I took a real jump. “And you followed Deborah Brand to Chichén-Itzá.”
The smile faded. He looked almost alert. “Follow who?”
“Deborah Brand.”
“Follow Deborah Bran’—who?”
“You.”
“You crazy.” He spoke with great, painstaking emphasis. Then he tittered. “Deborah Bran’s dead. Can’t follow dead girl. Why’d I follow a dead girl?”
“To get what she had,” I said. “And to murder her.”
“Murder her!” For the first since we’d started to talk, he showed signs of sobering up. His mouth dropped foolishly open. “Washn’t murdered. Fell in a well.” The euphony of the phrase seemed to please him. He repeated it: “Fell in a well.”
“She could have been pushed in a well.”
“Pushed? Why?”
Why?
“I don’t know.”
He had moved back to the couch and sat down, nursing his documents. “So she was pushed in the well.” He whistled through his teeth. “What do you know?” A sudden, clever look spread over his face. “Oh, you—always kiddin’.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Oh, yes, you are,” he sing-songed, like a little boy saying “Nyah”. “Oh, yes, you are. Because—you know why? If you thought she’d been murdered, know wh’a you’d have done? You’d ’ve gone to the pleesh in Merida.”
He looked at me triumphantly, implying that I couldn’t get round that telling thrust.
“I didn’t go to the police then,” I said, “because I didn’t have any evidence.”
He nodded to show he understood that okay. “And now you’ve got evidence?”
“Just that they’re gunning for me.”
“Why they gunnin’ for you? Why?”
“I guess because they think I was tied up with her, because they think I’ve got something they’re looking for. Incidentally, I haven’t.”
His lips pursed into a grimace of concentration. For quite a few moments he didn’t speak. I expected him to come out with something fairly sober. But I had got it wrong. He had been sliding even farther into his drunk. He closed his eyes.
It seemed futile to continue this farcical interview. By now I was as convinced of his innocence as I was of his drunkenness. There could surely be no point to a scene of this sort if it was a fake. His eyes were still shut. His head was nodding.
I got up and said: “Well, thanks for the drink. I’ll be pushing along.”
His eyes jerked open. He peered at me blearily and then pushing himself up, lumbered to the window. He swung back one of the zebra-striped drapes. “Shtuffy in here. That’s wha’ it is. Shtuffy.” He began to fumble with the catch of the window.
I crossed to him, holding out my hand. “Well, thanks, thanks again, Halliday. Time I went home.”
He tugged the window inward with a little grunt. “Wha’s tha’?” He turned to look at me owlishly. “Goin’? What’s sense o’ tha’? Plenny of beds here. Plenny of beds. Too shnotty to shtay here? You…?”
The sentence trailed off. He was supporting himself by a hand on the drape. He seemed to be clinging to consciousness only by a hair.
“I have to…” I started. Then I stopped.
From where I stood by his side I could see down the dimly lit street below.
Half a block away, parked in the shadow of a tree, was a familiar light-blue sedan. As I looked at it a lighted cigarette was tossed out of the front window and dropped sparking on to the side-walk.
I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine him there at the wheel with his smooth, little-boy face unlined by sleep, his wide, patient eyes fixed on the door of Halliday’s apartment house—waiting.
Junior was back.
A tingle of uneasiness came. I turned to Halliday. I began: “Well, on second thoughts, since you are so kind as to invite me…”
He grunted. Behind the shell-rimmed glasses his little eyes watched me vacantly. Slowly his hand uncurled from the drape. He leaned towards me as if to embrace me. Then his knees buckled under him and he fell slantwise to the carpet.
The party was over for Halliday. One hang-over—coming up….
I prospected through a door and found a bedroom with twin beds. I dragged him into it and hoisted him on to one of the beds. I took off his shoes, tossed an extra blanket over him and left him.
Just because I didn’t believe in passing up opportunities, I made a quick search of the apartment. I found nothing of any interest.
