A Game for the Living (4 page)

“And you became her lover at once?”

“Yes,” Ramón said, though Theodore knew this was not so. They had known each other for months before Ramón became her lover.

“Did you give her money, Ramón? Money when you slept with her?”

“No,” Ramón said sullenly through his hands.

“Did you give her money, Señor Schiebelhut?” Sauzas asked.

“I gave her many presents. I did not give her money.”

“And how did you meet her?”

“I met her—by accident. One Sunday in Chapultepec Park.” The scene flashed before his eyes, Lelia sitting on the stone bench sketching under the huge ahuehuete trees and glancing up at him as he strolled by, glancing up with the same preoccupied smile she might have given a
charro
on horseback, a peasant in sandals, a stray dog. Theodore had said: “It's a beautiful day for sketching.” Such a common place beginning, but sentimentally he remembered it.

“And then?” Sauzas prompted.

“Then I got to know her,” Theodore replied.

More smiles and smirks.

Someone was knocking on the door.

“Did you ask her to marry you, Señor Schiebelhut?”

“No.”

“He doesn't believe in marriage,” Ramón put in.

“Did you ever ask her to marry you, Ramón?” Sauzas asked him.

“No,” Ramón said.

It was an absolute lie, Theodore knew. Ramón had asked her many times. But perhaps through lies they would get at the truth.

“And why not?” Sauzas asked.

“Because I have not the money to support her.” Ramón lifted his head proudly and smiled.

The knock came again, and a female voice said: “Would you open the door, please?” But no one so much as looked at the door. Theodore recalled that Ramón had asked Lelia to marry him shortly after he, Theodore, had met her. And perhaps that hadn't been the first time. He wondered if Ramón had asked her again tonight, just before he was due to arrive, and Lelia had refused him. Not that Ramón would have planned it far enough that he was to walk in and be found with her body. No, Ramón did things impulsively. But he might have been angry tonight because she refused him.

“Did Ramón want to marry her, Señor Schiebelhut?” Sauzas asked.

“It was Lelia who did not want to marry.”

Sauzas went to the door and opened it very slightly. A shrill duet of female voices began, and he shut the door quickly and leaned against it. “How many other men friends did she have, Señor Schiebelhut?”

Sauzas simply wanted to label her a whore, Theodore thought, something he was familiar with. “She had many. Many of them are artists—painters like herself.”

“That she slept with?”

“Oh no. None.”

“Anybody who came here frequently? Who might have been in love with her?”

Theodore thought of one young and struggling painter from Puebla. But he gave that up. It couldn't have been Eduardo.

“There weren't any other men,” Ramón said slowly. “
We
were her friends, Theodore and I. The rest were just—”

“Boy friends,” supplied one of the detectives, and all the men except Sauzas and Theodore guffawed at Ramón.

“Any former lovers, then? You two weren't her first, were you?” Sauzas looked at Ramón.

Seconds passed, and Theodore said:

“I, at least, have never met any of her former lovers.”

“Do you know the names of any?”

“Only one—Cristóbol Wagner. She told me he now lives in California.”

Ramón had plunged his face in his hands. Cristóbol had perhaps been Lelia's first lover, at any rate the one who counted most. She had told Theodore, and probably Ramón too, that he was the only man she had ever considered marrying. His name, infrequently as Lelia mentioned it, always piqued a little jealousy in Theodore, and no doubt it did in Ramón. Cristóbol had known Lelia from the time she was twenty to twenty-three. Theodore answered Sauzas's questions about him as correctly as he could. He would be forty now, and he was an architect, and had gone to North America seven years ago and lived in California. As far as Theodore knew, he had never returned to Mexico, and Lelia never wrote to him. For one thing, he was now married and had children. Theodore did not know of any other former lovers in Mexico, but Sauzas kept asking him to rack his memory.

“She was a painter!” Ramón yelled. “This is her work! Look at it!” He indicated the four walls with a sweep of his arm.

The men looked about with prejudiced eyes, smiling a little.

“She was as good as this man here or better!” Ramón said aggressively with a nod at Theodore.

Now there was a sharper knock at the door. Sauzas went slowly to the door and opened it.

“I am Señorita Ballesteros's aunt,” a woman's voice said.

Theodore went immediately to her. “Tía Josefina,” he said, embracing her and kissing her cheek.

Lelia's Aunt Josefina, a woman of about fifty with a shining bun of black hair pierced with a silver comb at the back of her neck and a touch of purple shadow on her eyelids, permitted herself to rest her cheek for one instant on Theodore's shoulder. Then she lifted her head and addressed Sauzas: “Where is she, please?”

