In Cold Pursuit

by Ursula Curtiss

  Which Daniel Brennan could have done quite easily an hour ago, if he had wanted to, with Jenny in her comatose state.

  Leaving his fingerprints more or less all over the room? How quiet the pool, on the other hand. Simply from dinner, with drinks and brandy, her blood would have a certain alcohol content, and who could say with certainty how much it took to render someone helpless in the water? “She saw this silver thing on the bottom of the pool, and before I could stop her—”

  But why say anything at all? Until the headlights came snapping on they been an unidentifiable man and woman in near-darkness, just as they had been in the car on the way to the restaurant—and then there had been that fierce rush of light and glancing impact. The woman in the rain hat had seen and talked to Mary . . .

  She pressed a hand against her forehead like someone trying to extinguish a fever. She had thought, and rightly, that Jenny was a target here, and nothing would shake her conviction that the cocaine was the doing of Brian Beardsley, the known user of drugs. But what if, out of a nightmarish conjunction of circumstances, she had been a target too, and not only of an abiding malice?

  Somehow included in her tumbling brain was the recollection that Spence had been almost chillingly accurate in his assessment of people. Frequently, when Mary met someone likable and diverting at a party, he would ask later in amazement, “You didn’t really believe a word of all that claptrap, did you?” and nine times out of then he would be right.

  But this was St. Ives, now saying, “Maybe I’m wrong. People do strange things under stress, and maybe Brand is using another name because he thinks taking off for Juarez right after his wife was killed would look peculiar. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with Jenny that a few hours’ sleep won’t cure. But—” he glanced at the bed “—I’m the responsible party, I’m the one who took her out, and I’d feel a lot better if we got her to a doctor.”

  “Daniel Brennan thought she looked—” began Mary involuntarily, and stopped short. He had come to the room to satisfy himself that Jenny would not be awake and aware for some time, and of course he would say there was nothing to worry about. She glanced at her own message for Jenny, still propped in position. It made no mention of Brennan.

  Owen St. Ives had turned a shocked face. When Mary explained, very briefly because of her increasing sense of the need to hurry, he seemed less appalled by the planting of the drug than by the fact that the other man had actually been here. He said decisively, “Well, Brand isn’t a doctor, that I do know, and I doubt very much that we’ll get one to come here at this hour . . . Let’s see if we can get her dressed.”

  As if her name had been called, Jenny gave a smothered, cut-off snore. Mary had found this comforting earlier, as a normal sound emanating from deep sleep; now she wondered if it could be a subconscious cry for help. She went to the closet and took out the pink dress, its hanger clattering against the next under her shaky fingers. “But the stairs— we’ll never manage . . .”

  “There’s a service elevator, I saw it while I was waiting for you,” said St. Ives, giving an indicative nod in the direction of the dark well. He walked to the phone, picked up the receiver, put it down again. “Jenny isn’t going to like having this noised about,” he said, “and the hospital will certainly have an emergency room. Or—what do you think?”

  “I think we should just go,” said Mary, already beginning to feel as if she had been running, “but you’re going to have to help me sit her up.”

  Jenny would have burned with humiliation if aware that all her ribs were on display and easily countable between her bra and half-slip. As it was, she only lifted her eyelids as St. Ives’ propping arm ‘ went around her shoulders, gave them a glazed and uncomprehending look, muttered something about parakeets.

  “It’s all right, Jenny,” said Mary soothingly as she maneuvered an arm into a sleeve. “We’re just going to—” She broke off as St. Ives reminded her with a mute head-shake that Jenny had undoubtedly had her fill of doctors and might set up some kind of instinctive rebellion. She wasn’t helping, at the moment, but neither was she resisting. It was like dressing a very large doll.

