. . . The bottom of Jenny’s suitcase appeared to be innocent, but what tests might they subject it to? Probably none, but it was better to be on the safe side. Mary wet the end of a towel, wrung it, heard with horror a brisk tap on the door.
Would they come at night like this? Of course they would; she could scarcely expect a solicitous call first. How was she going to explain the suitcase emptied on the bed? She thought she had seen a cockroach? A tarantula, an iguana? Would they accept her statement that Jenny’s oblivion was the result of liquor and nothing else?
Mary walked to the door, determined to be militant (How dare you disturb me at this hour?), and opened it on Daniel Brennan.
Her reaction was so great that she simply stood there, staring at him, holding the doorknob as if it were a lifeline.
“They told me someone had called,” said Brennan, “and as I don’t know anyone else in the hotel I figured it could only be you and that you weren’t calling just to say goodnight.” His gaze slipped past Mary, towel forgotten in one hand, to the motionless girl in the bed and then the piled clothing beside the open suitcase. “Is Jenny—is everything all right?” The pitch of a man’s voice accomplished what Mary’s urgings had not: Jenny gave a sudden enormous snore and was silent again. “Oh, everything’s fine,” said Mary, unbearably rebellious all at once at the battering her nerves had taken in the last half-hour, “except that Jenny’s drunk and somebody put cocaine in her suitcase.”
A beginning flicker at the corner of Brennan’s mouth died at once. At the hollow sound of feet on the wooden stairs he stepped quickly inside the room, closing the door behind him as Mary’s grip fell unresistingly away. He didn’t waste time on incredulity. “What have you done with it?”
Mary told him. For just a second she thought bemusedly that this had happened before, and then she remembered that the other time it had been Owen St. Ives entering her room at the Casa de Flores. She said, “I don’t know what they do in situations like this. Dogs . . . or is that only with marijuana? Anyway, I thought I ought to sponge the suitcase.”
“It’s not a bad idea. Here, I’ll do it while you shake out the clothes,” said Brennan. “Have you got any cologne?”
Mary gave him Jenny’s, not asking whether this was for faster-drying purposes or to mislead any sniffers. In the mirror over the desk she caught a glimpse of Brennan’s absorbed activities with the towel and her own housewifely gestures with Jenny’s clothes, for all the world as if she were snapping laundry just off the line. Lurid scene in a Juarez hotel room, she thought, and didn’t realize that she had given the beginning of an unstrung laugh until Brennan, straightening and discarding the towel, studied her and said abruptly, “What you need is a drink, in case you aren’t aware of it. Let’s put this stuff back and go down to the bar.”
“But I’ve got a—” began Mary, and looked blankly around her: in her hasty packing she had left the Bacardi at the Casa de Flores. Instantly, the prospect of getting even briefly out of this room which at one point had seemed to close in on her, of sitting down with something long and mild and savoring her first cigarette since after dinner, was infinitely desirable. And impossible. She said, “I can’t leave Jenny.”
“I don’t know why not,” said Brennan, practical. “She isn’t going to miss you.” He moved over to the other bed, said Jenny’s name experimentally, bent to lift one of her eyelids and look at the returning pupil. He had a strangely professional air.
“Based on my unfortunately vast experience with a nephew who visits me in his cups, she’s all right,” he said, “and I can’t imagine her waking up for at least a couple of hours. You’re the one in need of attention.” He glanced down again at the sleeping face, his own curious. “How on earth—?”
“She seems to have an allergic reaction to alcohol,” said Mary. She located her handbag and, at the bathroom mirror, inspected her total pallor and commenced some swift repairs. There was no comment from beyond the door, but she made it to herself. Allergic—and unaware of it by age eighteen, living what could hardly be called a cloistered life? Or had she thought she could get away with it, just this once? Diabetics, long familiar with their condition, had been known to make rare, cautious departures from their regimes.
The brandy seemed ironic—she and Daniel Brennan with theirs, Owen St. Ives and Jenny sipping the same liqueur probably not far away. Her saying just now, “I can’t leave Jenny,” was a kind of echo of her insistence to St. Ives: “I’ve got to let Jenny know that I’m going.” Almost like following steps in a shadow ballet.