I went back into the bedroom and glanced through the window. The blue sedan was still waiting below. With a certain satisfaction I reflected that Junior had put in quite a hard day. He was going to be an awfully tired boy to-morrow.
I was tired, too. There was no reason to stay up any longer. I stripped down to my undershorts and climbed into the other bed. Halliday was breathing heavily, but he at least didn’t snore.
I snapped off the light. In a few moments I was asleep myself.
I awoke next morning to gay, splashing sunshine. My watch said eight-thirty. Remembering, I glanced across at the other bed. Halliday still lay as I had left him, the blanket tumbled over him. I got up and walked to the window.
Pleasant, daytime things were going on in the street. A prim nursemaid was pushing a baby in a perambulator. A man was dragging a chunk of ice along in a kind of primitive kiddy-car. Two dogs were sniffing each other’s noses and wagging their tails.
The light-blue sedan was not there.
I felt clear-headed and surprisingly light-hearted. I went into the bathroom and took a hot shower. I found a razor and accessories in Halliday’s medicine cabinet. As I shaved, a feeling almost of affection for him spread through me. Okay, he was an old bore with a line of bad jokes who couldn’t hold his liquor, but at least he’d saved me from a nasty situation and had given me a comfortable bed for the night.
And he knew no more about Deborah Brand than I did.
My soapy fingers lost their grip on the razor and I felt the blade jag into my cheek. Blood trickled down towards my chin. I swore, looked for cotton, couldn’t find any, and dabbed at the blood with a towel.
I located a styptic pencil and fixed the wound. But the towel had a bloodstain on it.
The dirty-linen basket was at my right, and I opened it and tossed the towel inside. As I did so, something red and shiny, poking up through the soiled towels and shirts, caught my eye. I glanced again and then a third time.
Curiously, I reached into the basket and pulled the thing out.
It was a girl’s pocket-book—a large red pocket-book.
I held it in my hand, looking at it, memories of Yucatan crowding back. I yanked open the flap. There were things inside—a white handkerchief, a lipstick, a compact, a mirror, change. But all my attention was fixed on the handkerchief.
Embroidered neatly on its corner were the initials
D. B.
XII
I stared at the red pocket-book. Around me the walls of the cosy little white-tiled bathroom seemed to shrink, hemming me in. The pocket-book had not fallen into the cenote with Deborah. It was here—of all places—in Bill Halliday’s apartment.
I knew it had not been in the clearing when the inn manager and I raced there after we heard the scream. Halliday must have taken it in the few minutes between the scream and the time of our arrival at the well.
If that fact did not prove he was Deborah’s murderer, it came very close to doing so. Close enough.
With this new knowledge, I tried to make some sense of Halliday’s behaviour the night before. Obviously he had made a one hundred per cent pure sucker out of me. He had been shamming drunk. He had deliberately rescued me from Junior and brought me to his apartment deliberately, too.
But why?
To protect me from whoever it was who had hired Junior? Did that explain his pseudo-drunken pulling of the window-drapes? Had that been a subtle way of letting me know that the light-blue sedan had returned and that I was safer spending t
he night here? But why should he want to protect me? Were there perhaps two factions, two groups of people who had been after whatever Deborah had been carrying? One group represented by Junior, another by Halliday? Each group battling to keep me from the other?
Whatever the thing was, it must be enormously important. But if Halliday wanted something enormously important he thought I had, why hadn’t he tried to get it from me last night? Why had he spent all his energy on the drunk act?
These sterile speculations darted through my brain quick as a school of minnows.
The situation was far less intelligible than Finnegan’s Wake. The only thing that was certain was my own inescapable involvement in it.
I thought of Halliday lying in the next room apparently stupid with rum. Should I confront him with the pocket-book, call his bluff once and for all? It was a temptation, because I had reached a point where to know at least something of what lay behind my predicament seemed worth any risk. But I controlled myself.
Anyone as smart as Halliday wasn’t going to be surprised or tricked into telling me anything he didn’t want me to know. At the moment he thought he had fooled me. It was more sensible to keep him thinking that way.