  Here was one of her shoes, lying on its side at the foot of the bed. Some mixed-up monitor in Jenny’s head must have instructed her to turn back the bedspread, as if for a fully dressed daytime nap, because the other shoe was underneath it. So was St. Ives’ message, now somewhat crumpled: “Mary—Jenny didn’t really have this much to drink but she has no head for liquor.” The underscoring was so pronounced that if Mary had found the note at once she might have been reassured enough to go peacefully to sleep, while in the next bed—

  But she spoke to us just now, thought Mary, blanking out a frightful vision of waking to find Jenny stilled forever. It was nonsense, but she spoke.

  “Where’s her coat?” asked St. Ives urgently, and Mary brought it from the bathroom. Together, while Jenny’s head lolled, they got her arms into the sleeves and managed her upright and to the door. Surprisingly, her legs moved like the wheels of a mechanical toy in need of oiling, late but obedient. It wouldn’t matter for her sake if anyone saw her being conducted along in this head-hanging fashion, because Mary was certain that it would be safe to leave here in the morning.

  But was Daniel Brennan watching from somewhere, right now?

  Brennan was not. He had finished his drink and ordered another, not that he particularly wanted it but because his room and his bed, one of Jaime’s creakily protesting specials, had no immediate appeal. Also, the evening had gone as empty as a bottle upended over a sink.

  A guest at the motel, Mary Vaughan had said to his inquiry about Jenny’s dinner companion, and she had sounded defensive. She did not want the man criticized—unless it was some motherly woman, which Brennan doubted very much. In spite of her skin-and-bone appearance, Jenny had a core of strength—and physical strength as well, as who should know better than he after her fierce and wiry resistance in the pool?—which he suspected other women would recognize.

  He should have clarified himself to Mary Vaughan (or Mary, he said tentatively to himself), previous and even egregious though it had seemed at the time. It was clear in every line of her that she was not a dallier with married men and for all she knew he had an unsuspecting wife and possibly a few children at home. But—even though she had looked to him across a lobby and then a dining room like the piece of incredible good fortune that doesn’t drop into a man’s life more than once—how to say, with the proper casualness, “I was married four years ago, or I thought I was until husband number one turned out to be hale, well, and undivorced”?

  Mina. Black-haired, gray-eyed, captivating him with the diverse activities—ballet lessons, a course in Greek and another in gourmet cooking—which had turned out to be not evidence of a lively mind and energy but a dissatisfaction that burned like an eternal flame. Unfairly, she had turned him against women of that particular coloring, like Jenny Acton.

  Who had an enemy, which automatically involved her travelling companion. Was the planting of a drug the entire gratification of revenge, retaliation, whatever it was? Brennan supposed so; it certainly seemed enough. Still, he wished that Mary had left her lighter or cigarettes behind, so that he could go legitimately back to her door and see for himself that all was well.

  There was no need to talk deceptively inside his own head. Of course all was well, although from the looks of her Jenny was assembling a hangover measurable on the Richter scale. He simply wanted to see Mary again before he slept. He could and would look her up in Santa Fe, but her life was probably full of people, and at any remove from the immediacy of her situation this evening he would be only an unwelcome reminder of a very unpleasant episode. Gloomily, he could hear her saying to some unspecified person, “If a Mr. Brennan calls, I’m not in.”

  In spite of its location and appearance, Jaime’s was not a nest of revellers, and at a little after eleven-thirty the bar was beginning to empty, most of its inhabitants trailing off in the
direction of the lobby and stairs, a few causing the slamming of car doors and starting of engines in the courtyard. Brennan wasn’t sleepy, thought of the thin blear of light from the lamp over his bed and remembered the hundred-watt bulb, bought that morning, reposing in the glove compartment of his car. He finished his drink and went outside.

  A few windows were still lit, but the unseasonable chill had chased most of the guests in and to bed early. Mary’s upstairs corner room, to which his gaze lifted at once, was dark. Her hazel eyes had looked brilliant with fatigue; she must have gone to sleep almost at once.

  Would she be roused by a sharp police knocking?

  Probably, if she had left this address behind her at the Casa de Flores, although he couldn’t imagine why she would. Jenny’s ex-gentleman friend would have directed the police to the motel, with a tale of having been approached with cocaine for sale, but how far did they go when their bird had flown? Make an automatic check of other motels, in case Jenny Acton had taken alarm and moved out?

