She had vanished.
Was she tooling around some unfindable side street in Las Cruces right now, bound for the home of a friend or relative? The stale sandwich bunched in his stomach at the thought, the coffee echoed in his throat. It had become clear to him—when?—that Mary Vaughan had to be dead by the time his wife was buried. That, and that alone, would carry him through the funeral.
On a frontage road, a gas station came into view, the first in well over a hundred miles. Was there a chance—? He needed gas, whatever he decided to do. He swung onto the apron in front of a row of pumps, asked a boy with a greasy pompadour to fill the tank but skip the oil and battery, said when the boy came back from a measuring look at his front tires, “I gave a lady a hand about ten miles back, she was having trouble with her butterfly valve and said she was going to stop at the first place she saw. I wonder if she came through here?”
He described the car and, out of indelible memory, the green-and-white dress. “There was a young girl with her, skin and bone, with long dark hair.” He triggered a response he couldn’t have hoped for.
“Yeah, but all she wanted was gas and the key.” He jerked his head backward at the sign indicating a ladies’ room. “The kid with her, a real freak like you say, stuck her head out the window and said—” here there was a falsetto mince, accompanied by hand on hip “—‘Is it as hot as this in Juarez?’ ”
Handed to him on a platter. He nodded indifferently over his leap of exultation, paid, drove away.
Juarez. He was familiar enough with the city to know that out of its many motels only three or four would appeal to Mary Vaughan and friend; he was, in fact, reasonably sure which one would be at the top of the list. He wondered a little about that lapse on the dark girl’s part—but then, how anxious would Mary Vaughan have been to impart the real motive behind this trip, and the necessity for keeping her tracks well covered?
What she had done was not easily confessable.
There were a couple of essential items missing from the suitcase he had packed so providentially to avoid his sister’s solicitude, but there would be time enough to acquire those once he knew where Mary Vaughan had gone to ground.
He chose the fastest bridge. He did not get lost.
“Libros,” repeated Mary doggedly to the desk clerk. She was making the discovery that the Casa de Flores was carelessly run under its surface pomp, and that when any smallest difficulty arose the staff elected, or had been instructed, to retreat behind a language barrier. She patted the air at shoulder height. “Mi carro.”
She had already been out to the car, parked humbly between a Continental and a Cadillac, and there was no sign of the books, three hardcover and three paperback, either there or on the surrounding cobblestones. Even apart from the pressing problem of something to read, because Juarez was innocent of English-language novels, they were books she wanted back. She also had a suspicion that the clerk had a perfectly good grasp of English, and was enjoy-ably watching her make a fool of herself.
She said crisply, changing her tactics, “When we arrived this afternoon, I put some books on top of my car while we were getting other things out, and they aren’t there now.”
The clerk studied her with keen attention as she spoke, as though he were a lip-reader, and then swept an arm around his small domain. He said, deliberately approximating her own command of Spanish, “You see? No books.”
“Then would you ask the bellboy, please?”
This brought a frown of impatience, much as if Mary ought to do her reading at home and not bother the clerk with it. He glanced around the lobby, consulted his watch, pulled out a sliding board evidently containing a schedule of some kind. “I am sorry.” He had clearly lost interest in the whole business and become intrigued with someone behind Mary. “Alfredo is not now on duty.”
“Can you tell me when he will be on duty, then?” Not for anything would she glance around. “I really must have those books back.”
The clerk shrugged, implying that this was as chancy as predicting earthquakes. “Nine o’clock?” he suggested.
There was nothing to do but accept defeat for the time being. Mary asked to be informed if her books turned up before the bellboy did, and left the desk with a casual look at what had so bedazzled the clerk. He wasn’t entirely to be blamed: it was a tall dark commanding woman in a gold sari, with a small but brilliant diamond fastened in her left nostril.
Strange, she reflected, going in search of Jenny and the pool and a swim of her own, the number of people who seemed to equate arrogance with elegance. The forecourt was crowded with cars, most of them costly, and their owners could not all be experimenters like herself; the Casa de Flores had been open for several months. It was considerably more expensive than other motels here, but the front-desk attitude, which generally reflected policy, appeared to be that guests should not trouble the management; they were lucky to be here at all.
A sound of splashing at the end of a tiled corridor led Mary to the pool. It was vividly blue, not much short of Olympic size, with the usual sprinkle of umbrella-shaded tables and, for the preponderance of people who came to pools for display or tanning purposes, long recliners. There was paging as well as bar service, because as Mary emerged into sunlight a voice rendered flat and atonal by travelling across water said, “Miss Beryl Oates, please, Miss Beryl Oates.”
As always when it was clear that a page was going to be unanswered, Mary was fleetingly tempted to identify herself as Miss Beryl Oates. What exotic messages were intended for these elusive people? “Air India has confirmed your reservation to Nepal”? “The judges were unanimous in their choice of yours as the prize-winning entry”? “Bring home a can of tomato soup”?
By five-thirty the warm gold of the sun was false, the air turning faintly crisp. The only people in sight were two children splashing in the roped-off shallow end of the pool, an elderly man in dark glasses recumbent on a long chair, and, at one of the umbrella-sheltered tables, Jenny.