I searched the contents of the pocket-book, even opening the lipstick and the compact. There was nothing revealing—just the ordinary things that every girl carries. But one thing that might have been there was missing. Deborah had told me she’d missed her plane connection to Mexico City. There ought to be a plane ticket to Mexico in the bag. There wasn’t. Had she kept it somewhere else? Or had she been lying? Or had Halliday taken it out?
I put the pocket-book back in the basket under the soiled towels and returned to the bedroom.
Halliday was still asleep, or pretending to be. While I dressed, he did not stir.
I scribbled a little note saying:
“Thank you for not snoring.”
Maybe he’d get the crack. Maybe he wouldn’t. I didn’t care.
I propped it against the carnations in the living-room and slipped out of the apartment.
The Plaza Washington was a couple of blocks down the street. I walked through the morning sunshine towards the bright little square and turned into a Kiko soda fountain and ordered orange juice and coffee. It was good to be in American-style surroundings. It reminded me that I would be in the States to-morrow—maybe.
A few customers were strewn around at the little red-painted tables. There was an atmosphere of leisure and quiet. But the disturbing image of Deborah’s pocket-book prevented me from developing much peace of mind. I tried to figure why Halliday had kept it, since there was nothing in it to matter, and its presence in his apartment had been a dead give-away. He had, of course, tried to hide it where I would be least likely to find it. But I had found it, and in one second it had destroyed the elaborate pretence of dumb tourist ignorance on which he’d worked so hard.
Since Halliday, whatever he was, was no fool, there must be some good reason why he had not tossed the bag away into the Yucatan jungle.
But what reason?
A perky waitress with a high starched cap brought me my orange-juice and flicked ineffectually at the table-top with a napkin. So far as I could see there was only one answer. Halliday must have kept the bag because, in spite of appearances, he couldn’t be sure that the thing he wanted wasn’t in it. Thanks to Junior’s theft of my clothes, I knew the thing they wanted was small. But surely it couldn’t be invisible.
Or could it? Why couldn’t it be something written? Some message, for example, which might be written in invisible ink? Which might conceivably be scrawled somewhere in the pocket-book? Was Halliday keeping the bag until he had a chance to submit it to laboratory analysis?
The waitress brought my coffee, slapping it down in front of me and patting her back hair. As I glanced up to acknowledge it, I noticed the man at the next table. He was plump and well-shaved, fashionably wearing sun-glasses. Propped against the sugar-shaker in front of him was one of those orange-bound pocket Mexican mystery stories. It’s chic in Mexico to read mysteries.
It needed that visual picture to link my mind up with the detective story Deborah had given me. I had thought of it several times the day before, but, because I had been figuring in terms of a jewel or some palpable object which could not be concealed in a book, I had never taken it seriously. I’d been sure Deborah hadn’t give me anything of any conceivable importance. Murders don’t get committed for the ownership of a book, I had said.
I could have been wrong.
You could send a code message in a book. The Wrong Murder by Craig Rice might be the thing they had been after all the time.
Someone had put a nickel in the inevitable juke box, and La Barca de Oro in danzon rhythm brayed above the genteel clatter of coffee-cups at the fountain. For the first time I began to figure out a pattern for Deborah’s apparently senseless behaviour on the morning of her death.
Suppose she had made a date to meet someone before breakfast at the cenote. She could perhaps have made it with the man I had seen lurking under her window the night before. The cenote, being remote from the rest of the ruins, was a reasonable enough spot to choose for a private rendezvous. Suppose, also, that this man was someone whom she didn’t completely trust. She could have brought me to the well as a safety device, not to take part in the interview, of course, but to be seen by the person she was going to meet. If he’d already been concealed somewhere around the cenote, he would have supposed, when she sent me away, that I was waiting nearby as a bodyguard.
