In Cold Pursuit

by Ursula Curtiss

Two minutes later, having been informed politely that there were no vacancies, she was testing her ploy. “I see. Would it be possible—” she made it sound unrelated, an afterthought, so as not to spoil this game for future comers ”—to speak to Raoul?”

  Surprisingly, for all its amateur-detective air, it worked. A courteous voice which was Raoul’s came on after a short wait, and after Mary had identified herself as a friend of the Julian Bells in Santa Fe there was a further little pause and then, “A double room with bath . . .Yes. About seven-thirty?”

  Jenny, poised with a pink dress over her arm to await the outcome of the call, made a pleased zero in the air with thumb and forefinger and withdrew. Mary said a warm thank you to the unknown Raoul and hung up, resolving to take back a bottle of gin for the martini-drinking Bells. Which reminded her of her own barely touched drink; she moved across the room to it, and was suddenly in the exact spot where she had stood that morning after washing the spilled coffee out of her clothes. She had been very briefly bothered then, as if she were neglecting something which ought to be done, and now she knew what it was.

  Her suitcase, closed but not locked because she had long ago lost the key. She had defended the chambermaid to Jenny, but her mind had obviously made a note of its own because in a gesture alien to her—it had never crossed her mind before to distrust a maid—she carried the suitcase to the bed (Had there been an edge of fabric protruding from it that morning? There wasn’t now), opened it, inspected the contents.

  She was found of her gold heishi earrings and a sand-cast silver pair, but they were hardly goals for theft and they were there, nestled in the side zippered compartment. Nor did it look—Mary found herself remembering the woman’s silent, sloping glide—as though the suitcase had been prowled through.

  Jenny issued forth in her pink dress, bangs firmly damped down, mildly inquisitive at the sight of Mary contemplating her own belongings as though they were the work of an old master. Mary said, “It’s just occurred to me that people are very fast with their passkeys here and you’re travelling around with your grandmother’s pearls. Do you keep your suitcase locked?”

  Jenny shook her head; like Mary, probably like a great many other people, she had lost the key. “But I’m not a hundred per cent crazy.” She drew out an apparently unopened package of pantyhose, slipped her fingers inside and extracted the single strand of quietly shimmering pearls, which she fastened at once about her throat. “Foiled again,” she said fondly.

  So Mary, forgetting the fact that there were two actions possible with suitcases, dismissed the matter from her mind. She dressed, found a childish satisfaction in phoning downstairs to have her bill prepared, told Daniel Brennan when he called that they were moving to Jaime’s Hotel and that she would meet him there at seven-thirty.

  “Jaime’s?” The telephone wire conveyed as much astonishment as a facial expression. “That’s where I’m phoning from, as a matter of fact. . . No Jenny?”

  How easily and frequently they used her name. It did not enter Mary’s head that, for purposes of striking up an acquaintance, her cousin was as made-to-order as an exotic dog on a leash. To avoid any misapprehension, she said that Jenny had turned out to have dinner plans of her own, an obvious lie in view of that offhand acceptance at the pool, and realized as she was speaking that Brennan hadn’t sounded disappointed but only formally polite.

  He suggested a restaurant new to Mary—“If you have a raincoat, that is. Otherwise . . .”

  Mary, who had been conscious for some time of the ticking, prickling sounds against the window, replied that she did. So, fortunately for the plan she had devised on her way back from the parking area, did Jenny. In it, in spite of her storklike legs, she was not nearly as noticeable.

  “Out to kill,” remarked Jenny suddenly. She had been inspecting her own blue eyeliner the moment before; now, in the mirror, she was studying Mary in thin sauterne-wool only slightly paler than her hair, the skirt swaying as she moved, only the earrings with their vertical hyphens of gold for accent.

  “No, just to stun,” said Mary ironically. “I’ll be right back, I’m going to settle up at the desk.”

  Her bill was in error by two dollars and eighty cents. To the clerk who corrected it with a practiced air of amazement and apology, she was at pains to explain that they were checking out because Miss Acton’s accident at the pool was turning out to be a little more serious than they had thought, and it seemed wise to get her back to her own doctor at once.