Oddly, she looked less startling in her one-piece claret bathing-suit than she did in conventional attire. Sitting negligently on the end of her spine, all long milky arms and legs, black hair trailing, she might have been a water nymph, naturally not of the same dimensions as mortals. On the table beside her bathing-cap was a glass of iced tea, half full. Across from it was another glass, and an empty Carta Blanca bottle.
“How’s the water?” inquired Mary, and Jenny glanced up with a visible start; she had been unaware of any approach. “Oh—nice, but on the chilly side. If you’re going in, I ought to warn you that there’s a lot of chlorine.”
Which, curiously enough, had left the whites of her eyes unaffected. I’m not going to pry about her beer-drinking companion, thought Mary, but neither am I going to be chased away from the pool. She said lightly, “I’ll get wet, at least,” and took her cap from her pocket, unzipped the towelling robe, walked to the pool edge, and dived in.
The water was, as Jenny had said, extremely cool. Mary couldn’t detect any odor or sting of chlorine (although someone had told her that alkali was actually to blame for any irritation). It was the first time she had swum since the summer before, and she was breathless after a single fast trip down to the float-bobbing rope and back again. Here she found Jenny, now muffled in white terry, standing on the concrete deck, gazing down at her and saying, “I think I’ll go up to the room and write some postcards, okay? Have you got the key?”
“In the pocket of my robe.” Luckily, they were very deep pockets. Mary swam away again, wondering, a little worried. Was Jenny, whom she had hoped would enjoy this necessitous trip, regarding her as a chaperone, checking up? How to reassure her that if she had found some friendly man—and for some reason Mary felt sure it was a man—that was all to the good?
Unless the man was someone Jenny didn’t want her to know about. Like Brian Beardsley. But even if he had arrived in Santa Fe, even if by some kind of second sight he had discovered their departure for Juarez, he cou
ldn’t possibly have pinpointed the Casa de Flores so soon.
Except that it was the newest motel in Juarez, cleverly masquerading as a resort. If he had asked someone about a good place to stay, he might very well have been directed here.
A part of Mary’s mind saw Jenny upstairs, not writing postcards but at the telephone asking hurriedly to be connected to another room. Another sector remembered those two gained pounds—no, more, consider those snappy-cheese-and-green-pepper sandwiches on the way down here, while she did nothing more active than keep a foot on the accelerator and make minute corrections with the steering-wheel.
By now, the water felt warmer than the air. Mutinously, with a goal of fifteen laps, Mary went on swimming.
For some hours, the Santa Fe police had had their murder suspect in custody on grounds of suspicion, but if he succeeded in obtaining the services of the attorney he had asked for, he wouldn’t be there long. This attorney would cry discrimination because of a Spanish surname, and ask incredulously if anyone seriously believed that his client, out on bond while awaiting trial, would have been so stupid as to place himself in further jeopardy?
Certainly the suspect did not look stupid; his pointed face had the alertness of a snake’s. Picked up with surprising ease at his parents’ home, the address on his driver’s license, he said that his wallet had been lifted the day before while he was playing pool. Had he reported the loss of his license? Shrug; he was going to get around to it.
Where had he been last evening between seven-thirty and eight o’clock? With friends; he produced names, confidently. In view of the nature of the dead woman’s injuries it was impossible that her attacker could have walked away without bloodstains; could they see his clothing? They sure could. He showed them notably clean jeans and a flowered shirt, and when a deputy walked into the kitchen and remarked that the washing machine was set on “Cold” he said, “Haven’t you heard about the energy program, man?” and pointed down at a large box of cold-water detergent. “Bio-degradable,” he said with a grin.
What were those purple bite-marks on his thumb? He’d been fooling around with the dog, he said, and snapped his fingers for the animal; it cowered.
There was no use trying to get anything out of his parents, who had summoned the police a few months earlier on an occasion when he had attacked them with his fists. There must have been reprisals for that, because even with the police now present they were clearly terrified of their son.
As the attack had taken place in the driveway, there was no hope of fingerprints. Footprints were also out, as the ground had been dry for a couple of weeks; the rain hadn’t started until about a quarter of eight. Grass under the trees gave them blood but nothing else.
The driver who had stopped for the victim had been requestioned, but without further result. All she had said was, “A boy. He tried to . . .” and the obvious inference there was attempted rape. Same with the ambulance attendant and at the hospital, which wasn’t odd: even without severe physical damage leading to shock, women tended to try to block this thing out.
According to her husband, whose innocence was unmistakable on a number of grounds, she hadn’t said anything helpful in the few minutes he had with her before she died. “She described running, trying to get away, but we’re fairly new here and it was dark and she had no idea where she was. And of course she was—well, pretty incoherent . . .”
But she must, the police reasoned, have tried to find refuge somewhere between her driveway and the street where she had been picked up. There were houses, after all; it wasn’t as if she had been staggering about a deserted mesa. What had happened there?
They would have to try to trace her route. More importantly, they would have to find the weapon, whose dimensions the police surgeon had been able to give them with fair accuracy because of that killing plunge. It wasn’t in the suspect’s home; they had established that, and it wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity of the attack.