The danzon thumped its curious, stumbling rhythm. I thought of the impression of falseness Deborah had given to me when she asked me to go back to the hotel for her camera. Perhaps it hadn’t been falseness. Perhaps it had merely been a sudden change of plan. At the last minute her distrust of the man she had to meet had got stronger and, on an impulse, she had given me for safe-keeping the most crucial thing in her possession—the book.
That might explain, too, why she had been murdered. The person who had met her at the cenote had wanted the vital information hidden somehow in the detective story. She had stalled, made some feeble excuse for not having brought it—and he had killed her.
I imagined Halliday peering down through his shell-rimmed glasses at the silver hair streaming in the cenote. I imagined him stooping to grab up the red-leather bag, searching it and finding nothing.
The danzon came to an end. Outside in the square the sound of brass instruments blared over the pomping of a drum. I caught a glimpse of naked brown arms and violent blue-and-orange costumes. It was a parade, of football players probably, demonstrating what a sport-loving race Mexico is.
The catch-as-catch-can of the last twenty-four hours took on a slightly comical aspect now. They burgled me, slugged me and tried to kidnap me just to obtain a twenty-five-cent reprint of a detective story. And all the time Lena Snood had been reading it, tucked up in bed, happily lulling herself to sleep.
It was a relief to have something doped out at last. It was an even greater relief to have something definite to do. Because, obviously, the thing to do now was to get the book back from Lena Snood immediately.
I called: “La cuenta, Señorita” to a group of waitresses huddled giggling together at the counter. My girl moved towards me, pulling a pencil out of her hair-do and scribbling on her check-pad.
A thought came, sudden and jolting as a kick in the teeth. Last night, at the table in front of Halliday, Vera and the bridegroom, Mrs. Snood had talked about the book.
I remembered her birdy face, flushed with champagne. I heard her voice:
“It was terrible. The poor girl! Just before she died she gave Peter a detective story. He lent it to me. Every time I read…”
Halliday, Vera, the bridegroom—the only people who could be involved in the murder—had all of them found out last night that it was Mrs. Snood and not I who had possession of The Wrong Murder.
By that one trivial social remark Lena Snood had put hersel
f smack in the path of danger.
I paid my bill with fumbling hands. At last I thought I understood Halliday’s game last night. He had insisted on Mrs. Snood inviting me to the party because he still thought I had the book, and had arranged for Junior to pick me up in the light-blue sedan afterwards. Perhaps Vera, too, if she was involved, had asked me to walk her home so that Junior would have a dark, deserted street in which to operate. But once Lena Snood had given away the fact that she had the book, the interest had shifted to her. That’s why Halliday had saved me from Junior, whom he hadn’t been able to warn of the change of plans, and that was why he had kept me all night at his place—to prevent me from contacting Lena Snood.
Because Halliday almost certainly thought I knew much more than I did. He probably thought I had deliberately given the book to Mrs. Snood as a clever ruse for keeping it safe.
I asked the waitress urgently: “Where’s the telephone?”
She pointed with the pencil over her shoulder to a telephone by the open door. I ran to it, leafed through the hanging directory for the number of the Hotel Reforma and dialled.
Anything might have happened to that poor little woman from Newark. And, indirectly, it was my fault.
Mexican telephones have more temperament than sopranos. My dialling had not made contact. I dialled again, and was greeted with an angry squawking sound. I dialled a third time. There was dead silence, and then the soft moo of a connection. The music of the football parade outside was less loud, but loud enough to interfere with my hearing. I put a finger in my ear.
The connection broke. A bright female voice said: “Hotel Reforma. Buenos dias.”
“Mrs. Snood,” I said. “Mrs. Lena Snood.” I remembered the room number. “74.”
“Bueno?” said the voice, not understanding.
“Senora Snood,” I shouted over the trumpet blasts, “Numero 74.”
“One moment,” the voice said in refined English. “I will connect you, sir.”
A buzzing sounded. It went on and on as my spirits sank.
The voice came again in sing-song. “Sorry, sir, the party does not answer. Do you wish to leave a message?”
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