Jenny stayed stubbornly at the heart of everything —but she was safe now that the pin had been pulled from Brian Beardsley’s grenade and he was undoubtedly gone from Juarez.
There was hotel stationery in the desk, and although Daniel Brennan looked a little amused at this precaution Mary wrote, “Downstairs at the bar— have me paged there if you want me” and added the time and propped the sheet against the mirror, which was the first thing Jenny would see across the room if she opened her eyes and took in her surroundings.
(Where, incidentally, was the note which Owen St. Ives was so sure he had left for Mary, and which would have spared her those long minutes of nearpanic? Why, for that matter, hadn’t he said a firm, “No, thanks,” to that interfering waiter, or even overridden Jenny’s request for brandy? She was smitten with him, and would have been obedient.)
“You keep going away,” observed Brennan pleasantly, holding the coat which Mary had picked up distractedly.
“Yes, I know. I’m sorry.” Another echo, thought Mary as she put her arms into the coat. She had said the same thing to him not an hour ago, and to Owen St. Ives when a necessitous feeling had driven her out of his car. She picked up the key from the desk, and said doubtfully, “Do we lock the door?”
“We certainly do.” Brennan was forceful about it, although this was the kind of mechanism which would leave Jenny imprisoned. “Jaime’s is a nice place, but there odd people everywhere.”
The night was chilly, holding left-over drips and glistens from the rain. Brennan was giving off little whiffs of Jenny’s cologne as he moved, but luckily he seemed unaware of this. Halfway to the stairs along the railed walk, a door came a few inches open at the sound of their footsteps, and a man’s voice called jovially, “Hey, what kept you so long?” He could only have seen the dimmest of outlines against the sporadically lighted front of the far side of the annex, but he said at once, “Oh, I beg your pardon,” and closed the door.
“We had a few things to clean up,” murmured Brennan.
He went before Mary down the steps, and strolled across to the edge of the willow-sheltered pool, which, not lit, held only little tremors of reflected pinkish-gold on its dark surface, along with a faint brilliance, at the shallow end, from a lamp at a corner of the building. “Someone dropped either a silver dollar or a pendant in here this afternoon,” he said conversationally. “I wonder if it’s been retrieved? I told one of the bus boys about it.”
Not caring much, Mary joined him automatically. There was always something fascinating about water, particularly in a dry country and perhaps especially at night. Any daytime gaiety had been swallowed up then, with the depths renewing their cold secrets until sunlight wiped them clear again.
She looked at a faint half-curve of glitter on the bottom, at perhaps four feet, and pointed. “There it is.”
Brennan moved closer. “Well, I suppose it can’t go down the drain,” he said, and turned to glance curiously at her through the obscurity. “I didn’t do a very good job of explaining myself at dinner. What I really meant to say—”
Something brushed lightly between Mary’s shoulder-blades. It was only, could only have been a frond of willow, but she stepped instantly away. She didn’t want to hear what he had meant to say, not just now, even though there have been a peculiar intimacy in the room where they had worked while Jenny slept. She had a slight sense of dizziness, as if the metallic curve on the pool bottom were
a shining object suspended by a hypnotist.
“You’re cold,” said Brennan abruptly as shafts of willow-fragmented gold struck across at them and a car engine started. In the same unobtrusive way in which he had claimed the doorknob upstairs, he now had possession of Mary’s elbow. “Let’s get that drink.”
She hadn’t been aware until then of a physical chill, but in the bar she gave a reminiscent shiver. Mercifully, the musicians had departed. As at the motel pool, Brennan did not rely on the mercies of a waiter, but went off and returned speedily with their drinks.
He didn’t pick up where he had left off outside. He asked instead, “Who do you think was responsible for the sabotage?”
