idea?”

  She said nothing.

  “What’s the matter? Say something!” She was still silent “Mad because I threatened to spank you? If somebody’d started in doing that a long time ago, life would be simpler at Harrigans’.”

  She made no reply.

  They rode in silence out Sunset and turned onto the side street. Matt stopped in front of the house. “Want to get out here? I’ll take the car around to the garage. Or are you speaking to me yet?”

  Concha lifted her face, and he saw that she had been silently crying all this time. “You … you laughed at me.”

  He looked at her red eyes and streaked cheeks, at the puckering of her mouth which twitched her face into a grotesque fright. “You’d laugh now,” he said gently, “if you could see yourself.”

  She leaned forward, caught his lapels, and dissolved on his shoulder. For what seemed like hours he tried to comfort her, with no idea of what random phrases he muttered. At last she looked up, sniffing but improved.

  “That wasn’t nice, was it? Twice in one evening. Men shouldn’t ever see women cry. It’s pretty in pictures, but when it’s real it’s just something awful.” She opened her handbag and tried to repair as best she could in the little light from the dashboard.

  “And there’s nothing,” said Matt, “that makes a man feel so goddamned helpless. Feel better now?”

  “I guess so. But please—you won’t laugh at me any more?”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Arthur always laughs at me, and Uncle Joe, and sometimes even Aunt Ellen. I thought you’d be different.”

  “Maybe I can be.”

  “’Cause you are so different from them. You’re real and strong, like out of another world. I’ve never known anybody like you.”

  “Guys like me are a dime a dozen, honey. You just don’t shop at the right counters.”

  “You see what I told you—what you laughed at—it wasn’t really true. But I didn’t tell you the truth because it would only make you laugh worse, I thought. I thought if I tried to be—oh, you know—sophisticated and worldly about it you wouldn’t think it was funny.”

  “I don’t know as I quite get it.”

  “I mean, if I said I wanted you to take me just because I was tired of it all … Well, I mean—people do do things like that, don’t they? You read about it.”

  “Not people like you, Concha.”

  “I know. I see that now. But I thought a man might react that way when he’d just be mad if I told him the real reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “Don’t you know?” She put away her bag and twisted sideways on the seat, half-kneeling and looking fixedly into his eyes. “Don’t you, darling?”

  “I know we’d better be getting inside, or Aunt Ellen—”

  “Oh, Matt, I love you something terrible. It hurts. It hurts worse than death and hate and everything. I—”

  She leaned forward and pressed her lips against Matt’s, awkwardly, innocently, tenderly. Against his will he felt his arm press her warm body close to him. Whatever else of her was child, he realized with a shock, that body was all woman.

  “Look.” He was arguing as much with himself as with her. “Don’t let’s make damn fools of ourselves. This isn’t natural. We’re thrown together under tension. Things happen all around us. Things happen to us, too. We’ve got to keep our heads—sleep on it.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll believe me,” said Concha softly, “but that was my first kiss. Oh, I mean people have pecked at me; but I never felt kissed before.” Her eyes had a new light all their own in the dimness of the car.

  Gently Matt thrust her into the opposite corner. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s your last.”

  “But darling!”

  “It’s a good thing,” he said, “you didn’t try out your little scheme.
I’m suddenly realizing it might have worked.”

  Chapter 18

  Matt was on the phone early the next morning. Luck was with him; he found Lieutenant Marshall still at home.

  “Duncan speaking.”

  “O? Ah ah oo ah?” remarked the Lieutenant.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t get that.”

  Gulp. “If you will call a man at breakfast, you have to put up with his talking through food. I said, What’s on your mind?”

  Matt thought of churches and fresh scars and tear-damp shoulders. “Plenty. But not all official. What I want at the moment is the answer to one question.”

  “Terry!” he heard Leona’s voice. “Don’t throw mush at your father when he’s telephoning.”

  “Sure,” said Marshall. “Any other time’s O.K. Well, what’s the question?”

  “Look. Do you know anything about the death of Mrs. Wolfe Harrigan?”

  All at once Marshall sounded distant and anything but friendly and confiding. “A little. Why?”

  “I can’t tell you—not yet, anyway. I may be some kinds of rat, but not all. But tell me this much—”

  “Sorry, Duncan; but I’m not an open information bureau. Frankly, I’ve told you things when I’ve thought you could help me—not just to satisfy your curiosity.”

  “Terry! Leave your father alone. He’s looking mad enough without your help.”

  “All right. But I’ll ask one question just the same. Is there any possibility that her death might have been a murder?”

  “No possibility whatsoever.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Positive.”

  “Thanks. Give my love to Leona and Terry.”

  Concha joined Matt halfway through his own breakfast. Aunt Ellen was at mass, and Arthur was sleeping off whatever revelry he and Greg Randall had indulged in after the Battle of Olvera Street.

  The girl was silent this morning: no reference to the night before, no attempts at bright chitchat, no sport with leaping toast. When she did look at Matt, it was with the sad eyes of a dog that has been rebuffed by its master.

  “Is your cheek all right?” she asked at last.