  Or simply notify U.S. Customs, with the rider that this drug-peddler belonged in Mexican jurisdiction because the event in question had taken place on their soil?

  Brennan had no idea. It hardly mattered, because the suitcase was thoroughly clean, apart from the worrying notion of Mary being waked and subjected to even a brief interrogation. Obviously they couldn’t ask questions of Jenny.

  A car came around the corner of the annex as Brennan unlocked the door of his and reached into the glove department. A departing employee, because that was the service area.

  But, although it wasn’t unusual for their U.S. counterparts to own something something startling in the way of transportation, Mexican waiters and bus boys did not drive cars of this newness and polish. Jaime himself, if there actually was such a man? Light bulb in hand, Brennan turned for a curious look.

  Star-shaped red tail-lights, the front seats of the car poised briefly at the gate the tall tapering kind suggesting a pair of nuns. There were two occupants; the interior light flicked briefly on and showed a dipping profile as the passenger door was opened a little—for a fold of caught clothing?—and closed again.

  Somehow astonishingly, because it meant that she had left Jenny behind her in a dark room, Mary Vaughan.

  15

  IN the back seat, after an inarticulate mumble of protest when for all St. Ives’ care her head got bumped smartly, Jenny had subsided into a tangle of hair and raincoat and Raggedy Ann legs. Her disorientation seemed complete. She had opened her eyes once in the shadowy service area where Mary held her propped while Owen St. Ives went for his car, but showed neither surprise nor concern at these peculiar surroundings.

  It was only what amounted to black-out, wasn’t it? They would know very shortly. At St. Ives’ suggestion, Mary had pocketed one of the yellow-and-white capsules from Jenny’s suitcase, because while medications came in all kinds of color combinations, depending on the manufacturer, it was just possible that a doctor might be able to identify this one at once.

  The trip from the room to the service elevator and then down had been accomplished without incident —without, in fact, meeting another soul, a fact for which Mary was grateful; she found that an innocent and necessitous act bestowed a feeling of near-criminality when carried out with every appearance of stealth. Jenny’s condition would be evident to a closer look and a sniff, but at first glance she would be put down as the victim of kidnapers.

  Mary had expected some kind of investigation when the elevator doors rattled open—for service only, this mechanism did not seem to get a lot of smooth care—and again when St. Ives used the rear exit to go out for his car. But at this hour a kitchen crew was loudly busy, behind heavy swing doors, with dishes, pots and pans, pails, occasional shouted sallies and less genial imprecations.

  She felt calmer now that they were actually on their way to the hospital, but still with a nervous need to talk. “This would have caused a fluster at the Casa de Flores,” she said as they turned out through the gate, and then, “I didn’t want to alarm Jenny yesterday, but I’m almost sure I did hear something odd from that room last night.”

  . . So did I,” said St. Ives, giving her his belated attention. Downtown Juarez had by no means gone to bed, and he was having to be forceful about maintaining his place in the thick stream of lights. Bicycles wanted to cut in; so did taxis. “I found out tonight that the invalid, or whatever he is, was evidently in a state where the nurse decided that some female company would calm him down, so one of the prettier bar waitresses was sent up.”

  He sounded the horn lightly at the car in front, whose driver was engaged in conversation with a companion although the red light had turned green. “The girl is no longer at the motel—handsomely paid off, I assume, and with a recommendation somewhere else—but she’s a cousin of the room-service waiter I talked to originally and she told him that the man sprang at her, babbling about company spies, and blacked her eye before the nurse, and a hefty one at that, could get him under control. He wasn’t young,” added St. Ives.

  A proxy fight had been one of his earlier speculations, Mary remembered, wincing a little at the speed with which the girl had been sent up as an offering. Had the man then begun to believe, because a notion once entertained in an unbalanced mind was apt to send out tendrils everywhere, that she and Jenny were also spies? That sudden heavy impact against the door behind her chair, as though to crash through it. . . Did he only have bouts of this, had he been spirited off to Mexico by one faction so that he should not be viewed in his current state by another?