  She had expected this to sink in, and it did. The clerk was instantly on guard, pointing out with much raising of shoulders and eyebrows that a posted sign advised divers that they were at their own risk. He would remember them and their destination homeward quite well, now, in case a man inquired for Jennifer Acton. Mary paid her bill, and turned to find herself gazing at Owen St. Ives.

  How much of that had he heard? He was certainly looking attentive, as well he might, expecting to take the invalid out to dinner momentarily. “Jenny will be down in a minute,” said Mary, moving out of earshot of the desk. “Did you—” she smiled at him briskly, the gift counsellor who had been called away to other duties “—get your shopping done?”

  St. Ives nodded. “I took your advice about a shawl.” His dark blue gaze stayed on Mary’s. “I’m sorry you can’t join us, but I understand there’s a friend.”

  He used the term in its comprehensive context rather than that of a single engagement. (Jenny’s work? “Your Mr. Brennan?”) Mary didn’t explain, partly because the lobby was beginning to be crisscrossed by people meeting other people for drinks or dinner, and the bellboy whom the clerk had summoned had spread his feet and clasped his hands behind his back with the air of a man whose patience was wearing dangerously thin. “I’m sorry too. Good night,” she said, and glanced back involuntarily as she reached the glass doors. Absurdly, she had expected him to be gazing after her. Instead, he was talking to the desk clerk.

  There was nothing coy about Jenny. Thoroughly dressed and ready to depart, she greeted Mary in mid-corridor with the frantic announcement that she was going to be late; from her tone, Owen St. Ives might have been prepared to leave on the dot without her, as implacably as a train or a bus. Mary assured her that he was waiting, said, “Jaime’s Hotel, remember, it’s on Panama Street,” and watched her flash around the turn for the stairs.

  She had already made her automatic inspection of bathroom, closet, bureau drawers, and managed to squeeze the books into their luggage. Five minutes later she was out in the chilly, rainy parking lot, the suitcases in the trunk of the car, the bellboy tipped, her keys in her hand.

  She retained a gratifying memory of her own insouciant wave at the watchful eye that had peered out from that other room at the sound of all those footsteps; the door had shut so sharply that it was a wonder he hadn’t caught his nose. She also realized, as she closed herself into the car and inserted the ignition key, that in spite of her last-minute check for belongings she had left her faithful Juarez—travelling, fruit-peeling knife behind her on the desk.

  Buy a new one tomorrow; she certainly wasn’t going all the way back up to her room even if there had been time. In fact, after several dull metallic grinds in which the engine didn’t turn over, she wasn’t going anywhere, at least in this car. For the second time in her three-year ownership of it, the first having been on a morning when the temperature was six below zero, it had failed her.

  She got out into the dark.

  The other and unsuspected knife in her life, a switch-blade not used for slicing limes but for driving deep between rib-bones, had on Gil Candelaria’s hunch been discovered in a now-dried abode brick in a form in the suspect’s back yard. Candelaria and a deputy had had to break a number of innocent bricks before they found it. Leroy Romero’s mother had begun to cry when the adobe broke away from the metal; his father had straightened his shoulders briefly before he let them droop again. In both reactions, there was a kind of terrible relief.

 
Even to the naked eye, the knife hadn’t been washed thoroughly, but then Leroy Romero was young, arrogant, and, in charge of loading and delivering the bricks, confident of his ability to extract the one that mattered. They weren’t made here on a large scale; it was a family enterprise, and the buyers were neighbors engaged in minor construction like walls or repairs to existing walls. Candelaria bore his prize away, reflecting that the elder Romeros, not cowed by poverty or incessant hard work but by their son, had deserved better.

  Although it would take time for the analysis to come through from the police laboratory, Candelaria felt sure enough to let the dead woman’s husband know that what they had every reason to believe was the murder weapon had been found. He fished through his papers on the case, located the number, dialled.

  . . . No answer.

  But of course he would be at the funeral home.

  11

  “...SO I had to take a taxi,” finished Mary a little breathlessly to Daniel Brennan in the lobby of Jaime’s Hotel.