Which he had accepted at once, even though he viewed Jenny with a fairly cool eye; that fact was suddenly as warming as the drink. “The man I told you about at dinner, the one with Astrid,” said Mary. Without realizing it, she must have been preparing a cut version of this. “Jenny was quite involved with him a couple of months ago, and he was furious when she broke it off. He isn’t, I gather, a man who likes being crossed.”
“Unlike the rest of us who revel in it,” remarked Brennan, giving her a mildly amused look. “He was certainly going to get his revenge, with bells on, but how did he . . . ? Oh, Astrid, I suppose, as she was staying right there with her nonexistent aunt and uncle. Lucky you found the stuff in time.”
He hadn’t, naturally, commented on her motives for exploring Jenny’s suitcase in the first place—but then for all he knew Mary was a chronic opener of other people’s mail, a listener at keyholes, a reader of diaries not her own. She said with firmness, “Yes, it was. If I hadn’t gotten worried about the combination of liquor and whatever prescription Jenny takes . . .”
“It’s none of my business, I know,” said Brennan into the little trail-away silence, “but Jenny looks as though a Shirley Temple would set her on her ear. Who let her—?”
Mary supposed that it was his business, in a fringe way, because he had helped her unquestioningly. Still, the implied criticism—just as if she had not framed a related wonder to herself—made her prickle slightly.
“Another guest at the motel, who must have been as startled at what happened as I was.” How to undo the impression of two lone females in Mexico on pleasure bent, dividing up for a little adventure: that one’s mine, you can have the other? To explain that she was to have been a member of that party would suggest either that good manners in honoring Brennan’s prior invitation had spoiled her evening or that she had preferred his company.
Mary finished her cigarette without hurry, to avoid any appearance of even minor confusion, and slipped her coat back on. “I’m sure Jenny’s still in the depths, but I think I ought to be back there anyway. Thank you for the drink, and for your help upstairs—I was on the point of flying to pieces.”
“You were keeping your head very well.” Brennan was standing too, gesturing down at her glass, still a third full. “But you haven’t—”
“I’ve had enough to restore me, honestly,” said Mary, and said goodnight and departed. She hoped as she crossed the courtyard that there were extra blankets in the room; the temperature seemed to have dropped a few degrees in the last half-hour, and there was obviously a late-spring storm on the way.
What had begun as an excuse to Daniel Brennan was suddenly true. Jenny certainly hadn’t looked like waking for some time, but her physical reactions were unpredictable. She could have received only the blurriest of impressions of the room to which Owen St. Ives had delivered her, so that she would open her eyes to what in effect were strange surroundings. She might even try the door before she discovered that propped-up piece of paper to be a note—it wasn’t likely that she would regain consciousness with a mind as clear as a bell—and find herself locked in.
Mary, who was mildly claustrophobic and would hate such a circumstance, quickened her steps on the wooden stairs. It crossed her mind that this audibly hurrying pace would have drawn a sharper vigilance than ever from those odd inhabitants at the Casa de Flores.
The stingy light at the top of the stairs receded as she passed the three intervening rooms to the corner one, key in her hand. She whirled and nearly dropped it as the black shadows against the wall broke and a man said her name.
14
FOR a shaken second, Mary thought that Owen St. Ives was going to pull her into his arms, key and all. Then he said simply, “Thank God. I called back a little while after I talked to you, and when there was no answer—May I come in for a minute?”
“Of course. I was only downstairs,” said Mary, having a little unaccountable trouble with the key. She got the door open and went instantly to examine Jenny, who had shifted position and was lying on her other side, her hair a fresh tangle of black. Her breathing seemed even and unchanged.
“You can see why I was so worried until I talked to you,” said Mary, turning to St. Ives. He must have waited outside for quite a while, she thought as he closed the door; two fingers on his right hand were almost white with cold. He nodded at her, pushing both hands into his pockets as though self-conscious about this frailty—Mary’s own ungloved hands had felt chilly, but not to that extent—and joined her at the bedside, gazing down with an abstracted frown.