But here they had a slight break. A friend of the suspect’s, hauled in routinely because he was known to the police for a variety of reasons, thought correctly that they would overlook the very small amount of marijuana in his possession at the time if he gave them any assistance. He said positively, “No way he’d throw away that knife, man, he loved that thing. He’s got it stashed somewhere he can get at it.”
So, find the knife.
Six blocks away, a mortuary assistant, having mistaken the deceased’s brother-in-law for her husband and been set right about this, was exhibiting caskets with the briskness of a sporting-goods salesman even though he was a little deflated because the best sales were to the nearest and dearest. “Now, a lot of people like this one. Oak, simple but nice if you know what I mean. Of course, the lining isn’t quite as luxurious as—”
“My brother wants the casket closed,” said Eunice Howe firmly, thereby disposing of the lining, and the assistant gave her an indulgent look. People never realized the wonders that could be performed cosmetically on even the most battered face. Indeed, he often thought that those laid out looked better than they had while walking around, what with tasteful hair arrangements and makeup and so on. He started to say something delicate about this, but Mrs. Howe cut him short by making a brisk choice and then giving him her telephone number although, she said, her brother would be in touch with him about any further arrangements.
“Not that I think he will,” she remarked to her husband as they emerged from organ-sounding dimness onto a gravelled walk. “When I talked to him he sounded in an absolute state of . . .”
She frowned at herself, exploring for the right word. . . shock,” she finished, and instinctively kept to herself the fact that that wasn’t really what she had meant at all.
5
IT was a quarter of seven when the doorknob turned almost soundlessly for the first time.
On returning from the pool, Mary had found Jenny writing postcards as announced—one, she couldn’t help noting, to a Myrna Vetch in New York. But postcards travelled almost at a walking pace; it wouldn’t matter.
She had then taken a speedy shower, made a second and this time successful request for ice, fixed herself a drink, and squeezed lime into papaya juice for Jenny. Although not normally given to much viewing, she found herself longing for a television set, even of the caliber usually found in motels: it would have allowed them to husband their tiny supply of reading matter. As things were, she was trying to follow her own advice to Jenny and dwell on every word twice when something made her glance at the door and its tentatively swivelling knob.
She was out of her chair at once, calling in a clear voice, “Yes? Who is it?” but by that time there was the sound of a key entering the lock. It seemed imperative to reach the door and open it before it could be opened from the outside. Mary managed this, heart beating much faster than at any time during her swim, and confronted a green-uniformed chambermaid. Down the corridor, another door closed quietly.
“Is there something you want?”
The woman, slender and unusually tall for her race, shook her cropped dark head in obvious incomprehension. Under ordinary circumstances Mary would have been able to produce at least an operative word or two of Spanish; now, for the first time in her life, she was powerless to communicate with another human being, and it was almost as dismaying as losing the faculty of speech itself.
She had taken an automatic step backward, as if to make way for the passage of towels or other paraphernalia, and the maid walked past her and into the room. She de toured around Jenny, who was pressed back in her chair like a silent statement of fear, bent a little from the waist, commenced a slow, intent, downward-staring prowl at the foot of the far twin bed and then the space between that and the wall.
“I think we’re looking for something,” said Mary casually, to break the spellbound quiet.
“I think we’re off our rocker,” said Jenny, barely audible, but the alarm had gone out of her; she was now simply amazed and diverted. As though sensing
herself to be the object of a wondering discussion, the maid turned, divided a glance between them, tugged at an ear lobe, shrugged. Mary spread her hands and shook her head to indicate that they hadn’t found an earring, and the maid withdrew as mutely as she had entered.
“My God, ” said Jenny in awe when the door had closed. “Do they just walk in like that down here?” Once again, and for no good reason, Mary was defensive. “Someone in this room before us obviously lost an earring, and may be accusing the maid. She’s probably worried about her job.” Might as well go ahead on this tide of crispness. “Is something worrying you, Jenny?”
Jenny gave her a wide and apparently candid blue-gray glance. “Look,” she said practically. “I’m just getting over Indians, and here you introduce me to Mexicans. I’m sure they’re friendly and ’courteous and everything you say, but it’s kind of weird when you don’t understand a word of their language, and that woman would give anybody the creeps.”
Mary, getting dressed to go to dinner, acknowledged to herself that Jenny had indeed exhibited a surprisingly childish fear of Indians, whether selling handmade jewelry from their blankets along the plaza or shopping in supermarkets, some of the men with their hair tied back, the women in voluminous layers of skirts and soft, soundless boots. And it was true that the chambermaid had been briefly unnerving.
But there had also been something sharply personal in Jenny’s reaction, almost like that of someone shown, without warning, the photograph of a dangerous face.
They did not have dinner at the Casa de Flores. At the entrance to a very dark dining room with a number of vacant tables, all with reserved signs although it was early for dinner in Mexico, the headwaiter suggested suavely that perhaps they would care to have a drink in the bar while they waited? Mary, who resented being manipulated in this blatant fashion, declined, and only realized when they were seated in a restaurant within easy walking distance that Jenny hadn’t wanted to leave the motel.
In Cold Pursuit Page 4