  It was comfortably unchanged from her last visit, and a far cry from its counterpart at the Casa de Flores. There were what appeared to be the same rubber plants in the windows facing the street, and a small pink-lighted fountain in an alcove beside the 1 stairs still let out a ratchety complaint under its splashing. The far end was in semidarkness out of deference to a televised baseball game being watched by a few dim, absorbed shapes. The bellboy was also familiar, with his long mobile face which might have belonged to a mime; in fact, Mary had never seen another bellboy here, although others must exist.

  Brennan was considering the rain-ruffled hair and color-stung cheeks she had already seen reflected in the mirror behind the desk. “Would you rather have dinner here, in view of the weather? I made reservations at the other place, but they’re easily cancelled.”

  “No, not at all, if you don’t mind driving in the rain.” Mary felt actually exhilarated by it and the accompanying drop in temperature; it was hard to believe that she had been prepared to swim that afternoon. “I’ll be down in just a few minutes.” Once again, she was not going to be housed in the hotel proper. The bellboy, keeping solicitously under the roof overhang as long as possible, conducted her across a stretch of puddled flagstones, past the pool, and up a flight of wooden stairs with a railing no shakier than she remembered it. The room, a corner one, looked more like space at a summer camp than a hotel accommodation. In spite of tautly drawn coverlets the twin beds had a faintly undulant appearance, the two no-colored chairs managed not to match, desk and chest of drawers were baldly just those. There was only a shower, but in that respect Mary had lost nothing. This place seemed honest and safe after the false sumptuousness of the Casa de Flores, and she liked every inch of it.

  She said curiously as the bellboy placed the heavier of the two suitcases on the luggage rack, “Thank you, this is very nice. I’ve been here before, but could you tell me who Raoul is?”

  He gave her a shy and charming smile and a little bow. “I am Raoul. How are Mr. and Mrs. Bell?” Mary, released from embarrassment by his tact, said that they were fine and Julian Bell had just had a new book published. “Ah,” said Raoul admiringly while between them the tip was managed with great delicacy. “If you should need anything, madame . . .”

  He indicated the telephone and withdrew. A relative of the management? Or someone on the staff so long that he had a room at his own discretion? It was probably, thought Mary, going to the mirror for brief repairs to her hair and face, one of those mysteries better left unexplored. But she must ask him at the first opportunity the best garage to call about her car.

  She had been lucky, finding a taxi almost at once although the rain was by then coming down in earnest. The suitcases were manageable, even with the books inside. A couple festive in dress but not in mood were being decanted as she reached the motel front; the woman had snarled as Mary climbed in, “I suppose your precious Mavis Jean will be here,” and the man had replied tersely, “Shut up, you hear?” (Shouldn’t that have been “You-all shut up?”)

  . . . In the courtyard, pool and willows received the rain in rustly near-silence; the flagstones were loud with it. People here parked like mad sardines because of the inadequate space, and as Mary reached the bottom of the wooden stairs one driver was in the process of extricating himself from what seemed an impossible corner. It proved to be Brennan. As she passed in front of his headlights Mary held up her room key, ran inside, left it at the desk with the explanation that Miss Acton might be requiring it first, and, moments later, was in the car which had cruised successfully up to the rear entrance.

  “That was a fast few minutes,” observed Brennan, mildly congratulatory. He steered through the narrow gate and made a surprising left turn. “About your car—were you thinking of going back tomorrow?”

  Was she? No, thought Mary instantly, realizing that this decision had already been made in her subconscious mind. After all this trouble, and all this nervousness, she had to give Brian Beardsley time to learn at the Casa de Flores that Jenny was on her way or had already returned to Santa Fe, try to find her at the house there, realize that he was being eluded and—surely?—give up. He might be furious at the Actons, but he couldn’t very well devote an indefinite period of time to the arranging of some personal revenge; for all he knew, Mary had any number of sheltering, cooperating friends.

  She started to say, “It depends—” but she had hesitated too long. Daniel Brennan said a little stiffly, “Because I’d be glad to have a look in the morning. It might be something simple.”