  The hospital would be coming up soon on their left, and like a number of smokers Mary was increasingly careful about lighting a cigarette in places where it would be considered offensive, even though this new campaign placed a weapon in the hands of uncaring people who had never had a weapon before and tended to use it with zeal. She reached inside her bag for package and lighter. “I suppose we’ll never know, exactly.”

  “I suppose not,” agreed St. Ives. He sounded faintly amused—at something he was discreetly keeping back about the bar waitress?

  Although the traffic was thinning, he was keeping an eye on the rear-view mirror, and he wrenched the car suddenly into a side street. “Gang of toughs behind us, waving bottles,” he said. “I’d just as soon lose them for a couple of minutes.”

  “I think that was the hospital, up ahead in the next block,” said Mary, having had a fast glimpse of a modernistic building with blue lights to mark it. But it was too late; they would have to circle back. The front entrance had looked peculiarly closed for the night, but that couldn’t be so. Sirens sounded frequently in the city during the small hours, and at least some of them must indicate victims of traffic accident or violent family argument.

  Had there been a small Pavlovian stir from Jenny at the word “hospital”?

  Mary twisted to peer back between the difficult seats, but they were off the main street now and it was too dark to see anything but a vague sprawl and a pale glimmer of face. Because of that brief inspection, she was late in registering the direction they had taken, right instead of the expected left, although surely they had shaken off that car with youths in a trouble-making mood?

  They had run out of shops quite a while ago, and now out of small, close-packed houses. This was an area of trees on one side, and what looked like the laying out of an industrial complex on the other; there were cordoned-off stretches of cement, some skeletal framework, piled bricks. Beyond, the headlights picked out a crumbling adobe building, its sides studded decoratively with the bottoms of thrust-in-green glass bottles, and St. Ives was pulling the car up in front of it.

  Mary gazed expectantly at him, waiting for him to back and turn, said bewilderedly when he made no motion toward doing so, “What are we—? To get to the hospital we have to—”

  “We aren’t going to any goddamned hospital,” said St. Ives in a voice like an exposed knife-blade. “We never were.”

  For seconds, whil
e the car gave off the tiny sounds that follow a suddenly switched-off ignition, Mary thought that she must have misheard him. She hadn’t. She realized with a hard heavy beating in her throat that this terrible slippage, this abrupt canting of everything in sight which must be experienced by stroke-sufferers, was happening.

  She put out a hand instinctively to the door handle, remembered Jenny helpless in the back seat with her dreams of parakeets, withdrew it again. She heard herself say steadily, like someone pretending fearlessness to a dog with its lips drawn back and its hair up, “I don’t understand this, Owen.” Speak to it by name. “Why are we here?”

  “Why are we here?” mimicked the man who called himself Owen St. Ives. There was the worst kind of mockery in it, as though Mary had been making flirtatious advances. “So that I can kill you,” he said, “like you killed my wife.”

  Even over the pounding of her blood, Mary felt a certain relief, because out of her own indisputable innocence she could argue with him, ultimately convince him. She could account for herself on the night before last, because this had to be what it was all about; give him the names of the two men she had been with at a long dinner, assure him that Jenny could back her up about the quiet evening afterwards.

  “If you’re David Brand—” she said out of a pinched throat.

  He gave a sharp bark which wasn’t laughter but a release of hoarded-up hatred. It was as horrifying as seeing a cloth snatched away from apparently healthy flesh to reveal an abcess at bursting point. “I liked the initials. Go on, you murdering bitch.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened to your wife, but I swear that I never even met her,” said Mary, discovering that it was possible even now to flinch at that invective in that particular voice. (But how would you know if you’d met her, whirled through her brain, when his name isn’t even Brand?) “I’ve never harmed anyone, that I know of, in my life. I’ve certainly never—”