“I was feeling badly about Jenny,” he said in a troubled voice, “and I started analyzing it and wondering if it was the drinks that knocked her out? She stretched her cocktail to last through two of mine, and she did at least eat part of her dinner. And then when I called back, and there was no one here, I was afraid it might have been something else, that she might have gotten worse. I couldn’t find your car anywhere, and I thought you might have gone for a doctor, or—God knows what I thought.”
“My car wouldn’t start, it’s still at the motel.” Mary was finding his apprehension about Jenny’s condition difficult to follow. Food poisoning wasn’t unheard of in Mexico, but it did not send one into a profound sleep, to put it mildly. “What do you mean by something else?”
St. Ives didn’t answer that. Instead, he asked abruptly, “Do you know a David Brand in Santa Fe?”
It didn’t ring the faintest of bells, and Mary shook her head. Her legs felt tired or unreliable or in some way unwilling to keep on holding her up. She dropped down on one of the inhospitable chairs, inviting St. Ives wordlessly to take the other, but he stood there beside Jenny, a core of restlessness even though he was still. He said, “I asked Jenny, tonight, who you’d gone out with, and she said someone named Daniel Brennan, who had apparently remembered you from Santa Fe.”
A quiet fist seemed to close over Mary’s breathing because of his tone. She said, astonishing herself, “Yes, he thought he had, but it turned out to be someone else he had in mind.”
“I saw him last night in the lobby,” said St. Ives steadily, “and I recognized him from a village meeting in Albuquerque about two months ago. Very few people came out for it because there was a storm, and I couldn’t have been mistaken. I started across to him to say hello, and he saw me coming and walked out the door.”
A child would have grasped the implication. David Brand, Daniel Brennan—either initialled luggage or the psychological factor. “Daniel Brennan lives in Santa Fe,” said Mary, equally steady. “He owns part of a shop there.”
Owen St. Ives commented on that only with his eyebrows. “Did you get an El Paso newspaper tonight by any chance?”
“No.”
“David Brand’s wife was attacked and killed in Santa Fe the night before last,” said St. Ives, and now he did change his mind and sit down in the other hard and armless chair.
Echoes, Mary had thought before—but this seemed more like a gradual and dangerous quickening of drums. “No worse, you must admit, than those women’s shops where . . .”
“You know about those.”
“Yes.” Single syllable, shutting off any further light discussion. She remembered those comical little whiffs of cologne, and felt sick. She said, as one who knew, “The world i
s full of people who resemble other people, and a man whose wife had just been killed in Santa Fe wouldn’t be here in Juarez.”
“Yes, I know, I thought the same thing.” The dark blue gaze was puzzled. “But I’m certain he’s Brand, and people react differently to shock.” St. Ives turned his head and studied the bed with its oblivious occupant. “Jenny told me that he had dived in after her at the pool this afternoon, and that in fact he’d been there for some time.”
“Yes, he’d been working at the motel with a buyer . . .” But would a man who had just lost his wife by violence have been carrying on business as usual? Or would he, while the onlooking attention was rivetted on Jenny’s diving, have seized the opportunity to extract the silver pillbox from the handily unzipped bag, sauntered off to the passageway with it, substituted something else for the contents of one of the capsules?
Judging by the number of overdose victims, sleeping pills couldn’t be hard to come by. Or borrow. No friend would think it odd under the circumstances if a man said, “Could you let me have something . . .” Because this was what St. Ives was clearly aiming at: Brennan’s presence on the scene, Jenny’s startling collapse later.
Oh, this is mad, thought Mary angrily. She said, “All right, suppose he is this David Brand. Jenny and I still met him for the first time last night, and we certainly had no connection with his wife.
St. Ives starred at her with the kind of brilliance which indicates thoughts turned inward. “Unless,” he said slowly, “you happen to resemble her.”
Late, late movie, thought Mary, trying protectively to reduce it to theatrical nonsense. Sudden widower crazed with grief, finding it unendurable that someone who looked like his wife was walking around in perfect health. (That initial attention from across a dining room, fastening on her like an actual touch.) Immobilizing the look-alike’s companion, so that he could destroy her without immediate hue or cry.
In Cold Pursuit Page 13