  “It didn’t sound like that, but thank you very much, I’d appreciate it.”

  Was there an inoffensive way to inquire if he knew where he was going? The lights of the Avenue of the Sixteenth of September, named after Mexican Independence Day, with its lively concentration of shops and restaurants and nightclubs, were steadily receding as the car threaded its way through narrow back streets. Mary liked driving here by day—the national tendency to decorate even the most utilitarian structure was a constant pleasure—but at night, in the rain, there was something secretive and even a little hostile about the shrouded windows behind iron grillwork, an occasional door whisked open and swiftly shut on a pulse of music, black alley-mouths which could lead anywhere.

  She took a quick side glance at Brennan’s profile, and at once, as if he had been anticipating her as he had at the pool or because the silence in the car seemed to be assuming an actual shape, he turned his head. “Sorry, I’m not getting us there very fast, am I? Some idiot gave me directions for what he said was a short cut, but he must have had Chihuahua in mind.”

  “I think—” began Mary circumspectly, and stopped, because Brennan had brought the car to an idling halt on the empty one-way street. He fished in a pocket, brought out not the scribbled map she expected but cigarettes, seemed not to know what to do with them, stuffed them away again. These maneuvers had brought him around in the seat so that he half-faced her. He is not the kind of man to make random passes, thought Mary, but her shoulders had stiffened involuntarily against the seat.

  “I might as well tell you,” said Brennan, casual and astonishing, “that Jenny is quite right. About not trusting me, I mean.”

  Jenny, tall and sprawly, childish and sardonic by turns—this was a flashback from the pool—coming along like an invisible third. Couldn’t she be content with Owen St. Ives? After this initial reaction, as instinctive as ducking from a flung missile but still shocking to her, Mary realized that Jenny did not in fact appear to care much for Daniel Brennan—but wasn’t that a compound of pique, at having been paid very little attention to upon introduction, and chagrin at the necessity for the pool rescue? He was after all an attractive man, and at the moment all Jenny’s pores were open.

  Why had he picked this unlikely time and place for his challenge, as awkward to answer as the one about wife-beating? The motor idled expectantly. Voice deliberately light, Mary said, “There must have been a more reassuring wa
y to put that,” and then Brennan’s face seemed to spring at her as the windshield was caught in an explosion of light.

  There was a long shriek of tires from the car coming at them the wrong way, invisible behind its flaring, dazzling beams; a jolt as Brennan rammed his car into gear and wrenched it to the right and up over the curb; a thin tearing sound of metal against metal, a heavy shudder and then, almost daintily, a tinkle of falling glass. And, for just a second, heart-adjusting, nerve-reacting silence.

  Brennan was wordlessly out of the car, slamming the door behind him with force. Mary, chest still hammering with left-over alarm, could understand his wrath: if he hadn’t stopped the car, if they had been approaching the corner, a head-on collision would have been inevitable. She twisted in her seat to peer through the rain-pebbled rear window, and saw Brennan walking toward a man and woman standing defensively against the glare from their remaining headlight. A dialogue commenced, Brennan with his head down and his hands pushed into his pockets as though commanding himself to be quiet.

  The woman detached herself and came to bend and look in at Mary, who rolled the window down. Short gray curls and ruddy face under a plastic rain hat: this was one of the group at the Casa de Flores.

  The recognition was mutual. “You’re at the motel, aren’t you,” asked the woman, “with that very sk—, I mean that very slender girl? My husband is just explaining that the one-way sign up there is bent and we didn’t see it until too late. I hope you didn’t get too shook up?”

  She was jaunty with nerves. Mary said no, politely; what about her?

  “Oh, this has been a trip, let me tell you,” said the woman elliptically. She bent closer. “Do you get the feeling that we’re being watched by maybe seven hundred people?”

  It was true, thought Mary. Although the only witnesses bodily on the scene were a trio of small boys who had appeared with magical swiftness, the night felt alive with eyes, possibly scornful ones. Anglos coming over the border to buy liquor inexpensively (although Texas exacted its bite, even from non-Texans), feeling free to misbehave as they wouldn’t at home . . . She felt more than ever like an intruder.