“In the bedroom,” Sauzas said.

Theodore went with her, holding her arm, and he would have held the arm of Ignacia, her twenty-three-year-old daughter, too, but the hall was too narrow for the three of them to walk together. Ignacia followed them, and so did three or four men who had come in from the hall with Josefina. Theodore recognized only one of them, a local shopkeeper whom Lelia sometimes greeted when she passed him in the street.

Josefina gasped, and then from her large bosom came pigeon-like sounds of repressed sobs.

“There is no need to look, Tía Josefina,” Theodore said, patting her arm. He tried to dissuade Ignacia from looking, but she stood where her mother was, on the threshold, clutching her mother's arm. Theodore went back into the living-room. “Why can't we put the sheet over her face?” he said both to Sauzas and the fat police officer. “Is that not allowed?”

Somebody was kicking at the door now. “This is the press! Will you open up or shall we kick the door in?”

“We are still taking fingerprints!” Sauzas yelled back in a stentorian monotone. “You are not allowed in! So stay out and shut up! And who are all of you?” he asked the men who had come in with Josefina.

“José Garvez, at your service,” said a tall, stout man with his hat in his hands. “I am the señorita's liquor caterer.”

“Hm-m,” Sauzas said, rubbing his black moustache. “And you?”

The next man shrugged, with embarrassment. His eyes were full of tears, and he could not speak. This was the man Theodore recognized as the baker.

“Sit down, all of you,” Sauzas said. “We have questions to ask.”

CHAPTER THREE

They were still at it at seven in the morning. Only Carlos Hidalgo and three of the men had been allowed to go home. José Garvez, the liquor caterer, had been asked to stay. The press had been let in, and six or eight men had clumped through the apartment with flash-bulbs and cameras and photographed Lelia from every angle they could, in spite of Theodore's protests and his pleas to Sauzas to call a halt. Theodore had begun to dislike Sauzas.

Nothing of significance had been found on the roof, nor had any fingerprints been found on the drainpipe.

One of the policemen had gone out for coffee and rolls, and they made a disorderly breakfast on Lelia's table that was already covered with fingerprint samples, newspapers, jackets, ash-trays, even a gun among all the mess only inches from Ramón's limp right hand. Ramón had laid his head down on the table, and whether he slept or not, nobody knew or cared.

They asked Josefina if she knew of any enemies that Lelia might have had. No; well then, any debts that she had? Josefina knew of only one possible debt, a small one to a doctor for a slight rash she had got at Lake Pátzcuaro last September, but even that was not really a debt, because the doctor had liked her so much he had told her she did not need to pay him anything.

This caused a burst of laughter among the police and detectives, and Josefina looked around at them with dark eyes afire with pride and resentment. “I know what you are thinking! If a woman wants to paint, what is so strange about that? If a woman has imagination? Do you think she wasn't serious? Look at her work around you, and if that doesn't impress you, maybe it will that she has paintings in the permanent collection at the Bellas Artes! And also that her work has been shown in New York! And if she does not want to marry, isn't that her own concern? And if she has two fine men friends,” she went on, patting Theodore's hand which he rested on the table, “isn't that her business, too? If they call on her in the middle of the night, must you all smile like schoolboys? Just because all of you would perhaps have only one reason for calling on a woman in the middle of the night?”

“Mama,” Ignacia said gently.

The portrait of the small boy named José, which Lelia had painted in luminous, melancholic blues and greens, looked down on it all with childlike dignity.

“When Lelia was nineteen, she went with my husband and me on a great tour through North America. She has studied in New York. She is no little girl from the provinces. I myself was a concert pianist,” Josefina said, tossing her head and sitting up still straighter. “But I gave up my career to marry. Lelia did not give up her career. And for another thing,” she said, looking at the fat officer and then at Sauzas, “my husband has for years been giving her a stipend of four hundred pesos a month. She did not have to beg for her bread, I assure you. Or whore!”

Sauzas acknowledged all this with a deep nod and made no comment. Coolly he turned to Ramón. “Ramón Otero, have you ever been in trouble before with the police?”

Ramón raised his head slowly.

Sauzas repeated the question.

“Yes,” Ramón said. “I was falsely charged and beaten nearly to death by the fine police of Chihuahua. I was sleeping by the roadside in a truck, and they came up and hauled me in for murder and robbery.” He glared with loathing at the fat police officer, and pulled his packet of Carmencitas—the cheap miniature cigarettes—out of his pocket.

“When was this?” asked Sauzas.

“Five years ago. Six.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty.”

“And you were found not guilty?”

“The guilty man was found a few days later. Otherwise they might have killed me. As it was—” He made an effort at a smile, but it was a grimace.

“They hit him with a metal bar,” Theodore said to Sauzas, “and he suffered a concussion. It has—” Theodore shrugged. “It has changed him.”

“Aha,” said Sauzas. “Has he ever been in a mental institution?”

“No,” said Theodore, “but he gets severe headaches sometimes.”

“You are now defending him, Señor Schiebelhut?”

“No, I am not defending him!” Theodore said, frowning.

“And he has spells also of bad temper?”

“Yes,” Theodore said firmly.

“And you think he got into a bad temper tonight and killed the woman?”

“I did not kill her!” Ramón shouted. “All right, beat me to death! Help yourself! But I didn't kill her!” He was half out of his chair.

“All right, Ramón! We are only here to find out the facts. Do you have a knife? A knife at home?”

“I have several knives. All for my kitchen,” Ramón said.

“You never carry a knife?”

“Do you think I'm a guttersnipe?”

Suddenly everyone was talking at once.

“You were the last one here!” Sauzas was yelling. “Why shouldn't we suspect you? Do you think we're numbskulls?”

“Try it! Go ahead!” Ramón yelled wildly.

Sauzas threw up his hands and turned to Theodore. “Señor Schiebelhut, why did you come to Mexico?”

“Because I like Mexico very much.”

“How long were you in the United States? Did you become a citizen?”

Theodore had already told Sauzas that he was born near Hamburg, that he had been taken by his parents to Switzerland when he was eleven, had received his schooling there and in Paris, and that he had come to the United States at the age of twenty-two. “I left before my citizenship papers came through in America,” Theodore said tiredly.

“Then what did you do?”

“I travelled—mostly around South America—for three or four years. I lived here and there. Does all this matter?”

“Yes. Why did you decide to come to Mexico?”

“Because I like it best. Since I have an income, it doesn't matter where I live.”

Theodore's source of income was discussed for perhaps fifteen minutes, though it was quite simple: he derived it from property that his family owned in Germany and from stocks which had become active and valuable when Germany had begun to recover after the war. All in all, he received about twenty-five thousand pesos per month. On which, of course, he paid the required Mexican income tax. He could prove that, if anyone cared to examine his papers. The subject bored him and made him feel sleepier than ever. It seemed to him that the police were deliberately keeping him and Ramón awake in a kind of slow version of American police grilling. There were no swinging lights or rubber cudgels; but in the long run the method was the same: extract a confession through exhaustion, through a collapse of sanity. His tiredness made him fretful, and he was particularly irritated by the stupid curiosity with which the police and detectives looked at him when they heard that he had an income of twenty-five thousand pesos per month. How did a man spend all that? What did he do with it? The more he cut short and evaded, the more closely they pressed him. When he said he owned a house in Cuernavaca as well as one in Mexico, D.F., they stared at him with the pleased, dazed expressions of people watching a Hollywood movie.

“I can only say that it is quite possible to spend twenty-five thousand pesos in Mexico, if one has a house, a maid, a car, repairs on the house—if one buys books and music—” Theodore had the feeling he was talking in his sleep, arguing with irrational characters in a dream.

“And a mistress?” the gum-chewing detective sitting next to Theodore asked him with a nudge in his ribs.

Theodore edged away from him, but the nauseating mint-staleness of his breath had made Theodore's stomach constrict. He took a swallow of his execrable coffee, which was mouse-grey and mostly boiled milk. The rim of the paper cup was disintegrating. “Excuse me,” Theodore said, getting up. He went to Lelia's bathroom off the hall. He could not throw up after all. There was nothing in his stomach. But he stood nauseated for several minutes over the toilet, holding his tie out of the way with his big, gentle hand against his chest. He washed his hands and face. His skin felt numb. Then he took some of Lelia's Colgate toothpaste and rinsed his mouth. He stood for a moment, staring at the array of perfumes and toilet waters on the little shelf on the wall. He looked down at the unlevel white tile floor and the oval blue bath-mat. He could see his own naked feet on it. How many happy days and nights— Perhaps it was all not true what had happened, Lelia dead, raped, and with her nose cut off. His ears began to ring and the tiles grew unclear. Theodore bent over as low as he could, until his head was below his knees. A ridiculous position. He cursed his body.

“Señor Schiebelhut!”

He waited with eyes shut, feeling his heavy blood gravitating to his head.

“Señor Schiebelhut!” Steps approached.

“Coming!” Theodore called, straightening. He brushed his hand across his hair and opened the door.

They were questioning Ramón about his work and his income. Ramón replied in sullen, monosyllabic answers, Ramón worked in a furniture repair shop behind the Cathedral, only five or six streets away. He was a partner in the shop with Arturo Baldin, and they had two assistants. Ramón's income varied. He said from three hundred to six hundred pesos weekly, but Theodore knew that many weeks Ramón made only a hundred pesos or even less, sixty pesos, as little as the commonest laborer in Mexico. Theodore, hearing of Ramón's low wages from Lelia, often tucked a hundred-peso bill into Ramón's jacket pocket and sometimes insisted outright that Ramón take a few hundred from him. Ramón had a sense of economic justice and didn't mind accepting money from Theodore, because Theodore had so much more and did nothing to earn it. He could take Theodore's money with neither shame nor arrogance. He did not even show that he was glad to get it. This Theodore appreciated very much in Ramón. But Theodore noticed now that Ramón did not mention that he often gave him money. It was just as well, Theodore thought, because it would have confused things still more. They kept asking Ramón how he managed to live on so little money, or did he not try to supplement his income in other ways. Ramón certainly did not try to supplement his income in other ways, not even with the
Loteria Nacional
. He lived frugally, and he did not complain. When the police officer—there was no systematic interrogation, and anybody asked a question who wanted to—suggested that Ramón might have served as a pimp for Lelia, Ramón replied in the same dull tone: “No.” How often did he come to see Lelia? Maybe two or three times a week, maybe every evening sometimes.

And sometimes, Theodore knew, he did not come to see her for two and three weeks. But always he came back, swallowing his pride, or rather concealing with debonair good humor the defeat of his pride once more.

A canary's trill came through the open window. A newsboy's “
Excelsior! Novedades?
” And the thunderous roar of a truck. It was another beautiful, sunny day.

“Señor Schiebelhut, do you think he killed her?” Sauzas asked suddenly.

“I don't know,” Theodore said.

“You thought so a few hours ago,” said the fat officer.

It was true, he had. Theodore could not think what had happened to make him doubt. Perhaps nothing.

“Who do you think killed Lelia, Ramón?” Sauzas asked him.

“Maybe he did,” Ramón said indifferently. His dark eyes rested on Theodore. “After all, he was found here with her. He can't explain how he got in. She let him in.”

“Ramón!” Josefina said in an admonishing tone.

Theodore felt only a slight start of fear, and yet his heart had begun pounding. He remembered a time when Ramón had thrown a platter of cooked duck out the kitchen window into the patio because he, Theodore, was a little late for dinner, and Ramón hadn't liked to wait. But with such a temper—if Ramón thought he had killed Lelia, he would certainly kill him, probably throttle him with those strong hands before anybody could stop him.

“Señor Schiebelhut did explain how he got in, Ramón. Ramón!” Sauzas said over his shoulder, “Get another wet towel, Enrique. Ramón, you have the key to this apartment. You have it with you. The lock is not automatic, so the door had to be locked from the outside—perhaps by you. The drainpipe would not bear your weight. We have tried it. The transom shows from its dust that
something
came through it. Now do you want us to suspect you?”

Ramón shrugged, and the very slightness of the shrug was an insult to Sauzas.

Everybody waited uncomfortably as the detective approached with the wet towel, put it over Ramón's face, and wiped it with a twist as if he were wiping a baby's nose. Ramón sprang up and threw a wild blow at the detective with his fist. Instantly the policemen were on their feet around the table. Ramón kept swinging violently, even when he slipped to his knees. A tall policeman was thrown completely down when he caught one of Ramón's arms. Then there was a cracking sound; Ramón sprawled on the floor, and a policeman hovered over him with bared teeth, holding by the barrel the gun he had struck him with.

“That's fine!” said Theodore, who reproached himself now for not having joined in the fight. “That's going to do him a lot of good! Six men, and you have to hit him with a gun-butt!”

Josefina was kneeling by Ramón, using the wet towel on his face. Ramón made feeble movements, as if he were fighting in a dream, but he did not open his eyes. His strong mouth looked calm and childlike.

When Ramón came to a little, Sauzas asked more questions, which Ramón scorned to answer by so much as a glance at him.

Then the door opened smartly, and Theodore jumped a little. A policeman he had not seen before came forward and saluted Sauzas. “The flowers were bought at a stand four streets from here,” the policeman said, a little out of breath. “They were bought between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty. The man is not sure.”